French Foreign Legion
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French intervention in 1862 reopened the civil war that had been won by Juárez and the liberals. Obviously, conservative and clerical interests rallied to the French as saviors. This in itself might not have proven fatal— certain areas of the country were deeply conservative, plenty of Mexicans were prepared to switch allegiance, or to serve both sides simultaneously for that matter, and the Juaristas were too weak to put up an effective military resistance, at least initially. French forces drove Juárez into the north and early in 1865 pushed what remained of the standing Mexican army over the border into Texas.
However, Louis-Napoleon made two miscalculations that were to prove fatal to the French cause in Mexico. First, he hoped for a Confederate victory in the War Between the States. But no sooner had Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865 than Washington turned her attentions to the problem of French intervention to the south. By the summer of 1865, Juárez had begun to receive arms and even American volunteers, which gave his cause the military muscle, as well as the diplomatic support, that it had lacked. Within the space of a few months, the apparently strong French position had been seriously eroded, giving the political, as well as the military, initiative to Juárez.
Louis-Napoleon's second political mistake was to arrange for the Austrian Maximilian to rule Mexico as emperor. This was a serious miscalculation for two reasons. First, by placing a foreign sovereign on the Mexican throne, the French bestowed upon Benito Juárez and his liberals the aura of patriotic resistance. The corrupt and often vindictive conservatives who supported the new emperor were now viewed as pawns of foreign interests. In fact, to some French minds the situation seemed hauntingly similar to the fanatical resistance encountered by Napoleonic armies in Spain, and this concern was encouraged by an early defeat of French arms before Puebla in 1862, a Mexican victory that is still celebrated today as a national holiday. When in 1864 Zédé met some Juarista officers who had been taken prisoner, he found that “They were inspired by an exalted patriotism like that of the Spaniards who have a hatred of all that is foreign.... From that moment, I had doubts about the success of our intervention ... ”16
Nor did Maximilian prove to be an astute politician. He made virtually no attempt to win over the vast Indian population of Mexico, but became a de facto prisoner of the conservatives, whose interests lay in oppressing and exploiting them. He dissolved the military commission directed by the French that aimed to construct an Imperial army, and with it went virtually any hope of establishing an effective military force capable of defending his throne once the French departed. One of the plans called for the ranks of the Legion to be filled with Indians, both as a political appeal to this important population and as a way to provide the nucleus of a Mexican army built around the Legion. This showed an imaginative use of the Legion as a political as well as a military instrument, and two companies of Indian legionnaires were raised. However, these units became so depleted by desertion that the experiment was abandoned. Why? No hard evidence exists for the Mexican case, but attempts in later years to use the Legion as the nucleus of locally raised forces also proved disappointing for a variety of reasons. The legionnaires, while technically proficient, had a very special esprit de corps and disciplinary methods that transmitted poorly to units whose soldiers did not share the Legion's mercenary outlook. It is also possible that the Legion accepted such duty with bad grace, regarding it as an unwelcome distraction. One can only suppose that these Indians adapted badly to the Legion's military culture, or that they were fundamentally out of sympathy with the imperial regime. Maximilian also lifted the French blockade of Mexican ports, which allowed the resistance to import substantial quantities of American surplus arms virtually unhindered, as well as volunteers who flooded into Mexico as “immigrants.”17
This deteriorating political situation could not help but affect military operations. Camerone was but a foretaste of the problems that would increasingly confront the French. For after a few successful sieges of major towns held by liberal forces, as well as a drive in the northern states that in the summer of 1865 shoved Juárez into Texas, the French distributed their army, which never amounted to more than thirty thousand men including Belgian, Austrian and even an Egyptian detachment, in small detachments to hold the countryside they had won.
