French Foreign Legion
Page 1
Works previously published by the author:
Army and Revolution: France 1815-1848 (1974)
The Portuguese Armed Forces and the Revolution (1977)
The March to the Marne: The French Army 1871-1914 (1981)
The Conquest of Morocco (1982)
The Conquest of the Sahara (1984)
Copyright © 2010 by Douglas Porch
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Porch, Douglas.
The French Foreign Legion : a complete history of the legendary fighting force / Douglas Porch.
p. cm.
Previously published: New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61608-068-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. France. Armée de terre. Légion étrangère--History. I. Title.
UA703.L5P67 2010
355.3’590944--dc22
2010021022
Printed in the United States of America
For Olivia
CONTENTS
GLOSSARY
PREFACE
1. “Le Plus Beau Corps de France”
2. “Between Politics, Diplomacy and the Cannon” — The Legion in Spain, 1835–1839
3. The “New Legion”
4. La Casquette du Père Bugeaud
5. Zaatcha
6. “Corps Sans Passé et Sans Avenir”
7. Mexico, 1863–1867
8. The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune
9. The Initiation
10. Indochina —The Invasion
11. “A Second Fatherland”
12. “They Fought Like Unchained Demons” — The Legion in Dahomey
13. “March or Die!” — The Legion in Madagascar
14. The Monastery of the Unbelievers
15. The Mounted Companies
16. 1914
17. 1915—Trench Warfare and Mutiny
18. “The Greatest Glory Will Be Here”
19. New Legion, “Old Legion”
20. The Invention of Tradition
21. “Cause for Hope”—The Legion in the Fall of France, 1940
22. “Question of Circumstances”—The 13e DBLE
23. A Fragile Unity
24. “Masters of the Battlefield”—The Legion in Indochina
25. “Squeezed Like a Lemon”— The War of Attrition, 1951–1954
26. The Final Act —Dien Bien Phu
27. “Priests of a Dead God” — The War in Algeria, 1954–1956
28. The Battle of Algiers
29. The Road to Rebellion
30. The Balance Sheet
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCE NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Illustrations follow page 344.
GLOSSARY
ALE Archives de la Légion étrangere, Aubagne
Armée d'Afrique French army units regularly stationed in North Africa
Armée Coloniale White and native units which normally served in the French colonies other than North Africa
ALN Armée de libération nationale
Armée Metropolitaine French army serving in metropolitan France
BEP Bataillon étranger parachutiste
BLE Bataillon de Légion étrangère
Bled Algerian hinterland
BSLE Bureau des statistiques de la Légion étrangère
Chasseurs d'Afrique Light cavalry raised for service in North Africa
DBLE Demi-brigade de Légion étrangére
DCRE Dépôt commun des régiments étrangers
DFL Division française libre
DMI Division de marche d'infanterie
FFL Forces françaises libres
FLN Front de libération nationale
GM Groupe mobile
Infanterie de Marine Troops under command of the French navy which were shifted to the army in 1900 and became the Armée Coloniale
Pieds noirs North Africans of European extraction
REC Régiment étranger de cavalerie
Régiment étranger Foreign regiment
REI Régiment étranger d'infanterie
REP Régiment étranger parachutiste
RMLE Régiment de marche de Légion étrangère
RMVE Régiment de marche de volontaires étrangers
SHAT Service historique de l'Armée de terre
SIL Service d'immatriculation de la Légion
Tirailleurs algériens Algerian Rifles
Tirailleurs sénégalais Senegalese Rifles
Tirailleurs tonkinois Tonkinese Rifles
TOE Théâtre d'opérations éxterieures
zouaves Corps formed in 1831 in Algiers from the zouaoua tribe. It gradually evolved into an entirely French force although its uniforms were modeled on North African dress.
PREFACE
“THE FRENCH, BEING a thrifty and practical people, have always been eager to let any available foreigners assist them in any necessary bleeding and dying for la Patrie,” writes American historian John Elting at the beginning of a chapter on the régiments étrangers in his massive study of the Napoleonic army. “From the Scots who rode with Joan of Arc to the Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu, the foreign soldier, idealistic volunteer or hard-case mercenary, is an integral part of the French military tradition.”1 This book is a study of some of those foreigners in French service—the French Foreign Legion from its inception in 1831 to the departure from Sidi-bel-Abbès in 1962. The attractions of writing such a book are obvious. While many national armies contain or have contained regiments or units with long and, at times, even heroic pasts, none has captured world imagination in quite the same fashion, or to such a degree, as the Legion. No corps is so surrounded by romance, by legend, by mystery.
