Origin
France
France was a dominant military power for centuries and a major influence on weapons development. The Charleville musket set the standard for Napoleonic infantry arms. France later developed the Chassepot and Lebel rifles, Mitrailleuse volley gun, and pioneered use of poison gas in WWI.
French Arms & Weapons
Overview
France has been a dominant military power for much of the past five centuries and a significant weapons innovator. French arms design influenced global military equipment repeatedly — the Charleville musket defined Napoleonic infantry, the Minié ball enabled the rifle revolution, the French 75 field gun was the most famous artillery piece of WWI, and France pioneered several aspects of early aviation and armored warfare.
Key Weapons by Era
Medieval
- French knights carried standard European arming swords, lances, and armor. French crossbowmen (Genoese mercenaries at Crécy) were devastated by English longbowmen.
Early Modern
- Charleville musket (Model 1717, refined 1777) — The standard French flintlock; .69 caliber; distributed in millions to French and allied armies; directly influenced the American Model 1795 Springfield
19th Century
- Minié ball (1849) — Invented by Claude-Étienne Minié; the conical expanding bullet that made the rifle practical for all infantry
- Chassepot rifle (1866) — Bolt-action; outperformed the Prussian Dreyse in the Franco-Prussian War (1870); rubber breech seal was innovative but degraded rapidly
- Lebel Model 1886 — The first smokeless powder military rifle; 8×50R Lebel cartridge; 8-round tubular magazine
- Mitrailleuse — An early volley gun (not a true machine gun) deployed in 1870; kept secret so long that French troops didn't know how to use it effectively
WWI
- French 75 (Canon de 75 modèle 1897) — The most famous field gun of the war; hydraulic recoil kept it on target between shots allowing 15 rounds/minute; icon of French military power
- Chauchat (CSRG) — Light machine gun; issued in enormous numbers; mechanically unreliable especially in the US .30-06 version
- Lebel and Berthier rifles — Primary French WWI infantry arms
- Renault FT tank — Revolutionary two-man tank with rotating turret; the template for all subsequent tank design
- Poison gas — France used tear gas (xylyl bromide) in 1914; both sides escalated through the war
WWII and Modern
- MAS-36 — Bolt-action rifle; simple, reliable; French service 1936–1978
- FAMAS — Bullpup 5.56mm assault rifle; French service 1978–present (being replaced by HK416)
This article is a stub.
Battles & Operations
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Battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415)
The Battle of Agincourt was fought on 25 October 1415, St Crispin's Day, in northern France during the Hundred Years War. King Henry V's small, sick English army, marching to Calais after taking Harfleur, was brought to battle by a much larger French army. Deployed between two woods on a muddy, freshly ploughed field, the English archers and men-at-arms destroyed the French men-at-arms as they struggled forward on foot. Thousands of French nobles were killed or captured, and the victory opened the way for Henry's conquest of Normandy.
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Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815)
The Battle of Waterloo, fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near the village of Waterloo in present-day Belgium, ended the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon Bonaparte, returned from exile on Elba, attacked the Anglo-allied army of the Duke of Wellington on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean; Wellington's line held through a day of assaults on Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte and the infantry squares until Blücher's Prussians broke into the French right flank and the Imperial Guard's final attack was repulsed. Napoleon abdicated four days later and died in exile on St Helena.
Weapons
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An XI Light Cavalry Sabre
The An XI light cavalry sabre was the regulation sword of Napoleon's hussars and chasseurs à cheval. Adopted in Year XI of the French Republican calendar (1802-1803), it has a curved blade about 33 inches long and a brass hilt with three bars protecting the hand. Made in large numbers at Klingenthal and other state manufactories, it was carried by the French light cavalry across Europe, from Austerlitz to Waterloo. It served well into the nineteenth century and shaped the light cavalry sabers of many other armies.
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Arbalest
The arbalest was the heavy crossbow of the late Middle Ages, with a bow of steel or thick composite so powerful it had to be drawn with a windlass or a geared cranequin rather than by hand. Its draw weights ran to several hundred pounds and more, and its short, heavy bolts could pierce mail and some plate at close range. It was slow to load, so its users often fought from behind large shields called pavises, but it needed little training to shoot well, and it served in European armies and on city walls for two centuries.
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Arming Sword
The arming sword was the one-handed, double-edged sword of the medieval knight, carried from the eleventh to the fifteenth century with a shield or buckler. With its straight crossguard and heavy pommel it formed the cross shape that became the symbol of knighthood and the Crusades, and it was the sword of the Knights Templar and of every man-at-arms who fought in the Holy Land. Ewart Oakeshott's types X to XIV describe its development from a broad cutting blade to a tapering one made to thrust.
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Charleville Musket
'Charleville' is the collector's name — taken from the great arsenal in the Ardennes — for the French service flintlock muskets of the 1717-1777 model series. Lighter and smaller-bored than the British Brown Bess at .69 caliber, with a barrel held by iron bands rather than pins, the Charleville armed France's armies for a century, equipped much of Washington's Continental Army through French aid, marched with Napoleon from Austerlitz to Waterloo, and fathered the first standard American service musket.
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FAMAS
The FAMAS is the French army's bullpup assault rifle, adopted in 1978 and in service for four decades. Made at the Saint-Étienne arms factory and nicknamed 'le Clairon' — the bugle — for its tall carrying handle, it places the action behind the trigger so that a full-length barrel fits in a rifle less than thirty inches long. It fires 5.56mm NATO very fast through a lever-delayed blowback action. It armed French soldiers and the Foreign Legion from Chad and the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Mali before the HK416F replaced it.
