Carabineers

A squadron of Carabineers resplendent in red crested helmets - surely the most colourful of the French heavy cavalry? No French Napoleonic army is complete without them. Here we have:

4 x FN106 Carabineer (one piece casting)
2 x FN311 Carabineer (mounted on FNH5)

One-piece Hinton Hunt cavalry castings are a bit marmite - you either love them or you hate them! They’re not the best of sculptures and generally came with more flash metal than figure. The detail such as cross belts tends to disappear annoyingly as you attempt to paint it so a good deal of imagination is required to animate the figures. However, for all their faults, I find myself strangely drawn to them. Perhaps it is because they were the only Napoleonic cavalry figures you could get when I started wargaming (unless you wanted to painstakingly convert Airfix US cavalry figures).

The two-piece castings are much better figures being easy to paint and compare well to those produced today. Presumably Hinton Hunt introduced them to replace the earlier one-piece castings although the two types remained in production together. I have enough castings left to make up another squadron to which I will eventually add some Cuirassiers to form a heavy brigade.