Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and today I am very excited
to be able to bring you an A6 Meunier rifle.
This was the first semi-automatic rifle
introduced in World War One by the French army.
They only introduced a few of them because this rifle wasn't
really logistically, or mechanically, well-suited to the trenches.
Now, this was developed by Monsieur Meunier, and he
actually started working on semi-automatic rifles in 1898.
The French military in general, started working on them
all the way back in 1894. Basically, as soon as they had
something working with the new smokeless powder,
they immediately wanted to get a self-loading rifle working.
And there was an incredible amount of developmental work done by the three different
French Technical Schools or Armourer's Schools that were working on self-loading rifles.
However, very little information survives about these rifles today, because this was all done under the
auspices of military state secrets, and the guns that
were developed were not patented commercially.
Now Meunier did get some patents on this, because it did go into
production. But in general all of these developmental rifles,
the only records that that were made were secret
French military records and a lot of those were lost,
in particular in the German occupation in 1940.
Just, the data's not there. So a lot of self-loading mechanisms
were actually first developed by French engineers,
but they don't get credit for them today because
they didn't put them out in the public record.
Meunier, for example, got his start making gas impingement guns before 1900. And most of his
early designs were in fact gas impingement guns. It was actually only with his sixth one,
this is the A6 rifle, that he switched to a long recoil system.
Not entirely sure why, it may have been specifically requested by the French military.
It may just have been a new idea of his that he wanted to try out.
At any rate, this rifle was put through formal testing in 1910,
and it was formally approved, sort of. I won't say adopted,
it wasn't actually formally adopted to replace, say,
the Lebel rifle for infantry service.
But it was approved, and so they started kind of looking
at putting it into production or tooling up and by 1913
they still hadn't. And at that point it kind of got sidelined
because the threat of war was looking a little more imminent.
However, once the war began
they decided that they did want actually a self-loading rifle.
And in 1916 a production run of these was manufactured.
They made a total of one thousand and thirteen of them.
What made this rifle particularly not practical for the
French military is the fact that it did not use
the 8mm Lebel cartridge, which was standard.
Instead it used a proprietary cartridge that Meunier had designed.
It was a 7x57 cartridge (although not related to the 7x57 Mauser),
fired a 139 grain bullet at ... 2950 feet per second.
So really a quite remarkably modern cartridge. That's a 9g bullet at 850 meters per second.
Great bullet, still actually a little bit overpowered probably for what was necessary.
but it was a nice high-velocity small bore cartridge, would have had a very long mean point-blank range
(which is to say the distance at which you can just set your sights to general battle sight and
make a hit on an enemy without having to make any adjustments).
High velocity cartridges are better at that than heavy slow cartridges.
Anyway, ... it wasn't a successful rifle in combat. It's a long recoil gun and as we'll get to in a minute,
there are some tolerances, particularly up here at the muzzle, that are not conducive to combat use.
So by August of 1917, when it became clear that the RSC 1917 rifles were coming into development
and production, this whole program was scrapped.
Now, let's go ahead and take a closer look at how this works.
This is a really, actually, kind of a remarkably modern rifle. It's light, it's handy, it's a little bit
more svelte than it may look in pictures, it's a narrow rifle, it's equipped with cool stuff like night sights,
so, let's take a closer look.
Looking at the markings on here.
We have Meunier A6 model of 1916,
manufactured by the Tulle Arsenal (t u l l e),
(If I can get the light just right ... there we go on the back there.)
So that's the main marking to look for on the side of the receiver.
We have a serial number and steel supplier
and inspection proofs up on top of the barrel.
On the right side of the barrel is of course the date,
just like a typical Berthier or Lebel standard rifle
being manufactured at this time. The 'T' is for Tulle.
So this was again manufactured at Tulle,
and a Tulle made barrel dated 1916.
So this particular one is number 1012 out of 1013 manufactured.
There's the serial number on the top cover.
There's the serial number on the stock, all of the
Meunier rifles were in the 'R' prefix serial number block.
On the stock we have a really nice cartouche
there, dating this to June of 1917.
So, the 1916 date is when the barrel was manufactured,
this is the date when the whole rifle was finished and approved.
So what we can see there is that the barrels were all manufactured as a group, then the guns
were built sequentially and this one was right at the end. So in August of 1917, just
two months later, this whole program was cancelled.
