French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  On February 26, 1831, the War Minister ordered a depot established in Langres in eastern France to receive “refugees and foreign deserters.” But when “foreign workers employed in France and non-naturalized soldiers from the régiment de Hohenlohe” requested admittance, they were turned away. “I do not think that the creation of this depot has as its goal recruitment of this nature,” wrote the general commanding the 18th Military Division.6 The evidence that, in the view of the government, the Legion was only a temporary expedient, a corps raised to funnel undesirable foreigners from the frontiers to Africa, is almost overwhelming. In 1834, a year before the Legion was handed over lock, stock and barrel to Spain, General Voirol, commander-in-chief in Algiers, wrote to war minister Marshal Nicolas Soult to suggest that if enlistment in the Legion were raised from three to five years, the unit's military performance might improve. However, Soult replied that the military efficiency of the Legion was of little interest to him: “As the Foreign Legion was formed with the only purpose of creating an outlet and giving a destination to foreigners who flood into France and who could cause trouble, we have no need to consider your suggestion,” he wrote on February 14. “The government has no desire to look for recruits for this Legion. This corps is simply an asylum for misfortune.”7

  To be sure, the precedent of foreigners in the service of France made the establishment of a foreign regiment in 1831 an unextraordinary, if an unfashionable, event in an era that was moving toward national armies. The Legion was the illegitimate child of the July Revolution, an embarrassment, at once acknowledged and shunned, whose meager patrimony was to be the right to die for France in the wastes of her empire. Its very name suggested all that was unfamiliar, unknown and distrusted, the very antithesis of the citizen, the compatriot, the comprehensible. Throughout the first decades of its existence, the Legion was to be largely friendless, the few men who would speak up for it like social workers pleading the case for the homeless and the needy, and with about as much success. France regarded it as a dumping ground for undesirables, a repository for the destitute, an attitude reinforced by the Legion's geographic isolation from France. As a consequence, the high command was seldom to understand the Legion, seldom entirely to trust it. The very nature of its primary purpose as a quasi-social service, and almost by default as a military organization, meant that too often they would regard it as something created to be sacrificed, perhaps even squandered, rather than a military instrument to be nurtured, honed and led.

  While the older Legion histories give the impression that the organization of the corps was a fairly smooth process, the archives tell a different story. By 1831, foreigners were arriving in droves. The commander of the 5th Military Division reported on March 5, 1831, that “The number of foreign deserters arriving in Strasbourg increases with each day and might become considerable.”8 Those arriving at Langres, most “in a complete state of destitution,” had quickly swamped the capacity of the 385-man barracks, so toward the end of March the government ordered the depot shifted to Bar-le-Duc, a town that straddles the Ornain River about 150 miles east of Paris, over the “lively” protests of the prefect, the chief administrative officer of the département.9 Depots were also established in Auxerre in Burgundy to accommodate Italians, and at Agen in the southwest for Spanish refugees.

  On paper, at least, this unsolicited recruitment drive had paid great dividends: by July, Bar-le-Duc served as the garrison for 1,164 “legionnaires.”10 Alas, all was not well with the new corps. As any unit knows, and as a new unit discovers to its peril, although recruits are often easy enough to come by, the art of transforming them into soldiers resides in its cadres. However, experienced officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) were in fairly short supply in 1831. The July Days of 1830 had set off an unbelievable turmoil in the army. Some officers had resigned out of loyalty to the Bourbons, part of the “internal emigration” that witnessed the self-exile of a number of aristocrats to their provincial estates. Others had been forced into retirement against their will by jealous colleagues and subordinates eager for advancement. Delegations of NCOs formed in many regiments to present inspecting generals with lists of “reactionary” and “Carlist” (a name given to followers of the deposed Charles X) officers whose removal they demanded. Indeed, so common had these political denunciations become that popular humor suggested, “A Carlist is someone who has a job that someone else wants.” The number of officers lost to the army temporarily or forever in this way is not known, but forty-four of sixty-four infantry regiments and five of twelve dragoon regiments saw their colonels sent into retirement.

  Replacing them was another matter. In many cases, NCOs were commissioned as second lieutenants following the Revolutionary practice of “careers open to talent,” which merely served to encourage further denunciations of superiors. But the government also turned to the demi-soldes—ex-Napoleonic officers placed on “half-pay” (hence the name) by the Bourbons in 1815—to solve their command crisis. Eight hundred and thirteen infantry officers and 455 cavalry officers were called out of retirement.11 It is likely that this government action was motivated in great part by a desire to curry favor with a group that was considered notoriously Bonapartist during the Bourbon Restoration.12 If so, it backfired both militarily and politically. Of course, at least one of these demi-soldes, Thomas Bugeaud, would stake out a brilliant, if bloody, career in the army. But most proved to be an embarrassment: Poured into uniforms that had not seen the light of day since Waterloo, their attempts to shout half-remembered or archaic commands produced chaos on the parade ground, a potentially fatal confusion in an era when close-order drill was tactics. Furthermore, their enthusiasm for the July Revolution often got the better of their common sense, and in the view of future Legion colonel and Marshal of France Certain Canrobert, they too often proved to be poor disciplinarians.13 Lastly, the return of these Imperial veterans with a crushing advantage in seniority actually produced mutinies among men who saw the possibilities of promotion within their lifetime disappear over the horizon.14

  Therefore, it is within this context of political and military turmoil that the Legion's novice attempts to organize must be understood. The desperate shortage of officers and the rather unattractive prospect of serving in a regiment of refugees made officers, especially good officers, hard to come by. While French officers appear to have regarded the nomination of foreign officers to staff positions in the Legion as an affront, nomination to command positions in the Legion was regarded by French officers as a punishment, especially as by oversight or design their names had been removed from the seniority list.15 It was a complaint that was to continue in the Legion's early years, and one registered by the inspecting general of the 6th Battalion at Bone in Algeria in 1833: “Today as officers are sent into the Foreign Legion as a punishment, they serve reluctantly, are humiliated to be there and look for any way to return to France. Several have very bad records and those good officers are upset to have comrades of this ilk.”16

