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 a French Model of 1874 Gras rifle.
This is the first cartridge firing rifle that the French military would adopt,
and we're doing this video in conjunction with the Kickstarter launch
of my book on French military rifles entitled,
"Chassepot to FAMAS, French Military Rifles ... 1866 to 2016".
So if you're interested in this subject, you should definitely
head over to the Kickstarter and pre-order yourself a copy.
We have some really cool Kickstarter only options up there.
Anyway, there's a link in the description text below.
And without further ado, let's get on to the 1874 Gras.
So this of course comes about after the Franco-Prussian war.
The French had made like 1,500,000 Chassepot rifles,
but then they got their pants kind of handed to them
by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war.
There was a serious spirit of revenge. They wanted to take
back the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.
And there was a major rearmament movement in France in the mid to late 1870s.
So this started almost immediately after the war.
In 1872 and 1873 the French military started holding some trials of new cartridge-firing rifle systems.
And what they really wanted was some way to convert existing Chassepot rifles to a new metallic cartridge system.
They'd made the decision with the Chassepot that cartridge manufacturing technology
wasn't really good enough to justify or to risk metallic cartridges.
But by 1872-73 clearly that was the wrong decision, and cartridge production was getting better,
and that was obviously the way of the future. So.
There were a whole bunch of different systems proposed. The one that they ended up selecting was designed by a Captain Basile Gras.
Who was a French artillery captain at the time, and that was relevant.
So his system was not the cheapest, and of course cheap was a major element.
However, it ... wasn't cheap because it required a whole new bolt
and you had to either make some changes to the barrel or replace the entire barrel.
And that's, you know, OK so you can reuse the stock, you can reuse the receiver, but it's a lot of new stuff that you have to make.
However, what the testing Commission noted was the resultant gun, a Gras conversion of a Chassepot,
was almost, like that close, to being the equivalent of a ... completely new gun.
And so that kind of made up for the extra cost in their minds. It was effectively getting something like new.
So this went through some pretty serious rigorous testing
and it is in fact, for a black powder rifle, a quite durable and strong gun.
Testing involved among other things, they proof tested these with 6 bullets stacked up in the barrel
and a 540 grain charge of black powder, and the gun actually survived that.
So they did reliability and endurance testing as well and this came out to be a really good system.
So ... they adopted it in 1874.
Oh, the thing that I forgot to tell you, I mentioned that Gras was an artillery captain at the time, that's relevant
because he designed this conversion while working basically on the clock for the French military.
Which meant all of his ideas were their ideas, which meant they didn't have to pay him a royalty.
Which cut the cost over a design that was submitted by an independent civilian designer who might have patented his own design.
So while it was a little more expensive to make, they at least got the savings on that end.
Anyway it was adopted in 1874 and went into production really in 1875 (first couple of prototypes in '74),
but major production in 1875. And it would stay in production all the way until 1884.
The French Army adopted this. The French Navy interestingly did not, the Navy retained the Chassepot and then made
some other changes ... they adopted something different, and we'll talk about that in an entirely separate video.
But production of the Gras would far exceed production of the Chassepot.
By 1884 they had made about 3,500,000 of these Gras long rifles for the infantry.
And then they also made a couple of carbine versions, which I've got sitting back here.
So they had a cavalry carbine which is, as you can see, a few inches shorter than the standard infantry version.
It has some brass hardware, it does not have a bayonet lug on it because this was intended for the cavalry.
And they did about 230,000 of these guys total.
They did a Gendarmerie carbine. This is meant for ... (Gendarmerie are kind of this sort of military police,
they're kind of an intermediary between a national police force and a military auxiliary),
at any rate, some of them were on horseback and they got cavalry carbines.
Some of them were on foot and ... they didn't need a full- length infantry rifle, they weren't firing in ranks in volleys.
But they did need a bayonet lug, so they had a slightly different version here.
This is the same length as the cavalry carbine and, as you can see, a couple inches shorter than the infantry rifle.
