[ Chassepot-Gras Cavalry Carbines ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
InterOrdnance/Royal Tiger Imports taking a look at
what just came out of one of the most
recent crates they have got in from Ethiopia.
I actually helped dig these guns out this morning and sort through them.
And we had an entire crate (or they had - they're not actually mine in any way),
an entire crate of Gras cavalry carbines.
Which is pretty cool because these are really pretty scarce guns here in the US.
And about a quarter of them were actually Chassepot-Gras conversions.
Meaning that they started out as 1866 pattern Chassepot cavalry carbines,
and were in the late 1870s converted into Gras cavalry carbines.
Really the only difference between the two being
whether they fire a paper cartridge or a metallic cartridge.
The Gras was designed to be an economical and easy conversion
of Chassepot rifles to allow them to use more modern metallic cartridges.
So in fact the barrels on ... two of these three are actually their original Chassepot barrels,
they simply put in effectively a chamber insert that would allow them to
... have the right chamber dimensions for the 11mm Gras metallic cartridge.
Now specifically to the cavalry carbines, this is a pattern that was adopted in 1869.
Of course the cavalry are on horseback, and they really need
a gun that's a little bit shorter, lighter, and handier than a full-length infantry rifle.
The infantry of course have issues of they need to mount a bayonet,
and they need reach on the bayonet.
And they're going to be firing in ranks, and so you want the barrels to be long enough
that you can have two or three ranks of soldiers standing behind each other
and the barrels of the backmost rank will get in front of, say, the heads of the guy in the front ranks,
so that you don't accidentally shoot your own troops in the back. Which would be bad of course.
So that's why the infantry rifles had long barrels on them.
The cavalry didn't need that, so the cavalry version of the Chassepot,
and in turn the Gras, had a much shorter barrel.
Like I said, this was adopted in 1869, production began in 1870,
and in total about 180,000 of these were manufactured.
I have not been able to find any good records on actual production of these.
However, what was really cool is being able to go through
the literally couple of hundred of these that came in to InterOrdnance.
I've been able to get hands-on serial number data that gives us some really cool dates of production.
And there are three different primary receiver markings that you will find on these.
So let's take a closer look at them.
Alright, so a few specifics first, ... these are of course single-shot guns.
... All of the carbine patterns were originally set up with bent bolt handles like this,
and they actually have some just slight texturing on the bottom of the bolt handle there.
Single shot of course, these are chambered for 11mm Gras, same with all of the Gras rifles.
They were given brass furniture,
and the cavalry carbines have two barrel bands, and a brass nose cap.
This one appears to have, I think, the correct pattern of cleaning rod,
which is rare in this batch.
The barrels were shortened, so the barrel is 700mm long which is 27.6 inches.
So still pretty darn long by today's barrel standards,
but definitely handier than the full length rifles.
We'll take a look at the rear sight on the next one
because this, typical of Ethiopian use, the rear sight has been removed.
The buttstock has actually also been shortened for the cavalry pattern guns.
This is about half an inch, well, 10mm, about 3/8 of an inch, shorter
than a standard infantry rifle stock for the Gras.
And of course there is no bayonet lug.
These were issued to cavalry, cavalry already have sabres,
there is no reason that they need to be sticking a knife on their rifle.
So the first guns manufactured were marked "Manufacture Impériale",
which means Imperial factory, or Imperial production,
because these were actually done under the rule of Napoleon III. This is France's Second Empire.
And they were manufactured actually primarily by the Saint-Étienne Arsenal,
but we happen to have a Châtellerault example here.
We have a serial number on the barrel, the "A" prefix indicates Châtellerault production,
and this is just under number 5,000.
Châtellerault and Tulle both made very small numbers of these,
the vast majority were made by Saint-Étienne.
But we have that Imperial manufacture,
and the original model designation was Model 1866 for the Chassepot.
Now this gun has been converted to a Gras.
When they did that conversion they added this "-74" because the Gras was the Model 1874 rifle.
Now I'm going to skip forward briefly to the next pattern.
And that is this receiver marking where there's no longer a Manufacture Impériale,
there's just the arsenal name. (And this was only done by Saint-Étienne.)
So it just says Saint-Étienne in this nice big fancy script lettering.
It is once again a Model 1866-74 because this has been converted to a Gras.
I should say, original 1866 cavalry carbines that are still set up
for the Chassepot paper cartridge are extremely rare.
The vast, vast majority of these guns were in fact converted into metallic cartridge firing.
So we can take a look at the rear sight on this one because it's still on there.
This is the standard sort of base for a Chassepot or Gras [carbine] rear sight.
So much smaller than the infantry rifle rear sight, and it consists of only a single ladder.
Now there should be a little elevation slider on here which is missing,
that's also very common.
In fact that's very common on these guns even if they didn't come out of Ethiopia.
But ranges go up to 1,000 metres.
... You weren't expected to be firing this at particularly long range off a horse.
Now this Saint-Étienne receiver marking was done basically during the chaos
of the Franco-Prussian war and the fall of the Second Empire.
So the French army is defeated by the Prussians, Napoleon III is taken prisoner,
but in particular the city of Paris refuses to surrender.
