Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Ader in Paris
taking a look at a bunch of cool guns.
Today we have
a fantastically cool Saint-Étienne revolver.
This is a commercial production revolver called
the Redoubtable, or ...
(I think, if I'm pronouncing that close to correct.)
And what makes it cool is it is, well, as the catalogue listed it,
le modèle de très grande puissance
Because this is a two-barrelled 20 shot revolver.
Now it's chambered for a .25 calibre revolver cartridge, I don't know the exact details,
the catalogue doesn't include the exact specification.
It's definitely not ... 6.35 Browning, but it is a .25 calibre cartridge.
Which is what allows them to have 20 shots in a ...
... I mean, it's a ludicrously large cylinder,
but not like you would need for say a .38 calibre with 20 shots in a cylinder.
In fact the reason it has two barrels is because that's the only way
you could make a reasonably sized cylinder, we'll show you that in a moment.
Now a little bit of background: this was sold by
or the Saint-Étienne Bicycle and Firearms Company.
Bikes and guns being fairly common products
to have side by side around the turn of the century and earlier.
FN for example, ... in fact FN's logo was a crossed rifle and bicycle pedals.
At any rate, this is a company commonly called "Manufrance".
And around the turn of the century they were kind of like the Sears Roebuck of France.
Like Sears Roebuck they had a big catalogue that they published every year
in which you could buy like anything.
From housewares, dishes, you could buy dog leashes,
you could buy exercise equipment, you could buy bicycles, you could buy firearms.
And Manufrance made some of its own firearms there in Saint-Étienne,
and they also imported guns. And the catalogue has both.
And what's interesting is as you watch the catalogue,
this revolver was introduced in either 1910 or 1911,
and it's sort of the culmination of a series of Saint-Étienne revolvers
that ... today we would call them more and more like tacticool.
At the time Saint-Étienne manufactured a lot of little pocket revolvers,
what we would now call "Velo-dog" revolvers.
5 shot, folding trigger, very compact things
like for shooting blank cartridges at dogs, or real cartridges at bandits.
Very much like the market in the US and everywhere else at the time.
But they started making larger versions.
And of course 1892, the French Army adopts the Model 1892 revolver,
manufactured in Saint-Étienne. ...
Actually there are a couple of different companies that start making civilian versions.
Exactly the same gun, but not made under military contract.
And you could buy those through Manufrance.
And ... like there was clearly an interest in this,
because they start going to bigger and bigger things.
And so you start seeing guns like "The Explorer" that ... is a 12-shot revolver, originally in rimfire.
And they have 10 and 12 shot revolvers.
And then by 1911 the catalogue has two really massive ones,
they are The Redoubtable, this one, and The Terrible,
... The Terrible is a 16 shot in .32 calibre, and The Redoubtable is a 20 shot in .25 calibre.
And they're basically the same frame size. I don't think they're interchangeable frames,
but essentially the same basic size.
You get more shots with this one because it's a smaller calibre.
Anyway it stays in the Manufrance catalogue until 1914
when of course the catalogue ceases publication for the duration of the war.
Anyway, enough rambling about where the gun came from,
let's take a look at how you do 20 shots and two barrels.
This example is in beautiful condition, it is refinished, but looks fantastic.
Jewelling on the trigger and the hammer, and a very nice blue.
Now there are some markings on it, but they are very small.
Right here we have a series of proof marks.
And then on the side of the lower barrel, I don't know if you can make that out,
but that's the name of the company:
And then up here on the top if I can get it just right, there you go,
we have the model name:
So the way this works is very simple, this is a double-action/single-action pistol
with two firing pins, but it only fires one shot at a time.
So single action, double action.
To open this up we have a spring-loaded lever right here.
Push that in and it actually pivots open on this screw,
basically at the rear sight on the top strap.
And then the whole thing opens up and, presto, there are your 20 cylinders.
Note we have 20 ratchet stops here for the hand.
Normally on a revolver you would see 6, but of course this has more than 6 chambers in it, so.
What looks like the old-style ejector rod here is actually connected to the ejector plate.
So you'd eject all 20 at once.
I can imagine you may need to bang on that with a little bit of force,
if you have a couple of sticky cases out of your 20.
