French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The second reason why Rollet and others sought out men unable to cope with the burdens of their existence was that this formed an essential precondition for the myth of redemption through Legion service. Unless a legionnaire's past concealed some dark secret, unless he had failed to make a success of his previous life, then the Legion's argument that it served a rehabilitative function lost its credibility.56 But, as has been seen in the pre-1914 complaints by Captain Clément-Grandcourt, Raoul Béric and even by Flutsch, the counterargument was that the atmosphere of the corps was such that it took a man of great character indeed to remain on a sound moral footing in the Legion. The Legion actually encouraged a man to adopt or continue a pattern of dysfunctional behavior—drinking, fighting, and even to a point desertion—because such behavior was tolerated and even rewarded there.

  Of course, a large place remained for the romanticism of the Legion, encouraged by the anonymat—Rollet was fond of asking legionnaires in the ranks what they had done in civilian life, and in one version of a celebrated story that is alleged to have taken place in Syria between 1921 and 1925 elicited the reply from a Russian, “J'étais colonel, mon colonel” Cooper noted that this much-publicized incident became a standing joke among legionnaires, so that all Russians were said to be ex-colonels in the Czarist army and Belgians ex-sergeant-majors who had departed with the company funds, to the point that Belgians were often addressed as “sergeant-major.”57 In fact, Rollet formalized the anonymat further with a 1931 directive that required the company officer to ask the legionnaire, in the event of inquiries, if he were willing for his presence to be divulged, a practice subsequently undermined by agreements with the Germans in 1940, the Soviet Union in 1945 and the Americans and British in 1948 that allowed for the recovery of deserters.58

  Prince Aage repeated the ancient belief that “a woman is behind each legionnaire,” and decried the establishment of the official bordellos because they “deprive the legionnaire of his ‘romantic’ aspect”: “One can say that, without women, there would be no Legion [italics in original].... Woman is part even of the character of the Legion, and, without her, the legionnaire would not be what he is; an overgrown child, sensitive and complicated.” He reproduced the unlikely but arresting story of an older legionnaire and a young lieutenant both killed in action who were discovered to have carried the picture of the same woman, proving that, unknown to each of them, they were father and son.59 This myth was amusingly satirized by Laurel and Hardy in Beau Hunks, when all legionnaires in the company, and even the rebel Arab chief, were found to carry the picture of the same woman. Carol concluded that although legionnaires constantly talked of women, they were only an abstraction: “The real woman does not exist. The Foreign Legion is a unit without women. For starters it is too virile for them... . Outside the barracks, it is physical sexuality, mechanical, in pleasure spots. Inside, the woman remains in the idealized imagination.”60

  The problem began when the desire to preserve the romantic myths began to stand in the way of unit efficiency. When, as before 1914, complaints began to be heard about the bad characters who were enlisting in the Legion and some officers began to demand stricter recruitment controls, Georges Manue objected that whatever the Legion gained in quality, it would forfeit in mystery: “It is just that possibility to leave incognito that seduces the vanquished of life who are little troubled by showing it,” he wrote. “Besides, it is to the mystery of his origins that the legionnaire owes much of his character.”61 Never mind that the upper-class romantics, the Beau Gestes, were virtually nonexistent: “I was five years in command of several different battalions, but I don't think I ever met more than twenty men that one could definitely identify as having come from the better classes of society,” the British writer Ward-Price was told by a Legion officer.62 Enough upper-class exiles had existed, or were believed to exist, to lend credence to the myth. But more to the point, by enlisting, every legionnaire participated to the full in the Legion's myths, wrapped himself in a cloak of mystery. “The legionnaires are mythomaniacs, inventors of fables which they are the first to believe in,” wrote Manue.63

  The fact that in the Legion, where according to Pechkoff, “each man lives with his thoughts . . . each individual has his philosophy,”64 legionnaires developed identifiable traits of a collective character appears confusing only if one assumes that, in the opinions and desires of its spokesmen, the Legion was truly a heterogeneous force. But the Legion spokesmen in the interwar years insisted that it had a collective character: “A touch of madness, chronic cafard, pride in the corps recreates, in these individuals who have sometimes lost it, a particular sense of honor, ticklish in the extreme, a contagion of heroism born of this esprit de corps” wrote Manue. “That is what gives the legionnaire a character which has no equal in any corps in the world.”65 Men with troubled pasts must be strictly disciplined or kept busy or, according to Prince Aage, “he risks to fall into the most tenacious and the most infernal regions of the cafard” In any case, “at the moment of death, all legionnaires, whomever they are, vomit and blaspheme their disgust for life and for men.”66

  Georges Manue, who had served in the Legion in the early 1920s when by common agreement it had been altered beyond recognition by the war and the postwar influx of poorly assimilated recruits, was somewhat ironically tasked with writing a piece of the “Psychologie du Légionnaire” for the 1958 edition of the Livre d'or. However, the irony ceases when one realizes that defining a Legion character was largely a work of reconstitution not description, which allowed Manue to characterize legionnaires as

  Ardent characters, tempted by misfortune, weak souls crushed by liberty, searching for a framework for their dreams, aristocrats or paupers, leveled by the uniform, all legionnaires are united by the same pride, the same secret aspirations, the same desires, the same needs; Pushed by the same male forces, physical and moral, they are united outside of ordinary conventions upon the plan of the great human laws.

