Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a Hotchkiss Universal.
I did a video on one of these many years ago, but, well, I can take this one apart now,
and I know some more information about them. So it's time for a redo.
Now the Hotchkiss Universal was of course produced by the Hotchkiss Company.
This is a company that was originally founded by an American, Benjamin Hotchkiss, back in like the 1870s.
He was working in small arms in the United States, and in the post-Civil War,
well, arms sale depression because there were tons of leftover arms from the Civil War,
he figured he wasn't going to sell anything in the US, so he might as well take his business over to Europe.
And he settled in Paris, founded the Hotchkiss Company there, and proceeded to do quite well.
Now by the time this was developed, Benjamin Hotchkiss had long since died.
But the company remained in France, it was responsible, of course, for the Hotchkiss Model of 1914 heavy machine gun
that was a mainstay of the French Army during World War One, and during World War Two as well.
And anyway, to move forward a bit.
During World War Two the French military had the MAS 38 submachine gun in 7.65 long.
Which was fine. It was a very compact submachine gun, it was mechanically a fine submachine gun,
but it really became obvious that they wanted to standardise on 9mm.
So after World War Two the French military held some trials to adopt a new submachine gun.
And in addition to being chambered in 9mm, they wanted something that was compact.
Something that would be suitable for guys who didn't have a lot of space.
In particular paratroopers and mechanised infantry. These are some of the
various specialities that came out of World War Two looking like they're the thing that's going to really be relevant.
Having guys in armoured personnel carriers, having guys in helicopters, having guys jumping out of aircraft.
And so if you look at the prototypes that were submitted to these trials, they all are compact in some way.
And the gun that ended up winning, the ... MAT 49, has a folding magazine well, kind of like this.
However, Hotchkiss took the folding thing to a whole another level,
and every bit of this gun folds up, which makes it incredibly cool.
So, let me go ahead and show you how all that actually works.
Alright, we'll start by folding this up. And this begins with the magazine well.
There is a latch right here, which allows me to push the magazine forward.
I can then press the magazine release button, right here, and pull the magazine through
... back in the magazine well. There's a little stop right here on the receiver, so the magazine comes to here.
By the way you can do all this with the magazine fully loaded,
which means you can actually have this gun folded up and in ... a
totally safe stowed position with a loaded magazine already in the gun.
Next up, we're going to retract the barrel, because this actually reciprocates into the receiver.
So to do that I'm going to take this lever, pull it down, and then I can grab the muzzle end out here
(and by the way, that's why there are these two finger rests),
and pull this back into the gun.
This button right here locks the barrel in place. (Put the charging handle there.)
And then lastly I'm going to fold the stock underneath.
So we'll pull this back, right there.
There's a little spring plunger in the end, right here, that locks into a plug in the end cap of the receiver.
Once you've unlocked it, this folds around, locks into the bottom of the magazine well.
The grip folds up because it's hollow and folds over the trigger guard.
And voilà, you now have a very compact package. This comes in at a little less than 18 inches long.
... You really can't get a smaller submachine gun than that for the equivalent barrel length.
We would normally then close the dust cover. On this particular one, the parts kits that came in for these are all pretty beat-up.
My dust cover doesn't want to stay closed.
But that is the folded configuration. To unfold it, which you can actually do pretty darn quickly,
you start by opening the stock.
Then pull this button right here down,
that extends the barrel. Pull the magazine forward, lock it in,
and then you need only rack the gun and it's ready to use.
Just to give you a little bit of a close-up on some of those, here is the latch that unlocks the magazine well.
And the magazine well is a two-part thing where we've got the inner magazine well
that actually holds the magazine, and the outer component which has the two hooks to lock into the stock,
and has the hinge mechanism and everything to keep this in place.
On the other side here we have this button, which releases the magazine.
This is a 32 round magazine.
And I have seen it claimed that this is in fact interchangeable with an MP40 magazine.
Unfortunately, I don't have an MP40 magazine handy to try this out.
So I'm not completely sure, but it does look very similar.
And it is, by the way, a double-stack, single-feed magazine.
There's an interesting element in the markings that's worth taking a look at.
