Berthier rifle

The Berthier rifles and carbines were a family of bolt-action small arms in 8mm Lebel, used in the French Army, and French Colonial Forces, from the 1890s to the beginning of World War II (1940). After the introduction of the Lebel rifle in 1886, the French Army wanted a repeating carbine using the same ammunition as the Lebel to replace their single shot carbine based on the Gras rifle. At the time, many armies based their carbines on their standard rifle model, however the Lebel rifle's tube magazine made it difficult to follow this approach. The Modele 1890 Berthier Cavalry Carbine addressed this issue by combining a modified Lebel action with an en-bloc clip magazine. With its successful cavalry introduction, the Berthier would go on to be produced in many different carbine and full-length rifle versions. The Berthier was originally introduced as a partial replacement for the French 1886 Lebel rifle. The Lebel, a revolutionary concept at the time of its introduction because of its smokeless high-velocity, small-caliber cartridge, still used a tube-fed magazine and other details carried over from black-powder designs. By 1900, the Lebel was already obsolete in comparison to other newer magazine-fed rifles introduced by Mauser, Lee, and Mannlicher. With its tube-fed magazine, the Lebel was long, ungainly and distinctly muzzle-heavy when loaded, difficult to manufacture, was overly complex in construction. Most notably, the Lebel proved very slow in reloading compared to newer rifle designs. On horseback, carbine versions of the Lebel proved almost impossible to reload while on the move, while shortening the barrel to carbine length resulted in feeding problems due to an unreliable tube magazine that were never resolved. Mounted security forces, cavalry units, and artillery units in colonial services were forced to use single shot Mle 1874 carbines, most not even converted to fire the modern 8mm Lebel ammunition, against insurrectionist forces who were sometimes better armed than government forces.