Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Aug 2012The Hotchkiss Universal is a pretty interesting submachine gun, despite its rather clumsy appearance. The overriding design intent was to make a very compact folding carbine, and Hotchiss certainly met that objective. However, the gun ended up being too expensive and complex to achieve any real commercial success. Some wound up in Indochina, and some sales were made to Venezuela and Morocco, but that was about the extent of the Universal’s production. There are a few of these guns that were imported into the US as live semi-auto carbines, interestingly.
Ian answers some viewer questions in the comments:
Forgotten Weapons
9 years ago
Yes — the French ended up adopting the MAT-49 for military service. It had a folding magazine well and a collapsing wire stock, but not the collapsing barrel or folding pistol grip of the Hotchkiss design.Forgotten Weapons
10 years ago
Nothing (well, almost nothing) is too rare to shoot! 🙂 No, we just had too little time with the owner of this piece, and it wasn’t possible to do a range trip with him.Forgotten Weapons
10 years ago
Actually, it is far from an MP38 copy. The Hotchkiss is hammer-fired from a closed bolt, which is completely different from the MP38’s open bolt mechanism.