The guns are marked CMH, which means Carabine Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss,
or carbine machine gun Hotchkiss, like automatic carbine Hotchkiss.
It looks like the early ones, the first batch that were produced, were marked like this and then serialised here on the receiver.
The second batch, or a later batch, were marked "CMH2".
They do not have a serial number on the receiver,
and they do instead have a serial number on a tag attached here to the buttstock.
Now, I'm not entirely sure of the significance of this,
I don't know exactly how many were made with each different marking.
However, there are a couple of features that you'll find variations of on the gun.
So one of them is right here, the little finger notches to retract the barrel.
There is one version where they are offset, and they have a nice little scalloped cut to them.
I believe this is the early version.
And then you also have a version here where they are simplified, they're squared off, there's no scallop.
I believe that's the CMH2, the later version.
I suspect what was going on here is that they were trying to simplify the design
where they could easily, and reduce the cost at least a little bit
to try and make these guns more appealing to the military.
So you can see here ... on this they actually turned down the barrel
so that this is flush with the barrel diameter all the way down.
Where here they didn't bother, ... they put an oversized front block on with a pin.
This, I believe, is the early style of sight.
They're all a two-position aperture sight with 50 metre and 150 metre settings.
However, this one is nice and rounded, the other version that you will see
(and unfortunately I don't have an example to show you here),
the other version are just simple square blocks.
So I believe this is the original, and the squared ones are the CMH2 type.
There is a peg here on the side of the grip that has a hole in it for attaching the rear part of the sling.
This is really annoying if you're left handed, but it's not that much of a problem if you're right handed.
The front sling was actually attached around the barrel.
... That's done so that when the whole thing is folded up you have
sling swivels that are basically at the front and rear of the package that you're left with.
The assumption would be if the gun is unfolded and ready to fire,
you're not necessarily carrying it on the sling, you're carrying it in a ready position.
If it's folded up, that's when you would want the sling to be most useful.
Now on this particular gun, the fire control group has been modified to semi-auto.
However from a parts kit I have an extra lower here that I can show you that has not been modified.
On this one we have "R" for répétition, or repetition, semi-auto, that you can push through on that side.
You have automatique, "A", automatic there. And there is actually a safe position that is in the middle.
So it's a little tricky to get to, it's very easy to run the button all the way to one side or the other.
But in the centre position the trigger is blocked.
Over here you've got semi-auto,
and over there you've got full-auto.
Disassembly is pretty easy. We're going to start by opening the rear cap.
We just fold that all the way in, and then there's a little button here.
When I depress that, I can then rotate the end cap 90 degrees.
It's going to come out, and I have a recoil spring.
Now, making sure that this isn't hooked, we can actually pull the whole lower assembly
there we go, back out of the gun.
So there's our lower with our fire control group, this is the same part that you saw my other [one].
This one's been modified to semi-auto of course.
With a little bit of wiggling the bolt comes out the back.
This whole thing is the bolt assembly.
And one of the ... unusual things about the Hotchkiss Universal is that it was, from the ground up, a closed bolt gun.
Meaning that the bolt chambers a round, and the bolt closes,
and then it waits until you pull the trigger to fire.
The alternative of course being an open bolt gun where the bolt starts in the rearward position,
and pulling the trigger causes it to go forward, chamber a round, and then immediately fire it.
For a practical matter in my case here, that means that this was a pretty easy gun to convert to ... legal semi-auto in the US.
It also means that this has a relatively complicated firing system, because it can't just have a fixed firing pin.
Instead it's got a series of interlocks and levers. ...
So this is the out of battery safety right here. When the bolt's in battery
this gets pushed up out of the way. And then pulling the trigger actually pushes this up,
which releases an internal hammer. And you can see the firing pin has now come through the breech face.
And then when the bolt cycles backward, this re-cocks it like that.
So the whole ... firing pin, firing pin spring and sear system are built into the bolt,
which is kind of a cool system.
Our one last bit of disassembly is that we can take the barrel off.
So this cap slides on the barrel and comes off, and then we can take ... this out.
And just like they built a bunch of stuff into the bolt, they ... built a bunch of stuff into the barrel as well.
