Sunday Battleship Blogging: Jean Bart
By The service of the French Navy in World War II was undistinguished. As inevitability of German victory in May 1940 became apparent, the French Navy decided to move as many ships as possible first to Great Britain, then to the French colonies. The change in plans proved disastrous for the French Navy and for Franco-British relations. The Royal Navy destroyed part of the French Navy at Mers El Kebir in July 1940. Most of the rest was scuttled by the French themselves when the Wehrmacht occupied Vichy in November of 1942. The most notable survivors of these twin disasters were the battleships Richielieu and Jean Bart.
Jean Bart and her sister were built to an extremely advanced design. They carried 8 15″ guns in two quadruple turrets forward, an unusual disposition. 
The ships displaced 35000 tons and could make 32 knots. Apart from the Iowa and South Dakota classes, they would probably have been the most all-around powerful battleships in the world. Richielieu, very nearly complete by the fall of France, exchanged fire with some British battleships in 1940 and was eventually refit in New York and incorporated in the Free French Navy. Jean Bart, however, was not nearly as complete in 1940. Escaping a German bombing raid under her own power, Jean Bart made it to Casablanca shortly before the French surrender. Since the French authorities in Casablanca had no facilities with which to complete the ship, Jean Bart remained moored for most of the rest of the war. This was not nearly as boring as it sounds; in 1942, the moored Jean Bart, with only one of her two gun turrets attached, exchanged fire with the USS Massachusetts. Massachusetts silenced but did not sink Jean Bart.
After the war Jean Bart was brought back to France. Bless their hearts, the French then did a very strange thing. While every other country in the world was decommissioning and scrapping its battleships (the United States Navy ceased work on the 80% complete Kentucky, for example), the French decided to finish Jean Bart. Four years later, the ship finally entered service, the last battleship to be commissioned by any navy in the world. Jean Bart participated in the 1956 Suez conflict, was decommissioned in 1960, and scrapped in 1970. She was the last dreadnought possessed by a European navy, save for one.