And here the problems began. The Mexicans were extremely fond of horses—indeed, the standing joke among French officers (if a joke it was) was that Maximilian, who seldom left his palace, was the only man in Mexico who did not ride a horse. Legionnaire H. Spinner put his finger on the problem when, after toiling over mountain roads in pursuit of the “bandits,” he found that “These centaurs, one hundred times faster on their horses than we infantrymen on our legs, had disappeared.”18 Not only could they disappear when attacked, they developed the disconcerting habit of reappearing at inopportune moments, concentrating their forces on isolated garrisons or convoys. In fact, Mexico looked like a series of little Camerones waiting for a place to happen. “We march, march without stopping,” wrote Diesbach de Torny in February 1864.
We enter the villages without firing a shot, [but] we do not have the men to hold what we take. ... All the troops which retreat before our army reform in the tropical lowlands in guerrilla bands strong enough to give us serious worries. We are too weak to pursue, [we] are like prisoners in the posts which we occupy, just happy enough to hold on. Now that they know our weakness, they come shoot at us in broad daylight, something they would not have done before.... Even though we are victorious, we cannot travel without fighting, every day assassinations and stagecoaches stopped.... Send forty men alone, they will be massacred by the small bands of four to five hundred men who come out of nowhere and who are elusive, protected by the inhabitants of the towns and the countryside who keep them abreast of what we do.19
It became obvious as early as 1863 that the French must do something to counter the superior mobility of the enemy. Their first excursion into the realm of counterguerrilla warfare was an unorthodox one, organized by a freelance soldier named Charles-Louis Dupin. Dupin's career had begun brilliantly—a graduate of the elite École Polytechnique in 1834, he had joined the infantry and distinguished himself in Algeria and Italy. However, something went terribly wrong during the China expedition of 1860, when, it was rumored, Dupin had been cashiered for selling articles pillaged from the summer palace. In 1862, he appeared in Mexico and offered his services to his former comrades, who set him to organizing a force of irregulars to beat the jungle behind Veracruz. Zédé described Dupin as a “small, bald old man, with a long white beard, a hook nose and lively eyes. A well-educated man, he had the polished manners of a duelist. He was blessed with an unbelievable constitution and was marvelously coordinated in physical exercises. But, he possessed all the vices except drunkenness. He was a valorous soldier and wise leader. His troop was perfectly designed for the task which it had been assigned—hunting guerrillas.”20
Zédé's assessment of Dupin was accurate—he was an upper-class thug utterly wanting in morals. However, to speak of a “design” when referring to Dupin's force is perhaps an overstatement. On paper Dupin's little army might look impressive—a battalion of five hundred men, two to a horse, capable of marching about sixty miles in twenty-four hours. To this were joined two squadrons of 150 horsemen each, two light cannons, and an ambulance. However, by the colonel's own admission, his force made the Legion look like a collection of choirboys: “One cannot claim that each nation sent its most praiseworthy representatives,” Dupin wrote of his multinational force, in a remarkable unpublished personal memoir that is preserved in the French war archives. “Almost all these men had left their countries to pursue a fortune which constantly eluded them. Discipline was unknown in this troop. Officers, NCOs and soldiers got drunk in the same tavern and soon the wine or the brandy would establish a fraternity and an equality among them which usually, between ten o'clock and midnight, would finish by an exchange of blows and other similar caresses.” Their
uniforms were torn and soiled, and one-third of the troops had no uniforms at all. Their armament was heterogeneous. “If this forced had marched through the boulevards of Paris,” Dupin admitted, “one would have thought it was an ancient band of thieves exhumed from the back streets of the city.”21 Zédé insisted that Dupin's force was recruited from “soldiers liberated from the army in Mexico who had acquired a taste for the country. The majority were ex-soldiers of the Legion.”22
The limitations, and especially the drawbacks, of such a force are fairly obvious. Dupin claimed great success for it, especially in gathering intelligence, the lack of which was to plague French operations throughout Mexico. Later on, the “counterguerrilla” force was attached to many French columns in the north. However, reading his memoir, it is clear that Dupin's principal activity lay in churning the countryside to burn farms, hold mayors and other prominent citizens to ransom and torture anyone who fell into their hands, not so much to get intelligence on rebel movements, but rather to extract information about hidden valuables. “From this moment, work is stopped and the country is given over to famine for a year. This, combined with the recent conquest of Mexico City, helped convince the inhabitants to submit,” Dupin concluded, prematurely, in the summer of 1863.23