  Manue argued that this “immutable” Legion character had been developed during the “heroic period” before 1914, when “the units of the Legion were composed for years of the same legionnaires, and they were commanded by the same leaders ... creating a typical mentality.” “At this time,” he believed, “there existed a psychology of the legionnaire,” which, despite changing recruitment patterns, had been passed onto the succeeding generations through tradition.67

  Myth and legend had an important role to play in the creation of this collective mentality, for it obliged legionnaires to conform to the myths even if their pasts had nothing romantic about them. It gave them an image to live up to. Adrian Liddell Hart, the son of the well-known British military historian and critic, insisted that the tradition of asylum and anonymity “has inspired a legend, a moral climate affecting those who are not refugees in the legal sense.” He confessed that he had been completely seduced by the romance of Legion mythology before enlistment,

  the legend of anonymous characters and curious situations, the sense of order and freedom. . . . I wanted to be on the frontier and in the center; to be accepted and yet to remain an exception. “The guest of life” ...

  The legends had a leveling effect upon the character of the unit—even its discipline and fighting potential were linked to its romantic image— discipline in the Legion “depends in the last analysis on the challenge, the unexpected,” he believed. The enlistment, a high individualized act, was the assumption of an obligation to participate in the legend of the Legion:

  The legionnaire fights for himself—and he has identified himself with the Legion.... The Legion is not the protagonist of a cause. He is not essentially a soldier performing a duty. He is an individual true to himself.68

  This definition of Legion character and the reaffirmation of unit loyalty were also made necessary by the attention focused upon the Legion by the cinema and by popular fiction in the interwar years. The strengthening of Legion romantic myths and the reaffirmation of “tradition” were
a reply to the strong countermyth formulated by the Germans before 1914, one that portrayed the Legion as a band of criminal outcasts kept in line by brutal officers and NCOs. Rollet became concerned when this vilification of the Legion spread to other countries in the interwar years. Even in memoirs written by renegade legionnaires masquerading as accurate accounts of Legion service that carried stirring titles like Hell Hounds of France, From the Abyss to the Foreign Legion, Twixt Hell and Allah or Death March in the Desert, the Legion was stigmatized as a trap for unsuspecting or romantically naïve foreigners who had been mugged by the Legion myth, a tradition that continues in Legion memoir literature in our own day.69

  The factors that drew so much popular attention to the Legion were not unique to the interwar years. Rather, they emerged from the heightened awareness and the broader dissemination of conflicting images of the Legion that had been apparent since at least the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, it was the conflicting nature of those images that in many ways helped to make the Legion attractive to a larger public. In strictly literary terms, legionnaires provided many of the qualities of the heroes found in dime Western novels and low-budget films. Their mysterious origins and life of adventure made them glamorous. The fact that they were Europeans fighting in bleak foreign lands bestowed upon them the mantle of civilization conquering barbarism. Yet they were sufficiently primitive themselves to find fulfillment, even pleasure, in confronting danger, and to retain the basic survival skills that allowed them to triumph over their savage enemies. Furthermore, the Legion's reputation for brutality allowed for the literary creation of suitable villains, unsavory characters like Sergeant Lejaune in Beau Geste or Deucalion, a psychotic ex-officer in Andre Armandy's Le renégat who escapes into the Legion to avoid a death sentence. These were Europeans who had completely surrendered to the savagery of their environment, who added tension to the plot and whose inevitable death in the last chapter represented the triumph of civilization and moral values.

  Furthermore, as the underlying theme for many of the novels and films, as for the Legion itself, was often that of sacrifice and redemption, the desert settings provided an appropriate moral geography for a story of human salvation set within the larger one of expanding European civilization and justice. Survival in the teeth of calamity was the beginning of self-respect, the recovery of identity, a reward for courage and virtue.70 To rephrase it into the contemporary American idiom, “No pain, no gain.” The institution of the Legion was sanctified by the sacrifice of legionnaires, legitimized because it was subordinated to a human ideal, although Adrian Liddell Hart believed the impulse to enlist as a requirement for the expiation of some sin was more a masochistic than a moral one. The infectious attraction of the Legion myth depended upon its conflicting images—the Legion held out the promise that one could always break with the past and begin anew, while the suffering and danger required for this process of expiation reaffirmed the conviction that one was correct not to have done so.71

