French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  This brings us to the Legion myth, the justification of its existence as an enterprise of social redemption and rehabilitation. Evidence for the validity of this view is strong. Legion service was hard, Rollet was fond of pointing out, but it was fair. That was precisely Flutsch's conclusion when he discovered that the Legion operated by a set of easily comprehensible rules that, if obeyed, made life in its ranks much less turbulent, more organized and more equitable than on the outside, an oasis of order in an often confused and unjust world. Legion service allowed Flutsch time to think out his situation, and gave him the self-assurance to return to face the consequences of his, albeit fairly minor, crime. Flutsch discovered the Legion to be a refuge, an almost monastic retreat, for men ill-equipped for life in a laissez-faire world. For twenty-two-year-old Joseph Ehrhart, refused reenlistment in the French army because of a poor service record and reduced to sleeping rough and scrounging a living in Paris train stations, the Legion offered a lifeline. The same could be said for numerous refugees, men uprooted by Europe's perpetual political turbulence, who discovered in the Legion a stepping-stone to a new life as French citizens or even a permanent stopping place. The fact that reenlistment rates were reasonably high served as evidence that Legion life was not all that unattractive.

  While attractive for public consumption, this myth had its limits. In the first place, the Legion's métier was combat, not to provide an outdoor counseling service for the troubled male population of Europe. Men who failed to adapt to its functions could not expect sympathetic treatment. That said, however, anyone prepared to cooperate with the system might easily discover a fairly comfortable niche in it. “No one in the Legion was ‘punching tickets’ [as in the U.S. Army] or phoning their congressman,” wrote William Brooks. “If you didn't make the grade then you got the shit kicked out of you. Of course, this also got misused.”14 But together with the men successfully redeemed through Legion service must be counted those for whom the Legion provided a very unsympathetic environment because of their politics or their religion. Nor must one neglect the unredeemable—drunken, lazy, and turbulent elements, jailbait or bums on the outside who discovered in the Legion a perfect support system. While the Legion can be assigned no blame for the attitudes of these men, by tolerating them, by allowing them to congregate around the depots where new recruits reported and even by making a virtue of some of their more extravagant behaviors like drunkenness, in the belief that it allowed them to let off steam or that it was a sign of aggressiveness, they were in effect permitted an influence upon the social atmosphere of the Legion out of proportion to their numbers.

  In this way, the Legion contributed to a situation that helped to undermine its own myth of salvation, for the pressure upon légionnaires to conform to a hard-drinking culture, with its inevitable result of a high rate of punishment and even of desertion, was immense. Legion life actually encouraged this sort of dysfunctional behavior. Critics even within the army could argue that the Legion lost as many men as it redeemed. Therefore, if the Legion did, in fact, offer salvation, it was to those whose characters and sense of priorities were already powerful enough to avoid the worst temptations that Legion life placed before them. The Legion provided the cover of the anonymat. Beyond that, the major concern was that the légionnaire be on line when required.

  Also, to many foreigners especially, the Legion could seem more tough than fair, because they were operating in a military and bureaucratic culture, and in a language, that they did not understand. During service this could translate into many incomprehensible decisions for foreigners, like that which caused Charles Hora's Korean batman to desert. Told that the Legion did not accept enlistments from “peoples of color,” but that Filipinos were acceptable, “Chang the Korean” enlisted as a Filipino. With his false name and nationality, he earned several decorations. However, when after the regulation three years he sought a rectification d'identité, he could produce no papers proving that he was “Chang the Korean.” Therefore, he was not allowed to wear his decorations, for French law forbade wearing decorations under a false identity. He found the explanation that in the Légion, “medals are not decorations of pride, but reflections of great memories” unacceptable, and subsequently deserted.15 More important were men who found it impossible to collect the pensions owed them after Legion service because they could produce no papers, which Communist and fascist bureaucracies refused to forward, or because they came from countries where bureaucracies were too inefficient, like Italy, or too primitive to match the impressive levels of paperwork required by the French administration. If justice is a question of perception, then it may be argued that, in the eyes of légionnaires like those pushed to desertion in 1910 over the unfair treatment of Private Weinrock, the Legion was always hard, but it was not always fair.

