She had a beam of 22.2 metres (72 ft 10 in) and a maximum draft of 7.5 metres (24 ft 7 in).

Henri IV was smaller than her predecessors, at 108 metres (354 ft 4 in) overall. Her superstructure was narrow and recessed from the hull above the main deck. Her rear hull had only 4 feet (1.2 m) of freeboard, although she was built up to the normal upper deck height amidships and at the bow for better sea-keeping and to provide for her crew. She was designed to make her a small target and lacked most of the normal rear superstructure common to ships of her period, other than that needed to keep her rear turret from being washed out. Henri IV was designed by the famous French naval architect Louis-Émile Bertin to evaluate some of his ideas. She was struck from the navy list in 1920 and scrapped the following year.

Afterwards, she was relegated to second-line roles before being sent to Taranto as a depot ship in 1918. She was sent to reinforce the Allied naval force in the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, although some of her secondary armament had been removed for transfer to Serbia in 1914.

She began World War I as guardship at Bizerte. Henri IV was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy built to test some of the ideas of the prominent naval architect Louis-Émile Bertin.

World of warships henry IV