design for the ships was based on the previous battleship , but instead of mounting the main battery all on the centerline, the ships used the lozenge arrangement of the earlier , which moved two of the main battery guns to single turrets on the wings. Five naval architects submitted designs to the high command; the design that became Charles Martel was prepared by Charles Ernest Huin, who had also designed the ironclad battleship . Political considerations, namely parliamentary objections to increases in naval expenditures, led the designers to limit displacement to around . Huin submitted his finalized proposal in line with these considerations on 12 August 1890, and it was accepted and ordered on 10 September. Though the program called for four ships to be built in the first year, five were ultimately ordered: Charles Martel, , , , and . An earlier vessel, also named Charles Martel, had been laid down in 1884 and cancelled under the tenure of Admiral Théophile Aube. The vessel, along with a sister ship named Brennus, was a modified version of the ironclad battleships. After Aube's retirement in 1887, the plans for the ships were entirely redesigned, though the later pair of ships are sometimes conflated with the earlier, cancelled designs. This may be due to the fact that both of the ships named Brennus were built in the same shipyard, and material assembled for the first vessel was used in the construction of the second. The two pairs of ships were, nevertheless, distinct vessels. The new Charles Martel and her half-sisters were disappointments in service; they generally suffered from stability problems, and Louis-Émile Bertin, the Director of Naval Construction in the late 1890s, referred to the ships as (prone to capsizing). All five of the vessels compared poorly to their British counterparts, particularly their contemporaries of the . The ships suffered from a lack of uniformity of equipment, which made them hard to maintain in service, and their mixed gun batteries comprising several calibers made gunnery in combat conditions difficult, since shell splashes were hard to differentiate. Many of the problems that plagued the ships in service, particularly their stability and seakeeping, were a result of the limitation on their displacement. General characteristics and machinery Charles Martel was long between perpendiculars and long overall. The ship had a beam of , a forward draft of and a draft of at the stern.