French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Nor did the city's exoticism diminish upon closer inspection. The Belgian Louis Lamborelle described the city he saw when, in 1841, he disembarked with a contingent of Legion recruits: “There we were in the middle of the Arab town,” he wrote. “... Moors, Arabs, Jews, bedouins from the plain in their white burnouses ... some wearing turbans, others a haik tied around their heads by a camel rope.... Some walked silently and majestically. Others lay like wild beasts at the foot of a boundary-mark. Still others gravely smoked their pipes in doorways of the houses. Some Moorish women, covered from head to foot by a large white wrap which only let you see the pupil of an eye, were already going to the baths followed by their slaves.”37 The sergeant led the recruits through the city gate of the Bab-Azoun and, shouting “Balek! Balek!” (“Make way! Make way!”), forced his way through the Berber market which crowded outside the gate.

  The road to Mustapha, where the Legion had installed its headquarters in a country palace confiscated from the Dey of Algiers, ran for about three miles through a string of suburbs sprinkled over a pleasantly hilly countryside. And as barracks went, it ranked among the best: “The entrance hall was entirely covered in marble, of which the alternate black and white squares formed a gigantic chess board,” Lamborelle recorded. “In the middle was an admirably worked fountain, from which a single spray of water fell into an agate basin. All of the buildings equalled this magnificence. The doors especially were remarkably worked, made up of a myriad of small pieces of wood, the rarest and most precious varieties, artistically brought together in a mosaic which was truly the work of a grand master.” The rooms had been cleared of furniture so that the legionnaires could sling their hammocks.38

  However, in 1831 Algiers, which had been seized by the French barely a year earlier, was in a great state of disrepair, as it had been partially destroyed and thoroughly pillaged in the invasion. Already cosmopolitan in an Oriental sort of way, this erstwhile outpost of the Turkish empire now folded a layer of Europeans into a social mélange which already included most examples of Homo africanus. And what Europeans! General Pierre Berthezène, who commanded the Occupation Division of around fifteen thousand men in 1831, complained to the war minister of “The vagabonds that Spain, Italy and above all Malta has vomited onto these coasts. I can still add, and there are not just a few of them, those who have come from France and whom you have sent us.”39

  Berthezène did not have the Legion in mind when he wrote those lines, not yet, anyway. This particular invective was directed at the corps of “Parisian Volunteers ... the scrapings of the streets of Paris ... given over to dissolution and debauchery,” who had already justified in full their nickname of “French Bedouins.”40 These Parisian Volunteers, who were not necessarily Parisians, also traveled under the name of “Volontaires de la Charte” —Volunteers of the Charter. The unit was soon dissolved, with some of its members placed into the newly formed zouaves, and others contributing to the formation of the 67th Infantry Regiment. Berthezène had early on grasped his fundamental problem—how to reconcile the task of colonization and military efficiency with that of, in the words of his predecessor in Algeria, Marshal Bertrand Clauzel, acting as a repository for “all who live in misery and can upset the tranquility and public repose.”41

  The French soon discovered that most of the units created for service in Algeria in 1831-32 would be the source of considerable discipline problems. The zouaves, whose military reputation eventually served as a model for many units in the American War Between the States, had a rocky start, as did the Chasseurs d'Afrique, which was created in November 1831. After two 1834 mutinies, several chasseurs were executed and six officers cashiered by courts-martial. The Legion was also a source of concern for the authorities. In January 1832, the commanding general in Algeria, Rene Savary, the due de Rovigo, ex-minister of police under Napoleon, distributed the Legion in small detachments throughout the town because, in their case, “... it would take only one drunken binge to touch off an insurrection.”42 The general inspecting the Legion complained in 1834 that, in their haste to speed undesirable foreigners out of France, mayors and recruiting officers were enlisting men who were “visibly” infirm.43 However, the need to provide a receptacle for undesirable foreigners remained one of the most potent arguments for keeping the Legion in existence. In April 1836, for instance, General Joseph Bernelle, eager to create a Legion cavalry, wrote to his superiors that by sending him Polish refugees with experience in that arm, the government would at once rid France of “agitated and turbulent elements” while “uniting under strict discipline and for active service men whom it already pays to do nothing.”44

