The French took the badly designed M1905 Puteaux machine gun and fixed it to make the horribly designed St. Etienne M1907.
Officially Mitrailleuse Saint Etienne Mle 1907, the 8mm Lebel chambered machine gun was a gas operated blow-forward clockwork design that had a variable rate of fire from 60 to 600 rounds per minute– if it worked.
That’s just the thing, as seen in the above video from C&Rsenal, the inner workings of the M1907 was extremely complex. This left it prone to overheating and jamming, just the thing when confronting the Germans.
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