The French cruiser Pothuau was an armoured cruiser built for the French Navy (Marine Navale) in the 1890s. She spent most of her active career in the Mediterranean before becoming a gunnery training ship in 1906. The ship participated in the Kamerun Campaign early in World War I before she was transferred to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in 1916 where she patrolled and escorted convoys. Pothuau fruitlessly searched the Indian Ocean for the German commerce raider Wolf in mid-1917. The ship resumed her previous role after the war until she was decommissioned in 1926 and sold for scrap three years later.