Why France could not match the Royal Navy ship for ship

What would happen if late nineteenth-century France tried to match the Royal Navy one for one?

France would likely bankrupt itself because it could not abandon the army and continental defense commitments that Britain did not share.

Britain's geography allowed it to place exceptional weight on naval power in a way continental France could not copy safely. France had to fund land defense, recover from the Franco-Prussian War, and sustain imperial commitments while also paying for a fleet. Matching the Royal Navy would provoke an arms race beyond Germany's historical naval effort and overload French finances. Fleet size depended on national geography and competing military obligations as well as naval budgets.