Why did the French Navy not more fully embrace carrier aviation after WWI?

The opening frames the puzzle: a navy willing to pursue submarines, destroyers, and fast battleships still entered the interwar carrier era with little more than Bearn and seaplanes.

Land-based aircraft could develop flying skill, but they did not give the French Navy the shipboard integration and force-level experience needed for true naval aviation.

France had room for another carrier and could treat Bearn as an experiment, so treaty limits alone cannot explain the absence of a follow-on program.

Competition between services forced Japanese, American, and British institutions to argue about naval aviation, refine doctrine, and preserve organizational momentum that France lacked.

Bearn becomes both symptom and cause: a slow conversion that could not generate the carrier-operating knowledge needed to make naval aviation self-reinforcing.

The answer roots France's interwar decision-making problems in the human and institutional losses left by the First World War.

A rapid turnover of French governments and naval ministers made sustained carrier policy difficult during the same years Bearn and treaty decisions needed continuity.

Rapid turnover denied ministers the time to master departmental language, test expert advice, and provide the informed continuity that complex defence programs required.

Returning ministers had to relearn a strategic picture in which Japan and Italy mattered before Germany again became an immediate threat, complicating long-term naval choices.

French naval chiefs usually entered national funding debates as vice admirals facing army marshals, generals, and more politically established British naval leaders.

French land-defence politics pulled attention and money toward the Maginot Line, leaving naval aviation outside the main defence debate.

Personal combat experience could distort procurement either by making one wartime role seem universally decisive or by encouraging leaders to reject painful lessons too completely.

France's navy had served globally in the First World War, but its necessary position behind the much larger Royal Navy weakened its interwar political prominence.

France had carrier tonnage and global commitments, yet chose battleship construction while leaving fast carriers until the Joffre class was too late.

The Royal Navy's Ark Royal, Illustrious, Unicorn, and later designs make France's much later Joffre program a distinct French institutional choice.

Bearn's over-engineered lifts and hangar layout show how a poor experimental carrier could teach the wrong lessons and slow operational learning.

Joffre's design reflected a need to launch and recover aircraft continuously for Mediterranean, reconnaissance, and anti-submarine work.

A French carrier needed enough speed to conduct flying operations with capital ships and enough reach to support anti-surface, anti-submarine, and Far Eastern commitments.

Britain and the United States would likely oppose a Japanese attack on French possessions, but France still needed forces present to protect its postwar political position.

Carrier fighters and airborne observers could warn and disrupt Mediterranean air attacks before layered anti-aircraft fire broke them into smaller, less coordinated groups.

The closing counterfactual asks how two earlier Joffre-like carriers and French twin-engine aircraft might have changed international carrier-air-group development.