French ship Valmy (1847)

Valmy, named after the Battle of Valmy, was the largest three-decker of the French Navy, and the largest tall ship ever built in France.

Design
The design of Valmy was decided by the Commission de Paris, as a way to modernise the 118-gun Océan class design and its derivatives. The most radical departure from previous designs was the shedding of tumblehome and adoption of vertical sides, shared by the Hercule and Suffren classes; this significantly increased the space available for upper batteries, but reduced the stability of the ship.

Valmy was laid down at Brest in 1838 as Formidable and launched in 1847. When she entered service in 1849, she was the largest warship in the world and would remain so until 1853, when the British three-decker Duke Of Wellington (6,071 tons and converted to steam power while on the stocks) entered service, but she would remain the largest sail-only three-decker ever built.

She displayed poor performances during her trials, especially with a tendency to roll, and was generally considered a failure. Stability problems were to some extent compensated with stabilisator fins, but no other unit of the type was built. The outcome of the project led the French Navy to return to a more traditional design with the next generation of ships, which would lead to Bretagne.

Career
She was engaged in the Crimean War, where she proved difficult to manoeuvre and, like other sailing vessels, often had to be towed by steam ships. During the bombardment of Sevastopol, the only time she fired her guns in anger, she was towed by the new steam two-decker Napoléon.

She returned to Brest in 1855, where she was disarmed. She was used as a school ship for the French Naval Academy from 1864 under the name Borda. She took back her old name of Intrépide one year before being stricken from the navy list in 1891. She was scrapped soon afterwards.

The name Valmy was later re-used for a Guépard class destroyer, launched in 1927 and scuttled in 1942.

Sources and references

 * dossiersmarine.free.fr
 * dossiersmarine.free.fr