  But one could always do so vicariously. The political and artistic conditions of the interwar years particularly favored the dissemination of these conflicting images of the Legion. The growing pacifism of the interwar years combined with protests raised in France over the Rif War to focus suspicion on the Legion as an unsavory corps in which unsuspecting recruits might come to great harm. On the other hand, in the atmosphere of economic dislocation and political confusion of the interwar years, the pre-1914 era evoked great nostalgia. The prewar world, re-created through the healing haze of memory, seemed to have been a well-ordered place where issues were simple and where everyone knew his proper place in the social order. As British film historian Jeffrey Richards has noted, the cinema of imperialism that flourished in this period in Britain and America, as well as in France, offered up prewar settings dominated by ritual and a hierarchical system. The heroes prevailed over treacherous and ungrateful natives through discipline and loyalty, reassuring those who might otherwise have begun to have doubts on that score after World War I of the superior attributes of Western culture and of the obligations imposed by the “white man's burden.”72 Furthermore, this basic message was inserted into stories with exotic settings and romantic themes that dealt with destiny, fate, loves that died at dawn, and the unfairness of life all very popular to interwar audiences.73 Europeans wanted an escape from routine, from the life-style of the crowded industrial cities. They craved simple plots in which virtue, honesty and simplicity were rewarded. Even intellectuals saw this sort of film as a palliative for jaded and overly sophisticated tastes.74

  Quite naturally, the Legion would be assigned a prominent place in this genre, to Rollet's deep regret. A. R. Cooper recorded that Rollet was angered by Beau Geste because he believed the Legion misrepresented in the novel.75 Some films on the Legion, especially those out of Hollywood, were given venomous reviews by the Legion. Morocco, a 1930 production with Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret singer and Gary Cooper as Legionnaire Brown, was denounced by the Légion étrangère, the official magazine of the Legion, as yet another production of the “American nest, from which we rarely receive any good,” which was an obvious attempt to discredit the Legion with “the habitual calumny and a complete incomprehension of the subject.”76 The production of Le grand jeu in 1934, which was enormously successful in France and more influential there than was Beau Geste, caused the Legion, through the Amis de la Légion, to intervene with the war minister, World War I hero Marshal Pétain, to have it censured. The president of the Amis de la Légion, American art dealer Philip Ortiz, objected to the depiction of legionnaires in the film as drunken, quarrelsome and generally indifferent to their military duties. He questioned the low moral tone of a story that essentially turned upon a conspiracy between a legionnaire and the wife of a cafe owner to murder her drunken husband. “One makes us live with the Legion in a vitiated, depressing, repugnant atmosphere,” Ortiz complained. “At no time do they come to their senses. Nothing healthy, nothing invigorating. No breath of fresh air in this film [italics in original], nothing is presented as a sincere and authentic reflection of the true life of the legionnaire.”77

  The critical success of Le grand jeu did not cause the Legion to retreat from what it believed to be the battle for its reputation. Protests were raised in April 1932 by Paul Rockwell over the publication of Ernst Loehndorf's Hell in the Foreign Legion as well as the favorable reviews accorded to Bennett Doty's Legion of the Damned, whose “sincerity and moral value of the book” were called into question.78 In May 1934, the possibility of taking the BBC to court for “oral defamation” was discussed.79 The 1926 production of Beau Geste was censured in France, while the celebrated 1939 version with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston was forbidden altogether until 1977. Condemned with Ronald Colman was also banned because, like Beau Geste, it contained a scene of a Legion mutiny.80 In 1936, the Légion étrangère complained bitterly about Under Two Flags, a film freely adapted from the Ouida classic, in which a former guards officer who enlists in the Legion is sent on a suicide mission by a Legion major after the major discovers that his mistress is in love with the legionnaire. “We have tried to make Hollywood understand what the Legion is,” it editorialized in November 1936.

  We have sent instructors, French observers and documentalists over there, but this has served and will serve for nothing, for the producers have their own ideas on this brilliant phalange and they want to present it to their public as they imagine it and as it is not.81

  Defenders of the Legion, like Ortiz, in the hope of drumming up official support, claimed that unflattering films and novels about the Legion were in reality attacks upon France by Gallophobic foreigners. Ortiz begged the French government to subsidize a film on the Legion that would present a more favorable image.82 The ministry replied on October 27,1932, that “it seems preferable, as far as possible, to maintain a silence over the Foreign Legion.”83 A 1934 report agreed that the attacks against the Legion were “one of the manifestati
ons of the propaganda against France abroad,” and called for a government-sponsored film.84 In 1937, the war ministry and the governor-general of Algeria subsidized the production costs of Légions d'honneurs, a film in which a legionnaire, an ex-officer, falls in love with his captain's wife, but chooses to seek a glorious death, for which he is awarded a Legion of Honor rather than dishonor her.

  While the Legion was upset with many, perhaps most, of these films, in their essential aspects they were not at cross-purposes with the basic image that Rollet, Aage, Maire, Manue and Jean des Vallières, author of Les hommes sans noms, sought to project of the Legion. For instance, Beau Geste, which angered Rollet, supported several Legion myths. The story of three brothers who flee into the Legion, taking the blame for something they did not do, to protect the honor of their family bolstered the notion that behind every legionnaire lay a story of more than ordinary interest, suggested an upper-class presence in the ranks and delivered on the promise of redemption that Legion service was meant to bestow.