  Perhaps the greatest limiting factor of the myth of salvation was that the Legion succumbed to its own public relations campaign. It formed an official stereotype of its légionnaires as men with mysterious and troubled pasts who required the firm guiding hand of Legion discipline, with a touch of tolerance and even indulgence. It was not that this attitude was inhumane. But it created an image of the individual légionnaire that hovered between arrested adolescence and advanced schizophrenia. It was a comfortable myth, because it allowed officers to form an image of themselves as a priesthood ministering to a flock of social and psychological misfits in need of firm guidance. But it prepared them poorly to deal with légionnaires who did not fit into this mold, especially those who arrived in both world wars. Too often these men were treated with suspicion and were insulted, and quickly became disgusted with their decision to serve France. All in all, the myth of salvation was one more element in sealing off the world of the Legion from reality, increasing the monastic quality of its life-style and outlook, deepening its sense of estrangement from la régulière and even from France.

  All of which raises a final question—how beneficial has the Legion been for France? In a way, this is a superfluous question, for the existence of the Legion is itself a reflection of French attitudes toward foreigners. It testifies to the view that France must always pay some price for the political turbulence of Europe in the form of refugees, because the attractions of her universal culture at the center of which stands Paris, her democratic institutions and her traditions of asylum have made her an obvious destination for the uprooted. An immigrant country like the United States has been forced to make a virtue of necessity by taking pride in its heterogeneous culture. France, on the other hand, like most ancient nations with a well-defined history, adopted the attitude that the arrival of these waves of outsiders posed a threat to her cultural and linguistic integrity. What was more, foreigners might threaten her political stability, either because of the ideas they imported and their attachment to revolutionary groups, or because they were a potential source of sedition. For these reasons, it seemed logical to round up as many of these men as possible and get them out of the country. Those who were serious about acquiring French nationality could earn it by serving in the hard school of the colonies.

  When measured by these standards, in the Legion the French have gotten what they wanted, and probably more. For together with ridding France of some of her foreigners, the Legion has policed her colonies and fought her wars, while at the same time earning fame as a crack unit with an international reputation for military efficiency. In this way the Legion has occupied a vital place in French defense, for it has become a cliché of Legion apologists that every dead légionnaire has spared the life of a Frenchman.

  This is a role that continues today. The 1er étranger at Aubagne, a suburb of Marseille, serves as the Legion's main induction and administrative center. Recruits are trained by the 4e étranger at Castelnaudary in southern France, and then distributed to one of the Legion's other units— the 1er REC in Orange, the 2e REP in Corsica, the 2e étranger in Nîmes, the 3e étranger, which trains in jungle warfare in French Guiana, or the 5e étranger, the old Indochina
regiment, which now operates largely as a labor battalion on the Mururoa atoll in the Pacific where the French carry out their nuclear testing. The 13e DBLE, still proudly wearing its Gaullist Cross of Lorraine, provides the garrison for Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, while a small Legion detachment occupies the island of Mayotte in the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean. Recently, the 6e étranger has been resurrected as an engineer regiment.

  Far from appearing as a quaint anachronism, the future of the Legion appears bright now that it has become obvious that the Socialist government elected in 1982 has no intention of carrying out its electoral pledge to abolish the Legion. The progressive reduction of conscript service to nine months has actually increased the value of the Legion to the French military. The appeal of the Legion is buoyant enough to allow the Legion to accept, according to its calculations, only one in six volunteers and still maintain a strength of ten thousand. As in the past, most of the nations of Europe are represented in its ranks, with Germans and French predominating. The 1980s witnessed an unprecedented influx of English recruits, caused by a combination of the Falklands War and the appearance on British television of a program on the Legion narrated by Simon Murray. With these men, the Legion provides elements for France's force d'action rapide, designated to operate on Europe's central front. The easing of tensions in Europe may even increase the usefulness of a corps whose traditional role has been to fight outside of Europe. Legion units were dispatched to Lebanon in recent years. The Legion also plays a central role in France's strong presence in Africa. Quite apart from the 1978 intervention of the 2e REP in Zaire, the Legion frequently trains in the Central African Republic and provides elements to support French policy in Chad. At the time of this writing, Legion units are also serving with the multinational force in the Persian Gulf.

