Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look at a French Model of 1874 Gras rifle. This is the first cartridge firing rifle that the French military would adopt, and we're doing this video in conjunction with the Kickstarter launch of my book on French military rifles entitled, "Chassepot to FAMAS, French Military Rifles ... 1866 to 2016". So if you're interested in this subject, you should definitely head over to the Kickstarter and pre-order yourself a copy. We have some really cool Kickstarter only options up there. Anyway, there's a link in the description text below. And without further ado, let's get on to the 1874 Gras. So this of course comes about after the Franco-Prussian war. The French had made like 1,500,000 Chassepot rifles, but then they got their pants kind of handed to them by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war. There was a serious spirit of revenge. They wanted to take back the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. And there was a major rearmament
movement in France in the mid to late 1870s. So this started almost immediately after the war. In 1872 and 1873 the French military started holding
some trials of new cartridge-firing rifle systems. And what they really wanted was some way to convert
existing Chassepot rifles to a new metallic cartridge system. They'd made the decision with the Chassepot
that cartridge manufacturing technology wasn't really good enough to
justify or to risk metallic cartridges. But by 1872-73 clearly that was the wrong
decision, and cartridge production was getting better, and that was obviously the way of the future. So. There were a whole bunch of different systems proposed. The one
that they ended up selecting was designed by a Captain Basile Gras. Who was a French artillery captain
at the time, and that was relevant. So his system was not the cheapest,
and of course cheap was a major element. However, it ... wasn't cheap
because it required a whole new bolt and you had to either make some changes
to the barrel or replace the entire barrel. And that's, you know, OK so you can reuse the stock, you can
reuse the receiver, but it's a lot of new stuff that you have to make. However, what the testing Commission noted was
the resultant gun, a Gras conversion of a Chassepot, was almost, like that close, to being the
equivalent of a ... completely new gun. And so that kind of made up for the extra cost in their
minds. It was effectively getting something like new. So this went through some
pretty serious rigorous testing and it is in fact, for a black powder
rifle, a quite durable and strong gun. Testing involved among other things, they proof
tested these with 6 bullets stacked up in the barrel and a 540 grain charge of black powder,
and the gun actually survived that. So they did reliability and endurance testing as
well and this came out to be a really good system. So ... they adopted it in 1874. Oh, the thing that I forgot to tell you, I mentioned that
Gras was an artillery captain at the time, that's relevant because he designed this conversion while
working basically on the clock for the French military. Which meant all of his ideas were their ideas,
which meant they didn't have to pay him a royalty. Which cut the cost over a design that was submitted by an
independent civilian designer who might have patented his own design. So while it was a little more expensive to make,
they at least got the savings on that end. Anyway it was adopted in 1874 and went into
production really in 1875 (first couple of prototypes in '74), but major production in 1875. And it would
stay in production all the way until 1884. The French Army adopted this. The French Navy interestingly
did not, the Navy retained the Chassepot and then made some other changes ... they adopted something different,
and we'll talk about that in an entirely separate video. But production of the Gras would far
exceed production of the Chassepot. By 1884 they had made about 3,500,000
of these Gras long rifles for the infantry. And then they also made a couple of carbine
versions, which I've got sitting back here. So they had a cavalry carbine which is, as you can see,
a few inches shorter than the standard infantry version. It has some brass hardware, it does not have a bayonet
lug on it because this was intended for the cavalry. And they did about 230,000 of these guys total. They did a Gendarmerie carbine. This is meant for ...
