Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Cody Firearms Museum
taking a look at some of the guns in their collection.
In particular today this French Arcelin musketoon, "mousqueton".
This is ... what's called a capping breech loader, and I'll explain that in just a minute.
The backstory here is in the 1850s the French military started looking for a new weapon for their cavalry.
The guys on horseback wanted something that would load a little faster,
that they could load from the breech. Give them a little more firepower.
Obviously if you're on horseback, it's virtually impossible to reload a muzzleloading firearm while riding a horse.
Well, if it's a breech loading firearm you can keep it ... well under control in one hand,
kind of at the balance point of the gun, and then open the breech and do whatever you need to do to reload it.
So, they went ahead and experimented with ... four major different designs in the mid-1850s,
and this is one of them. So this is a carbine, a system, that was developed by General Charles Arcelin.
... Actually he'd been involved in ordnance for the French military for a while.
He was the guy responsible for first bringing the percussion cap to the French military in 1842.
And he came up with a system that is, like I said, a capping breech loader.
So the idea there is it loads from the back ... actually this is legitimately a bolt-action rifle, single shot.
And it uses a self-contained paper cartridge. So a piece of paper wrapped up with a bullet and powder, but no priming mechanism.
You load that into the chamber, and then through a ... nipple on the outside you attach a standard percussion cap,
and then it has a hammer. When you fire the gun, the hammer hits the percussion cap and, just like a muzzleloader,
the flame from the percussion cap goes into the barrel, lights the powder and ... fires the cartridge.
So it's a ... breech loader, but it still uses a percussion cap.
Let me go ahead and show you that up close.
So the way this works we actually have a folding bolt handle,
because this was designed for the cavalry and you don't want it digging into the back.
So if we go ahead and unfold that we then have effectively, literally, a bolt-action rifle.
This is going to open up to the back like that.
You'll notice there is a plug right here,
and that's going to create an air space between the cartridge and the rear of the bolt face.
Once you've got this open you're going to push your cartridge manually into the chamber there,
you then close the bolt like so.
And that plug at the front is going to push the cartridge in a little bit deeper
if you haven't done so already yourself.
Now there are two sets of ... interrupted locking lugs in here, but they're shrouded inside the rear of the barrel there.
Rotate it to lock. Then you're ready to actually cock the action, put a percussion cap on it.
When you fire ... of course the hammer snaps down
detonates the percussion cap, which fires the charge.
Now if we look inside there, you can see two sets of interrupted locking lugs
at the 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock positions, horizontally laid out.
There are a matching set of locking lugs inside the bolt here.
And those are vertical now because the system is unlocked and open. And when you close the bolt
those interface and lock up with the lugs up here in the barrel, thus sort of sealing the system.
Now on the Chassepot, and on most of the other breech-loading systems,
you have some additional mechanism to help seal gas from the breech end of the gun.
On the Chassepot you had this expanding rubber obturator that did it.
On the Dreyse you had a tight fitting set of interfacing cones that did it.
The Arcelin has nothing that does it. So the problem here is that powder fouling does in fact come back
from the paper cartridge and it gets onto the ... bolt lugs.
And the more you shoot, the more powder fouling accumulates on those bolt lugs.
A quick look at a few other features here. ... The only markings on this are right here,
Manufacture Imperiale de Châtellerault, the factory that manufactured it.
And we have serial numbers on a few of the parts. The best one to show you is up here on the bayonet lug.
It's number 108. As far as I can tell only 108 were actually made for testing, so this is basically the very last one.
It does have a cleaning rod in here, which would also be used as a clearing rod.
If you had a cartridge that failed to ignite for some reason, it's a paper cartridge,
there's no extractor in the gun and no extractor mechanism on the cartridge.
So you'd have to use your rod here to tap the cartridge out the back of the breech.
Beyond that we have some brass furniture there, and a brass barrel band midway down.
This one's in gorgeous condition.
On the back here we have a brass trigger guard as well.
Although the rest of the fittings are either steel or iron, rear sling swivel, a number of serialised screws.
And a brass butt plate on the very end.
So these were initially tested at ... Vincennes.
And in 1853 the first ... single prototype gun went through its trial, and fired 130 rounds
before it developed so much fouling in the breech that they couldn't load and fire another round.
And that's not bad, on the basis of that the gun was provisionally accepted.
Emperor Louis Napoleon III thought that was pretty impressive,
and ordered that 800 be manufactured by the Châtellerault Arsenal.
In total it appears that only 108 actually were, and they were ready for testing the next year in 1854.
So they went through a much more substantial field trial.
... It ended up the test took the course of two full years.
Now, they weren't just testing this gun for two years straight, they were testing other stuff as well,
but ultimately, ... the conclusion they came to was that the gun was not acceptable.
And in 1856 it was formally rejected by the Artillery Commission.
The Artillery Commission being the guys who were responsible for weapons design.