Why this should be so is not difficult to discover. The Foreign Legion was and continues to be unique in our age—a multinational, polyglot force made up of men, some of whom were on the run from the law or had in some other way reached the end of their tether, some of whom simply wished to push life's experience to the very brink of endurance and beyond, cast out upon the diverse and distant lands that once comprised the French colonial empire. The men and the settings have combined to make the history of the Legion one of unparalleled exoticism, pathos and drama.
But while this may explain the attractiveness of the subject for the historian, it does not in itself justify yet another history of the Legion. Indeed, a moderately diligent English-speaking reader with access to a public library should be able to locate one or two books that tell the familiar stories of the stubborn defense of Camerone, of Tuyen Quang or of Dien Bien Phu. Not surprisingly, the classic histories of the Legion are in French. Some of the nineteenth-century histories such as General Grisot's La Légion étrangère de 1831 à 1887, or Bernelle and de Colleville's Histoire de l'ancienne Légion étrangère, have stood the test of time and have become important sources for historians of the early Legion. In our own century, General Paul Azan's La Légion étrangère en Espag
ne, 1835—1838, published in 1907, and A.-P. Comor's history of the 13éme DBLE in World War II have offered excellent studies of those periods of Legion history.
Nor has the Legion's special recruitment and psychology escaped the notice of authors. As early as 1864, French writer Antoine Camus defined the Legion mentality in Bohèmes du drapeau, an exercise repeated by G-R Manue and Ferri-Pisani in the years between the two world wars. In The White Kepi, published in 1956, American author Walter Kanitz, who in 1939–40 served in a unit of French foreign volunteers (RMVE), made a very original attempt to get at the “truth” of the Legion through a thematic exploration of the attitudes and experiences of legionnaires. Since the nineteenth century, the Legion, too, has taken steps to adjust its methods of leadership to the special psychology of legionnaires. Recent editions of the quasi-official Livre d'or de la Légion étrangère contain a chapter on the “psychologie du legionnaire.” And in 1951, the Legion even published a manual written by Legion captain Henri Azam, La Légion étrangère: Ses régles particulières, designed to instruct its cadres in the delicate responsibility of drawing the most from their men. The problem posed by these exercises in the definition of a legionnaire psychology is that it is difficult to detect the point at which truth merges into myth.
I believe that there is room for a book on the Legion that links its combat performance to its recruitment, training, rituals, and special social environment. My claim for the originality of this work is based upon the questions it poses, the forgotten or neglected episodes of Legion history that it reveals, the extent of its documentation, and its attempt to define the frontiers between the myths and realities of Legion history. For the author, the accomplishment of this task has required several summers spent combing archives in France for undiscovered documents, diaries and memoirs, pulling from more accessible sources material that has eluded other authors, and consulting often excellent monographs and theses, many of which have yet to be folded into any general history. This study does not pretend to be an exhaustive history of the Legion—that would be quite impossible! The Legion forces selectivity simply because it has been in existence for too long, fought in too many places, and is a subject too rich in human drama for any student of its past to claim totality for his work.
However, its basic premise is that without an understanding of why men volunteered for the Legion, what psychic income they drew upon being initiated into its peculiar mysteries and esprit, and the stages of development and levels of growth in the career of a legionnaire, then the litany of heroic acts that makes up most Legion histories are rather like reading a book of crime fiction in which the motive for the murder is never revealed. A history of the Legion is also a history of a portion of the European working class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one which a Marxist historian might claim had slipped through the fingers of the “capitalist revolution.” It is often, but not invariably, a chronicle of dropouts, of misfits, of refugees, of men commonly regarded as out of place in normal society. What this book hopes to explain is how they fought so well, and why this class of man needed to bury himself in an army to find self-expression. In many respects, the Legion offers a mirror image of its society, a comment upon Europe's norms and values and France's attitudes toward foreigners, a place where men were able to find something that civilian life failed to provide them. In this respect, the book hopes to suggest that military history has broader implications than many historians have so far been willing to attribute to it.