And we'll have a protracted period of the Siege of Paris, the Paris Commune.
And the Saint-Étienne Arsenal continues to operate,
but it's no longer operating as part of the Imperial government
because the Imperial government has fallen with the ... capture of Napoleon III.
Now if we look at the opposite side here, we have a pair of dates on ... this gun.
And we'll see this on all of the conversions.
So the first date here is the date that this carbine was originally produced as a Chassepot.
And that is S.1872, the S indicates that it was the Saint-Étienne Arsenal
that built ... the barrel I should say,
and it was manufactured in 1872.
So the Imperial guns, manufacture was only in 1870.
Basically by the time we've hit 1871 Imperial manufacture ends,
and there were about 60,000 made under that Imperial marking.
Now the second date on here is S.1876,
that is the date that this carbine was converted to a ... metallic cartridge firing Gras.
And again the S indicates that it was the Saint-Étienne Arsenal that did that conversion.
So these dates are really cool,
and this is what it's been really nice to be able to record from this cache of Ethiopian carbines.
Originally these had a boxwood or dogwood plug in the stock
to indicate French military ownership.
These have been in Ethiopia long enough that the original stock roundels,
and the markings here are all long gone.
And in fact some of these original boxwood plugs
have been replaced by some interesting things, like in this case
what I believe is a 1940 Italian cartridge case head, that's kind of neat there.
And coming out of Ethiopia, most of these have some Ethiopian markings on them.
So this ... I believe ... indicates ownership by Menelik, who was the King of Ethiopia.
A very famous, very effective leader of Ethiopia. Did a very good job of preventing Ethiopia
from becoming a colonial possession of any of the European powers.
Now we have a third primary receiver marking that will be found on these guns,
and that is "Manufacture d'Armes".
... Basically ... in the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War,
the French Third Republic was founded. And under that republican government
the ... marking became Manufacture d'Armes, which means arms factory, or weapons factory.
So this is another Saint-Étienne gun, like I said, the vast majority of them are.
Our serial number here is now a "G" prefix.
So they started with F, Saint-Étienne used F and G prefixes for these guns.
And then this will be relatively late in production.
So if we break it down overall for Saint-Étienne, the first 50,000 or so were Imperial production.
The next 100,000 or so were sort of that intermediate era of production.
And starting at about G50,000 we have Manufacture d'Armes for the Third Republic.
And then production would end not that long after,
they got to about G70,000, which would be 170,000 guns total manufactured.
And then production of the Chassepots ended,
and they were replaced with the standard made from scratch Gras carbines.
One of the other interesting things you can note here (and we're getting pretty nerdy at this point),
the Chassepots were given letter prefixes that are in block characters,
where the ... 1874 Gras rifles used a script prefix letter.
So if you see ... the square letter, that indicates that this would have originally been a Chassepot.
You'll also probably have noticed we have this "M 80" marking.
In 1880 these guns were updated with a safety improvement.
There is now a cutout around here to allow gas to escape in the case of a breached cartridge.
That was added in 1880, and most ... Gras have that update.
So if we look at the manufacturing dates on our Manufacture d'Armes example,
we have originally produced by Saint-Étienne in 1873,
which is going to be during the Third Republic.
And then in 1877 it was updated to a cartridge firing Gras.
Now the one other barrel marking you might see is one like this.
So this is "T" which means this was done by the Tulle Arsenal, and it says 1886N.
This indicates that the barrel was replaced by a brand new, "nouveau", N, barrel in 1886.
Like I said, the majority of the Chassepots actually retained their original barrels,
and were updated, basically re-chambered, for Gras metallic cartridges.
But you do have some, like this one, that were given entirely new barrels.
It's a little less cost effective to do, but sometimes they had to.
And so that's what this indicates. And again, this is our gun that's missing its rear sight.
So there you have the three standard ... patterns of Chassepot receiver marking.
Manufacture Impériale which runs up to 1871.
The just script arsenal name, which is 1871 and 1872.
And then Manufacture d'Armes, which is 1873 and onward.
You'll find those markings used on all the different patterns of the Chassepot.
So the long rifles, the cavalry carbines like these, the Gendarmerie carbines,
and also the Artillery musketoons.
I'm showing you this pattern today because this is what I have access to.
Unfortunately most of the examples that came in have no rear sights on them.
We picked out a couple of the nicer ones here
to show what the pattern would have originally looked like.
But as you see on this guy, the rear sight has been completely removed,
and that is sort of the standard, that's typical for these Ethiopian import guns.
For whatever reason, the Ethiopians just ditched the rear sights,
not just on these things, but on a lot of especially their cavalry, or short carbine, type of guns.
So this is to me one of the really interesting things.
One of the opportunities of bulk imports from places like Ethiopia
is we really have a time capsule of guns, and even if a lot of them are not in ideal condition,
they can still tell us a tremendous amount about the history of these guns.
So I now have a really good serial number database of exactly
when the production was for these, when the conversions were done,
and when the different receiver markings changed.
So on the next upgrade or iteration of "Chassepot to FAMAS"
we'll be including that information in the Chassepot chapter.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.