Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're talking about a prototype French assault rifle
/ submachine gun, the Fusil Automatique 1918, the automatic rifle model of 1918.
This was designed by a guy named Paul Ribeyrolles, or as it would be spelled in English Ribeyrolles.
He was actually the manager of the Gladiator bicycle factory, and
became something of an arms design expert himself over the course of being
heavily involved in the design of the 1915 Chauchat, or CSRG, the R in that name
is for Ribeyrolles and the G is for Gladiator, his factory, where the guns were built.
He was also involved in the RSC 1917/1918 guns, again the R is Ribeyrolles.
And so, he was involved in arms design, and in particular in some of the most advanced
forward-looking arms design that the French military was doing during World War One.
And the 1918 automatic rifle, or automatic carbine some sources call it,
was definitely on this forefront. It was a select-fire, intermediate cartridge,
magazine-fed short carbine.
In concept one of the very first weapons to embody this role of the assault rifle.
Now, it wasn't the very first, in addition to some experimental ones that I may not be thinking of,
there was also actually an American weapon, which we did a video on, the 1917 Burton rifle.
That fulfilled all of these roles and actually had more than a few similarities to the 1918 Ribeyrolles.
That came a year before, Burton was 1917, but the reason that people are aware of
this 1918 French firearm is because it was added into the video game 'Battlefield 1'.
It's in there and a lot of people are wondering well, what's the deal? Where are they?
People would like to see one. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge,
there are no surviving examples, and there's basically
only one existing photograph of the gun, and it's this.
So overall, this thing was 1.09 metres long,
that's about 43 inches, which means it is just about the same size as an Indochina
pattern Berthier, except it would have had a magazine, right about here in the middle.
And one of the big things about this particular rifle is that it was heavy.
So the thing weighed 5.1 kilograms. That's 11.25 pounds.
Think of this kind of like a Thompson, except longer.
That's a really heavy gun, ... for an infantry sort of shoulder weapon.
The reason it was that heavy is that it was a simple blowback action,
and it was chambered for either 8x35 or 8x32 semi-rimmed.
(Different sources give different numbers.)
That cartridge was basically the .351 Winchester self-loading cartridge,
which the French used in the Winchester 1907 rifles during the war.
They basically took that cartridge, gave it a semi-rim (so ... a rim that was a little bit wider in diameter
than the cartridge body), presumably to get better extraction, although that would also
probably hinder its feeding in magazines. Anyway, they took that cartridge case,
they sized the neck to .32 calibre, or 8mm, and used an armour-piercing 8mm Lebel rifle projectile in it.
All of this seems pretty slick and pretty forward- thinking. It really was ... an intermediate power cartridge.
The simple blowback action means it had to have a pretty darn heavy bolt
in order to handle that cartridge. Typically when we look at
intermediate cartridge weapons like AR-15, AKs, the German Sturmgewehr,
all of these guns have locked breech actions, and they're still fairly heavy.
The Ribeyrolles had just a simple blowback, like a submachine gun.
It used a 25 round magazine.
And it was actually first introduced in the summer of 1918, where it was tested at Versailles.
Ribeyrolles presented this to the French military for their testing, and unfortunately
the testing went really pretty poorly. The gun had significant reliability issues.
If I'm reading it right, the one piece of data I saw said that they tried
firing 75 rounds in semi-auto, and they had 53 malfunctions, so
not quite there in 1918. And then, of course, the war ended in November of 1918,
before the gun had a chance to be developed and perfected any more.
Now it did come back after the end of the war, and in 1921 Ribeyrolles presented it
again for further testing in the summer of 1921 at Camp de Chalons,
and it didn't apparently really do much better.
... Even if it had worked perfectly at that point, it was honestly too far ahead of its time
to be adopted at that point. The French military was trying to fit this into
... one of the roles that they had in mind for small arms,
and so what they were picturing was an infantry rifle, and like an
individual weapon, which would have been something like a submachine gun,
looking at the German MP18 sort of concept. And the problem they had was that
this Ribeyrolles 1918, it was too heavy to be a submachine gun, at 11.25 pounds
it was too much, and they didn't think it fit that role. It was also too underpowered,
as an intermediate cartridge, to fill the role of an infantry rifle.
They found that its effective range pretty much ended at 400 metres,
and remember, this is still in the day of "we want 800 - 1,000 metre effective range",
the French would eventually go on ... Actually what they would adopt fairly shortly after this
was the 7.5x54mm rifle cartridge, which is just slightly less powerful than 7.62 NATO.
And obviously, that's what they were looking for, not an intermediate cartridge.
On the one hand you could look at this as being a huge oversight,
and a missed opportunity to really get the jump on small arms technology again.
On the other hand it's worth considering that they almost certainly wanted one cartridge
to use in both machine guns and rifles, and something like an intermediate cartridge,
like 8x32 or 8x35 semi-rimmed, was not an effective machine gun cartridge.
And so that's justification to reject it. Now, should they have used it?
Yeah, probably, if the gun had worked reliably,
and again it's important to point out that it didn't. In fact, as best I can tell,
they only ever made a grand total of 3,000 rounds of ammunition for the thing.
I don't know how many actual examples of the gun were made, but it certainly was not many.
As far as I know, none of them survive to this day. So
that is why I am doing this discussion of this gun here in my chair, instead of
waiting to actually bring you one from a museum. Because I'm pretty sure
I'm never actually gonna find one, because I don't think any of them exist.
So that is the story of the Fusil Automatique 1918 Ribeyrolles.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. If you enjoy using it in Battlefield 1, awesome.
It's worth being aware that in video games they don't ever have malfunctions,
and that was the primary downfall of this particular weapon in reality.
Thanks for watching. Tune in again tomorrow for another Forgotten Weapon.