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.

The Charlemagne class consisted of three pre-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy in the 1890s. The ships spent most of their careers assigned to the Mediterranean Squadron. They had oddly eventful peacetime careers as they were involved in four accidental collisions among them, one of which sank a French submarine with all hands. Saint Louis was usually a fleet flagship during her career and Charlemagne twice participated in the occupation of the port of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos—then owned by the Ottoman Empire—once as part of a French expedition and another as part of an international squadron.