cavalryman

Named after French naval architect Stanislas Charles Henri Dupuy de Lôme (15 October 1816 – 1 February 1885). Not sure if it's this one or a later airship named in honor of Dupuy de Lôme: "The Dupuy de Lôme airship was 36 meters in length, 14.84 meters in diameter, 29 meters wide, and had a total volume of 3,454 cubic meters. It was powered by a 2 horsepower (1.5 kW) engine, providing a speed of between 9 to 11 km/h. The basket under the balloon could carry eight, several operating the balloon and others observing. She was the first operational airship, and was employed during the last days of the Franco-Prussian war."

According to Wikipedia, a Spahi is a "light cavalry regiments of the French army recruited primarily from the indigenous populations of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahi)

I think this is actually Le Francport, a small village in the vicinity of the other October, 1914 French battle pictures in the Bain Collection. Also sometimes written as Le Franc-Port. (It was ultimately the site of the armistice in 1918 and the surrender of Germany after World War II). I cannot find a "Frane Le Port" (as in the negative caption) or a "France Le Port" (the Flickr caption). However, there is a picture in the Bibliotheque National de France's Gallica online photo collection of Moroccan Spahis at Le Franc-Port: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9041734x

retired at last and artolog: Thank you for finding the date on the negative. bior: thank you for the information about the Spahi regiments. There seem to be quite a few images of the Spahi soldiers in the Bain News Service Collection. It seems probable, artolog, that this image shows Francport as you say, and not "Frane Le Port" which appears in the caption. It looks like some of the French language place names were not correctly written by the Bain captioners. Thank you for helping us fix them.

Other Bain/LOC photos of Spahis:

Magistral estampa...

Thanks for sharing your wonderful photo! Seen in Galería Siabala