Only a couple controls on these rifles
We have a manual safety here. The forward
position is fire and the rearward position (where, if
you're right-handed, you can feel that with
your trigger finger), that's the safe position.
Bolt handle is up here, and kind of distinctive
for this sort of U-shaped hook, which allows it to get past the end of the receiver cover there.
We have our stripper clip guide here for reloading.
The rear sight is a tangent leaf style, actually not really similar to ... this is closer in pattern to a
Mauser than it was to a Lebel or a Berthier.
If we look at the back of the sight, you can see
these two little round holes in there, those were
for luminous radioactive material
and there was another one here on the front sight.
So these were all equipped with luminous night sights in 1916.
In 1917 that style of sight would become standard on some of the production Berthier rifles as well.
And then out at the front, on the nose cap, we have
kind of a standard Lebel style stacking rod,
a bayonet lug (apparently these took a
Berthier style sabre bayonet,
although the attachment is again kind of a little more ...
the blade is Berthier style, the attachment is more Mauser style.)
So the magazine is pretty cool, actually.
If we push this button forward we can pivot this out,
and there's our magazine. If I compress this down, the whole thing lifts out.
I guess it would have been too easy to have just a plain coil spring.
So instead you get this, with sort of this cross X
shaped follower thing. This whole thing is powered by a
little flat spring down here which pushes on this arm,
then this arm, with its two pegs traveling in those slots,
keeps the follower parallel to the muzzle at all times,
so that you don't get ...
Well, look at this as the 1910 French version of the
anti-tilt follower. Because that's exactly what it's doing there.
As for the bolt, we have a rotating bolt, multiple locking
lug, kind of like a 1910 Ross or a number of other guns.
Drops into battery like that.
Pretty simple there, a little bit stiff on this gun.
So mechanically this is a long recoil action with
that rotating bolt. Long recoil's a pretty unusual
system to find on military firearms, it was used
on the French Chauchat light machine gun.
That was actually kind of in development around the same time, and of course it was then put
into major production in 1915. It was also used on the Remington Model 8, designed by John Browning,
which was a very successful commercial sporting rifle.
But beyond that, there aren't a whole lot of other long recoil rifle designs out there.
Some, I know, and people will tell us what they are in the comments, but it is an unusual system.
Anyway, what long recoil means is that the whole
barrel and bolt assembly recoil together all the way
back the full length of the cartridge. So the bolt
handle is going to go from here all the way back to here,
and the bolt and the barrel stay locked that entire time.
What this means is that the barrel itself is reciprocating
from the muzzle all the way back to the bolt.
So what we have here is a nose cap
with the barrel riding inside it.
This is a hollow tube over the barrel, and one of
the problems these had in service is that the fit
between this nose cap and the barrel is extremely
fine (it's something like five to eight thousandths,
I believe). And while that's great when the gun's
clean (and of course it aids in accuracy because you have your front sight mounted to the sleeve
here not to the barrel itself), the problem is with
just a little bit of dirt or grit or, even worse, a little
bit of water causing a little bit of corrosion inside
and these two can jam themselves together.
And it might be corrosion, it might just be dried grease, but this one is stuck together.
So I can't actually show you the barrel reciprocating.
But, picture the end of the muzzle coming all the way back to probably about here.
Now, as this is reciprocating, it's compressing a
mainspring which is located underneath the barrel down in here. In fact, if you see these two
pins and this assembly, this is the end of the recoil spring. So up here
... we just have an empty handguard that's supporting the
cap on the end and giving you a place to hold onto the gun.
The recoiling assembly includes the rear sight and
it includes this whole section. If we look at it from
this side we can see a little more clearly,
this is all reciprocating. This piece right down here
(slightly different color to it, and it's got this groove in it),
that's the fixed receiver that doesn't move. So this receiver
has a pair of tracks or rails that this bolt assembly,
which goes from here all the way out to the muzzle
of the gun again including the whole rear sight,
all of that slides backwards.
And it's sliding under this removable top cover.
Now, what happens is, these two are going to
come all the way back to here upon firing,
then the bolt is caught at the back and locked in place,
while the barrel starts to ... return forward. The barrel will pull itself off of the now empty case.
When it's fully off of the case, the ejector comes out and pops the empty case out of the gun, ejecting it.