Amiable admitted that the Mexicans lived in great fear of Dupin.24 Dupin argued that his brutal reputation was greatly exaggerated, and that whatever his faults, one must realize the brutal environment in which he was forced to operate: “I've hardly sent a dozen bandits to another world, and in this, I have done good work, because these rogues would probably have already killed more than thirty honest folk,” he wrote to his niece in February 1864. “If you knew how much I have aged since I came to this awful country. Everyone thinks I'm 60 when I'm hardly 49.”25 While it is certain that Dupin's force often behaved in no worse a fashion than some of his Mexican opponents, it is unlikely that his terror tactics did more in the long run than increase the number of Mexicans determined to resist the invader. Apparently both Maximilian and French commander Achille Bazaine realized this, and sent him packing. But the elegant Dupin managed to convince Napoleon III that he was doing great work in Mexico, so the emperor returned him there, where he remained until the last troops were evacuated in 1867. Napoleon subsequently reintegrated him into the French army with the rank of major, but he died the following year, some believed from poisoning.26
Dupin's was an interesting if somewhat irregular and inadequate response to the guerrilla problem. A second option was to recruit the guerrilla bands for the government, and Bazaine attempted to do this. However, most operated on their own account, often in the name of both sides, were more interested in terrorizing and pillaging a territory than in serving the government, were impossible to coordinate for any sort of strategic operation and quickly became a political embarrassment. In short, they were more trouble than they were worth.27
For this reason, it was soon apparent that the Legion too needed to acquire mobility, more mobility even than in Algeria, if it was to hold its own against the mercurial Mexicans. As early as October 1863, a “compagnie franche” was formed from one hundred Legion volunteers considered the most able marchers.28 But although this light company continued to function throughout the Mexican occupation, it could only be a halfway solution. What the Legion needed was cavalry, and in April 1864 a “company of mounted partisans” was formed in the 1st Battalion to act, according to the regimental history, as “dragoons.”29 However, the real break for the Legion came with the fall of Oaxaca in February 1865. When the garrison surrendered, the French collected so many horses that they were able to develop their mounted forces substantially, according to Zédé, by calling principally upon German ex-cavalrymen.30 Not all were so experienced, however. Amiable claimed that he volunteered for this new formation because he believed a horseman would be spared the “dragging about and carrying his own baggage.” However, he quickly discovered that his horse had a mind of its own—he fell off fully five times on his first patrol and was left so far behind that, had his company not stopped in a village to bake bread, he might never have caught up.31
Nor was life among the “partisans” one of great ease. Amiable found that he was constantly on the move, sometimes spending ten days without taking his boots off, his feet becoming so swollen that he could hardly feel them. In areas where there were few wells, men drank filthy, stinking water from stagnant pools only after the horses and mules had been watered. The only advantage—and it was a substantial one—of the mounted forces was that one seldom went hungry, as the inhabitants usually fled at the mere sight of them, leaving their pigs and chickens behind.32 While these cavalry formations were often used as convoy escorts or integrated into the “mobile columns” that Bazaine used, on the Algerian model, in Mexico, they did on occasion operate independently. Their most notable success came in November 1865, when a squadron of Legion cavalry operating with a “mobile column” dispatched to relieve the siege of Monterrey caught up with the retreating Mexicans, killing 112 of them.33
But there were other victories—in January 1866, Major Gustave Saussier surprised a Mexican band near Saltillo, killed forty of them and wounded one hundred, while capturing eighty-seven horses. On March 2, a small force made up of mule-mounted legionnaires and Mexican auxiliaries covered about sixty miles in thirteen hours to attack a rebel band near Monterrey, killing about thirty of them. In June, Saussier's legionnaires, escorting a convoy near Monterrey, inflicted about fifty casualties on the enemy.34
Yet the Legion cavalry, or that raised by other contingents like the Belgians, could never be a war winner. There were simply too few of them—240 officers and men in September 186635—to be able to operate safely beyond infantry support. One of the problems was the lack of mounts—horses sent from France often broke their legs during transit in rough seas and had to be killed. This meant that the strategic effect of the sort produced by cavalrymen like J.E.B. Stuart, Bedford Forrest or Phil Sheridan at that very moment north of the border was simply beyond their means. In North America, specialists had concluded that the era of cavalry had passed, and that mounted infantry made the most effective troops. In the War Between the States, mounted infantry was especially effective for the South as an adjunct to defensive warfare. It allowed rapid concentration of troops and devastating raids, obliging generals like Ulysses Grant to expend large numbers of troops to guard his communications—for instance, at Vicksburg, two-thirds of the Union forces were guarding communications so that one-third could undertake the siege.