  Last, the Legion's reputation for tough efficiency continues to make it the unit of choice for many of the French army's best officers. At this level, the Legion practices a sort of no-nonsense professionalism: “The Legion had functional inspections,” wrote William Brooks of his experience in the 1970s. “Was the equipment clean, and did it work? The thought of eye wash (as in the U.S. Army) never entered anyone's mind.” Once, on a training exercise, his platoon leader pitched an inoperable machine gun into the brush and left it there.

  When we arrived back on base, he told the armorer to go get it. Jesus, can you see a lieutenant in the American armed forces doing that? He also told the armorer that if the gun refused to work next time he would kick his ass! God, I loved it! That was the kind of personal initiative taught in the Légion, but you were not privy to it until you earned it; i.e., NCO rank.16

  Yet the Legion ledger has a debit side. One of the complaints against it traditionally has been that it draws off quality cadres that could have been better utilized to improve the quality of la régulière. Therefore, the combat record achieved by the Legion has been accomplished to an extent at the expense of the rest of the army and of French military efficiency generally. The cutthroat reputation of the Legion has also brought France much unfavorable publicity, much of it uninformed or politically motivated certainly, but plausible. Its brutal reputation, and on occasion its excessive behavior, helped to give French colonialism a poor image abroad. And while the Legion played a central role in imperial conquest, it proved less effective in incorporating the men who came to serve France out of loyalty and patriotism in the two world wars.

  This helps to undermine the argument that every dead légionnaire represents a French life saved. Not only is it likely that France would have enticed more foreign volunteers into her ranks when national survival was really at stake in the two wars had she incorporated them into the regular army, but also she would have utilized more of them. For despite the heroic conduct of légionnaires in both 1915-18 and 1940, the fact remains that probably no more than a quarter to a third, possibly less, of Legion manpower was ever used on the critical front in those periods. Compare this, for instance, to the two-thirds of Legion manpower employed at any one time in Indochina between 1946 and 1954. In fact, the Legion served principally as a great colonial internment camp for foreigners in the two world wars.17 The conclusion toward which one is invariably led is that France did not really want to utilize these men because she suspected their loyalty, and preferred to fight her national wars without them. As for the colonial wars, the government was extremely reluctant to send Frenchmen to the colonies in any case. Without foreign and native volunteers, the French, like the British, would have had no empire. So the number of French lives economized by the Legion in its main role of imperial warfare can only be a matter of conjecture, especially as at times the Legion counted up to 40 percent Frenchmen in its ranks.

  A final drawback for France in its decision to collect foreigners into a unit that cultivated an aggressively mercenary mentality was that its loyalty was never fully assured. It is curious that the French government has tolerated the existence of a corps that has placed loyalty to the regiment higher on its standard of values than loyalty to France, and whose very motto, Legio Patria Nostra, is a declaration of circumscribed allegiance. Indeed, this has helped to make the Legion a magnet for officers and soldiers out of sympathy with many of the values of Republican France. Rollet must bear much of the blame—or the credit, depending on one's point of view—for this state of affairs, for by inventing and amplifying Legion traditions in the interwar years he intensified the separateness of the corps, its feelings of self-sufficiency, its belief that it existed only for itself and to glorify its own myths. He succeeded far too well, for the rebellion of important segments of the Legion in Algeria was due in part to the fact that the Legion had become a prisoner of its own myths, too attached to its moral geography and “ville sainte” to remember that its function was to carry out government policy, however distasteful. The Legion today is as much a “monastery of the unbelievers,” perhaps even more so, as in Flutsch's time.

