Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here
today at the Cody Firearms Museum taking a look at some of the guns in their collection. In particular today this French Arcelin musketoon, "mousqueton". This is ... what's called a capping breech
loader, and I'll explain that in just a minute. The backstory here is in the 1850s the French military
started looking for a new weapon for their cavalry. The guys on horseback wanted
something that would load a little faster, that they could load from the breech.
Give them a little more firepower. Obviously if you're on horseback, it's virtually impossible
to reload a muzzleloading firearm while riding a horse. Well, if it's a breech loading firearm you
can keep it ... well under control in one hand, kind of at the balance point of the gun, and then open
the breech and do whatever you need to do to reload it. So, they went ahead and experimented with
... four major different designs in the mid-1850s, and this is one of them. So this is a carbine, a system,
that was developed by General Charles Arcelin. ... Actually he'd been involved in
ordnance for the French military for a while. He was the guy responsible for first bringing the
percussion cap to the French military in 1842. And he came up with a system that is,
like I said, a capping breech loader. So the idea there is it loads from the back ... actually
this is legitimately a bolt-action rifle, single shot. And it uses a self-contained paper cartridge. So a piece of paper
wrapped up with a bullet and powder, but no priming mechanism. You load that into the chamber, and then through a ...
nipple on the outside you attach a standard percussion cap, and then it has a hammer. When you fire the gun, the
hammer hits the percussion cap and, just like a muzzleloader, the flame from the percussion cap goes into the
barrel, lights the powder and ... fires the cartridge. So it's a ... breech loader,
but it still uses a percussion cap. Let me go ahead and show you that up close. So the way this works we
actually have a folding bolt handle, because this was designed for the cavalry
and you don't want it digging into the back. So if we go ahead and unfold that we then
have effectively, literally, a bolt-action rifle. This is going to open up to the back like that. You'll notice there is a plug right here, and that's going to create an air space between
the cartridge and the rear of the bolt face. Once you've got this open you're going to push
your cartridge manually into the chamber there, you then close the bolt like so. And that plug at the front is going to
push the cartridge in a little bit deeper if you haven't done so already yourself. Now there are two sets of ... interrupted locking lugs in here,
but they're shrouded inside the rear of the barrel there. Rotate it to lock. Then you're ready to actually
cock the action, put a percussion cap on it. When you fire ... of course the hammer snaps down detonates the percussion cap,
which fires the charge. Now if we look inside there, you can
see two sets of interrupted locking lugs at the 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock positions, horizontally laid out. There are a matching set of
locking lugs inside the bolt here. And those are vertical now because the system
is unlocked and open. And when you close the bolt those interface and lock up with the lugs up
here in the barrel, thus sort of sealing the system. Now on the Chassepot, and on most
of the other breech-loading systems, you have some additional mechanism to
help seal gas from the breech end of the gun. On the Chassepot you had this
expanding rubber obturator that did it. On the Dreyse you had a tight fitting
set of interfacing cones that did it. The Arcelin has nothing that does it. So the problem
here is that powder fouling does in fact come back from the paper cartridge and
it gets onto the ... bolt lugs. And the more you shoot, the more powder
fouling accumulates on those bolt lugs. A quick look at a few other features here.
... The only markings on this are right here, Manufacture Imperiale de Châtellerault,
the factory that manufactured it. And we have serial numbers on a few of the parts.
The best one to show you is up here on the bayonet lug. It's number 108. As far as I can tell only 108 were actually
made for testing, so this is basically the very last one. It does have a cleaning rod in here,
which would also be used as a clearing rod. If you had a cartridge that failed to ignite
for some reason, it's a paper cartridge, there's no extractor in the gun and no
extractor mechanism on the cartridge. So you'd have to use your rod here to tap
the cartridge out the back of the breech. Beyond that we have some brass furniture
there, and a brass barrel band midway down. This one's in gorgeous condition. On the back here we have
a brass trigger guard as well. Although the rest of the fittings are either steel or iron,
rear sling swivel, a number of serialised screws. And a brass butt plate on the very end. So these were initially tested at ... Vincennes. And in 1853 the first ... single prototype gun
went through its trial, and fired 130 rounds before it developed so much fouling in the breech
that they couldn't load and fire another round. And that's not bad, on the basis of that
the gun was provisionally accepted. Emperor Louis Napoleon III
thought that was pretty impressive, and ordered that 800 be manufactured
by the Châtellerault Arsenal. In total it appears that only 108 actually were,
and they were ready for testing the next year in 1854. So they went through a much more substantial field trial. ... It ended up the test took
the course of two full years. Now, they weren't just testing this gun for two years
straight, they were testing other stuff as well, but ultimately, ... the conclusion they came
to was that the gun was not acceptable. And in 1856 it was formally rejected
by the Artillery Commission. The Artillery Commission being the guys
who were responsible for weapons design. The problem was, as you saw earlier, it has
no obturation, so fouling built up on the lugs. So this manifested itself as broken bolt handles. The explanation being as the bolt lugs get fouled, it gets
harder and harder to actually close the bolt on a cartridge. And so the natural reaction of a soldier in
the field with the gun is to hit the bolt handle. And ... as they get really fouled you have
to hit that thing really hard, and eventually the bolt handle breaks
before it rotates into battery. And that was the main objection, and that's
a really serious and really valid objection, and that was enough for them to reject the guns. However, what's interesting is that in the meantime,
after that 1853 first initial trial that looked fairly positive, the military at large went ahead to test them,
but they were actually adopted basically on the spot. In 1854 these were adopted as the official
firearm for a brand new little unit of men that was created by Louis Napoleon III,
his Cent-garde, his hundred man guard. And this was intended to kind of be one of many things that he
did to try and bring back the glory of the French First Empire, having these really fancy special squadron of
palace guards and personal bodyguard for him. And those guys needed a cool, modern, cutting-edge
gun, and so they got these breech-loading mousquetons. And to go with them they got
the world's largest bayonet ever. This thing is legitimately like a sabre.
