France was the last ship of the Courbet-class battleships, the first dreadnoughts built for the French Navy. She was completed just before World War I as part of the 1911 naval building programme. She spent the war in the Mediterranean, covering the Otranto Barrage in the Adriatic. France, accompanied by her sister ship Jean Bart, was sent to the Black Sea in 1919 to oppose the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Her crew briefly mutinied in April 1919 from a combination of war-weariness, Communist sympathizers in the crew and difficult conditions. The mutiny and general lack of morale among her crew caused her to return to France later that month.