Then, when the barrel's all the way forward in its fixed finished position, it trips a release
which allows the bolt to now come forward.
The bolt is being powered by a second separate recoil spring.
The bolt recoil spring is actually down here,
it comes off under the butt plate and there's a
little monkey tail on the end of the bolt, kind of
like an FN FAL rifle. So that's what's pushing the
bolt forward, and that's a very stereotypical thing for long recoil actions.
They will have two main springs, one for the barrel, and one for the bolt.
At any rate, once the bolt is all the way forward
it's going to pick up a cartridge, chamber it, and then you're ready to fire again.
So let's take off this rear cover.
In order to do that, we have a little spring-loaded
retention pin that we have to push,
and then this rear tab is going to lift up.
There we go, just like that, that comes up, and then
the rear cover comes off at the back of ... the rifle.
There we go.
(This one's really tight so we gave it a little bit of a start with a wooden dowel and a hammer.)
But then, that rear cover comes off, and we have access to the internals here.
Now there are a couple things going on inside here.
One of them is ...
Normally you would expect to have a spring back here,
but the spring is actually down inside the stock
and the monkeytail that connects to it is right
there.
So when the bolt comes back you'll see that
depress into the action.
In fact. that piece, right there, is the plunger end cap of the spring and the tail of the bolt starts right there.
Now this is the trip lever,
this is what's going to lock the bolt back here at the end of travel.
And then when the barrel goes all the way forward, it pushes down on this lever, which you can see drops this.
That acts just like the sear in a submachine gun. When that goes down then the bolt is released to go forward,
allowing it to chamber the next cartridge.
Then we also have the hammer right there.
This is a hammer fired gun.
(There we go, let that up nice and gently.) So when you fire it, that's going to come up to actually do
the firing, and then when the bolt cycles that gets cocked back down in place like that.
And of course you'll note that this thing is serial
numbered all over the place on the inside.
It's 1012, and so you'll see little number numeral 12s on, like, everything.
Well, I wish I could show you more of this coming apart,
but at this point, because of the muzzle cover being a little too tight to work with right now,
this is the extent of it.
Of all of the French semi-auto development dating back into the 1890s,
the A6 Meunier is the only one that was actually put into real production during World War One.
And in some ways this is a remarkable step forward. It's a very modern,
cutting edge weapon. On the other hand this is still, kind of, basically a trials rifle.
There were definitely some real problems with it. They only put less than a ... 1,000, 843 actually,
into front-line combat service before they were all recalled and the program cancelled.
The different cartridge made it difficult,
the rifle really wasn't quite ready for the brutal brutal combat of World War One.
So was it a good idea or a bad? Well, in the long term ... it was a dead end.
Maybe they would have been better off putting developmental resources into something else
(like the RSC program which did provide a pretty good combat rifle).
But certainly very interesting to take a look at
one of the very few semi-auto combat rifles of World War One.
So once the program was basically cancelled, ... all of the rifles were called back
to the factories (or as many rifles as could be still had at that point) and there was a program put in
place to convert them into air service carbines.
So they did a number of things to improve the guns for carbine use. They obviously cut them down,
cut them down about eight inches, about 200mm shorter.
They loosened up the tolerances on the muzzle cap, which allowed the guns to work a little more reliably
(definitely a good thing). They replaced the magazines with an extended 15 round magazine.
Of course in air service you want to have more ammunition available quickly.
Still reloaded by stripper clips, they were not detachable magazines they were
... also not permanent. They were a removable box magazine that was fed by stripper clips, basically.
And they added a manual bolt hold-open slash bolt release button. So a number of changes made, the
profile of the handguard and all changed as well.
But even in this guise they never ended up getting issued. So of course, once we were getting later into
the war, machine guns became much more available, and those were a better system than a
still quasi-experimental rifle using specialty ammunition.
So, that was ultimately the end of the A6 Meunier. There are only a ... I don't know the exact number,
but there's probably less than a dozen of these still existing today.
Very cool to be able to take a look at this one and bring it to you guys.
So a big thanks to Paul for letting me take a look at his A6 Meunier.
If you guys enjoy seeing this sort of content on-line, please do consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's the support from folks there that makes it possible for me to travel about,
find guns like this and bring them to you.
Thanks for watching.