French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The celebration of Camerone was revived in the 1920s as part of the attempt to link the “New Legion” with the old one. On April 30, 1931, numerous dignitaries, including Louis II of Monaco, Marshal Louis Franchet d'Esperey, generals, foreign officers and twenty-seven delegations of anciens gathered at Sidi-bel-Abbès in the presence of legionnaires of all units to watch a parade led by sappers sporting beards, wearing leather aprons and carrying hatchets. The use of the sappers to “open the route” in Legion parades was another “tradition” that had disappeared with the Second Empire in 1870 and was reinvented by Rollet to recall the sappers created by Bernelle in Spain and the beards popular in the old Legion but no longer worn after 1918. This opened a ceremony that included the recitation of an account of the battle and the appearance of the wooden hand of Captain Danjou, paraded in a glass reliquary, as the Legion band played what was now established as the official version of the Legion march, “Le Boudin.” However, the legionnaires in this period do not appear to have marched with the slow elongated step that is such a distinctive feature of their march today. Newsreels show a normal, even a rapid pace, which is to a degree confirmed by Bennett Doty, who spoke of marching off to Syria in 1925 accompanied by the Legion band playing “its best pieces, its gayest, most rhythmic airs, drawing us along at the Legion's rapid marching step ...”28 The slow Legion march appears to be a “tradition” that dates from the post-World War II era, when it was first used for the victory parade down the Champs Elysées of June 18, 1945.29

  The high point of the 1931 celebration came with the unveiling of the Legion monument—a large metal globe upon which Camerone is marked by a gold star, and all countries in which the Legion has campaigned highlighted in gold, sitting on a square marble base, at the four corners of which stand four statues of legionnaires representing the conquest of Algeria and the campaigns of the Second Empire, Tonkin and the RMLE. The figures were modeled upon paintings of legionnaires done by Maurice Mahut, an artist whose drawings and illustrations of legionnaires before 1914, in particular those included in d'Esparbès's Les mystères de la Legion étrangère in 1911, had contributed to the myth of legionnaires as men with a mysterious past.30 This monument, as well as references to Camerone in the Legion salle d'honneur, offered a visible link between the Legion and its past. It became the focus of regimental ritual, a place of pilgrimage surrounded by liturgical convention—the barracks square in which it stood was christened the vote sacrée or “sacred way,” and so transformed into a sort of sanctuary violated only during elaborate regimented ceremonies. “Its purpose is not to embellish a quarter,” Major Maire said of this monument. “It is destined to be the symbol of the troop which gives asylum to those who need a refuge.”31 This was the official consecration of a heretofore informal and spontaneous collection of sagas and myths, those of the “unknown heroes,” a handful of képis blancs whom romantic misfortune had driven into the last refuge of the Legion, and who bore the standard of European civilization to those parts of the globe ravaged by heat, disease and bloodthirsty savages. This image was too laden with drama and romance for Hollywood to ignore.

  Like all faiths, the Legion required a holy city. Sidi-bel-Abbès, a town Rollet had wanted to abandon altogether in 1920, now became “the town the Legion built,” “la Maison-Mère, centre vital de la Legion”32 a sort of Vatican through which all new legionnaires must pass to receive the catechism, and to which veterans return for spiritual renewal. North Africa became the Legion's “melting pot,” the environment whose harshness forged regimental character, the center of its moral geography. Camerone was its holiest feast day, the promise of death without resurrection perhaps, but not without immortality. Even today, Legion recruits are aligned beneath Jean-Adolphe Beaucé's painting of Camerone and given a recitation of the battle before they proceed to sign their enlistment papers. So sacred has the scriptural version of this event become that when it was discovered only a few years ago by an Austrian archivist in the Vienna archives that the hand of Captain Danjou had not been found among the bodies by the relief as described in the Livre d'or,33 but in fact had been purchased two years later by Austrian troops from a farmer who lived almost one hundred miles from the site of the battle, the new information was believed by some Legion officers to be subversive enough to warrant suppression.34

