from capturing the vessels. Richelieu meanwhile was overhauled in the United States and served with the Free French from 1943. , with only one main battery gun turret operational, briefly engaged United States forces during Operation Torch in November 1942, and was eventually completed in the late 1940s. Both she and Richelieu served as training ships before eventually being decommissioned in 1968. Pre-dreadnought battleships Brennus Brennus, built in the late 19th century, was the first pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy. During this period, the French Navy experimented with the Jeune École, which emphasized cheap torpedo boats and cruisers instead of the expensive ironclad warships that had dominated naval construction in the 1860s and 1870s, and so the navy ordered a series of experimental designs to determine the most effective ship types. Admiral Théophile Aube, then the Minister of the Navy and a proponent of the Jeune École, cancelled a pair of ironclad battleships in 1886, but after Aube left office his successor allowed one of the vessels to be redesigned as a modern pre-dreadnought battleship. Brennus was the only vessel built to her design, which had been prepared by Charles Ernest Huin, though it provided the basis for several subsequent ships. She departed from earlier French ironclad battleship designs by introducing a number of innovations. These included a main battery of heavy guns mounted on the centerline, homogeneous steel armor, and the first use of Belleville boilers. Brennus spent the majority of her career in the Mediterranean Squadron, initially serving as its flagship. In 1900, she accidentally rammed and sank the destroyer Framée. As newer battleships were commissioned into the fleet, Brennus was relegated to the Reserve Squadron in the early 1900s; she spent this period largely inactive with a reduced crew, being reactivated for training exercises with the rest of the fleet. She was used as a training ship from 1908 to 1914. By the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, her old age and poor condition prevented her from seeing action and she was instead reduced to a hulk. She was ultimately stricken from the naval register in 1919 and sold for scrap three years later. Charles Martel Charles Martel was the first of a group of five broadly similar battleships ordered during the 1890 construction program as part of the French response to a major British naval construction program. The five ships were built