Richelieu was a French fast battleship , the lead ship of the Richelieu class. Built as a response to the Italian Littorio class , Richelieu and its sister ship Jean Bart were based on their immediate predecessors of the Dunkerque class : they used the same unconventional arrangement that grouped their main battery forward in two quadruple gun turrets. They were scaled up to accommodate a much more powerful main battery of eight mm 15 in guns compared to the mm 13 in guns of the Dunkerque s , with increased armor to protect them from guns of the same caliber.
Richelieu was laid down in and was launched in , just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe. As war with Germany became increasingly likely, work on the ship was rushed to prepare her for commissioning in April There, she came under repeated British attacks that had been intended to either compel the battleship to join the Free French Naval Forces or sink her; these included during Operation Catapult in July and the Battle of Dakar in September.
Damaged in both attacks, the ship was slowly repaired before eventually being turned over to Free French control after the Allied invasion of North Africa in November After being sent to the United States for repairs and an extensive modernization, the ship served with the British Home Fleet in early before being deployed to the Eastern Fleet for operations against the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. These included several bombardment operations and in May she was present during the Battle of the Malacca Strait , though she was too far away to engage the Japanese force.
Richelieu was part of the force that liberated Singapore after the Japanese surrender in September, and she later operated in French Indochina as part of the initial effort to restore French colonial rule.
Recalled to France in December , she was repaired and modernized slightly in The ship saw relatively limited training in the immediate postwar years and, in , she was removed from active service for use as a gunnery training ship. In , she was placed in reserve and was thereafter used as a stationary training vessel and barracks ship until , when the French Navy decided to discard her. She was sold for scrap in , and broken up in Italy from to When in Italy announced that it would begin building two Littorio -class battleships armed with mm 15 in guns, the French Navy immediately began preparations to counter them.