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Falchion
The falchion was a single-edged medieval sword with a broad blade, heavier toward the point, that combined the chopping power of an axe with the handiness of a sword. It appears from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century in two main forms: a broad cleaver-like blade, like the famous Conyers Falchion at Durham Cathedral, and a slimmer blade with a clipped or cusped point. Few examples survive, but manuscripts show falchions in the hands of knights and foot soldiers alike, including through the Hundred Years War.
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Frankish Francisca
The francisca is the throwing axe of the early Franks, the Germanic people who overran Roman Gaul in the fifth century and gave France its name. A short-hafted axe with a curved, forward-angled head, it was hurled in a volley just before the Frankish line charged, to break shields and disorder the enemy at the moment of contact. Found in warrior graves from the Rhine to northern France between about 450 and 700, it was so closely tied to the Franks that later writers believed the weapon was named after them — or they after it.
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Great Helm
The great helm was the fully enclosed, flat-topped or sugarloaf helmet of the high medieval knight, worn from around 1220 until the mid fourteenth century over a mail coif and often over a smaller skullcap as well. Riveted together from several iron plates, pierced by narrow eye slits and breathing holes, it gave the mounted lancer the most complete head protection yet seen in Europe at the cost of vision, hearing and air. Topped with heraldic crests, it became the knight's badge of rank, and it survives in coats of arms to this day.
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Lebel Model 1886
The Lebel Model 1886 was the first military rifle to fire smokeless powder, and it made every other army's rifle obsolete overnight. Its 8mm Lebel cartridge, loaded with Paul Vieille's Poudre B, drove a small bullet faster and flatter than any black-powder round and without a betraying cloud of smoke. The rifle itself kept an old-fashioned tubular magazine under the barrel, slow to reload, but it remained the main French infantry rifle through the First World War and served in the colonies and in 1940. Nearly three million were made.
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Minié Ball
The Minié ball is the conical, hollow-based lead bullet that made the rifled musket a practical infantry weapon. Developed by the French officer Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849 and simplified at Harpers Ferry by James Burton in 1855, it was small enough to ram easily down a rifled barrel, but its hollow base expanded on firing to grip the rifling. It gave ordinary infantry accurate fire at several hundred yards, and in the American Civil War it caused the great majority of casualties and the shattered bones that filled the field hospitals.
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Napoleon 12-Pounder
The 12-pounder Napoleon was the most common field gun of the American Civil War: a bronze smoothbore gun-howitzer of 4.62-inch bore, adopted by the US Army as the Model 1857 and named for Napoleon III, whose French canon-obusier de 12 inspired it. Light enough to maneuver with the infantry yet heavy enough to fire solid shot, shell, spherical case and canister, it replaced a whole family of guns and howitzers. North and South built well over a thousand, and at close range, firing canister, it was the deadliest artillery piece on the field.
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Norman Kite Shield
The kite shield is the long, round-topped, tapering shield carried by the Norman knights of the Bayeux Tapestry and by armored horsemen across Europe and the Mediterranean in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Built of wooden planks covered with leather, it protected a rider from shoulder to knee on his left side and could be slung from the neck by its guige strap when both hands were needed. It carried the Normans into England, Sicily and the Holy Land, and its flattened later form became the heater shield of heraldry.
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Plug Bayonet
The plug bayonet was the first bayonet: a dagger with a tapered handle that was pushed into the muzzle of a musket, turning the gun into a short pike. It appeared in France in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps named after the town of Bayonne, and was issued to French and English troops from the 1670s. Its fatal weakness was that the musket could not be fired while it was fitted. At Killiecrankie in 1689, government troops were overrun by charging Highlanders while fixing their plug bayonets, a disaster that helped bring in the socket bayonet.
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Poleaxe
The poleaxe was the knight's weapon for fighting on foot in full plate armor during the fifteenth century. About five to six feet long, it carried an axe blade or hammer on one side of the head, a beak or fluke on the other, and a spike on top, with steel strips called langets protecting the shaft and a small rondel guarding the hands. Men-at-arms used it in battle, in formal combats in the lists and in judicial duels, and fencing manuals of the period teach it as a weapon of skill, not brute force.
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Smallsword
The smallsword was the gentleman's sword of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a light, short thrusting sword, usually with a stiff triangular blade, worn every day as part of civilian dress and used in duels. It grew out of the rapier in France around the 1650s to 1680s and spread across Europe and its colonies with French fashion and French fencing. Its hilts were often jewelry in steel, silver or gold, and the fencing school built around it became the basis of modern foil and épée.
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Trebuchet
The counterweight trebuchet was the heaviest artillery of the Middle Ages: a great pivoting beam whose short arm carried a box of earth or stone weighing many tons, and whose long arm swung a sling that hurled stones of 50 to 150 kilograms against castle walls. Descended from the Chinese man-powered traction engine, it appeared around the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century, battered Acre, Stirling and Xiangyang, and dominated siege warfare for two hundred years until gunpowder bombards made stone-throwing obsolete.
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War Hammer
The war hammer is the late medieval answer to plate armor: a steel head with a blunt, often toothed hammer face on one side and a stout curved spike on the other, mounted on a short haft for horsemen or a long one for fighting on foot. Where a sword skidded off a steel breastplate, a hammer delivered concussion through it, and the spike could punch through plate or find the gaps. It was the knightly weapon of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its horseman's form survived into the seventeenth century as the nadziak of the Polish hussars.