If you take IFHE you gut your Fire Chances not only for your Secondaries, but for Main Battery also. By default their HE Pen is only 17mm, which isn't enough to Pen High Tier DD hulls and High Tier BB superstructure that are 19mm. Most of the possible long range secondary FR BBs rely on 100mm guns. The IFHE / Armor update gutted almost all FR BB Secondary Builds. They all can be DPM'd to death quite easily compared to German, IJN, even USN Battleships. Jean Bart, Republique, Gascogne, Richelieu, Alsace, Bourgogne. Even in High Tier, they were coated in 32mm armor, which HE Spammers LOVE. Even when the line was new, it's always had soft exterior armor that is susceptible to HE Penetration by the many spammers out there. Premium Jean Bart used to be a Battleship "No Fly Zone." Not anymore. In the RTS days, Lyon, Richelieu, Alsace has had good AA. Some of these FR BBs used to have great to killer AA. One of the things the CV Rework of early 2019 did was affect AA. WG improved German BBs to USN / RN BB dispersion, so now the French are stuck as the only BB Line with the worst dispersion pattern in the game. It used to be German & French BBs used the same bad dispersion. Decent line but it's not as good as it used to be.