French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The second factor that favored a romanticization of the Legion and a reaffirmation of its “traditions” to the point of invention was the new challenges faced by the Legion at the close of World War I. The success, even the survival, of the Legion obsessed Rollet, for everywhere he looked he saw potential for the Legion's demise. Already, as commander of the RMLE in 1918, he had feared that the absence of recruits might result in the disbandment of the Legion. The political upheavals that inundated the Legion with waves of Germans and Russians, Jews and Spaniards, whose deep nationalist antipathy for France or ideological preferences for the extreme right or left made them poor candidates for assimilation into a mercenary force, were a further concern. In the absence of the old soldiers who had played such a vital role in the socialization of the Legion's heterogeneous recruits, the entire outlook, spirit and even efficiency of the unit was under threat—one of the burning questions for soldiers in the interwar years was whether the “New Legion” was worthy of the military reputation of its pre-1914 predecessor. If this were not bad enough, Rollet was especially distressed by what he viewed as the attacks on the Legion by novelists, filmmakers and even from ex-legionnaires willing to sell memoirs made sensational for public consumption. In his view, this posed a threat more serious than the anti-Legion campaign run out of Germany before 1914, for it was a movement made for mass consumption and not confined to the narrow nationalist agenda of one country.

  To counter these threats to the Legion posed by the constant changes and innovations of the postwar world, Rollet reached back into the Legion's past to resurrect, reaffirm and restructure symbols, practices and lore that would offer visible links between the historical Legion and the post-1918 corps. This would bestow legitimacy upon the Legion in the eyes of its recruits and give them a sense of continuity and communion with past generations through a set of highly symbolic and repetitive rituals, which would act as a means of inculcating values and standards of behavior in legionnaires by implying that these were the perpetuation of hallowed practices. But also, “tradition” would reaffirm the Legion's status in its own eyes as the only truly professional corps in an overwhelmingly conscript army.

  Rollet's goal was to bequeath his Legion the stability of an unchanging and invariable “tradition” in a period of turbulence and change. The Legion was “a very special troop, whose worth comes from its heterogeneous composition cemented by TRADITION.”3 The commander of the 2e étranger in 1923 agreed: “[The Legion's] reorganization is slow, too slow in my opinion, because tradition is at the base of the Legion and the measures taken often neglect the experience acquired over almost one hundred years.”4 Major Poirmeur of the 3e étranger argued in 1924 that the Legion would recover its efficiency once it was “solidly cemented by ‘tradition.’ ”5 Unfortunately, in the early 1920s these “traditions” were little more than a collection of ill-defined and informal practices, many of which had fallen into abeyance during the war or remained only in the memories of those few survivors of the pre-1914 Legion (which was why Poirmeur surrounded the word in quotation marks).

  The visible links that bound the new and old Legions across the chasm of World War I were tenuous ones in 1919. The most obvious one was Sidi-bel-Abbès, itself, with the regimental “Salle d'Honneur” which featured the combats of Camerone and Tuyen Quang, the names of the regiment's commanders engraved in marble and the lists of Legion officers killed in combat. But salles d'honneur were not unique to the Legion. And, as has been seen, even Rollet had wanted to abandon Sidi-bel-Abbès after the war, so that there appears to have been no particular importance attached to the continuity provided by the Legion's long association with its primary garrison. If the Legion was forced to retain Sidi-bel-Abbès as its headquarters, it was essentially because the 19th Army Corps feared seeing the Legion disappear into the relative independence of Lyautey's Morocco. The anonymat persisted, but it is not clear what significance this practice held for the many adolescent recruits who joined after the war and whose experience of life, and motivations for enlistment, differed from those of their prewar counterparts. As the diarist of the 2e étranger noted in 1921, the prewar “adventurers” mentality seemed to be a thing of the past among the young recruits, who were “indifferent to their surroundings.”6 And, above all, the old veterans who could pass on such anecdotes as that of the “Royal Prince of Prussia,” so common before the war, had become an endangered species. The Legion now had no uniform that distinguished it from other corps, which had formed such an important element of its prewar identity. Even its traditional “Valeur et Discipline” device on its regimental standards was replaced in 1920 by “Honneur et Fidélité” In other words, the Legion did not have “traditions” as such, but rather a more or less vague collection of ancestral memories that had yet to be formalized in any systematic fashion.7