It's not a curved blade, but it's a military sabre that just happens to also mount on the end of the gun. There is actually a hole,
I don't know if you can see it there, there's a hole in the handguard basket here to go
around the muzzle of the carbine to mount this thing. Let me show you that. Alright, so I really can't do justice
to this thing back behind the table, because this is too ludicrously long and
you can't see all of it. So bring it out here, set the scabbard back. That is truly a full proper cavalry sabre. So then you can go ahead and get
our carbine here, mousqueton, sorry. And this guy is going to fit on there. And that is, can you see that? I think, honestly, the camera is so far away at this point
I can't tell if you can quite see that all the way up, but it is quite a ridiculously long
contraption when put together. So there's the whole thing. Now, there's a couple of ways to look at this.
On the one hand this seems incredibly goofy. On the other hand if you're actually going
to use ... a bayonet in combat at this period, it's to defend yourself against someone on horse. And having a short little musketoon or carbine, you
need a fairly long bayonet to make up the difference so that you can actually stick the guy
on the horse before he runs you over. So in that sense, maybe it's not
the most ludicrous thing ever. And of course the actual use that
these things got was standing on guard, where, yeah, it actually looks
kind of cool. So it does its job there. Now, it's interesting, there is an apocryphal story
which is, I am quite sure, genuine Grade A nonsense that they ceased using these because the
Guardsmen kept poking holes in the ceiling with the ludicrously long bayonet.
That is clearly not true. If you ever have a chance to
go to a French Imperial Palace you'll know that the ceilings
are way taller than this thing. This may be stupidly long, but
those ceilings are really, really high. So that's just apocryphal nonsense, but. Before we finish this off, I do
want to point something out here. You can see the inscription here, which is Manufacture Imperiale Châtellerault,
made in June 1865, for the Dragoon Model of 1854. This is actually a sabre bayonet for the rifle
that replaced the Arcelin in Cent-gardes service. So it's almost identical, but the style of
the hilt here is just a little bit different. And when we mount it on the gun, it fits, but it doesn't actually go
far enough forward to lock. The bayonet lug hits the front of the slot in the
bayonet there, and you can see that the muzzle doesn't quite come all the way through. So the two styles of literal sabre bayonet have the
same geometry between the muzzle and the lug, but they aren't quite interchangeable.
And it's certainly understandable why someone whenever this came into probably the Winchester
Collection, from whence it came to the Cody Firearms Museum, it's understandable why they
would not necessarily catch that. Unfortunately it's not quite exactly the right
pattern of bayonet, but it is the same length, it's only difference is in the hilt between this
and the actual specific correct pattern. So in addition to being a really cool mechanical system, one of the early styles of breech loader
that would eventually ultimately lead to you know, cartridge firing guns,
metallic cartridges as we know them today, this thing also has the honour of being the most
ridiculous bayonet ever used on a carbine. Now I said in ... 1856 the gun was rejected by the
military, and in 1856 the Cent-gardes also got rid of it, and they replaced it with ... a breech-loading,
like an open-bolt pinfire single-shot rifle, which is a tremendously interesting gun as well. And as
soon as I can find one I'll do a video on it for you guys. But that thing also used
basically the same style of bayonet. So sword bayonet, just literally
sword bayonet in this case. So that is the Arcelin 1854 pattern
breech-loading capping musketoon. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, I think it's a
really cool story and it's a tremendously rare firearm. And it is only one of a great many very cool
firearms that are here at the Cody Firearms Museum. Most of them actually on display, this
one actually came out of the back vault. But they have something like 7,000 firearms
on display in a brand new, newly renovated gallery. It's a very cool museum and I would
highly recommend that you stop by, visit, and take a look if you're ever in the Cody area. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
There's sword bayonets, and then there's just swords. If you were a cavalryman I guess you could use it as a lance.
I'm kind of sad though, this would have been a great opportunity for a scholagladiatoria collaboration
Funny how he says it's not quite a sabre because it isn't curved
In French parlance, sabres are defined by their hilts. So this is still a sabre, as it is french, despite having a straight blade.
In British parlance, a sabre must be curved. The same is not true for French swords
For example, the sabre d'officier d'infanterie model 1882 is a straight, double edged sword with a 3/4/5/6/7 bar hilt (they were very customisable, normally 3 bars + knucklebow)
I've got to wondering, if the bolt had been cut a tiny bit deeper around the plunger, and the space filled with a gasket of some kind that was forced tightly against the barrel breach, would that have helped noticeably with the fouling issues?
From my research it appears it was never actually issued to the Cent-gardes. They were issued to half a squadron each of two line cavalry regiments according to French source I've read.