The problem was, as you saw earlier, it has no obturation, so fouling built up on the lugs.
So this manifested itself as broken bolt handles.
The explanation being as the bolt lugs get fouled, it gets harder and harder to actually close the bolt on a cartridge.
And so the natural reaction of a soldier in the field with the gun is to hit the bolt handle.
And ... as they get really fouled you have to hit that thing really hard, and eventually
the bolt handle breaks before it rotates into battery.
And that was the main objection, and that's a really serious and really valid objection,
and that was enough for them to reject the guns.
However, what's interesting is that in the meantime, after that 1853 first initial trial that looked fairly positive,
the military at large went ahead to test them, but they were actually adopted basically on the spot.
In 1854 these were adopted as the official firearm for a brand new little unit of men
that was created by Louis Napoleon III, his Cent-garde, his hundred man guard.
And this was intended to kind of be one of many things that he did to try and bring back the glory of the French First Empire,
having these really fancy special squadron of palace guards and personal bodyguard for him.
And those guys needed a cool, modern, cutting-edge gun, and so they got these breech-loading mousquetons.
And to go with them they got the world's largest bayonet ever.
This thing is legitimately like a sabre. It's not a curved blade, but it's a military sabre
that just happens to also mount on the end of the gun.
There is actually a hole, I don't know if you can see it there,
there's a hole in the handguard basket here to go around the muzzle of the carbine to mount this thing.
Let me show you that.
Alright, so I really can't do justice to this thing back behind the table,
because this is too ludicrously long and you can't see all of it. So bring it out here,
set the scabbard back.
That is truly a full proper cavalry sabre.
So then you can go ahead and get our carbine here, mousqueton, sorry.
And this guy is going to fit on there.
And that is,
can you see that? I think,
honestly, the camera is so far away at this point I can't tell if you can quite see that all the way up,
but it is quite a ridiculously long contraption when put together.
So there's the whole thing.
Now, there's a couple of ways to look at this. On the one hand this seems incredibly goofy.
On the other hand if you're actually going to use ... a bayonet in combat at this period,
it's to defend yourself against someone on horse.
And having a short little musketoon or carbine, you need a fairly long bayonet to make up the difference
so that you can actually stick the guy on the horse before he runs you over.
So in that sense, maybe it's not the most ludicrous thing ever.
And of course the actual use that these things got was standing on guard,
where, yeah, it actually looks kind of cool. So it does its job there.
Now, it's interesting, there is an apocryphal story which is, I am quite sure, genuine Grade A nonsense
that they ceased using these because the Guardsmen kept poking holes in the ceiling
with the ludicrously long bayonet. That is clearly not true.
If you ever have a chance to go to a French Imperial Palace
you'll know that the ceilings are way taller than this thing.
This may be stupidly long, but those ceilings are really, really high.
So that's just apocryphal nonsense, but.
Before we finish this off, I do want to point something out here.
You can see the inscription here,
which is Manufacture Imperiale Châtellerault, made in June 1865, for the Dragoon Model of 1854.
This is actually a sabre bayonet for the rifle that replaced the Arcelin in Cent-gardes service.
So it's almost identical, but the style of the hilt here is just a little bit different.
And when we mount it on the gun, it fits,
but it doesn't actually go far enough forward to lock.
The bayonet lug hits the front of the slot in the bayonet there, and you can see that the muzzle
doesn't quite come all the way through.
So the two styles of literal sabre bayonet have the same geometry between the muzzle and the lug,
but they aren't quite interchangeable. And it's certainly understandable why someone
whenever this came into probably the Winchester Collection, from whence it came to the Cody Firearms Museum,
it's understandable why they would not necessarily catch that.
Unfortunately it's not quite exactly the right pattern of bayonet, but it is the same length,
it's only difference is in the hilt between this and the actual specific correct pattern.
So in addition to being a really cool mechanical system,
one of the early styles of breech loader that would eventually ultimately lead to
you know, cartridge firing guns, metallic cartridges as we know them today,
this thing also has the honour of being the most ridiculous bayonet ever used on a carbine.
Now I said in ... 1856 the gun was rejected by the military, and in 1856 the Cent-gardes also got rid of it,
and they replaced it with ... a breech-loading, like an open-bolt pinfire single-shot rifle,
which is a tremendously interesting gun as well. And as soon as I can find one I'll do a video on it for you guys.
But that thing also used basically the same style of bayonet.
So sword bayonet, just literally sword bayonet in this case.
So that is the Arcelin 1854 pattern breech-loading capping musketoon.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, I think it's a really cool story and it's a tremendously rare firearm.
And it is only one of a great many very cool firearms that are here at the Cody Firearms Museum.
Most of them actually on display, this one actually came out of the back vault.
But they have something like 7,000 firearms on display in a brand new, newly renovated gallery.
It's a very cool museum and I would highly recommend that you stop by,
visit, and take a look if you're ever in the Cody area.
Thanks for watching.
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