  But were the men of the Legion as bad as all that? In 1831, the Legion had been organized into national battalions of Swiss and Germans, Italians, Spanish and Poles, although these categories were never watertight. For instance, many if not most legionnaires in the 6th Dutch-Belgian Battalion, formed in 1833, were in fact Germans who had deserted over the Belgian frontier and were subsequently guided to France. The Belgians who joined were young, many drawn by “the attraction of the African adventure.”45 The inspector of the 3,168 legionnaires stationed at Mustapha on December 1, 1832, was of the opinion that the 87 French had joined for rapid promotion and the 94 Swiss were “zealous,” most being from the Swiss regiments of the Bourbons, while the 571 Italians were aloof and “jealous.” The 98 Belgians and Dutch and 19 Danes and Swedes got high marks, as did the 85 Poles, rated as “good and brave soldiers.” The 10 Englishmen were “little known.” However, the 2,196 Germans did give cause for concern: “many are deserters or political refugees, medical students, lawyers or solicitors, of a disquieting imagination. These must be continually watched.” What a far cry from eighteen months earlier, when these students were selected as NCOs and even had pretensions of forming elite companies!46

  So what had happened? The disappointed idealism of the 1830 revolutions, the dashed hopes that the trois glorieuses would spark the “liberation” of Europe must have played a part. Men who enlisted out of revolutionary fervor could hardly have been delighted at being exiled to Africa as undesirables. Yet this could not have been the full story, for the Poles, for instance, established an excellent reputation in Algiers and subsequently in Spain, although hatred of Russia was undoubtedly at the top of their political agenda. Of course, it may have been that most of the Poles were soldiers by profession, as the 1831 rebellion against Saint Petersburg was essentially a military one. The Legion was also exhibiting a martial dislike of intellectuals, preferring men with lesser expectations to those whose critical attitudes too easily led to disaffection. Rovigo suggested that the Legion's problems lay essentially with “a hundred or so bad subjects, deserters of various armies, who require close watching” and who should be released from service. But these men were in the Legion precisely because they did require “close watching.”47

  Despite the fact that the Legion was given its first regimental banner by a royal ordinance of November 9, 1831, a regimental spirit was slow to develop among men who did not speak French, many of whom had no previous military experience. The fact that the Legion, which eventually grew to seven battalions, was fragmented and often assigned to the least desirable, most disease-ridden posts or given useless or often futile tasks to perform hardly improved spirits. The real key to performance, Rovigo believed, lay with the officers: “A leader who knows how to handle these men can soon create an esprit de corps.”48 For, despite their disparate and troubled backgrounds, or perhaps because of them, most legionnaires responded well to two things: first, officers who took an interest in them, who nurtured their self-respect, a role model who must be a soldier's soldier, and one who was ever sensitive to their very acute sense of justice and human dignity. Second, they needed an institution with which they could identify, one that gave them both the pride and perhaps also the forced discipline that was lacking in their personal lives. Of course, the second largely followed from the first, especially in the French army, whi
ch lacked the tradition of a strong corps of NCOs to be found in the British or Imperial German armies.

  The problems of recruiting good officers at Bar-le-Duc followed the Legion to Algeria. Not all officers were bad, of course. The abolition of the Royal Guards regiments in the 1830 Revolution created a thirst for elite units in Algeria, which the Foreign Legion helped to satisfy. One of the Legion's early commanders, Colonel Michel Combe, was one of the French army's most ardent supporters of light infantry, whose ideas contributed to the formation of the Chasseurs à Pied, a light infantry unit.49 A number of foreign officers sought entry into the Legion, including, in 1834, 227 Polish refugees in London. But while the Legion undoubtedly counted officers of worth, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the quality was uneven. General Voirol complained in 1833 that French officers in the Legion frequently resorted to sarcasm or “injurious or disdainful expressions” that pushed the legionnaires to “resistance and insubordination.”50 It is probable that the German students especially were offended by this behavior and showed it. But the poor attitude of too many officers had devastated morale. On January 1, 1834, Voirol reported that regimental pride was nonexistent, drunkenness endemic, the turnover of troops too great, and that no one wanted to reenlist once their three years’ service was completed.51

