''Lave'' was an ironclad

floating battery A floating battery is a kind of armed watercraft, often improvised or experimental, which carries heavy armament but has few other qualities as a warship. History Use of timber rafts loaded with cannon by Danish defenders of Copenhagen a ...

of the

French Navy The French Navy (french: Marine nationale, lit=National Navy), informally , is the maritime arm of the French Armed Forces and one of the five military service branches of France. It is among the largest and most powerful naval forces in t ...

during the 19th century. She was part of the of floating batteries. In the 1850s, the British and French navies deployed iron-armoured floating batteries as a supplement to the wooden steam battlefleet in the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the ...

. The role of the battery was to assist unarmoured mortar and gunboats bombarding shore fortifications. The French used three of their ironclad batteries (''Lave'', ''Tonnante,'' and ''Dévastation'') in 1855 against the defences at the

Battle of Kinburn (1855) The Battle of Kinburn, a combined land-naval engagement during the final stage of the Crimean War, took place on the tip of the Kinburn Peninsula (on the south shore of the Dnieper–Bug estuary in what is now Ukraine) on 17 October 1855. Duri ...

on the

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Rom ...

, where they were effective against Russian shore defences. They would later be used again during the

Italian war The Italian Wars, also known as the Habsburg–Valois Wars, were a series of conflicts covering the period 1494 to 1559, fought mostly in the Italian peninsula, but later expanding into Flanders, the Rhineland and the Mediterranean Sea. The pr ...

in the Adriatic in 1859. The ships were flat-bottomed, and commonly nicknamed "soapboxes". They were towed from France to Crimea to participate in the conflict. ''Lave'' was towed by the

paddle frigate Steam frigates (including screw frigates) and the smaller steam corvettes, steam sloops, steam gunboats and steam schooners, were steam-powered warships that were not meant to stand in the line of battle. There were some exceptions like for exa ...

''Magellan''.

References

Bibliography

* * 1855 ships Dévastation-class ironclad floating batteries Ships built in France Ironclad floating batteries Crimean War naval ships of France {{France-mil-ship-stub