Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to
take a look at the Model of 1884 Kropatschek.
This was a French production, basically an iteration on
the 1878 Kropatschek that we took a look at last time.
So once again, briefly, I am doing this in conjunction
with the Kickstarter pre-sale of my book,
Chassepot to FAMAS, French Military Rifles 1866 to 2016.
So if you're interested in this subject at all
you should definitely pause the video and go check out the Kickstarter,
pick up a reduced price, cool, limited edition book, and then come back here and finish this.
Alright now that you're back, we can carry on with this
gorgeous example of the Model 1884 Kropatschek.
Basically what's happened here is in the intervening years
since the Army adopted the single-shot Gras in 1874,
and then the French Navy adopts the repeating Kropatschek in 1878,
... military staff official's concerns, about the viability and the wisdom of a repeating rifle had started to shift.
So at the beginning of this time period there were some, seemingly legitimate, objections to a repeating rifle.
Things like, "Well, our gunpowder creates these huge clouds of smoke when it fires, and so what's the point in a repeating rifle?
You have to let some of that smoke clear before you can even see where you're shooting, so let's save the money
and let guys use that time when the smoke's clearing to just reload the rifle. No big deal."
... These people were theorising that you wouldn't actually see a practical increase in the rate of fire with a repeating rifle anyway,
so why bother with the cost? And of course there were concerns about manufacturing cartridges,
concerns about maintaining ammunition supply, about, you know, controlling troop discipline and rate of fire.
Well events on the ground, actual field use of these guns, started to change people's minds.
And one of the big events to do this was the Battle of Plevna in the Russo-Turkish war 1877-1878.
And what happened there, now I've seen some debate recently about what actually happened there,
but as far as everyone at the time understood, what the military observers reported back,
is what happened was a force using Winchester repeating rifles just demolished a force using single-shot rifles.
And that this idea, all these potential theorised problems of the repeating rifle, were vastly insignificant
compared to the amount of firepower that they could generate, and the effectiveness that that could have.
How it could take a small force, multiply its effective firepower, and allow it to prevail over a larger force.
So people start looking more seriously at a repeating rifle. Well in the French military the ...
perfect example on hand is the Kropatschek. The Navy has adopted it in 1878,
they've gotten some field use with it. ... The Marines are using these things out in the colonies and it's working fairly well,
you know a few little hiccups here and there.
But during these years, the head of the tool shop at the Châtellerault Arsenal, a guy named Albert Close,
he's been working on that 1878 rifle, because if the French Army is going to adopt a rifle they're not going to buy it
from some foreign manufacturer like Steyr, like the Navy did with this small batch of 1878s that they got.
If the Army's going to adopt this rifle, it's going to be made in one of the French arsenals,
or probably in several of the French arsenals. So in 1883 he presents his final development of,
basically, copy and slight improvement of the 1878 Kropatschek to the ... Ministry of War.
And they rather like it. They go ahead and actually adopt it and put it into production in 1884. And it is this rifle.
So let's take a closer look at this and let's see what he did to change it from the 1878 ... Kropatschek.
We'll start with some markings here. This example is made at Manufacture Des Armes De Châtellerault, it is a Model 1884.
As you would expect on any French rifle like this, we have a serial number here on the barrel.
This has an "A" prefix because it was made by Châtellerault,
the Saint-Étienne ones will have an F prefix as usual. Saint-Étienne got ... letters starting at F.
Châtellerault had ... A, B, C, D and E at this point.
We have a rear sight still very much reminiscent of the Gras.
In fact the official battle sight zero is flipped all the way forward like this,
and then you have range that goes up to I believe 1,900 metres.
We have our production date here on the barrel. A Châtellerault barrel, 1884 production.
MA for Manufacture Des Armes.
Then this example has just a gorgeous roundel stamp still in it,
identifying that this particular example was adopted into service in November of 1884.
The action here is still fundamentally the same as the earlier Kropatschek,
and really it's fundamentally the same that you would have on the Lebel, with a couple of little exceptions.
So once we open the bolt we have a ... lifter there that's going to pop a cartridge up.
When you close the bolt, that lifter drops down,
which allows a round to feed out of the tube magazine onto the lifter.
... The magazine tube was extended so that the 1884
has a capacity of 8 rounds in the tube instead of 7 on the earlier model.
In fact if I bring out the 1878 you can see that here.
The tube on this ends inside the stock, the tube on the 1884 extends a little bit farther.
And it's just enough farther out to afford it one extra round of capacity.
The 1884 also got itself a cleaning rod along the side of the stock.
Of course it can't go centre line under the barrel because that's where the magazine tube is.
The '78 did not have a rod like this, and it was judged to be important enough to add on.
While we're up here at the muzzle of the rifle, I will point out that one of the weak points in the design overall,
one of the things that they would beef up in the 1885, was this cutout right here
tended to be a weak point and the stock tended to crack there.
You needed that cutout because the bayonet mounted right up here,
and you had to have a little bit of a relief to be able to get it back off.
