Every Fourth of July, Americans fire up the grill, light off some fireworks, and maybe listen to an uncle explain how the Founding Fathers would feel about modern politics. What rarely comes up at the cookout is a simple, slightly humbling fact: the guns that help win American independence were, for the most part, are not American at all. They were French. So, when Manurhin, the storied French revolver maker now under the Beretta umbrella, unveiled the MR73 Liberty to mark America's 250th birthday, it was not only about marketing, but it is also a shared history by the two countries.

Here's the history lesson your high school textbook probably skipped: most of the muskets and flintlocks carried by the Continental Army came from France, not from any workshop on American soil. A striking number of them were forged roughly 20 miles from the very town where Manurhin revolvers are hand-built today. The next time someone tells you the American Revolution was won on grit alone, you can politely remind them that a fair amount of French steel and gunpowder had something to do with it too.

The French didn't just supply muskets and shrug. King Louis XVI, still years away from losing his head over his own revolution, backed the American cause with money, ships, and troops, while the Marquis de Lafayette became something like America's favorite adopted son. Arms shipments were even funneled through a fake trading company set up by the playwright Beaumarchais, which is either a brilliant piece of 18th-century statecraft or the plot of a spy movie nobody has made yet. Without that French support, the Continental Army might have run out of both ammunition and options a lot sooner than it did.

Fast-forward two and a half centuries, and the same corner of France that once helped arm American soldiers is still making firearms, just with a lot less musket smoke and a lot more precision engineering. Manurhin builds its revolvers by hand in Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, a small town with a gunmaking pedigree that predates the United States itself. The MR73 platform, the backbone of the Liberty edition, has spent decades earning a reputation among French police and elite tactical units as one of the most accurate and durable revolvers ever built.

The MR73 Liberty takes that pedigree and dresses it up for the occasion. It debuts a first-ever 4-inch heavy-profile barrel paired with an unfluted cylinder, a combination that improves balance and stability while giving the gun a cleaner, more purposeful silhouette than its siblings. In other words, it's the MR73 with its collar straightened and its shoes shined, built to look as serious as it shoots.

Then there's the engraving, which is where the history lesson really sinks in. The word "Liberty" is stamped onto the revolver, lifted straight from the Declaration of Independence's famous promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Alongside it sits the historic coat of arms of Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, a symbol that has marked the town since the 1500s and still appears around it today. That same region supplied arms and munitions to the colonial fight for independence, so the engraving isn't decoration for decoration's sake. It's a handshake across 250 years.

Only 100 of these revolvers will ever exist, and starting prices run at $5,099, which is a fairly reasonable ask for a hand-built piece of history that also happens to be a fully functional revolver. It's built to perform on the range, not just sitting behind glass looking dignified, though the buyers will likely let it do exactly that.

There's a nice symmetry here worth pointing out, though the folks in Saint-Bonnet-le-Château may not have planned it this way. America's most famous liberty landmark, the Statue of Liberty, was also a gift from France, unwrapped nearly a century after the Revolution as a reminder that the friendship had staying power. The MR73 Liberty follows the same script on a smaller scale: metal, craftsmanship, and a French signature under an American ideal.

So as the U.S. celebrated its 250th birthday a week ago, it's still worth raising a glass, or maybe just a well-balanced revolver, to an alliance that's held up remarkably well for two and a half centuries. The Manurhin MR73 Liberty won't be sitting in many gun safes, given there are only 100 of them, but it's a fitting reminder that American independence was never a solo project. France helped supply the muskets that kept the Continental Army in the fight, and now it's hand-building the tribute that remembers it.