  Conditions of service must also have played a fundamental role in the Legion's morale problems. The sad truth was that things were not going well for the French in Africa. The troops of the original expeditionary force sent out in the summer of 1830 to administer a lesson to the Dey of Algiers, who had had the temerity to strike the French consul with a fly whisk, were thoroughly demoralized and eager to get home. Low morale was due in part to the political turmoil in France, to the continued fallout of the Revolution, to the often acrimonious debates that split the Assembly over what to do with Algiers now that it had been conquered, and to the utter lack of enthusiasm among the French people for the Algerian enterprise. The military situation in Algiers also contributed to low spirits. The soldiers who originally had been bivouacked outside the town in early 1831 were pulled inside the walls for security. This had transformed Algiers into a besieged town, so Rovigo had hit upon the solution of building a series of blockhouses at strategic approach points to permit a bit of breathing space. However, this too caused problems. At best, duty in these small outposts was tedious, at worst lethal.

  To their credit, legionnaires fought honorably in these early engagements. Two companies were engaged on April 7, 1832, in the unit's first action. On May 23, 1832, a detachment of twenty-seven legionnaires and twenty-five Chasseurs d'Afrique under Major Salomon de Musis were attacked near the Maison Carrée, which protected the eastern approaches to Algiers. The Major urged his legionnaires to hold on while he disappeared with the cavalry to find help, leaving them under the command of the Swiss Lieutenant Cham. The legionnaires, hardly familiar with African warfare, shot a first volley at the approaching Arabs and then broke for a small wood a short distance away. Having broken ranks, a fatal mistake in conditions when volley firing was the best guarantee of defense, the legionnaires were surrounded, and killed or captured. The prisoners, including Lieutenant Cham, the first Legion officer to die in combat, were massacred one by one as they refused to abjure Christianity and adopt Islam. Only legionnaire Wagner, a Saxon, agreed to accept Islam and was spared. In the camp of his new masters, where he was now employed as a slave, Wagner met five deserters from the Legion who were also subsequently killed when they too attempted to escape to Algiers. Wagner eventually managed to flee and after thirteen days made his way to the Maison Carrée, where his battalion was drawn up to hear his story and learn the hard lessons of desertion. Salomon de Musis was transferred to the penal infanterie légère d'Afrique in disgrace, and died in 1836 in an Arab ambush.52

  But an enemy by far more ubiquitous, persistent and deadly than the Arabs, and one that mercilessly stalked legionnaires, was disease, “fever,” a term used in those days of imprecise medical science to cover typhoid, pneumonia and, most commonly, malaria. (The great cholera epidemic that ravaged Algiers and other North African towns in 1834-35 was called by its proper name.) Between 1831 and 1835, 3,200 legionnaires, or about one-quarter of strength, either died or were released as too debilitated to serve because of disease. In July 1833 alone, 1,600 of 2,600 legionnaires of the Algiers garrison were in the hospital, not a tantalizing prospect in an era when Algerian hospitals were little more than primitive sheds for parking the sick. The old saw that legionnaires only entered the hospital to die was no mere boast. It reflected the reality of a situation of near-criminal neglect, of hospitals without beds, where the ill were placed in hammocks or simply deposited on a layer of straw in requisitioned houses, under tents or crude lean-tos opened to the four winds. Sanitary facilities and running water were virtually nonexistent, and the sick had to ask permission to hobble into town, if they were able, to take a bath. However, most scandalous were the constant complaints of hunger among the sick, who had to spend their own money, do odd jobs around the hospital or, in extreme cases, even sell parts of their uniforms, often to the kitchen staff, to feed themselves. Such was the case of legionnaire Pregno who, suffering from dysentery, was forced to spend his savings and then sell his shoes, collar and gaiters to buy the special food prescribed by the doctor. Pregno was fortunate—he was given only two months’ prison by a court-martial that recognized his dilemma. But military judges, who were usually prepared to admit drunkenness as an extenuating circumstance in breaches of discipline, with Dickensian logic too often dismissed justified cases of hunger as an insufficient reason for selling pieces of the uniform.53