In Mexico, the advantages of mobility lay with the Mexicans. Their men were virtually born on horseback. Furthermore, the strategic situation favored them, for the French were drawn deep into Mexico and scattered in isolated garrisons that were especially vulnerable to mobile forces which could concentrate and disperse at will. In Mexico, the Legion cavalry became a sort of fire brigade, rushing about the countryside to rescue French garrisons in distress. For instance, in March 1866, a force of Legion cavalry rescued 44 legionnaires and support troops besieged for five days in a church at Parras, north of Mexico City.36 In July 1866, 125 legionnaires barricaded themselves in a farm near Matehuala and fought off over 500 Mexicans for two days until relief arrived.37 On December 12-13, 1866, a group of 50 legionnaires were surrounded and were saved in the nick of time by mobile troops.38 Such incidents were fairly commonplace in 1866. As long as the legionnaires could reach a defensible position, the Mexicans seldom had the skill, or the stamina, to triumph.39 However, if caught in the open, it might be another matter. The worst defeat suffered by the invaders was inflicted on a combined Austro-Mexican force on June 14, 1866, when a convoy they were escorting was attacked and overwhelmed at Camargo across the river from Rio Grande City, Texas, on the American frontier. Among the attackers, led by the Juárist chief Escobedo, were a large number of American blacks liberated from the Federal army. The 300 Austrians fought bravely, but their defense was compromised by two battalions of their Mexic
an allies who managed to change sides in the midst of the fray, and they were forced to surrender. The Mexicans collected over 1,000 prisoners, eight cannon and three hundred wagons.40 This offered proof that the French could only react to events rather control the pace of the war. Their cavalry could not give them the strategic initiative.
Of course, even without the creation of these mobile forces, the Legion could always rely on the superb marching ability of its soldiers, which remained impressive. The Mexicans thought the Legion mad for marching in the impossible heat of midday. Indeed, their concern was such that even one of Diesbach de Torny's Mexican prisoners suggested that “You'll kill yourself in this country.” And while Diesbach de Torny put on a brave front—“We French don't keep hours.... When we're thirsty, we sing!”— he admitted secretly that the Legion in Mexico was maintaining, quite literally, a killing pace.41 For instance, the legionnaires who marched from San Luis Potosi to relieve the siege of Matehuala in late March 1866 made the normally ten-day journey in less than half that time, averaging almost five miles an hour despite resistance from the Mexicans. Many men simply could not keep up. “As for myself,” wrote Amiable of this grueling march, “my tongue was down at least to my feet, but I kept going, knowing what awaited stragglers.”42 But by punishing the infantry in this way, the Legion probably lost in firepower what it gained in mobility, especially as the veterans of Africa were replaced after April 1864 by recruits hastily trained at the temporary Legion depot in Aix-en-Provence.