The chauchat Was the first attempt made at a hand held self loading rifle for the military. It was intoduced to the french military and to the english in small numbers during the midst of WWI at an attempt to overcome the use of the german maxims overdominating the trenches. Although there were good intentions behind it, the gun itself was very poorly designed and failed to fire even in the best of conditions. The early design had a straight box magazine, and the later model had a very ugly half moon looking magazine that even worsened the reliability of the gun. It was not uncommon for the gun itself to expolode if it got a little hot, and soon into the war, they were being thrown away left and right. In fact, it was not uncommon for english or french soldiers to leave a couple grenades under one after they discarded in order to fatally suprise a curious german soldier who hoped to aquire a new weapon.
As the war was coming to a close, the US military had just adoped the 1918 model browning automatic rifle, which in itself was a whole new world in standards of reliability. The eruopean armies armed with the chauchat were disheartened to hear glorious stories of american soldiers with a new and good automatic rifle, when all they had were the useless ugly weapons they had come to know.
Another interesting fact is that the gun used to be pronounced "chow~chat" whigh was the original french pronunciation of the word. When the designer took it to america in hopes of it being adopted, the US military officials took it for testing, and afterwards were so displeased with it they nicknamed it the "sho~sho" (which it is referred to universally now as) as a comedic response to its poor reliability. America never adopted it after that.
If you perfer this gun because it just appeals to you, than by all means go for it.
But just keep in mind what kind of place it holds in history.
