French Foreign Legion
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In France, the employment of mercenaries dated from the twelfth century, when King Philippe Auguste resolved to acquire a force more dependable than the feudal levies who were obliged to remain under arms for only forty days. He instituted a system of payment in lieu of service for his knights, the income from which was in turn invested in the hiring of routiers, or “free companions.” The practice of employing mercenaries grew during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of these mercenaries were foreigners—when in 1439 France created fifteen companies to form the nucleus of a standing army, two of them were Scots. Attempts to form a national infantry in the form of francs-archers —bowmen who were called “franc” because they were exempt from paying taxes—between 1448 and 1509 foundered, causing the kings of France to rely upon mercenaries and foreigners to fight for them. And while the size and power of France meant that her government was not held hostage to turbulent mercenaries as were the small and fragmented states of Italy in Machiavelli's day, the cost of mercenary troops meant that they frequently went unpaid or were disbanded and thrown upon the countryside, which gave them a bandit reputation. This unsavory imag£ deepened in the eighteenth century, when a growing nationalist sentiment, the French defeats in the Seven Years’ War (1757-63), and growing calls for political reform that accused royal authority of resting upon the bayonets of its troops, especially of its foreign troops, increasingly called the practice of hiring foreign soldiers into question. At the same time, the growth of similar sentiments elsewhere gradually reduced the number of foreigners available for recruitment. Switzerland remained the exception to this general rule. There poverty, tradition and government encouragement continued to hemorrhage men into the armies of foreign monarchs.9
Nevertheless, when the French Revolution erupted in 1789, foreigners were well represented in the French army, making up perhaps a quarter of its strength. Most of them were to be found in the eleven Swiss regiments whose recruitment was fairly strictly controlled by capitulations or agreements between the King of France and various cantons. Twelve of ninety-one non-Swiss regiments in the French line infantry were also foreign regiments.10
When the Revolution broke out, the foreign regiments proved most loyal to royal authority, which hardly increased their popularity with reformers. From its earliest days, the Constituent Assembly called for the abolition of foreign units in the French army. This was finally achieved on July 21, 1791, after soldiers of the former Nassau Regiment, a German unit, grown weary of constant harassment from French civilians, tore all their distinctive insignia from their uniforms and “declared that they are French, and that they wish to serve as French.”11 Only the Swiss units, covered by an ancient and special treaty, survived until August 20, 1792, when popular hostility caused them to be disbanded.
From a historical perspective, then, the introduction of conscription by the French Revolution that was called for in 1790 and definitively organized in 1798 is seen as a great step forward in the evolution of military organizations, allowing the creation of homogeneous armies based on the cheap supply of patriotic manpower, clearly superior to their more expensive predecessors in which loyalty to the organization was low, desertion rates high, discipline draconian, and tactical and operational possibilities limited. Citizen armies expressed national purpose and fought for national goals, which made them, potentially at least, at once more forceful and more flexible instruments in the hands of energetic and innovative commanders. Nor were they as likely to threaten the integrity of the state.
This is not to say, however, that foreign soldiers disappeared from the Revolutionary armies—quite the contrary. The National Assembly was torn between the need to keep the army both well-disciplined and loyal, goals which in the midst of the Revolution were not always compatible. Political agitation, resignations, mutiny and desertion had disorganized much of the old Royal Army, while patriotic volunteer and national guard battalions called up to defend “la patrie en danger” when France and Austria went to war on April 20, 1792, broke and ran at the first sight of enemy cavalry. This poor performance, combined with the capitulation of Longwy and Verdun to the invading enemy armies in September, which placed Paris in danger, caused the government to enlist between three and four thousand well-disciplined Swiss troops released from service in French units barely a month earlier.12 Likewise, French propaganda that called for soldiers in enemy ranks to “embrace liberty” presented the Revolutionaries with the problem of what to do with those, mainly Dutch and Belgians, who rallied to their cause. On August 1, 1792, a légion franche étrangère was created, followed in September by a légion germanique for Prussian and Austrian deserters.
The proliferation of foreign units in the French army grew in the period of the Directory (1795-99), which even signed a new capitulation with Swiss authorities in 1798 allowing them to recruit soldiers in the Helvetian cantons. Napoleon made extensive use of foreign and allied troops, organizing Italian and Polish auxiliaries during his Italian campaign of 1796-97, and Copt and Greek legions during his invasion of Egypt. Bataillons étrangers, which eventually became régiments étrangers , were organized from 1802 to incorporate foreign deserters, prisoners and other odds and ends out of place in French line regiments. These were true foreign legions in which Napoleon was careful to mix nationalities in the battalions. However, he must have thought them of uneven quality, for they were assigned secondary, often coastal defense, roles or garrison duties in Holland, Spain and Italy for most of their existence. After 1805, the number of foreign troops in the Grande armée increased substantially as Napoleon's conquests brought more and more of Europe under his control and as allied and vassal states were prevailed upon to contribute men to the French army. Between a third and a half of Napoleon's army that invaded Russia in 1812 was made up of foreigners, many of whom, like the rest of that army, failed to return. But their stock dropped rapidly when Saxon units deserted during the battle of Leipzig, followed by the defection of the Bavarians and mutinies in other German units. Many of the foreign units were dissolved in November 1813, leaving only Swiss, Poles and three régiments étrangers.13
So while legislators and most theorists continued to favor conscription in some form or another after 1789, this brief sketch demonstrates that the traditions of mercenary service survived the Revolution. In fact, it can even be argued that the Revolution gave the mercenary tradition a new lease on life in France, for by making France into the homeland of the Revolution, it virtually guaranteed that generations of Europe's politically repressed would make for Paris. Some of these refugees would be forced to resort to military service, only to discover legal barriers that kept them out of French line units. The problem for the French army was to discover ways to transform these refugees and other foreigners into efficient soldiers. Outside of France, Swiss mercenary units continued to be counted in the Prussian army until 1848, that of Naples until 1861, and in the Papal forces until 1870, with the Pope's Swiss Guard surviving to our own day.