  In the process of establishing Camerone as the central event in the Legion calendar, Rollet demonstrated his command of Legion psychology. Camerone established the cult of sacrifice, of heroic death in battle. And while evoking heroic moments in the history of the regiment is hardly unique to the Legion, the power of its message is probably unequaled. Camerone and the hand of Danjou exercised a powerful effect in a Legion recruited among the disoriented, men who verbalized little and responded best to visual symbols. It encouraged the view, quite literally, that the only good legionnaire was a dead legionnaire. “Nous saurons bien tous périr suivant la tradition” (We will all know how to die following tradition), the final line of the “Boudin” declares. French psychologist Roger Cabrol actually encountered legionnaires near the end of their careers who had a psychological crisis because they felt they had let down the institution by surviving to retirement, “legionnaires who had not succeeded in proving that they were heroes like their forbearers,” he wrote. “Death and Legion, like all the recitations and the social stereotype of the Legion. The gift of the body is implied in the enlistment.”35 These are perhaps extreme examples. A. R. Cooper bailed out after twelve years precisely because he believed, or claimed to believe, that it was Legion policy not to allow men to survive until retirement. Although this was patent nonsense, having survived the Dardanelles and some of the toughest fighting of the Rif War, as well as what he describes as the transparent attempt by one of his officers to send him on suicide missions, he may perhaps be forgiven for taking early retirement.

  The themes of death and sacrifice interlace Legion ritual, assurance that the Legion always stood by its own, never abandoned them, even in extremis. In Les hommes sans nom (The Men Without Names) Colonel de Joyeuse explains that Legion graves are always meticulously kept in the bled, and that no one is ever abandoned, even if extra lives are expended to retrieve the corpse.36 As has been seen, however, the “Old Legion” made it a fairly standard practice to leave behind those unable to keep up— indeed, Legion efficiency had been based in part on their relentless march forward and refusal to be slowed by stragglers. To a large extent this had been forced upon them by circumstances, which included the lack of medical support, the remoteness of the battlefields and the fact that they were often closely pressed by the enemy, as during the retreat from the Gates of China in 1885. And while the Legion, like other corps, certainly honored their war dead, what might be described as the cult of the elaborate Legion funeral was a post-World War I invention. Flutsch was told that in Tonkin, legionnaires who could not keep up were actually shot by their own comrades, which was considered more humane than disarming and abandoning them to the not too tender mercies of the locals, which was also a common practice. During the Madagascar campaign, for instance, Legion dead were often pitched unceremoniously into ravines, perhaps rightly so in circumstances that bordered upon physical and moral collapse.37 A. R. Cooper also claimed that bodies were left behind during the Rif campaign because it was all they could do to carry the wounded.38 One of the greatest benefits for the Legion of Rollet's emphasis upon the elaborate celebration of sacrifice and death as part of regiment ritual was that it provided a value system and a means of socialization for men who were most susceptible to this sort of mythmaking.

  Not everyone proved susceptible to the myth, however. Charles Favrel, who experienced his first Camerone in 1938, recorded that while selection to recite the account of the battle was considered a great honor, and one that usually fell to a Teutonic sergeant who read it in a high unintelligible voice, “as his audience already does not understand correct French, the incident has little importance.” What legionnaires retained of
Camerone was the memory of the formidable drinking that went on afterwards: “Camerone? they say shaking their head, Oh, la, la! What a drunk!”39 The Englishman Henry Ainley, who enlisted during the Indochinese War of 1946–54, believed that the primary purpose of Camerone was to allow legionnaires to let off steam and settle scores. In any case, unpopular NCOs stayed well away from the postparade celebrations.40