  All these arguments, however, appear prosaic and unconvincing when placed beside the unique panache of the Legion and the colorful role it has played in the history of French imperialism and the French army. Besides, in the Legion France has gotten what it wants. The Légion, the saying goes, has become French by the blood it has shed. But it has also become French because it is tightly bound up with French prejudices and with French vanity. When France applauds the Legion loudly on Bastille Day, the enthusiasm is self-congratulatory. France believes that she has been endowed with a special gift, even a genius, for organizing foreigners to fight and die for her. This is a reaffirmation of France's special role as a terre d'asile (land of asylum), the regenerator of the exiles of mankind. For this reason, Legion propagandists have had little trouble in convincing their countrymen that criticism of the Legion abroad is in reality an indirect attack upon France. “This splendid troop ... has always provoked jealousy, envy and denigration among all foreign peoples,” Colonel Louis Berteil insisted.18 Its elite image and ferocious military reputation are also necessary for French amour propre, for it helps to rehabilitate the military honor of an army whose record over the past two centuries has been an uneven one.

  For all of these reasons, the Legion has survived in a form and with a mentality long extinct in the armies of other nations. As dinosaurs go, however, it is a lively and colorful one. To watch the Legion parade down its voie sacrée before the monument commissioned by Rollet (which, like other Legion relics, has been transferred to Aubagne near Marseille), its bearded sappers, axes on their shoulders, opening the march with their slow elongated step, followed by légionnaires in their white kepis, red and green epaulets and blue sashes, is to glimpse its irresistible mystique. It takes only a small leap of the mind to imagine that the bleak, boulder-strewn peaks of southern Provence that tower over the museum to the Legion's past glories, which contains the crypt with the wooden hand of Captain Danjou, are those of the Kabylia or the Rif. For if the Legion is a uniquely French creation, it has become an international property. Th
e Legion expresses some essential need of the human spirit, the belief that one can break with life and begin again, that salvation is to be found in the quest for danger and suffering.19 As long as there are people who believe that, then the Legion will have a bright future, as well as an interesting past.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  LIKE ALL AUTHORS, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many people whose encouragment, cooperation and support helped to nudge this book toward completion. John Keegan first suggested that I write on the Foreign Légion, an idea endorsed with enthusiasm and much helpful advice by my agents Gill Coleridge and Michael Congdon. Bill Fuller offered many valuable insights and suggestions during long and pleasant conversations at the Naval War College. My colleagues at The Citadel have provided the congenial atmosphere and, in the case of Larry Addington, Bill Gordon and Joe Tripp, the expertise that helped me to resolve many teasing questions. Even the impatience expressed by my Citadel cadets at not seeing the work completed, as well as their infallible ability to rescue themselves from the bleak prospect of a lecture on the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution by a few well-placed questions about the Légion, lubricated the process. I am also most grateful for the generous support of The Citadel Development Foundation, which funded the vital research visits to France. Finally, I must thank my editor, M. S. Wyeth, who patiently imposed order upon what was at times a rebellious script.

  In France, my primary gratitude must go to the Legion itself, which proved unstintingly helpful and hospitable, especially A/c Tibor Szecsko, Adjutant Yann Cuba, and S/c Hugues Rivière. Visits to the 2e REI under the command of Colonel François provided a memorable view of the vitality of the modern Legion. As usual, the staff of the Service historique de l'Armée de terre at Vincennes proved immensely helpful. Colonels Pierre Carles and Henry Dutailly made enlightening comments on portions of the manuscript, while Raymond Guyader and André-Paul Comor patiently answered my many queries. However, my special thanks must go to Richard Mahaud, whose close reading of my manuscript saved me from many errors of fact and interpretation. I, of course, accept full responsibility for any that remain.