Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company taking a look at one of the pistols that is going to be
in their upcoming April of 2020 Premier Auction.
This is a Le Français Type Armée,
or an Army Model the France.
... These were manufactured in two different variations ... in the late 1920s and early 1930s
for French military testing. They weren't ultimately adopted.
But what's interesting is that this is a pistol that evolved from one of the very early
semi-automatic pistols offered in France that was designed entirely for self-defence. Like civilian pocket carry.
And a lot of the problems that this encountered in military testing stem from the fact that it is effectively
a concealed carry pocket pistol scaled up to service pistol size.
So the design was from one Etienne Mimard, it was developed in 1912, it was put into production in 1913,
and it became added to the catalogue of Manufrance (or Manufacture Française D'Armes Et Cycles De Saint-Etienne)
in 1914.
In total like 250,000 of these pistols would be made, 210,000 of them in .25 Automatic calibre.
And then most of the rest were the .32 ACP version, and only a few thousand of these, which are in 9mm Browning Long.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at it,
... it's got a lot of weird features to it that are much better shown up close.
Alright, let's start with basic function, because this does not work the way of a normal pistol that you're used to.
It has a slide, but it has no gripping surfaces on the slide whatsoever,
because you are not expected to ever manually cycle the slide.
Instead you have this lever that pops the barrel up. Now when this was initially designed as a pocket pistol
the idea was when you remove the magazine it would automatically pop the barrel up.
So when you went to unload the gun, pull the magazine, and then you pull the cartridge out of the barrel.
So it doesn't need an extractor, you just do that by hand.
And then when you went to load the gun you would put in the magazine,
and you would put one cartridge directly into the chamber.
Thus obviating the need to ever manually cycle the slide.
Now on the military version here you can see there's that loop on the bottom of the magazine.
That is there to hold the one extra cartridge.
So you've got 8 rounds in the magazine and you can load that. It also has an unusual, unique
magazine retention system here, where this plate is actually spring-loaded and pulls
forward like so.
Anyway you load the magazine, you then take your one last cartridge out of there,
come up to the barrel, pop the barrel open, load your final cartridge, snap it shut,
and now the pistol's loaded and ready to go without ever having to have been manually cycled.
The trigger is double action only. And you can see the striker coming back there.
And it is really long and heavy. It's a terrible trigger. And this again made sense in a civilian pocket carry
sort of situation, where you have a heavy double-action trigger instead of a manual safety. Which this of course does not have.
But when you get up into a service pistol, that's no longer really the best solution.
Taking a moment to look at the markings, we have the manufacturer here:
Manufacture Française D'Armes Et Cycles De Saint-Etienne
(also known as Manufrance) on the right side.
And Type Armée on the left.
This was never actually adopted. It was given that name because this is the service pistol sort of size and version of the gun.
One of the distinctive features here is this ribbing on the barrel.
This is actually the second pattern of the pistol. The very first ones were introduced in 1928
(sometimes these are called the Model of 1928), and they had a smooth barrel and about 1,100 of those were made.
That was followed in 1931 by this pattern with the finned or ribbed barrel, and about 3,800 of these were made.
So we have a total of 4,900 of these guns produced overall.
There are two numbers here on the barrel. That 850 is actually ... a model designation.
There were three different levels of finish, plain, sort of engraved, and really fancy.
And 850 was the designation for the standard version. This started as 12 and then they changed it to 850,
you know internal numbering systems are often not very explicable.
Anyway, above that, right here, we have the number 7,086. That is the serial number.
So the serial number range for the first and second patterns runs in a single group, but it starts at 5,000.
So you'll start to see finned barrels like this at about 6,100 and then they'll continue to just shy of 10,000.
So, that's your serial number.
Given the somewhat unusual operating mechanism, you probably won't be surprised to find out that the
disassembly is a bit unusual as well. So we're gonna start by removing the magazine.
Then the next thing is to actually remove the barrel, and it's held in place by this pin.
That pin has a little ledge on the bottom and is retained by that pin, but it rotates freely.
This isn't a screw. So if I rotate this (it's kind of tight there),
Rotate that to line up
like so.
Then I can push it right out.
... As I said, this one's a little stiff.
There we go. So that pin comes out.
Now I can unlock the back of the barrel, and the barrel is going to come off.
And the trigger guard here is actually functioning as
a leaf spring that's putting pressure on the barrel to pop it open.
So there's our barrel.
We can pull out this guy.
Then you'll notice there's no mainspring in there. This actually has, kind of like a Webley semi-auto, it has a lever.
The mainspring is in the front of the grip, that's the bottom of it right there,
and there are two levers that convey that force up to the slide.
So to take the slide off, I'm actually going to lift it,
there we go, lift it up.
And there's just a little tiny pair of nubs back here that run in guide rails in the slide.
So with this off, that's our striker, right there, that gets pushed back. It's very heavy.
And not a whole lot else. There's your breech face, no extractor on it.
There is an ejector. I'm sorry, I said it didn't have an ejector earlier, it does.
There's the fixed ejector which comes through that slot on the side of the breech face.
Now that we have the slide off we can take the grips off.
There are no screws on the grip panels, instead you pop them up slightly and then they lift off.
They have these metal tabs, here and here, that lock in there and there, and hold the grip panels in place.
I'm going to leave the other one on for the moment.
... The trigger assembly is right there connected to a spring. That just pushes the striker back
like so. And then it drops down at the end of travel to release the striker.
This is our lever that is going to connect from the mainspring here up to the slide.
The slide has these two cutouts where this lever sits like so.
So in order to go backward this lever has to pivot like so,
which causes it to compress the mainspring
like that. This has a very heavy mainspring.
There's a huge amount of mechanical advantage, the difference between this distance and this distance,
so you have a very heavy spring that gets very little compression when it cycles. Which is good for the longevity of the spring.
So that's pretty much it.
We've got a double spring in here. This puts a little tension on the magazine. This is what holds the magazine
backwards, so that when you lock it in place
the magazine is able to push forward just slightly in order to
(there we go), that is what allows the magazine catch system to work.
And then the top arm of that spring is what's putting pressure on the barrel latch.
So the barrel itself is pushed upward by the trigger guard acting as a leaf spring.
The lever itself is pushed back into position by this little leaf spring.
So a lot of unusual elements inside this pistol.
Well, as I mentioned earlier the Versailles Commission, the French military, tested these
on a number of occasions and just never found them quite up to snuff for military service.
They didn't like the fact that they were double action only. They didn't like the fact that they were simple blowback.
They didn't like the fact that they had no extractor or ejector.
And I suspect they didn't like how much these guns weigh, because they're very heavy.
However, Manufrance sold these commercially to anyone who wanted one.
And French officers at the time had to supply their own handguns, much like British officers also did,
and so some of these did see military service having been purchased privately by French officers.
So, they are certainly one of the cooler and more unusual interwar sort of service pistols.
Secondary service pistols you could say.
Very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one, they're pretty scarce out there today.
If you'd like this one, of course it is in Rock Island's ... April auction.
You can check out their description and their photos in their catalogue through their website.
And if that's not your thing, you can check out all the other cool stuff in the auction instead.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]