They made about 162,000 of these all told.
And then they also had an Artillery musketoon. We would call this a carbine,
they actually called the other two carbines and this a "Mousqueton", or musketoon.
It is substantially shorter. And this was intended, as the name implies, for artillery crewmen who needed some sort of weapon.
But kind of like it was more important that it was handy and didn't get in the way, than that it was a really effective firearm.
So these little guys, they made somewhere north of 300,000 of.
So ... I should say there was also a fifth version. There was an African cavalry carbine, which is
... well, it's an African rifle really. Very subtly different from the standard infantry rifle.
And they only made like 12,000 of those things, and I don't have one to show you.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at what this conversion actually was.
Alright, let's start by looking at just the bolts. You can see the obvious similarity, especially in the bolt handles.
However, one of the expensive parts of this conversion was the fact that you couldn't just
convert a Chassepot bolt into a Gras bolt, you had to make this entirely from scratch.
There were too many major features that had to change.
So what Gras did was he introduced, first off, a removable bolt head.
Now the locking surface for this bolt is still the stem, right here, locking up against the receiver.
Notice that there is a straight track on the Chassepot bolt. One of the things we talked about in the Chassepot video
was how you had to manually re-cock the thing before you could open the bolt. Well, the Gras didn't need to do that.
We talked about why in the Chassepot video. But for the Gras this track is now curved,
and so opening the bolt actually cams the striker back exactly like we would expect for a modern bolt action rifle.
Once I take the bolt head off here I can actually pull the extractor out very easily.
It's just a little V spring that sits in the top of the bolt.
(Pop that guy back in, right there.)
And this just rotates on. You can unscrew the back as well, but just got a typical sort of striker in there,
very much like you would expect for a modern single-shot bolt-action rifle.
So when it came to barrels, there were two different ways that they could be done.
This one has actually been re-barrelled. You can see "S 1873" indicates that
this was originally an 1873 production Chassepot, and then it was re-barrelled by Saint-Étienne.
So the "S", Saint-Étienne originally made the barrel and then Saint-Étienne re-barrelled it in 1880.
The carbines interestingly will have a four-digit date if they are re-barrelled, the rifles just a two-digit.
When they put on the new barrel, no big deal, it's just a normal barrel.
When they initially converted these, they did have a little bit of an issue that the Chassepot chamber
was really quite deep because you had this extra combustion chamber behind the cartridge.
And so converted Chassepot barrels tended to have a very long free bore,
and that had some hindrance on the accuracy of the guns, until they were re-barrelled.
Now we can see on the basic markings here that this is a converted gun because it is a Model 1866-74.
On the new production Gras rifles this will just read Mle, Model, Modele, 1874.
On the conversions they tacked a "-74" onto the existing marking.
Because this is a conversion gun it will actually have two roundel stamps on it, one on each side of the stock.
This one is from the original Chassepot and it's dated July of 1873.
And then on the other side we have a second stamp when it was once again accepted into military service as a Gras conversion.
And this is 1880, so March of 1880. So this was converted into a Gras through the use of a brand new barrel in 1880.
The carbine and musketoon variations are all mechanically identical, but they do all have bent bolt handles.
And that's to make them more easily slung across the back so the bolt doesn't stick out and catch on things.
This is our Artillery musketoon with a little short rear sight and a very short barrel.
This still takes the same standard bayonet as the full-length infantry rifle.
These had their own standard pattern of bayonet, and we'll cover the bayonets in a separate video.
But what's interesting is the Gras could still accept a Chassepot bayonet as well as its new style of Gras bayonet.
This Artillery musketoon, by the way, is a new production Gras. So you can see it's Model 1874 there,
without any ... reference to the older pattern of Chassepot.
Now this is also marked "M.80" and that's relevant because in 1880 there was an upgrade that was made to these guns.
They discovered a problem with them, namely a problem in how gas was handled if a cartridge ruptured.
