French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The apparent paradox in this brief explanation of the evolution of the legionnaire from rebellious recruit to proud soldier is that conventional wisdom would appear to doubt that such poor material and such brutal training methods could produce an elite fighting force. Of course, this is not to say that heterogeneous, even press-ganged, forces in the ancient mold did not on occasion rise to superior levels of performance—one only has to think of the armies of Frederick the Great or Wellington, or the British navy in the Napoleonic Wars. But, generally speaking, there is just so much that severe discipline, rigorous training, tight leadership and perhaps the desperation of circumstance can do to improve the performance of “the scum of the earth enlisted for drink.” And even if these forces are capable of flashes of heroism, they lack the inner strength to sustain them through prolonged adversity. After all, one is unlikely to “faire Camerone,” that is, fight almost to the last man as did a group of legionnaires at the Mexican village of Camerone in 1863, if there is the slightest possibility of a viable alternative. Riffraff commonly behaves like riffraff given half a chance, which is one reason why most nations have chosen to fight their wars with conscript armies, at least since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 made them virtually mandatory.

  All of this suggests several possibilities. The most obvious is that the performance of the Legion was perhaps less consistently inspirational than Legion lore would have one believe. This has not been my conclusion. The Legion has never lacked for courage, although I believe I can show that it has been plagued by endemic problems, namely desertion, which could on occasion prove very disruptive. Nor has the Legion been immune in conditions of prolonged conflicts from what modern military observers call the “curve of combat efficiency,” which dictates that the accumulated stress of battle leads to a progressive deterioration of performance.17

  Therefore, while recognizing in full the potential for exaggeration, even for mistaken assessment, it seems logical to conclude that critical reports were drawn up in good faith and reflect an honest perception of conditions in the Legion at a particular time.

  But if Legion performance has generally lived up to its press notices, then there appears to be something exaggerated or left out of Morin de La Haye's description—perhaps recruitment to the Legion has been of a higher quality and service and discipline less brutalizing than has been commonly supposed. Or perhaps the act of enlistment was not necessarily one of desperation, but a search for something that conventional society, even conventional military society, could not provide—risk; glory; a tough, quasi-outlaw image; and a quest for the assurance, in an incongruous way the stability, that only a strict hierarchy and a rough and ready justice could provide. A third possibility might be that, while the Legion merited in full its unsavory reputation, it discovered ways to minimize its handicaps, or even to transform qualities that would be liabilities in conscript armies into strengths. It is just such questions that this book will seek to answer.

  There are many dangers awaiting a historian of the Legion, not the least the enormous mystique of that corps. No force has been so much the object of mythmaking as the Foreign Legion, a process that began even before the Geste brothers decided to try their luck at soldiering. However, this accretion of myth has been one of the major impediments to a serious study of the Legion as a fighting force, and helps to account for the fact that works on the Legion often seem to lurch between popular hagiography and eulogies to its heroism, and condemnations of the Legion as a brutal, quasi-criminal institution, unworthy of a nation with pretensions to civilized values.

  While the encrustation of myth provides one of the main impediments to understanding the Legion, it also furnishes one of its most irresistible attractions. Of no element is this more true than of recruitment. The identity of legionnaires has always been shrouded in mystery, and intentionally so. Part of the romanticism of the Legion rests on its tradition of asylum and its laws of silence, both reinforced by the anonymat —the Legion policy of adopting a false identity upon enlistment that was built into Article 7 of the ordinance of March 10, 1831, that founded the corps. The anonymat has caused people to build great legends about the Legion.18 Indeed, it has caused legionnaires to build great legends around themselves—Antoine Sylvère, who enlisted under the name of Flutsch in 1905, noted that once even the familiar bearing of a name had been abandoned by men already disoriented by life, legionnaires set about conjuring up a past out of their fantasies and failures.19

  The task of the historian is to get as close to the truth as his documentation and historical imagination will allow. Even this cursory introduction will alert the reader that, in the case of the Legion, this can be no easy task. Despite the often harsh realities of service, mystery is at the very heart of the Legion. It was created by the circumstances of its early years, nurtured as the very essence of its personality, reinforced by certain regulations tailored specifically for the corps, and jealously guarded by those who have successfully gained admittance to its inner fraternity. To study the Legion, then, is to open oneself to problems beyond the standard range, difficult enough in themselves, of those that confront the historian who attempts to divine the motives and actions of men long dead. It is in reality to break a code, to explain the men whose experiences have often burst the normal confines of human activity. It is also to explain the rules and social rituals of this curious freemasonry whose continued existence is in itself a social, political and military statement that cannot be ignored. The Legion forms an important part of France's military self-image, but not a central part. The Legion does not so much run against the current of history; it defies it. To explain this defiance, and why, on balance, it has been a story of remarkable success, is the task of this book.

  ODE TO A MERCENARY ARMY

  These, in the day when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth's foundations fled,

  Followed their mercenary calling

  And took their wages and are dead.

  Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

  They Stood, and earth's foundations stay;

  What God abandoned, these defended,

  And saved the sum of things for pay.