  Rollet was not alone in wanting to create a postwar image of the Legion based upon his perception of its pre-1914 personality. His contribution was to confirm and direct a movement that to a large degree was spontaneous, to formalize a series of symbols and rituals that would give to legionnaires a sense of belonging to a unique fraternity. It is in this sense that Legion “tradition” was invented, a “factitious” link between the post-and prewar Legion, a panoply of symbols and rituals whose constant repetition not only established a rhythm of regimental life, but also gave a sense of invariable constancy in a period of upheaval and change. Rollet's purpose was to teach a new generation of legionnaires to speak in a common idiom, to create a vision borrowed from myth to design a collective mentality, to formulate a common view of reality. In other words, the Legion existed as an organizational structure. Now he must make the legionnaires.

  As in any army, no symbol was considered more potent than that of the uniform. While uniform details may seem arcane to some, it is clear that the Legion took the issue of the creation of a special uniform very seriously, and rightly so. A uniform confers special status, a sense of belonging to an elite, and offers an incentive to bravery. Unfortunately, the distinctive uniforms that had characterized the French army, and especially the French army abroad, before 1914 had been shed in favor of less target-worthy colors during World War I. The metropolitan troops emerged from the conflict in their “blue horizon” uniforms, while the overseas detachments finished the conflict in khaki, which had become the operational uniform for the Legion in 1907. This was not to the liking of Legion “traditionalists,” especially as the “Commission des Uniformes” appointed in the aftermath of the war appeared intent upon recommending a single uniform for the entire army. The question was further complicated by the fact that troops in Syria and Morocco were required to use up odds and ends of surplus American stocks that remained in the warehouses at the end of the conflict.8 The Legion command was intent upon giving the Legion a uniform which at once distinguished it from the common regimental herd, while at the same time distancing the legionnaire from “all the human contingencies which surround him.”9

  The history of Legion fashion is an intricate and sometimes hotly debated one, in part because uniform regulations changed with some frequency, and perhaps were not always enforced in remote areas. Indeed, the historian may be on shaky ground in talking of a Legion uniform at all— English journalist G. Ward-Price, who visited the Legion in Morocco in 1933, declared them to be “the untidiest soldiers I had ever seen. The stubby beards on the chins of most of the men were inevitable in a country where water was so scarce, but it was astonishing to find troops, that had only left their barracks six weeks before, in such ragged and nondescript clothes.” Many of them wore sandals, and he even saw a man “on campaign in a pair of under-pants.”10 Martin also confessed that legionnaires in the field in Morocco were liable to kit themselves out in the native markets—“We had exactly the appearance, beneath our unusual clothes, of a band of partisans,” he wrote. “The only part of our uniform left to us was the kepi.”11

  If on campaign the legionnaire sought to express his persona
lity in a clochard-like idiom, in garrison he looked to make a more elegant sartorial statement. In fact, it was the reverse side of the same phenomenon: “One always flatters legionnaires by telling them that they are chaps different from the others,” Martin wrote.12 But the task was not as easy as all that. While before the war most of the Armée d'Afrique dressed as if going to a costume ball, the Legion was confined to the rather drab, certainly very common uniforms of the metropolitan army, of which it was a part. The kepi and the epaulets disappeared in 1915, the supply services could not furnish the blue waistbands, and in 1927, Rollet complained that legionnaires did not even have their own buttons emblazoned with the grenade with seven flames. Therefore, as late as 1923 there was nothing to distinguish a legionnaire from any other soldier in the French army except his stripes and the regimental number on his collar tips, which were on a green background.13

  The campaign to gain a distinctive uniform for the Legion focused upon the kepi. In 1850, the Legion and the Bataillons d'Afrique had been issued kepis, with white covers that included a “couvre-nuque” (“neck cloth”) for the summer. In 1852, the kepi became the common cap for the entire army. Pictures of legionnaires in pre-World War I North Africa show them dressed in white uniforms and white kepis. In 1907, the Legion was put in khaki campaign uniforms and the kepi was covered with a khaki cloth, which sunlight and constant washing bleached white. New legionnaires, eager to shed the status of bleus as quickly as possible, scrubbed their newly issued khaki covers to appear more like the anciens. However, during World War I, the kepi was replaced by the garrison cap.

