Edgar Quinet

Edgar Quinet was an armored cruiser of the French Navy, the lead ship of her class. She and her sister ship, , were the last class of armored cruiser to be built by the French Navy. Edgar Quinet was laid down in November 1905, launched in September 1907, and completed in January 1911. Armed with a main battery of fourteen guns, she was more powerful than most other armored cruisers, but she had entered service more than two years after the first battlecruiser——had rendered armored cruisers obsolescent. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Edgar Quinet participated in the hunt for the German battlecruiser and then joined the blockade of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic. She took part in the Battle of Antivari later in August, and the seizure of Corfu in January 1916, but saw no further action during the war. In 1922, she evacuated over a thousand civilians from Smyrna during the climax of the Greco-Turkish War. Converted into a training ship in the mid-1920s, Edgar Quinet ran aground on a rock off the Algerian coast on 4 January 1930 and sank five days later. Description The Edgar Quinet class were designed initially as sister ships of the preceding cruiser , but instead of the mixed battery of and guns, the two ships were altered to carry a uniform battery of 194 mm weapons. Other minor changes were introduced during the design process, including some features of the latest French pre-dreadnought battleships, including a straight stem. The two Edgar Quinet-class cruisers proved to be the last major warships of the French fleet to rely on reciprocating machinery for their propulsion systems.