Historically, however, the view that mercenaries could be made to perform efficiently, and in certain conditions more efficiently than conscripts, found its strongest proponents among French colonial soldiers, who faced essentially two problems: those of power projection and adaptability. Even under the ancien régime, colonial expansion met indifference and even hostility in France, and found favor with only a few ministers such as Richelieu and Colbert. Voltaire could dismiss cession of Canada to the British in 1763 as the trifling loss of “a few acres of snow.” The disastrous French expeditions to Egypt (1798-1801) and Saint-Domingue (1801-1808), as Haiti was then known, did little to contribute to the general popularity of foreign adventures in the French government and public opinion. Even the acquisition of Algiers in 1830 was often regarded by the July Monarchy (1830-1848) as an embarrassing legacy of the fallen Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830). The brutality of the conquest, the lack of economic viability of the French empire and the ever-pres
ent menace of a German attack after 1871 caused many to regard colonial expansion as a useless and even dangerous distraction that weakened France's position in Europe and even threatened to draw her into a war against her interests.14 Therefore, in the minds of many Frenchmen, the empire remained the domain of têtes brûlees, wild adventurers, marginal or ill-adjusted social elements.
This was to have consequences in military terms. Between the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, France practiced a form of modified conscription, with recruits selected by an annual lottery. The relatively small size of the army, which meant that only a few of the young men eligible were conscripted each year, the fact that those who had drawn a “bad number” could pay someone to serve in their place, and the fact that service was seven years with a high percentage of reenlistments, made distinctions between conscripts and professional soldiers academic. While units like the Foreign Legion, zouaves and Chasseurs d'Afrique were created especially for service in “Africa,” as Algeria was then known, and specialized units of Infanterie de marine manned other far-flung French possessions, the main task of conquering Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s fell to French line regiments.
This changed after 1871, when the French army expanded enormously to meet the military challenge of a united Germany. Conscription was broadened, the possibility of purchasing a replacement eliminated, and service time eventually reduced to two years. From this time, the “Metropolitan Army” largely composed of conscripts was regarded by the French public as a force to be used for home defense. When the Third Republic dispatched some line regiments from western France to help in the conquest of Tunisia in 1881, there was a public outcry. As a result, French governments were reluctant to send troops and often even to provide cash for colonial conquests. Therefore, French officers were forced to recruit an army on the cheap to expand the boundaries of empire and to garrison lands already conquered. This meant creating an army specially tailored for colonial service—combinations of European professionals and native levies.
The second complaint against conscripts in the colonies was that they adapted badly to the rigors of service there. Despite the reluctance to employ French conscripts in imperial expeditions, units of the 19th Army Corps in Algeria, zouaves and Chasseurs d'Afrique which contained conscripted North Africans of European extraction and Jews with a smattering of metropolitan French conscripts, continued to be used in colonial expeditions, as was the infanterie légère d'Afrique, the penal Bataillons d'Afrique, more commonly known as the “Bats d'Af,” made up of conscripts who, because of a prior criminal record, were deemed unworthy to serve with honest Frenchmen. A small number of conscripts also were present in cavalry, engineer, artillery, transport and veterinary units used abroad. But because these conscripts belonged to the Armée d'Afrique and because of the small numbers involved, no one protested their use in the colonies. Conscripts, albeit voluntary ones, were included in the Madagascar expedition of 1895 and in the 1900 China expedition with unhappy results, their youth and lack of acclimatization being blamed for their high mortality rates.