  A. E. Housman

  Chapter 1

  “LE PLUS BEAU CORPS DE FRANCE”

  THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION was created by King Louis-Philippe on March 10, 1831. The stilted official prose of the royal ordinance of that date directed that a legion of foreigners aged between eighteen and forty years be recruited for service in the French army. When a bill to create a foreign legion had been originally presented to the Chamber of Deputies in February, it stipulated that these foreigners could serve only outside of France, a provision that found its way into the law voted on March 9, 1831. Although this proviso had been dropped from the final text of the law signed on the following day, it was nonetheless clear that one of the purposes of the new Legion was to clear France of foreigners. While in theory a number of options for foreign assignment were open which included Guadaloupe and Martinique, the French garrisons in Greece or at Ancona in Italy, in 1831 the most likely destination was Algiers.

  Official documents usually give little away. But this one speaks volumes both about the state of France in 1831 and about the relationship between that country and the corps of foreign soldiers it had called into being. The revolution which in July 1830 toppled the Bourbon Restoration rekindled hopes among many European liberals and nationalists that the new regime would take up the crusade to spread liberty and equality throughout Europe, as France had done between 1789 and 1815. Many of these men flocked to France, encouraged by the unilateral renunciation by France of the extradition treaties with other European governments signed in the shadow of the reactionary Congress of Vienna of 1815. This hope also set off a series of minor detonations throughout Europe—in Italy, the German States, Poland and in what came to be Belgium. Spain already seemed to exist in a permanent state of civil war. However, with the exception of the independence
movement in Belgium, none of these revolutions enjoyed the success of Paris's Trots Glorieuses, as the three “glorious” days of the July uprising had come to be called. After an initial period of surprise, the princes of Europe almost everywhere had restored the reign of order.

  Defeated, many of the unsuccessful revolutionaries fled toward France, which, until deposed by Russia's October Revolution of 1917, served as the homeland of the Revolution. They were joined by other foreign immigrants who came into France for personal or economic reasons and who, without resources, became vagabonds, delinquents or even contributed to the considerable political turmoil of the period. Many of the soldiers from the Swiss regiments disbanded in 1830 had also failed to return home. For Louis-Philippe, France's new constitutional monarch, this invasion was unwelcome. Enough homegrown revolutionaries existed in Paris, Lyon and other French cities who wanted to lead the revolution of 1830 toward what they believed should be its natural conclusion—a republic. In the opinion of the Citizen King, they needed no reinforcements.

  The idea of employing the French army to absorb, and therefore tame, these revolutionaries had come about in the previous year. In August 1830, a retired cavalry captain named Gauthier suggested in a letter to the war minister, General Etienne Gérard, that agitation would continue in Paris until those who had participated in the July Revolution had been rewarded with military commissions. The idea was taken up by the government, which eventually reserved two sublieutenancies and four sergeant slots in each regiment for men who had distinguished, or claimed to have distinguished, themselves on the July barricades.1 What proved a partial solution to the problem of local revolutionairies might also be applied to that of the influx of foreigners into France.

  The Legion, and many of her historians, like to see the 1831 ordinance as the continuation of France's long reliance on foreign troops. But it is equally possible that without the circumstances of the moment, the tradition of a foreign corps might have been as much a casualty of the July Revolution as was the Restoration. However, when Louis-Philippe turned his attentions to those who swarmed into France quite literally from all directions (many of the Poles who came in 1832 arrived by boat), he discovered that the proposed remedy of incorporating foreigners into the army had hit a snag—it was illegal, and with good reason.

  The 1830 revolution had been an expression of French nationalism as well as a demand for liberal reform. Frenchmen who had been raised to the very summit of glory by Napoleon discovered their national prestige much diminished under the restored Bourbons. Waterloo had brought the impossibly corpulent Louis XVIII to the throne, who was succeeded in 1824 by his brother, Charles X. They cut a sorry figure in France. The dynamism that had helped Henri IV and Louis XIV to transform France into a modern and powerful state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been bred out of these later Bourbons. Reactionary, still brooding about the fate of their brother Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette, at the hands of the Revolution of 1789, they were, in the eyes of many of their countrymen, kings who owed their throne to foreign bayonets and who, in return, appeared to bend those energies left them toward keeping France a second-class power to serve the interests of Metternich, the Austrian chancellor and grey eminence of Restoration Europe, and the English.

  As was traditional with regimes whose power was not based upon the consent of the governed, the Restoration relied in part on pampered guards regiments and foreign mercenaries to enforce their authority—in this case six regiments of Swiss and the régiment de Hohenlohe, into which foreigners of all nationalities were recruited. The Swiss Guards in particular had become hated symbols of royal authority. As opposition to the Bourbons grew after 1827, fights between the Swiss and Parisian workers were reported in July 1827 and June 1828. In October 1829, police reported that groups of Swiss Guards from Paris's Babylone barracks frequently mistreated civilians there. Nor were the Swiss popular in the army. In the first place, they earned double and in some ranks even triple the pay of their counterparts in French regiments. And quite apart from manning the hardship garrisons of Paris, Versailles, Saint-Cloud and Fontainebleau, Swiss officers occupied one rank above the equivalent command position in a line regiment, positions often acquired, it was openly charged, through court intrigue rather than ability.