So we have our feed ramp here, this is actually the ejector,
the barrel trunnion and all, obviously all of this is built right into the barrel assembly.
On the original guns as machine guns, the magazine housing assembly right here
is actually a separate part that can come off as well.
The conversion process of making a semi-automatic receiver for this gun
involved making the tube one contiguous part. You can see where it's welded on right there.
So I can't show you that bit of disassembly on this gun.
So considering the relatively small number of parts one normally sees on a
modern post-World War Two submachine gun,
which would be you know, a very simple stock, a tube receiver,
a basically ... one piece bolt and a fixed barrel.
You can I think understand the issues that Hotchkiss had with this gun,
it was just way too complicated, way too expensive.
A couple other things to point out.
While these are more colloquially known as the "Universal", or "Universelle",
... in Hotchkiss's terms they were referred to as the Model 010.
And there were a bunch of other models of this basic system that Hotchkiss made
I think more intended for police sales than military.
There were a bunch of versions with long barrels, some with wooden stocks,
some with folding stocks, most of them without the telescoping barrel feature.
But ... there was a Model 010, the Model 011, 017, the Model 304, there were bunch of these.
If you're interested in them, Jean Huon has a book on French submachine guns
that has pictures of a bunch of the different models. It is a book only in French though.
In practice, I find this actually a pretty uncomfortable gun to use.
In order to have the pistol grip fold up over the trigger, the grip is a C-shape,
and it's hollow on the front, which makes ... for weird handling. It's a little squishy here as well.
You can see that these grips have already cracked.
The trigger itself is really, really wide, which is kind of odd. I don't understand why it would need to be.
That seems to be a design decision that Hotchkiss went with, and I don't know exactly why.
The butt plate is also pretty darn small and kind of has a weird shape to it, again as a result of the need to fold.
So this is where the magazine is actually sitting when the stock folds.
I also find the sights to be quite remarkably low.
This is the long range 150 sight, that's the short range. And for me it's fairly awkward
to get my cheek down low enough on this tube stock to actually get a good sight picture.
The aperture is really quite small.
I have a lot ... of ergonomic complaints with the gun.
There's no particularly good front grip. This again comes from the requirements of having it all fold up.
Like where would you fold a grip into? So this is your front grip.
I guess you could hold it back here, but you can't really.
And you don't want to hold it out here because this is the barrel itself, and that will get hot quite fast.
So it's this that you're stuck with.
If you're left handed, you've got this thing right inside your grip, which is weird.
So not the world's most comfortable gun. But it is the world's most folding gun I think,
and there's something certainly to be said for that.
Not surprisingly, the Hotchkiss here did not win military trials, of course the MAT 49 did.
The Hotchkiss was rejected on account of being too complex and too expensive.
And you can certainly see ... where those complaints come from, and they're totally justified.
Hotchkiss was able to make about 7,000 of these guns.
... There were a couple of small contracts that they got, they apparently sold some in Venezuela,
they sold some to the Moroccan police, they sold some to French police forces.
Apparently they sold a hundred to the CRS, which is like the presidential security,
VIP security forces of the French government.
And they did also actually see trials and limited use in Indochina by the French Foreign Legion.
In particular we know that the 1st BEP, or the 1st Foreign Legion Paratroop Battalion
did get issued some Hotchkiss Universals basically for field trials.
And their reaction to ... the gun was,
"It seems fine. It's reliable. It's way too complicated and weird to try and open and close."
So these guys, who weren't actually jumping out of aircraft when they were using these guns,
they were already on the ground, they just carried them in this, in the deployed configuration,
rather than try to mess with all the buttons and levers.
Not nice to clean, as you might suspect from having seen the inside, but.
Ultimately, like this was a commercial failure. Yeah, 7,000 is nice, but not all that many.
They remain really quite scarce today, and it's very cool that,
well, I consider myself very lucky to have managed to find this one.
It has of course been registered as a short-barrelled rifle.
And I'll tell you what, we are going to go ahead and do some shooting with it tomorrow.
So if you're curious to see how this does on the standardised pistol calibre carbine course of fire,
stick around, check out the video tomorrow.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]