That's potentially a lot of friction to overcome there.
And right here you can see our two firing pin holes.
Now you might be wondering how ... does that two firing pin thing work?
I know I was, I was curious about how do you prevent the firing pins from being damaged.
Or does it fire two rounds at a time?
Well, the reality is ... there are two barrels
because ... if you had 20 shots in a single row of chambers
you would have to have a huge, just an ... impossibly large cylinder.
By staggering them here, it actually fires like, this one, then that one, then this one,
then that one, then this one, then that one, in sequence one at a time.
And ... each time you cock the hammer,
so right there it has lined up one of the inner chambers with the bottom barrel,
and then drop that.
Next time it's going to line up one of the outer chambers with the top barrel.
Inner again,
outer, and so on.
And then if we look closely, this has a rebounding hammer.
So if I hold the trigger down and we look through the cylinder gap there,
which may not be, ehh, that's going to be really hard to see on camera.
However, what's going on is
the firing pins don't protrude far enough to actually hit this ejector plate.
The cartridge has a rim that sits on the outside of this ejector plate.
That holds the cartridge up, so it's not a fully supported rim.
Now fully supported rims are better technically, they are safer.
But this isn't going to be a particularly high-pressure cartridge.
And by doing this it means that you can have the firing pins
both protrude through on every pull of the trigger.
But they don't actually come in contact with the ejector plate.
So there's no damage to dry firing this.
Now the other challenge would be regulating the two barrels
so that they both hit in the same place.
I don't know how much effort they actually put into that.
Given the price and the quality of the guns, it was probably fairly reasonably done.
There are ways to do that when manufacturing the guns.
But there you go, there is your massive 20 shot revolver.
Now I mentioned that the catalogue ceased to be published after 1914 because of World War One.
The next catalogue that would come out from Manufrance was in 1920.
And in 1920 this gun, and most of the sort of fanciful, ...
the guns that were there for people who had imaginations
and perhaps a bit of disposable income to spend on them.
(Very similar to what we see in a lot of areas of the firearms market in the US today.)
There weren't so many people in that situation in France in 1920, compared to France in 1912, say.
And so this disappears out of the catalogue, and it was only available
for like four years, 1911 to 1914.
It might have been in the 1910 catalogue, I'm not sure.
It wasn't in 1909, it was in 1911.
And so these disappear, and ... I don't have any numbers on exactly how many were made.
But it was a relatively small number because, aside from being a little awkwardly bulky,
the downside to this thing is that it was pretty expensive.
This would cost you 100 francs.
Which to put it in context is basically the same that you would pay for a Luger, or a C96,
or an FN Model of 1903, that being the 9mm Browning scaled-up blowback pistol.
So, you could get yourself a top-of-the-line modern semi-auto pistol,
or for the same money you could get yourself a tacticool 20 shot revolver.
And as much as people then, and still today, like the idea of these
when it came to actually putting money on the table
I think a lot more people put that money on a good semi-auto.
I should point out: at the time all of this stuff was free to own in France.
There was no licensing, registration, permitting.
So there was no legal benefit to a revolver, it was just pay your money, take your choice.
... Actually to add a little additional context,
a copy of the 1892 military revolver at this same time, 1910 to 1914, would cost you 45 francs.
So if you're willing to take a larger calibre, but lower capacity, army pattern revolver,
that'll cost you less than half as much as this.
And if you just wanted a little pocket revolver, that's going to cost you
between 30 and 40 francs depending on the exact pattern.
And they had a whole plethora of different models you could choose from.
So this is a lot of money to spend on a gun that is of
dubious real practical value, but certainly extremely cool, so.
It's interesting to note in the catalogues the economic decline in France after the war,
the incredible burden that World War One put on the French economy.
Those 30 to 40 franc little pocket revolvers
jumped to a minimum of 200 in the 1920 catalogue, tremendous inflation and economic trouble.
Anyway, that's kind of beside the point.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. These are really cool.
They show up very infrequently in the US, and not all that often over here in Europe either
because there just weren't that many of them made, so.
A big thanks to Ader for giving me the opportunity to take a look at it.
Thanks for watching.