Best French interwar fleet

The biggest problem with Bearn was her elevators. Change them out, make them faster and she isn't that bad. Take off those casemate mounted guns and add some AA, then use her as a Training carrier until better ones come along. And as Badlogic has said, increasing naval aviation and training Armee de l'Air for naval missions in addition to their normal missions.
 
It would also really help that the AdA stopped dumping all its rotten and failed aircraft to the Aeronavale. MB-151 Potez 630 among them. LN-401 / 411.
The Aeronavale took them per lack of other option but ended looking like a museum or horrors or a collection of failures.
It really worked this way, France 1940: the Army hated the newly independant AdA (1933) that hated all those GAO army cooperation groups filled with obsolete types the Army did not even used properly. There were more GAOs for the Army than fighter bomber reco units !
Then the AdA avenged on the Aeronavale.
 
The biggest problem with Bearn was her elevators. Change them out, make them faster and she isn't that bad. Take off those casemate mounted guns and add some AA, then use her as a Training carrier until better ones come along. And as Badlogic has said, increasing naval aviation and training Armee de l'Air for naval missions in addition to their normal missions.

I wrote an unfinished story a few years back where Bearn's air group attacks Graf Spree on Christmas Day 1939

During my research I had to learn quite a bit about the old girl and her lifts were a weak point in the design (which was not brilliant to begin with)

Mind you even as late a building Ark Royal who had separate lifts for moving aircraft from the lower to the upper hanger and moving aircraft from the upper hanger to the fight deck - they were getting it wrong!

Bearn definitely falls under the heading of 'experimental' and dare I say 'clunky' - but I do have a soft spot for her.
 
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