The peculiar psychology and motivations of these apparently enigmatic fighting men have exercised a fascination since the nineteenth century. Before 1914, the 1er étranger was known as the “1er mystérieux.” French journalist Lucien Bodard found legionnaires to be virtually the only truly inscrutable race planted among a human Indochinese landscape that he otherwise deciphers with remarkable sensitivity. As legionnaires at Cao Bang, the post at the extreme end of the deadly Route Coloniale 4 that paralleled the Chinese frontier in Tonkin, prepared to receive the Viet Minh onslaught in October 1950, “... they looked perfectly happy,” he quoted a French administrator as saying. “And yet, these fellows behind the machine guns are under sentence of death already, condemned to be swept away by the Viet wave whenever Giap gives the order and his tens of thousands of regulars sweep forward. Their cheerfulness filled me with pity; but with admiration too. For after all, they really had no hope, with nothing but one little airfield as their only link with the rest of the world.”2
Perhaps the greatest paradox of the Legion is how an elite unit has come to be fashioned out of material regarded as unpromising. One of the general assumptions of modern military history has been that conscripts, or at the very least national forces, are superior in most respects to those composed of mercenaries. Perhaps I should pause at this moment to explain what is meant by my reference to the Legion as a mercenary force. My Legion friends object strenuously to this appellation, and their case is a good one. The first and most obvious connotation of mercenary is one who exchanges military service for cash. The “cash nexus” is what distinguishes a mercenary from a mere professional soldier. While many legionnaires no doubt enlisted in the past to have regular meals, the desire for material gain was seldom a primary, or even secondary, reason for enlistment. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of recruits never thought to ask how much they were to be paid, and it came as a great shock to some of them, like the German-American Erwin Rosen, who enlisted before World War I, to discover how scandalously low Legion wages actually were, certainly lower than for professional French soldiers in other units. Only in very recent years, and perhaps also traditionally in Indochina where they qualified for extra “colonial pay,” have legionnaires received anything resembling a fair wage. Indeed, the abysmal pay of the legionnaire was a persistent source of problems for the Legion. But when this was pointed out, the government argued (unconvincingly!) that to pay legionnaires a fair wage would open them to charges of being mercenaries. Therefore, harsh administrative logic decreed that the virtue of the legionnaire, as well as that of France, was somehow redeemed by his impoverishment.3
However, in other ways the Legion does meet the criteria for a mercenary force, the most obvious being that the legionnaire is compensated in ways other than cash payment, and ways that were honored in an exceptionally masculine, perhaps also in an exceptionally working class, environment. The future German writer Ernst Junger, who joined the Legion in 1913, had no doubts that he was serving in a mercenary force, “even though the pay was in counterfeit coinage: The promise of the extraordinary.”4 The legionnaire is also a soldier hired into foreign service, notwithstanding the large numbers of Frenchmen who have served in the Legion. The Legion also demonstrates certain dysfunctional traits commonly associated with mercenary forces, namely a high desertion rate. Finally, the Legion has consciously cultivated an attitude of professional detachment that distinguishes it from other troops made up of men who fight for a cause. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, men who joined the Legion out of the idealistic motives of serving France, democracy or to fight fascism were made to feel very much out of place in the Legion.
And here the problems of explaining Legion performance begin. The word mercenary has acquired an unflattering connotation in both English and French because it suggests someone incapable of elevated sentiments such as loyalty to a cause but who acts only in his own interests. Traditionally, mercenary forces were often little more than congregations of ruffians with soldierly skills. For this reason, many societies have found mercenaries to be unsteady, even dangerous, foundations upon which to rest the fortunes of the state. Some Muslim dynasties preferred a system of military slavery over that of hiring mercenaries because slaves were easier to acquire, proved more loyal, and, because of their servile status and youth, adapted more readily to new military techniques and innovations than did mercenaries.5
In the West, the prejudice against mercenaries runs at least as far back as the end of the Feudal Age, w
hen the expansion of the cash economy allowed the Italian city-states to hire condottieri to put muscle into their foreign policies. The result, according to Machiavelli, among the first Western writers to call for conscript armies, was a disaster: “The present ruin of Italy is the result of nothing else than reliance upon mercenaries,” he wrote in the fifteenth century. After describing pitched battles among condottieri bands in which the only men killed were those unfortunate enough to be pitched from their horses and suffocate in the mud, he gave a comprehensively damning appraisal of their fighting abilities: “They are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal, overbearing among friends, cowardly among enemies; there is no fear of God, no loyalty to men.”6 And while most kingdoms relied upon mercenaries in the centuries between Machiavelli and the French Revolution, they did not always earn the praise even of the great captains whose reputations were built upon their blood. King Gustavus Adolphus, whose mercenary armies ravaged Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, saw them as “faithless, dangerous and expensive,” and took good care to keep them away from his native Sweden.7 A master warrior of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great of Prussia, was of the opinion that his men had “neither courage, nor loyalty, nor group spirit, nor [spirit of] sacrifice, nor self-reliance.” They were capable only of a primitive Korpsgeist, and “[because honor has no effect on them] they must fear their officers more than any danger.” He conceded that an army recruited among patriotic citizens would be infinitely more resilient, more adaptable and cheaper than his own, but he was unwilling to redistribute political power in the way that an armed citizenry would have demanded. So mercenary armies survived, not because they were militarily efficient, but because they provided the foundations of royal absolutism.8