Photo Galleries for the book French Warships 1859-1914

These photo galleries contain archival and other photos of french warships that could not be included in the book French Warships in the Age of Steam, 1859-1914, by Stephen S. Roberts (2021) and its predecessor volume. One of the few limitations on published books is that space for illustrations is scarce and expensive. This is not the case on the web, and this opportunity is being taken to provide additional photographs that are relevant to the books but could not be included in them. Photographs shown in the books at full page width are generally not duplicated here, but some of the ones printed in half-page width are presented here in larger format to show additional details and many new ones are provided. In the categories listed below the sections for ships up to 1882 have been completed and work is beginning on the 1882-1897 sections.

The Photo Galleries (by ship type)

General Notes

Sources

The sources for the individual photographs are given in their captions, but several require specific mention. These are:

• The "NH" photo collection of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in Washington, D.C. (referred to here as the "NHHC Photo Archive").
• Photos relating to Brest on Wikimedia Commons and in private digital collections from multiple French repositories, including the Archives municipales et métropolitaines de Brest (here "Archives M&M Brest"), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF Gallica) (here "BNF"), the Musée de Bretagne / Ecomusée de la Bintinais (here "Musée Bretagne"), the Musée National de la Marine de Brest (here "Musée NM Brest"), and the Archives départementales du Finistère (here "Archives Finistère").
• Photos relating to the Rochefort dockyard on Wikimedia Commons and in private digital collections from a collection of 1270 glass plate images made between 1870 and 1917 by the Direction de la construction navale there and now held by the Service historique de la Défense at Rochefort (referred to here as "SHD Archives Rochefort"). The whole collection may be viewed on the SHD's Mémoire des hommes website.
• The author's collection, including items from the SHD's main navy archives at Vincennes (here Archives Marine), private digital collections (notably those of Vladimir Yakubov and Андрей Мятишкин/Andrey Myatishkin, accessed via Facebook), miscellaneous online sources, and items from small sellers online (here "Shipscribe collection").

Photo Restoration

Most of the photos here have been put through a simple restoration process to bring out details in them without otherwise altering them. Images now in RGB color have been restored to their original grayscale and the images have been adjusted with the levels tool to utilize the full tonal range from dark to light, correcting both washed out and overly dark areas. In addition an effort has been made to correct camera tilt so that horizons are level (the author believes that ships don't go uphill or downhill except in heavy weather), and images have been conservatively cropped to remove unneeded areas.

Credits and Rights

The author has made a diligent effort to identify and credit the original sources of the images on this site as well as the rights pertaining thereto. Concerning images found on Wikimedia, he notes that "Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content, that is, images ... that are not subject to copyright restrictions which would prevent them being used by anyone ..." although certain license requirements like proper source credits are allowed. The author's effort, however, has met with incomplete success. The U.S. Navy's NH collection contains albums of items collected by naval attachés in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, on many of which the source credits are absent, not visible, or unknown today. Digital collections often can not be traced to their original sources, and items purchased online, many of which are postcards, mostly bear credits to commercial publishers who are unknown today. The author believes that the photos on this site with inadequate sourcing can be considered "orphan works" and hereby assigns to them the status DR (Droits réservés). He offers his apologies in case his efforts have failed to identify a holder of legitimate rights to an image or images presented here, and he also apologizes if he has failed to identify and respect the legitimate rights of any source that he has identified. If notified of a problem, he will immediately withdraw the image(s) while the matter is being resolved.