By the way, this bayonet was actually a standard Gras bayonet.
Where the 1878 had its own proprietary Steyr production bayonet,
with the 1884 they wisely went back to using a model that they already had in large quantities.
We still have a magazine cut off here in the form of this little lever.
So if I push that all the way forward the bolt no longer pushes the elevator down, in fact it's locked.
Which means (you can of course see the hole in the bolt here to sit over that little lever),
so when I close the bolt the ... elevator doesn't go down, which means it doesn't pull a cartridge out of the magazine.
It's still in the upward position,
so you would simply single feed the rifle in this configuration until you wanted to use the magazine,
then you pop that lever back and the next time you close the bolt,
the elevator goes down, and it's ready to feed a new cartridge.
One other change here, mostly stylistic, is a change in the design of the cocking piece.
So the 1884 has two notches back there for the sear. One's a safety catch, a half-cock notch so to speak,
and the other is your regular firing catch. Where the Kropatschek actually had four of them in there.
So that was deemed a little bit unnecessary.
And the overall profile of the cocking piece was changed as well.
But most of these things are just little stylistic minor differences.
Fundamentally the '78 and the '84 work the same way. Just the '84 has been optimised for French arsenal production.
So 1884 this thing goes into production. They tool up for it at both Saint-Étienne and Châtellerault.
Saint-Étienne would make 50,830 of these rifles,
Châtellerault would make somewhere between 33,000 and 35,000 of them. So
that's not trivial, like that's serious large-scale production.
And they're ramping up to ... issue these things out to a lot of forces. This is gonna be a standard infantry rifle.
Well, two things happen. First off, there are some small problems with it that require some revision,
and there would actually be an 1885 pattern that would take over from this.
But more importantly in 1886 smokeless powder is invented by a French chemist named Paul Vieille.
And that completely revolutionises military small-arms, and it literally makes these rifles obsolete overnight.
And that would lead to the development of the Lebel.
And we'll talk about the early development of the Lebel in a separate video.
But basically it's this thing, or it's the 1885 version of it, modified, ... necked down to 8mm.
But where this left the 1884s was in kind of a limbo.
These were used, rather briefly, by colonial troops, mostly in Southeast Asia. And they had a good reputation down there.
They were equipped out to second line troops...
Really they weren't really used at all until World War One rolls around, and then
every rifle in French inventory is really pretty urgently needed as the losses start piling up in the fall of 1914.
So Kropatscheks, in particular 1884s and 1885s, would be issued out to second-line sorts of rear-echelon troops,
basically to free up Lebel rifles to go to the front. Now this would last until about late 1915,
by that point production of the Berthier has gotten underway, and really alleviates some of the rifle supply problem.
And at that point pretty much all the Kropatscheks that are still in French inventory, the '78s, the '84s and the '85s,
a total of about a 105,000 of these rifles are packed up and sent to Russia as military aid.
Because ... the French are under control, they don't need these,
the Russians can use anything that shoots a bullet so we'll send these all to Russia.
And in large part because of that, Kropatscheks, all three of these versions of the Kropatschek, are really extremely rare today.
Most of them went to Russia, most of them didn't survive Russia. Those that did survive the fighting in Russia,
most of those ended up back in inventory in Russia, well, in the Soviet Union.
And then ended up getting sent to Spain as military aid to the communist and socialist and anarchist groups
in the Spanish Civil War. And most of those didn't survive the Spanish Civil War.
The ones that did mostly then went into Franco's arsenal, to be sold to Interarmco, to Sam Cummings,
and brought into the United States in the 1950s or '60s.
So most the ones you see here ... they'll be pretty rough, and they'll often have a stamp that says "Made in France"
stamped onto the top of the barrel or receiver and that's to comply with US importation law
at the time which required them to be marked with the country of origin.
So this one has not. I don't know exactly what path this one took to get here today.
But it certainly did not go through World War One or the Spanish Civil War because it is in gorgeous shape.
So that is the story of the 1884 French Kropatschek.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, you must have if you're still sticking around this long, and
in fact if you are still sticking around this far into a video on a black powder, bolt action rifle like this,
you should definitely go check out the Kickstarter pre-sale for my book Chassepot to FAMAS,
because it covers this, as well as the 1878, the 1885,
the conversion of the 1874 Gras into the 1885. And then a whole slew of other French rifles
both before and after these. From the 1866 Chassepot all the way through the modernised variants of the FAMAS.
So there's a ton of cool history in there, whether you are a collector looking to find out more about
guns you have or looking to ... figure out if a gun that you're looking to buy is correct or not,
Or if you're a military historian and you just want to know more about the development of French military rifles
as they've been used in every conflict from the Franco-Prussian war to modern day brushfire conflicts in central Africa.
So, there's some really cool Kickstarter only offers and perks and reduced prices and such.
So definitely go ahead and check that out and hopefully we'll be sending you a copy of it soon.
Thanks for watching.