  There is other evidence that, despite the ritualistic emphasis upon Camerone and the message that legionnaires must be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, the “tradition” was hedged in practice. As will be seen, in January 1943 a unit of the 3e étranger was overrun in Tunisia, in the process, almost inconceivably given the strength of “tradition,” abandoning to the enemy one of the Legion's most precious relics. And in Indochina, legionnaires passed up at least two occasions to faire Camerone. The first came in October 1950, when the BEP (Bataillon étranger parachutiste) and a battalion of the 3e étranger were cornered during the retreat from Cao Bang on Route Coloniale 4. According to Hungarian legionnaire Janos Kemencei, the idea of resistance to the death was discussed and then rejected because the legionnaires determined that they lacked the munitions and fortifications to make a proper job of a glorious last stand.41 The second time came at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where several thousand legionnaires surrendered only days after they had crowded around the radios in their fetid, shell-torn bunkers to hear the April 30 broadcast that reminded them that on that day in 1863, “Life rather than courage abandoned these French soldiers.”42

  The point is neither that the legionnaires had lacked courage nor that they were wrong to surrender, although in retrospect those who gave themselves up to the Viet Minh would have lost little in fighting to the death, as Viet Minh prison camps were more like Auschwitz than Colditz. Rather, legionnaires were able to draw the distinction between the myth of Camerone and its practical application on the battlefield. They also placed limits upon their willingness to sacrifice themselves. Kemencei reasoned that he was quite prepared to faire Camerone “to preserve the honor of the Legion.” But all bets were off when the leadership, as so often in Indochina, “are incompetents, unworthy to command the men who have the misfortune to serve under their orders.... A decimated army is not worth much, and battles are won with the living.”43

  The 1931 celebration marked the culmination of Rollet's campaign to unite the Legion around a panoply of symbols and “traditions.” It was also a bid by the Legion to define itself as France's premier regiment, justified in this view by its status as the French army's only remaining completely professional corps. In this way, Rollet cleverly sought to secure its future against possible ingratitude, xenophobia, or political pressure, either foreign or domestic. Rollet commissioned the well-known military scholar and collector Jean Brunon to compile a history of the Legion in time for the centenary. Although one of its later editors has written that the “livre d'or de la Légion étrangère” “has no pretensions other than to conserve the souvenir of the great moments of this institution,”44 it was more than that. The Livre d'or was both a hagiography destined, like Camerone, to awe and inspire, and an attempt to reestablish the “Old Legion” as a model for the new one, as did artists commissioned by the Legion like Pierre Benigni (1878–1956), a student of the celebrated military painter of the early Third Republic Edouard Detaille, who collaborated with Jean Brunon in the publication of the Livre d'or. Benigni's painting of the Battle of Ischeriden in 1857, which shows legionnaires attacking in képis blancs, was an obvious attempt to boost the cause of the white kepi for the Legion, as there is no certainty that the Legion was wearing white covers on their kepis at the time.45

  That Rollet commissioned a history written in a heroic mode is hardly surprising. His purpose was both to inspire and to create an image of the Legion as a corps of adventurers. However, Rollet and others conscientiously sought to define a Legion mentality. Or rather redefine it, as by common consent it had vanished in World War I. One of the most powerful arguments in favor of enhancing traditions was to bind together a corps “formed by an amalgamation coming from all the peoples of the earth; that this group of men profoundly different in race, origin, trade, religion, language and sentiments forms there a block whose elements are indissoluble.”46 Adrian Liddell Hart agreed that the Legion kameradschaft “arose from our very differences for, in a curious way, these differences of race and age, social background and motive, cancelled each other out.”47

  Yet how heterogeneous was the Legion? It was certainly multinational, but beneath a babble of different languages the men of the “Old Legion” had much in common, similar social origins, an inability to find satisfaction in civilian life and a sense of being in the professional military trade perhaps foremost among them. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Legion had been its unwillingness or inability to make a niche for men whose backgrounds or motives differed from those mentioned above—patriotic Alsatians before 1914, the “temporary” volunteers of 1914–15, the influx of “transplanted,” sober, largely young men in the immediate postwar years. And, as will be seen, an increase in Eastern European Jews and eventually Spanish Republicans in the ranks as World War II approached also caused problems of indigestion.

