The Liberté class consisted of four pre-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy in the early 1900s. The class comprised Liberté, Justice, Vérité, and Démocratie. They were ordered as part of a naval expansion program directed at countering German warship construction authorized by the German Naval Law of 1898; the French program called for six new battleships, which began with the two République-class battleships. During construction of the first two vessels, foreign adoption of heavier secondary batteries prompted the French to re-design the last four members to carry a secondary battery of 194 mm (7.6 in) guns, producing the Liberté class. Like the Républiques, their main armament consisted of four 305 mm (12 in) guns in two twin-gun turrets, and they had the same top speed of 18 knots.

Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built from the mid- to late- 1880s to the early 1900s. Their designs were conceived before the appearance of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and their classification as "pre-dreadnought" is retrospectively applied. In their day, they were simply known as "battleships" or else more rank-specific terms such as "first-class battleship" and so forth. The pre-dreadnought battleships were the pre-eminent warships of their time and replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s.