  Not surprisingly, resentment against the Swiss ran high in the army, as when, in November 1828, a full-scale regimental fight broke out between the Swiss and the 2nd Grenadiers at Versailles. This resentment was matched in the population and found full expression in the 1830 Revolution, when the fury of the crowds was especially directed at the Swiss. By Friday, July 30, the fourth glorieuse, with the insurgents already in control of Paris, the Swiss were deserting in large numbers, and their colonels began to solicit safe-conduct passes out of the country for their troops from the Provisional Government, no doubt acutely conscious of the massacre of Swiss soldiers following their attempt to defend Louis XVI against a Paris mob on August 10, 1792.2

  The Revolution of 1830 was taken as an excuse for a general military housecleaning. All guards regiments were abolished, a step seen by many soldiers as one of the greatest accomplishments of the July Revolution, for it ended the most flagrant examples of favoritism and returned the French army to the egalitarian principles of 1789.3 Foreigners were also shown the door: Article 13 of the Charter, which served the July Monarchy as a constitution, read, “No foreign troop can be admitted into the service of the State, except under a [special] law.” On August 14, 1830, the Swiss regiments were disbanded, a process that was complete by the end of September. With the Treaty of Lucerne of April 24,1831, France renounced her capitulations with the Swiss Republic.

  But if the Swiss were roundly disliked, the attitude toward that other regiment of foreigners, the Hohenlohe, was less well-defined. Unlike the Swiss, the Hohenlohe was a curious artifact rather than the hated symbol of a fallen regime. Created on September 6,1815, under the title of Légion royale étrangère, the unit's original purpose had been to enlist those soldiers in Napoleon's régiments étrangers who still wished to serve France. The regiment's patron and honorary colonel was a naturalized Frenchman, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Bartenstein, whose name was assigned to the regiment in February 1821. Created Marshal of France and Peer of the Realm in 1827, Hohenlohe died in 1829. However, his regiment was in no way the object of favoritism as were the Swiss. After occupying a series of dreary provincial garrisons throughout the Restoration, in July 1830 the regiment found itself in Marseille, ironically, perhaps, in occupation of Fort Saint-Jean at the entrance to the old harbor, one of the forts that in later years would become the staging point and the first experience of Legion life for so many men bound for Sidi-bel-Abbès. The presence of a regiment of foreign mercenaries seems to have passed virtually unnoticed in a town that had become one of the major depots for the expeditionary force sent to attack Algiers in May 1830, except perhaps for the public concerts of the regimental band that had received rave reviews from the opposition newspaper, Le Sémaphore.

  Like all provincial towns, Marseille was forced to await events in Paris rather than participate in the movement that would settle the political fate of France. In the days before the telegraph, news traveled slowly. That of the July Revolution reached Marseille only on August 2, by which time Charles X was on his way into exile. There were rumors that the Hohenlohe commander, Colonel Pozzo di Borgo, attempted to raise his regiment against the orders on August 4 to replace the white flag of the Bourbons with the tricolor of the Revolution. But if true, the revolt came to nothing. Hohenlohe was feted by the newly formed Marseille National Guard, and on August 22 the new division commander, Lieutenant General Delort, declared that by their conduct the soldiers of Hohenlohe had earned the right to be “naturalized Frenchmen” and promised to replace the “H” on their shakos with a number. However, this local enthusiasm for the Hohenlohe was not shared by the new government, which seemed undecided, even confused, about its fate. On December 12, it or
dered the Hohenlohe to prepare to embark for “Castle Morea,” near Patras, where a French garrison was supporting Greeks fighting for independence against Turkey. Then on January 5, 1831, in a rapid about-face, it ordered the regiment disbanded. Those soldiers who wished to continue in the French army— presumably those eligible for French nationality—were incorporated into the 21st Light Infantry Regiment.4

  Therefore, it would appear that the tradition of foreign troops in the service of France had been broken, both by law and in the spirit of Frenchmen, by the Revolution of 1830. When a new recruitment bill was passed on March 21, 1832, Article 2 declared that “no one will be admitted to serve in the French forces if he is not French,” an obvious indication that the existence of the Legion was ignored by the lawmakers even a year after its creation. However, there is a second and perhaps even more venerated tradition in France at least since 1789—that of offering asylum to foreign refugees, especially to those escaping political repression. And it is to this tradition, rather than to that of hiring foreign mercenaries, that the Légion étrangère appears to owe its existence. The Foreign Legion was created in response to a short-term refugee crisis, a crisis that was contributing to the political turmoil in France and costing the French government a considerable amount of money in subsidies to foreign refugees.5 While it is true that the mercenary tradition, which was alive and well in Prussia, Naples and the Papal states, as well as being part of France's very recent history, offered an obvious solution to this crisis, the Foreign Legion was not conceived as a corps that would “continue the traditions” of the Swiss and the Hohenlohe regiment.