  What was Rovigo prepared to do about this? The short answer is, not much. In partial mitigation, it should be pointed out that he was in good company. In the first decade of the Algerian occupation, few senior officers seemed overly concerned about the deplorable conditions in which their soldiers lived. It would take the dynamic General Bugeaud, appointed governor-general in 1840, to jack up a slothful and even dishonest military administration and create service conditions approaching something in which human beings might reasonably be expected to exist. Rovigo placed the blame for the Legion's high mortality rate on the exceptional intemperance of its soldiers. This was certainly a contributory factor. He declared war on the numerous cabarets and wine merchants which, along with dishonest land speculation, seemed to be the only business ventures that had so far flourished in Algiers.54 However, the real problem, as he knew full well, was that the Legion was set tasks in those areas around Algiers considered the least healthy, and where men left for more than three days almost invariably succumbed to “fever”—guard duty at the Maison Carrée or draining the marshes of the Mitidja, the plain that stretches east and south of Algiers behind the Sahel Hills. For instance, of forty legionnaires sent to the Maison Carrée in 1834, all were hospitalized within a month.55

  Of course, someone had to do these jobs. But why so often the Legion? Rovigo insisted that the Legion's public works projects in the Mitidja were a spontaneous initiative, and that its two battalion commanders were “impassioned for this idea” of using legionnaires as colonizers.56 But there was more to it than that. Rovigo, in contrast to his predecessor Berthezène, was a staunch advocate of military colonization as a way to disarm critics in France who clamored for an end to the North African adventure.57 The Legion's officers must have known how to make themselves, and their unit, agreeable to the commander-in-chief. There is nothing intrinsically suspicious about a military unit volunteering for tasks that help to accomplish the mission. And all units, not just the Legion, were required to participate in public works projects. When in 1835 a battalion of the Legion was excused from road-building duties because of a high number of hospitalizations, they took it as a slight on their ability to perform.58 Also, it is fair to add that the Legion's officers did attempt to mitigate the noxious effects of these pestilential garrisons somewhat. For instance, when the 6th Battal
ion, advertised as a low-country unit but in fact overwhelmingly German, melted like spring snows while holding the fort at Bône, it was suggested that they be replaced by the more resilient Spaniards. However, the high command reasoned that the sight of the handful of healthy legionnaires marching out of town would virtually finish off the majority of the suffering, so the rotation was abandoned.59 Eventually, some of these garrisons would be handed over to native Algerian troops. However, the conclusion that the healthy garrisons were reserved for French troops while the Legion, considered expendable, was assigned the rest is difficult to escape.60

  The tedium of manual labor, perhaps the obvious distaste of many French officers for their foreign troops, and the reality of service in Africa, which meant that a legionnaire was far more likely to perish miserably from disease than go out gloriously, must have scorched many romantic visions of adventure. In most cases, this simply translated into low morale. Occasionally, however, soldiers preferred to opt out before their contracts reached full term. In North Africa, this was a rather desperate alternative, for it meant desertion to the enemy, always a risky business. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the problem was most troublesome at the insalubrious Maison Carrée, where the El-Ouffia tribe offered sanctuary to any legionnaire who cared to come. When, for instance, on April 6, 1832, Sergeant Muller of the 3rd Battalion and a comrade were promised by two “bedouins” that “we would be well treated and that we would no longer have to work,” they tipped off Major Salomon de Musis. On April 7, these “deserters” were shadowed into the mountains by a substantial French force. However, after the women had cut off their buttons and exchanged their uniforms for Arab burnooses, “I started to be afraid,” continued Muller. “We mount our horses. Seeing that the detachment was not coming, I take a bedouin by the foot. I throw him to the ground. I turn my mule around. I want to rejoin the encampment. The detachment arrives, fortunately.” It certainly did. The Arabs left seventy dead, including two Legion deserters, and the Legion took home ten thousand francs worth of prizes, which were distributed according to rank.61 The extent of desertion in the Legion before 1835 is unknown. But Rovigo complained in May 1832 of Legion deserters inciting their comrades to join them, “by writing that they will have, like them, a horse, money and women.”62