  The rehabilitation of the kepi in the Legion began in 1922, when General Cottez requested its distribution. The following year, a stock of surplus khaki kepis was issued to legionnaires in Morocco, who quickly contrived to make them white to match the image of the prewar Legion. Thus, the “tradition” of the képi blanc was born. In March 1926, Rollet complained that he had written on four separate occasions to the war ministry in 1924 and 1925 to have the kepi replace the garrison cap and the pith helmet for the Legion, without results.14 His letters must have had some effect, however, for on June 18, 1926, the Legion became the only unit in the army allowed to wear the kepi. It was only a partial victory, for the regulation permitted the prewar red kepi, rather than the white one favored by legionnaires. By the centennial of the Legion in 1931, several of the Legion regiments had taken matters into their own hands and only those of the 1er and 4e étranger were red.15

  Two years later in Morocco, Martin recorded that a battle raged between legionnaires and the command over the white kepi, almost as fierce as the one fought between the Legion and Moroccans in the mountains. Upset apparently by the number of head wounds among legionnaires, the command considered distributing helmets, but abandoned this idea as a recipe for sunstroke in a Moroccan summer. Instead, they commanded the legionnaires to replace their kepis or dye them khaki. “That caused a real stink,” wrote Martin. “The veterans ‘had’ always ‘fought’ in white kepis, in the toughest campaigns, and we were ‘going up’ in khaki?” When the order came to dye their white kepis by any means, the legionnaires obeyed, while at the same time demonstrating a flair for creative insubordination by producing a rainbow of colors running from light beige through ocher to a “delicious pale mauve” in the machine-gun section. “This went on all summer!” Martin continued. “The legionnaires were still wearing white kepis in September, despite all the orders and counter-orders, observations and punishments.”16 Bennett Doty believed that the kepi in itself represented a victory over the solar topi, especially when it was worn “at the right angle, [which] accurately expresses the half-sardonic, rough insouciance of the Legion.”17 The color issue was finally resolved when the Legion paraded in white kepis down the Champs Elysées on July 14, 1939.18 “Many readers will probably be surprised to learn that the white kepi cover is very recent in the Legion, at least in a quasi-permanent status on the kepi of the legionnaire,” the Livre d'or recorded in its 1981 edition. “... The vision of the legionnaire wearing an immaculately clean white cover on his kepi dates from the last fifteen years.”19 While it was clearly older than that, only in quite recent times has the white kepi taken on the importance of a quasi-religious symbol, bestowed upon legionnaires near the end of their basic training in an impressive torchlight ceremony. When Adrian Liddell Hart enlisted in 1951, he was issued a battered, secondhand kepi with a torn white cover: “No matter,” he concluded philosophically. “We could now pass, at a distance, for legionnaires.”20

  Rollet and other “traditionalists” won the battle to have the Legion revive the kepi, resurrect the red and green epaulets “dites (so-called) de tradition” from November 1930,21 and reissue the blue waistband, which had in effect disappeared from the uniform, if not from the regulations, in time for the Legion centenary in 1931. A 1934 report recorded that, while these results had been beneficial for Legion morale, they “were often the result of initiatives of the corps leaders or unit commanders, acting generally on the margins of regulations.”22 And while Rollet believed that his efforts to secure a special uniform were greatly appreciated by the legionnaires, not everyone agreed: “This dress, so appreciated by the images d'Epinal [a line of patriotic prints] and color magazines, was much less so by those who must exhibit it,” wrote legionnaire Charles Favrel, who enlisted in 1938. In Algeria, the white kepi was reserved for the band, while the epaulets were too heavy for the shirts and sat badly on the shoulders. The puttees worn by all French soldiers, he reckoned, were a plot by military suppliers to sell off excess cloth, and he speculated that a fair portion of French POWs in 1940 owed their capture to unraveling puttees, so that “they couldn't run away fast enough.” The blue waistband—all two and a half yards of it—was a complete nuisance, especially in town when one had to make a rest stop. The legionnaire was required to close one end in a door and perform a pirouette before reappearing in public. When legionnaires in his group boarded ships to be transported to France in 1940, one of their first acts, Favrel claimed, was to jettison their waistbands overboard. “But this spontaneous gesture of emancipation proved to be useless,” Favrel complained, for “A stock of new waist bands caught up with us at the camp of Larzac!”