So in the original style of the gun if your brass case blew out
(and by the way the French spent a lot of effort trying to prevent this from happening. They worked very closely
with the Gevelot company that manufactured ammunition. Military men involved with ammunition would
actually rotate through and spend time working at Gevelot to give them some proficiency with that technology),
but if you had a cartridge rupture, there was just this open track back here, and gas could
blow straight back along the bolt into the shooter's eye. And that was a problem.
So what they did in 1880 was they cut this track out right behind the cartridge head,
and there's a matching cutout in the bolt head right there.
So if we look at these two side by side, you can clearly see the difference. Solid. That's got a relief cut in it.
And what this did was it ... redirected gas. The path of least resistance for
gas from a blown cartridge was now to come into this and blow out
right there. Safely out to the side where it wasn't going to hurt anybody.
This upgrade was made to most of the guns that were in military service.
It's not unheard of to find ones that haven't been upgraded to the M.80 standard, but this is substantially rarer than that pattern.
So here's another example of a conversion. This was a Chassepot that has been converted into a cavalry carbine.
So it has a muzzle with a cleaning rod but no provision for a bayonet.
In truth these could sort of take a bayonet. The mounted Gendarmerie who got these ... carbines
did have a socket bayonet that fit just over the end of the barrel.
Cavalry troopers did not. Cavalry had their own bladed weapons already and they didn't need bayonets.
Again, we have a little shorter rear sight here. This one goes out to 1,000 metres.
And this is kind of more typical of what you'll often find with the roundel marks on Chassepots and Gras.
This one obviously has been worn and at some point it was probably sanded when someone decided to try and improve
the condition of the stock, and so you can tell, it's still got that government property plug.
That did its job, you can't really hide that.
But you can only vaguely see the remnants of the outer circle of that roundel,
and the date information on it is completely gone. So unfortunately that's pretty common.
There's a serial number on the other side, and we can still read the serial number, right there.
You can see that it's been sanded down as well. But the serial numbers were generally deeper than the roundel stamps.
And lastly here is our Gendarmerie à Pied, or a Foot Gendarmerie carbine.
This one is a straight Gras, new manufactured Gras.
It's got that bent bolt handle. You'll notice it does have the M.80 gas relief upgrade to it.
A shortened rear sight. And this one's actually pretty early because the carbines didn't go into production
until after a couple years and this is an 1878 production carbine.
So despite the massive numbers of these guns produced, I mean more than 4,000,000 of them between the rifles and the carbines,
the Gras was never actually a front line weapon in a major conflict.
These got used extensively by French colonial troops, French Foreign Legion, fighting little brush wars in Africa and Indochina.
They would see use around the world after they were more or less obsolete, when they were kind of,
"There are 4,000,000 of the things." They'll hand them out kind of like candy to anyone who's looking for
small arms who they don't want to give the newest, latest and greatest stuff to.
But the war that these were built for, this war of revenge against Germany,
never actually happened during the Gras, you know, time in service.
So by the mid-1880s it was being replaced. And of course the major development would be 1886
with the ... invention of smokeless powder which led to the Lebel rifle.
So there were some intermediaries in there that we'll touch on in separate videos.
But the Gras itself, ... it's a cool example of one of these European single-shot black-powder rifles
that existed, you know, in the late 1800s in between the development of the cartridge
and when people started figuring out how to really do effective repeating rifles. So I think they're pretty cool.
If you're interested in these, of course you should definitely check out my book,
Chassepot to FAMAS, French Military Rifles 1866-2016, which is currently on Kickstarter being pre-sold throughout this month.
We have, as I mentioned at the beginning, some really cool options for ... pre-sale adopters.
Neat stuff in there for you. So definitely check that out if you're interested in the subject.
If not, I understand. Sort of. Actually I don't really understand, I think these are all really cool guns obviously.
But we will have something a little different for you tomorrow, so stay tuned.
Thanks for watching.