(Gendarmerie are kind of this sort of military police, they're kind of an intermediary between a
national police force and a military auxiliary), at any rate, some of them were on
horseback and they got cavalry carbines. Some of them were on foot and ... they didn't need a full-
length infantry rifle, they weren't firing in ranks in volleys. But they did need a bayonet lug, so
they had a slightly different version here. This is the same length as the cavalry carbine and, as
you can see, a couple inches shorter than the infantry rifle. They made about 162,000 of these all told. And then they also had an Artillery
musketoon. We would call this a carbine, they actually called the other two carbines
and this a "Mousqueton", or musketoon. It is substantially shorter. And this was intended, as the name
implies, for artillery crewmen who needed some sort of weapon. But kind of like it was more important that it was handy and
didn't get in the way, than that it was a really effective firearm. So these little guys, they made
somewhere north of 300,000 of. So ... I should say there was also a fifth version.
There was an African cavalry carbine, which is ... well, it's an African rifle really. Very subtly
different from the standard infantry rifle. And they only made like 12,000 of those
things, and I don't have one to show you. So, let's go ahead and take a closer
look at what this conversion actually was. Alright, let's start by looking at just the bolts. You can
see the obvious similarity, especially in the bolt handles. However, one of the expensive parts of this
conversion was the fact that you couldn't just convert a Chassepot bolt into a Gras bolt,
you had to make this entirely from scratch. There were too many major features that had to change. So what Gras did was he introduced,
first off, a removable bolt head. Now the locking surface for this bolt is still the
stem, right here, locking up against the receiver. Notice that there is a straight track on the Chassepot bolt.
One of the things we talked about in the Chassepot video was how you had to manually re-cock the thing before you
could open the bolt. Well, the Gras didn't need to do that. We talked about why in the Chassepot video.
But for the Gras this track is now curved, and so opening the bolt actually cams the striker back
exactly like we would expect for a modern bolt action rifle. Once I take the bolt head off here I can
actually pull the extractor out very easily. It's just a little V spring that
sits in the top of the bolt. (Pop that guy back in, right there.) And this just rotates on. You can unscrew the back
as well, but just got a typical sort of striker in there, very much like you would expect for
a modern single-shot bolt-action rifle. So when it came to barrels, there were
two different ways that they could be done. This one has actually been re-barrelled.
You can see "S 1873" indicates that this was originally an 1873 production Chassepot,
and then it was re-barrelled by Saint-Étienne. So the "S", Saint-Étienne originally made the barrel
and then Saint-Étienne re-barrelled it in 1880. The carbines interestingly will have a four-digit
date if they are re-barrelled, the rifles just a two-digit. When they put on the new barrel,
no big deal, it's just a normal barrel. When they initially converted these, they did have
a little bit of an issue that the Chassepot chamber was really quite deep because you had this
extra combustion chamber behind the cartridge. And so converted Chassepot barrels
tended to have a very long free bore, and that had some hindrance on the accuracy
of the guns, until they were re-barrelled. Now we can see on the basic markings here that
this is a converted gun because it is a Model 1866-74. On the new production Gras rifles this
will just read Mle, Model, Modele, 1874. On the conversions they tacked
a "-74" onto the existing marking. Because this is a conversion gun it will actually have
two roundel stamps on it, one on each side of the stock. This one is from the original
Chassepot and it's dated July of 1873. And then on the other side we have a second stamp when it was
once again accepted into military service as a Gras conversion. And this is 1880, so March of 1880. So this was converted
into a Gras through the use of a brand new barrel in 1880. The carbine and musketoon variations are all
mechanically identical, but they do all have bent bolt handles. And that's to make them more easily slung across the
back so the bolt doesn't stick out and catch on things. This is our Artillery musketoon with a
little short rear sight and a very short barrel. This still takes the same standard
bayonet as the full-length infantry rifle. These had their own standard pattern of bayonet,
and we'll cover the bayonets in a separate video. But what's interesting is the Gras could still accept a
Chassepot bayonet as well as its new style of Gras bayonet. This Artillery musketoon, by the way, is a new
production Gras. So you can see it's Model 1874 there, without any ... reference to
the older pattern of Chassepot. Now this is also marked "M.80" and that's relevant because
in 1880 there was an upgrade that was made to these guns. They discovered a problem with them, namely a
problem in how gas was handled if a cartridge ruptured. So in the original style of the
gun if your brass case blew out (and by the way the French spent a lot of effort trying to
prevent this from happening. They worked very closely with the Gevelot company that manufactured ammunition.