  As the reaction to the volunteers of 1914 and those after 1918 had demonstrated, the Legion had a strong sense of its own personality, and a strong desire to preserve it in the face of an invasion of men who did not require the asylum the Legion offered, whose apprenticeship in the military trade was only a temporary and reluctant one, for whom Legio Patria Nostra (“The Legion Is Our Fatherland,” another invented epigram of the interwar years) was little more than a quaint and empty slogan. Jean Brunon believed that although the character of the Legion had altered through its history, “its base rests immutable: The Legion remains therefore really what it has always been.”48 Basically, this was correct. And if it is so, it is largely because Rollet helped to define and confirm the outlook of a corps prepared to make few concessions to the idealistic, the political, the patriotic, the middle-class—in other words, those whose ideals slowed their assimilation, discouraged them from defining life in purely Legion terms, to “think Legion.” Henry Ainley was of the opinion that it was “An admirable organization for the desperate—but not at all the place for those who have a certain lust for life and liberty.”49 “The day the legionnaire lost the sentiment of living on the margins of society,” wrote Prince Aage, a member of the Danish royal family and descendant of Louis-Philippe who joined the Legion as an officer soon after World War I, “he lost his strength and his human worth.”50 These were precisely Cabrol's conclusions in his 1971 study of legionnaires: “One would think that the multiplicity of nations represented would cause seismic problems,” he wrote. “This is not so. There is a basic personality.... In fact, one legionnaire resembles another, and that is a guarantee of success.” Those who experienced problems in civilian life adapted especially well to the Legion “microculture because it is easy to understand and it poses no problems of socio-economic confrontation. Life is programmed, pedigreed, rhythmic.”51 In other words, what the Legion preferred was men who were dysfunctional, or at the very least unsatisfied, in traditional civilian or even traditional military society. Those in trouble with the law, so long as they were not hardened criminals, also made loyal recruits because they had no viable alternative to life in the Legion.

  Therefore, the Legion and its propagandists spent much time in the interwar years defining the Legion character, or rather Legion characters. The Legion, in Rollet's view, was a sanctuary for life's tragic figures, men cast into its ranks by forces beyond their control, who then depended upon the Legion for direction and psychological well-being. It was these men who most needed “tradition”: “The legionnaires need to feel protected by one hundred years of glory against the disdain and the indifference of the crowd,” wrote Manue.52 It is also they who needed the larger-than-life leaders, a clutch of great figures like Rollet, Maire, de Tscharner, de Cort
a, Nicolas and Aage, who served in a way as founding fathers and as the creators and custodians of tradition, dominating personalities who established themselves in Legion lore in the interwar years. For this reason, the Legion novels and sympathetic memoirs of the interwar years are peopled with stock characters—the Russian aristocrat, the Belgian sergeant-major who fled into the Legion after stealing the regimental funds, the half-mad legionnaire who tattoos obscenities on his hand to give his superiors a full frontal insult with each salute, the hopelessly alcoholic German batman who dresses up in the colonel's uniform and terrorizes subalterns, the sergeant with a dark secret who one day commits suicide and so on, men whose life is given purpose and direction by the Legion, who in heroic death actually redeem their wasted lives. Charles Favrel claimed that the legend of the Legion as a haven for criminals was so prevalent in the interwar years that prospective recruits sometimes claimed to have committed a crime because they believed this was the only way they would be accepted.53

  This is not to say that Rollet invented these characters, or that they did not exist. On the contrary, one of the primary qualities of myth is that it has a foundation in reality. These were the men who peopled the Legion before 1914, and whom Rollet wished to entice back into the Legion. These were his ideal legionnaires for at least two reasons. The first was that, if handled properly by officers who knew what they were about, the disoriented were easy to lead, as Ernst Junger had observed in 1913, “no one allows himself to submit more easily than he who does not know what he wants.”54 The last thing that Legion officers wanted to deal with was a man who asked questions, who actually thought about life in ways that might cause him to place limits upon his loyalty to the Legion. This was why so many officers sent to the Legion on TOE after 1918 found it so difficult to adapt there, and has given rise to observations by French line officers that service as a Legion officer is really very easy, because they do not have to deal with “thinking” soldiers who want to know the reason behind an order.55