Another, unspoken, objection to conscripts among colonial soldiers was that they inevitably brought more scrutiny to bear on the conduct of colonial operations from politicians of the Third Republic. Also, colonial theorists like the future Marshal Hubert Lyautey argued that colonial service was a special calling whose requirements were very different from those of European warfare. Like many French colonial officers, Lyautey believed that the importation into the colonies of inappropriate European military methods and of a “metropolitan mentality” had been the source of many disasters. His arguments, laid out in a celebrated article entitled “Le rôle colonial de l'armée” published in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes in 1900, was instrumental in persuading the French parliament to pass a law creating a separate colonial army in that year. In fact, the 1900 law simply streamlined the French imperial military organization to the point of taking the troupes de marine away from the French navy and attaching them to the army under their new title of troupes coloniales. It also included provisions allowing units of the Armée d'Afrique, including the Legion and the tirailleurs, technically part of the metropolitan army, to be used in colonial possessions outside of North Africa.15
The existence of this separate “two-army” tradition in France was in no way unique in this age—British forces included many colonial regiments as well as the celebrated Indian Army. The Dutch colonial army was created in 1830, while the Spanish kept colonial garrisons in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines until 1898, and in 1920 created their own Foreign Legion modeled in part on the French Legion, but trained more specifically for combat in the mountainous Rif. Yet, on the European continent in an era of large national armies, the mercenary tradition remained a minority one, and the tradition of foreign white mercenaries one close to extinction. A handful of European officers like Charles “Chinese” Gordon found employment in the armies of oriental potentates; the Dutch hired about a thousand foreigners for their colonial army at the turn of the century, mostly Germans but also, until he deserted, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud; and foreign immigrants furnished many soldiers for the U.S. Army. However, it was in the French Foreign Legion that the venerable and virtually extinct tradition of white mercenary service survived in its most robust form.
And given the poor reputation of such soldiers, even in the eyes of their eighteenth-century commanders, the Legion would seem to have offered little promise of the elite performance which its historians claim for it. The image of the Legion as popularized in the years between the world wars by such books and films as Beau Geste is of a mongrel unit recruited among the scrapings of humanity, perhaps even among the criminal classes, but also containing a fairly sizable contingent of “gentlemen rankers” who fled into the Legion to escape a dark past or out of a desire for adventure. This heterogeneous collection of men was denied any of the motivations commonly thought essential for modern fighting men—patriotism, a desire to defend family and homeland, the certainty that one's national cause is righteous and, lastly, the crutches of a language and national character, even of a shared sense of humor, so essential in carrying men over the rough spots. That the Legion is presumed to have fought so well appears to defy common sense.
THE COMMON ASSUMPTION has been that the Legion was able to function, like those armies of Frederick the Great, because of discipline so draconian that a sergeant of the Legion made Captain Bligh appear indulgent by comparison. Unit cohesion was guaranteed by fear of punishments long outlawed in Europe, if indeed they had ever existed there, and by the sheer remoteness of the Legion's garrisons. General Duchesne's well-known admonition to his legionnaires during the Madagascar expedition to “march or die” seems to sum up rather neatly the conditions of service, except that it might be amended to read “march and die”! In this world of desperate and brutalized men, desertion, the running sore of the Legion, offered the only escape from the evil conditions in which legionnaires were forced to live—better risk decapitation at the hands of marauding Arabs or drowning in the Suez Canal than continue an existence which was only one notch above that of a penal colony. In any case, in the public view at least, the only thing worse than fighting against the Legion was to fight for them.
In summing up the problem from the Legion point of view, Captain Morin de La Haye went a long way toward confirming the popular view of Legion service: “Given the heterogeneous elements which we recruit from all over for the Legion, the fabrication of the soldier is particularly delicate there,” he wrote in 1886.
The legionnaire in no way resembles the good little French soldier who only wants to accomplish his service with no fuss and then return home. The man who enlists in the Legion often has a military vocation. But he is sometimes a déclassé, an adventurer, someone made bitter by life, a bandit. In the Legion we get everything. In the companies which have a strength of three to four hundred men, one finds a mixture of ex-officers, ruined gen
try, anarchists and freed convicts. One must knead this human capital so as to give it worth as an engine of war. We do this through a training system pushed to its maximum intensity.
The men, isolated in the posts of the Sud Oranais such as Géryville, Thiaret, Méchéria, constantly practice maneuvers, marksmanship; we push them to the limit.
In the beginning this system produces vague impulses of revolt. Refusal to obey, desertion, cases for court martial occur daily; men shoot at their officers, others look to unhorse them; in the Legion, the officer must expect everything. The human beast shows his teeth and is brought to heel only through the use of fists.
At certain times we carry out forced marches. We leave for the south. Everyone must keep up. The man who remains in the rear risks death by starvation or being taken by Arab dissidents. After these marches, the number of stragglers is considerable: One must be strong to endure. This is the Darwinist survival of the fittest applied to the troops.
It seems unlikely that troops treated in this way could be capable of anything but mutiny. But Morin de La Haye disagreed: “The training and education of the legionnaire are therefore very hard,” he continued.
But they produce surprising results. In several months, one has a solid troop, maneuverable, admirably practiced in shooting and marching, and entirely in the hands of its leaders. The men obey not with submission, but with spirit and assiduity. One would say that the constant exercise of the will of the leader works on them like a hypnotic suggestion. One sees in the eyes of the soldiers that they are attentive to orders, proud to maneuver well, and conscious of their worth. It is superfluous to dwell upon the amount of work one must require of the instructors to obtain this result. They carry it out with zeal, even fanaticism, in the expectation of campaigning with the men that they prepared for this end.16