Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company taking a look at one of the C96 pistols that's going
to be in their upcoming April of 2020 Premiere Auction.
Now this pistol specifically is a French Gendarmerie Contract C96,
or at least that's the general name given to them.
They are a pretty well documented, or well described, variation of the C96.
Their actual connection to the French Gendarmerie
is a little bit tenuous, and a little bit speculative.
But let's go through the whole story. So basically
with the ... Armistice in November of 1918,
the Mauser company is still in business. They're a private firm, they're not a government run arsenal,
and they want to continue to build stuff and make money.
When the Treaty of Versailles is actually signed it's going to put some pretty serious restrictions on German arms production,
but those haven't quite taken hold when these pistols are actually made and purchased.
A lot of people think Treaty of Versailles was November 11th 1918, in reality November 11th was the Armistice,
that's when the shooting stopped. The actual formal treaty took many, many months to hash out and finally get signed.
And these pistols kind of existed in the interim time between those two events.
So there would be restrictions on long barrelled pistols, military calibre pistols,
shoulder stocked pistols, as well as rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, that sort of stuff.
This version of the C96 is basically the very first batch of guns that were produced after the Armistice.
And so they actually used some leftover parts from military production runs.
And what we know is that in 1919 a batch of 2,000 pistols was sold through a German dealer by the name of Albrecht Kind,
who had worked with the French government before.
We don't have any specific documentation showing that these guns went to the French military.
However, we know that the French did use C96 Broomhandles with the occupation troops in Germany after the war.
And so ... the coincidental evidence is fairly substantive that this order of 2,000 was almost certainly purchased by the French government.
So let's take a closer look at exactly what they were buying.
So the most visually distinctive thing on these pistols are the grips.
We have a hard rubber grip on these, with a little embellishment here that is a little difficult to see,
but it is actually an entangled M and W for Waffenfabrik Mauser, like you see there.
And those grips are the same on both sides of the gun.
We have a standard Waffenfabrik Mauser Oberndorf am Neckar manufacturer's mark on the right side.
We have that same Waffenfabrik Mauser marking on the top of the chamber.
And then the serial number on the side, and a German proof mark, crown over U.
Most of these guns, although not all of them, are marked "Germany" on the left side plate.
That is a marking that was added for commercial export purposes. And it kind of fits with an immediate post-war purchase of the guns.
So part of the deal is these pistols, this variation, were not made to order specifically for the French.
They were guns that were basically in stock and available when the order was placed.
And so there isn't a single defined serial number range. There is a range, but it's not every gun in the range.
These were guns that were pulled from stock, and so some of them had already been marked for export like this, and some hadn't.
That serial number range is from 430,000 to 434,000.
But the guns only comprise 2,000 examples within that range, so it's not every gun in that range.
This one does of course fit in there, and it's all matched, which is nice.
Got the last three digits up there on the hammer. And "S" is the new safety model, you'll see that on all the postwar guns.
One of the kind of unique features of this specific model is that they were ... fitted with 50 to 500 metre tangent sights,
which normally were only equipped on 9mm Parabellum calibre Broomhandles.
Typically the 7.63mm guns, and all of these are in 7.63 Mauser, those were equipped with 1,000 metre rear sights.
And the reason that they differ here is because at the time the muzzle velocity
on the 9mm Parabellum cartridge that Mauser was using was about 1,000 feet per second,
where the muzzle velocity on 7.63 Mauser, which admittedly used a much lighter bullet, was like 1,400 feet per second.
So, because of that 9mm was travelling a lot slower, and at long range had a lot more drop.
And in order to fit a 1,000 ... metre rear sight to a 9mm gun, there would have had to be
a very severe slope here, and the sight would have had to be really high at that 1,000 metre mark.
The 7.63 guns already had a pretty darn high sight, and Mauser chose instead
to ... go with the easy solution and simply reduce the range on the guns.
To the point where the 500 metre tangent curve here basically matches the 1,000 metre 7.63 curve.
Anyway, that's a long introduction to the fact that they had leftover rear sights from the 9mm,
the "Red 9" Broomhandles that were made for the Prussian military,
and they put those on some of these post-war guns.
So the fact that it's 500 metres on a 7.63 calibre gun, and this kind of fancy-ish
script on the rear sight, identify that as the rear sight from a Red 9.
As with basically all Broomhandles, these were cut for shoulder stocks, and the shoulder stocks
were also basically leftover components from Prussian Red 9 production.
So this one doesn't have a shoulder stock with it. But the appropriate shoulder stock would be an oak one,
as was used on the Red 9, and it would actually be a full-length stock.
These guns have the shorter 100mm, or 3.9 inch barrel.
But the stocks that were available for them were made for the full-length ... wartime guns with 6 inch barrels.
So you get a full-length stock, made of oak, like the Red 9s it had no lanyard loops on the stock.
The stock lug would be matched with the last three digits of the serial number.
And that's what you would normally expect to come with one of these French Gendarmerie guns.
So you might be wondering why the French Gendarmerie would be buying guns from Germany in 1919.
And well, again I don't have any specific documentation explaining the point from their perspective.
But if you consider the role of military police occupying surrendered territory,
this sort of gun kind of makes sense.
Really I think what would have been ideal, had it been in French inventory at the time, would have been a submachine gun.
That's kind of still today sort of the typical armament for military police, Gendarmerie who are,
you know, in a potentially high-risk area. But the French didn't have any submachine guns.
And why they didn't buy submachine guns from Germany?
It may simply be that there weren't any available. Where Mauser had large stocks of C96 parts,
and they were eager to fulfil a contract and they could sell 2,000 guns.
Which is, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but probably more submachine guns than the Germans ever fielded in World War One.
At any rate, the French didn't have a pistol calibre carbine like this in their inventories either.
They had handguns and revolvers, they had rifles and carbines in, you know, 8mm Lebel.
But they didn't have something like this that was convenient, easy to carry, and kind of unobtrusive for a policeman.
Carry it ... in the shoulder stock holster, but still be able to attach the shoulder stock and use it as a de facto carbine,
you know should situations get really sticky. So.
It's I think a pretty cool variation on the C96 with a neat bit of history behind it.
If you're interested in one, this one is of course coming up for sale here in the April auction.
You can check out Rock Island's pictures and description of it,
as well as everything else that they've got in their catalogue over at their website.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]