  Throughout the chaos of the fall of France and the organization of the Gaullist resistance, the blue waistbands followed the Legion like a bad debt, even into the heart of the Libyan desert, where they were ordered to put them over their British-issued short trousers. When, in 1943, legionnaires were given GI clothing, the Legion retained the waistband as a distinguishing mark. However, Favrel wrote that “this carnival travesty” was finally, though only temporarily, abandoned at the insistence of Allied commanders.23

  Rituals occupied a central place in Legion life. Blanc discovered that ceremonies began with the arrival of Colonel Nicolas at the barracks gate each morning on horseback to inspect the guard, far different from his metropolitan regiment, where the colonel arrived on his bicycle and dismounted at full tilt, leaving the guard to catch it as best he could. The daily training routines were capped by the weekly “revue des catégories”— officers, NCOs and legionnaires, decorations dangling from their chests, drawn up along the vote sacrée to hear announcements of promotions and decorations, welcome new officers, give good-conduct certificates to departing legionnaires, dispatch contingents to other garrisons, and finally to review the cases of the discipline section, which stood to the left of the formation, their blankets folded under their arms. The ceremony ended with the Legion band, whose ranks had swelled under Rollet to 180 members, in addition to a 100-strong orchestra and bands created for every other regiment, striking up the “Boudin.” “It was for the newly arrived a sort of public enthronement,” Blanc remembered. “The enthronement was pronounced before Tradition, before History, in front of one's Peers, a trilogy which manifested itself in the Legion monument, the salle d'honneur, and the Mess.”24 Ritualized, formalized, constantly repeated, Legion life was regulated by
ceremonies, from the weekly dinners held by officers of each rank, to the parades on November 11, to the celebration of Christmas and the exchange of New Year's wishes between officers and legionnaires.

  However, one ceremony came to occupy a central place in Legion “tradition”—that of Camerone. The institutionalization of Camerone as the preeminent celebration of the Legion occurred on April 30, 1931. For Rollet, the gigantic ceremonies that he organized at Sidi-bel-Abbès on that day were also meant to establish the formal, historical link between the “old” and the “new” Legion. The choice of April 30, rather than the Legion's birthday of March 9, was deliberate. The anniversary of the 1863 battle of Camerone in Mexico offered a far more dramatic symbol of regimental legitimization, a more potent behavioral role model and occasion for celebration, than did the signing into life of the Legion by King Louis-Philippe in 1831. In this, as in many of his innovations, Rollet played midwife to a “tradition” that had been emerging spontaneously in the Legion.

  Although the fight at Camerone in 1863 was a rather marginal event in the Mexican campaign, its importance in the legitimization of the Legion in the public conscience, and in the eyes of legionnaires, was immense. Coming upon the heels of the very credible Legion performances at Sebastopol in 1854-55 and Ischeriden in 1857, Camerone conferred upon the Legion the reputation of a troop capable of making the supreme sacrifice, the beginning of the legend of the heroic desperadoes.25 The first time that Camerone was actually celebrated appears to have been in 1906. Whether this was deliberate or the fortuitous result of a ministerial decision of February 16, 1906, to award a Légion d'honneur to the 1er étranger in a ceremony that eventually took place on April 28 of that year is unclear. But legionnaires certainly saw the connection—Joseph Ehrhart, who was present at Sidi-bel-Abbès in 1906, remembered the decoration of the regimental banner as a very emotional occasion that recalled Camerone on “28 April, 1866,”26 while in Tonkin a detachment of the 1er étranger likewise marked the event with a review that recalled Camerone. Aristide Merolli, who joined the Legion in 1911, gives accounts of Cameron celebrated in 1913 and 1914,27 with the reading of the account of the battle, followed by games and an alcoholic binge. However, if Camerone had been celebrated in the RMLE in World War I, one would expect it to have been commented upon by the Legion's numerous diarists and letter writers. But these “volunteers for the duration” appear to have been completely ignorant of Camerone.