Military men involved with ammunition would actually rotate through and spend time working at
Gevelot to give them some proficiency with that technology), but if you had a cartridge rupture, there was
just this open track back here, and gas could blow straight back along the bolt into
the shooter's eye. And that was a problem. So what they did in 1880 was they cut this
track out right behind the cartridge head, and there's a matching cutout
in the bolt head right there. So if we look at these two side by side, you can clearly
see the difference. Solid. That's got a relief cut in it. And what this did was it ... redirected gas.
The path of least resistance for gas from a blown cartridge was
now to come into this and blow out right there. Safely out to the side
where it wasn't going to hurt anybody. This upgrade was made to most of
the guns that were in military service. It's not unheard of to find ones that haven't been upgraded to
the M.80 standard, but this is substantially rarer than that pattern. So here's another example of a conversion. This was a
Chassepot that has been converted into a cavalry carbine. So it has a muzzle with a cleaning
rod but no provision for a bayonet. In truth these could sort of take a bayonet. The
mounted Gendarmerie who got these ... carbines did have a socket bayonet that
fit just over the end of the barrel. Cavalry troopers did not. Cavalry had their own
bladed weapons already and they didn't need bayonets. Again, we have a little shorter rear sight
here. This one goes out to 1,000 metres. And this is kind of more typical of what you'll often
find with the roundel marks on Chassepots and Gras. This one obviously has been worn and at some point it was
probably sanded when someone decided to try and improve the condition of the stock, and so you can tell,
it's still got that government property plug. That did its job, you can't really hide that. But you can only vaguely see the
remnants of the outer circle of that roundel, and the date information on it is completely
gone. So unfortunately that's pretty common. There's a serial number on the other side, and
we can still read the serial number, right there. You can see that it's been sanded down as well. But the serial
numbers were generally deeper than the roundel stamps. And lastly here is our Gendarmerie à Pied,
or a Foot Gendarmerie carbine. This one is a straight Gras, new manufactured Gras. It's got that bent bolt handle. You'll notice it
does have the M.80 gas relief upgrade to it. A shortened rear sight. And this one's actually pretty
early because the carbines didn't go into production until after a couple years and
this is an 1878 production carbine. So despite the massive numbers of these guns produced, I mean
more than 4,000,000 of them between the rifles and the carbines, the Gras was never actually a
front line weapon in a major conflict. These got used extensively by French colonial troops, French
Foreign Legion, fighting little brush wars in Africa and Indochina. They would see use around the world after they
were more or less obsolete, when they were kind of, "There are 4,000,000 of the things." They'll hand them
out kind of like candy to anyone who's looking for small arms who they don't want to give
the newest, latest and greatest stuff to. But the war that these were built for,
this war of revenge against Germany, never actually happened during
the Gras, you know, time in service. So by the mid-1880s it was being replaced. And
of course the major development would be 1886 with the ... invention of smokeless
powder which led to the Lebel rifle. So there were some intermediaries in
there that we'll touch on in separate videos. But the Gras itself, ... it's a cool example of one
of these European single-shot black-powder rifles that existed, you know, in the late 1800s in
between the development of the cartridge and when people started figuring out how to really do
effective repeating rifles. So I think they're pretty cool. If you're interested in these, of course
you should definitely check out my book, Chassepot to FAMAS, French Military Rifles 1866-2016, which is
currently on Kickstarter being pre-sold throughout this month. We have, as I mentioned at the beginning,
some really cool options for ... pre-sale adopters. Neat stuff in there for you. So definitely
check that out if you're interested in the subject. If not, I understand. Sort of. Actually I don't really
understand, I think these are all really cool guns obviously. But we will have something a little
different for you tomorrow, so stay tuned. Thanks for watching.
