Looking for both a lot more guns and also a more field-reliable system, the French began buying a great many Modele 1914 Hotchkiss machine guns, and they would replace the Modele 1907 by the end of the war. The gun was not well suited to the muddy hell of trench warfare, despite its beautiful machining and quality.

It would have been truly at home on a Napoleonic battlefield – but not a World War One battlefield. The Modele 1907 St Etienne gun is a magnificently Victorian machine gun, with a downright Swiss-like rack and pinion system running its action. This would be the machine gun which France would enter World War One with, and more than 40,000 would be manufactured by 1917. The St Etienne Arsenal set about improving it, and came up with the Modele 1907, which retained the forward-moving operating rod but used a gas piston instead of a gas trap. The gun was adopted and put into service, and as with every other military user of gas trap guns, the French quickly found the system to be seriously flawed. This was a gas trap style of action, pulling an operating forward with each shot. And so, the Puteaux Arsenal developed the Modele 1905 gun. For the French Metropolitan Army, it wanted a gun designed and produced by its own arsenal system. Instead, France purchased a number of air-cooled Hotchkiss machine guns for its colonial forces. One of the reasons was that in France’s North African colonies, transporting water for guns was considered an unnecessary liability.

When the French first began testing machine guns in the late 1890s, they were one of the few countries that did not purchase quantities of Maxim guns.

St. etienne le francais guns