Reffye Mitrailleuse

Origins

The French word mitrailleuse comes from mitraille, grapeshot, and the weapon was first seen as a replacement for the case shot of field guns. Its ancestor was a volley gun designed in Belgium by Captain Fafschamps and developed by the Brussels engineer Joseph Montigny in the 1850s and 1860s. Emperor Napoleon III took a personal interest, and an artillery officer, Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffye, produced an improved French version. It was made in great secrecy at the Meudon workshops from about 1866 and officially called the canon à balles, the bullet cannon. About 190 guns were ready when war broke out in 1870, though estimates vary slightly.

Design & Construction

The Reffye gun had 25 rifled barrels of 13 mm caliber, grouped in a square cluster inside a bronze casing that made it look like a small field gun. It stood on a wheeled artillery carriage with a limber and was drawn by horses. It was served by a crew of artillerymen, and the limber carried spare loaded plates. To load it, the crew slid a steel plate holding 25 cartridges into the breech and closed it with a lever. Turning a crank at the side then moved a second plate that released the firing pins one after another, so the barrels fired in a quick ripple rather than all at once. A trained crew with spare plates could fire roughly 100 or more rounds a minute. A second crank traversed the gun slightly during firing to spread the bullets. It fired a heavy bullet that could reach well beyond the range of infantry rifles, including the Chassepot Rifle.

Combat Use

Because it was kept secret, few officers knew how to use the mitrailleuse when the Franco-Prussian War began in July 1870. It was given to the artillery and organized in six-gun batteries, one to each infantry division, and it was usually posted alongside the field guns and fired at long range. There its bullets could not be seen striking, so aim was hard to correct, and its batteries became targets for the longer-ranged Krupp breech-loading guns of the Germans, which knocked many of them out. Where it was placed well and fired at closer range, it could be deadly. German reports of heavy losses from French volley fire at Gravelotte and St Privat on 18 August 1870 are often linked to the mitrailleuse, though it was not always possible to tell its fire from that of the Chassepots. At the Battle of Sedan on 1 September, mitrailleuse batteries were among the French guns shelled and overrun as the German ring closed. After the empire fell, the Government of National Defense built more of them and also bought the American Gatling gun.

Legacy

The mitrailleuse was blamed by many for failing to deliver what had been hoped, and the lesson taken by some armies was that rapid-fire guns were mere artillery curiosities. Historians now point more to how it was used than to the weapon itself. France withdrew it to fortress defense after the war. Within a generation, the single-barreled, recoil-operated Maxim Gun made hand-cranked volley guns obsolete. Until then the main rival design had been the American Gatling gun, whose barrels revolved around a central shaft. The name lived on, however: mitrailleuse became, and remains, the ordinary French word for a machine gun.