  Those who did land in the Legion too often comprised a catchbag of demi-soldes, foreigners or men who lacked the ability or the connections to find better employment. The Legion's first commander, the Swiss Baron Christophe Antoine Jacques Stoffel, complained in June 1831 that “Among the 26 officers who are here, only eight are competent at their job. The others have been retired from the service for a long time, are foreigners or from the cavalry. It is of the utmost urgency that we be sent good line officers who can speak German.”17 One of these officers, Second Lieutenant Mathieu Galloni d'Istria, earned the unenviable distinction in an August inspection report as “the worst officer in the army.”18 Stoffel also complained in that same month that his chief administrative officer “seems to have a talent to disorganize everything.”19 The government began combing the country to find foreign officers willing to take posts in the Legion. Although a large number of refugee Spanish officers lived in France, generals and prefects who interviewed them reported that they would fight “only
to defend the liberty of their country.”20 Only six Spaniards took up the offer to serve in the Legion as officers, all of whom had resigned by 1834. In the end, 107 foreigners, mostly Swiss, German and Polish, would serve as officers in the Legion by 1835.21

  In such a heterogeneous command in such turbulent times, conflicts were almost inevitable. Those that struck the infant Legion were perhaps unexceptional, but they certainly helped to get the regiment off to an interesting start. Stoffel himself was part of many of his unit's problems. In August, the inspecting general suggested diplomatically that the Swiss was perhaps not the right man for such a command: “This colonel seemed to me a man of integrity, loyal, gifted with too much kindness, zealously active and capable,” he reported on August 22. “But he lacks military practice, above all command experience as he has only served as a staff officer. He knows neither the regulations nor the ordinances.... But, I repeat, he is an estimable man who works and is interested, and who soon will be competent. As he becomes better known, he is loved, appreciated and given credit...”22

  Stoffel's difficulties were not entirely of his own manufacture. His two battalion commanders, Majors Clavet Gaubert and Salomon de Musis, nurtured their own ambitions and “were not pleased when he arrived,” according to the inspecting general. “It is certain that he was badly received by them and that on the day of his arrival these two officers said publicly before the troops that M. Stoffel was ignorant, inept, and not worthy to command them.” With any luck, the soldiers did not understand these denunciations. However, if these fledgling legionnaires could not trust their ears, they could believe their eyes, especially when the colonel passed in review at the head of one of his battalions with “a woman disguised as a man” marching at his side. “Obliged, therefore, to appeal to the honesty and the délicatesse of this senior officer, he confessed that it was indeed a woman,” the inspecting general continued. “I gave him a formal order to get rid of her immediately, and he assured me on his honor that he would do so. I took measures to see if my orders would be carried out.”23

  However, the true strength of a unit resides with its NCOs. Alas, those of the Legion were not bad, they were simply nonexistent. Although an appeal went out to French ex-NCOs to come out of retirement and join the Legion, very few if any appear to have done so.24 Therefore, NCOs were selected from among the number of German university students who were to be found among the refugees at Langres because of “their knowledge and their social position.”25 However, Clavet Gaubert complained in May that “The NCOs and the corporals whom we have provisionally chosen are that in name only. They do not wear, nor can they wear, distinctive marks of rank. They have no confidence in themselves. They are without authority and cannot act against their subordinates, some of whom cannot forget that they were NCOs in the foreign regiments from which they have come.”26

  Part of the problem may have been caused by the social divide that existed between the German students, some of whom had been named as corporals, and the rest. “Social position” may have been a positive disadvantage when dealing with the sort of characters who crowded into the Legion depots, who were already demonstrating egalitarian, not to say proletarian, tendencies that would set the tone in barracks. Major Clavet Gaubert wrote the war minister on July 11, 1831, that the German students exhibited “exaggerated pretensions.... But it became impossible for me to accustom them to live in common with the deserters most of whom were given to stealing and debauchery.” So he formed the university students into two separate companies. However, later, “when we proceeded to the election of NCOs, several refused the promotion which they merited so as not to leave their comrades.” Their real motivation soon became clear: they hoped to be designated as the two elite companies of grenadiers and skirmishers contained in each line battalion, but which were only permitted in the Legion from April 1832. “Once we even saw grenades and hunting horns on the shakos of several of them, which we obliged them to take off immediately,” Clavet Gaubert assured the war minister.27

  If the German students were groping for an esprit de corps, many of the new recruits appeared to offer poor material from which to fashion a regiment. Clavet Gaubert complained in May that the obvious problems of attempting to control nine hundred men with twelve officers and a smattering of NCOs were complicated by the selection of Bar-le-Duc as the site for the regimental depot. Although Bar-le-Duc could claim to be the birthplace of Napoleonic marshal Oudinot, in 1831 it was a modest little town with much to be modest about. Like many of the towns of eastern France that depended on textiles, Bar-le-Duc was in the grip of a recession. The peasants who drifted to town to escape rural poverty exacerbated the unemployment problem, creating groups of idle and disaffected men. It was for this reason that the prefect of the Meuse protested so vehemently against the addition of dispossessed and perhaps politicized foreigners to this already volatile situation.

  Bar-le-Duc may have been chosen over a larger garrison town like Metz or Strasbourg because it was thought to be a quiet backwater where these men would be kept well out of harm's way until they could be shipped out of the country. But it had one enormous disadvantage—barracks space was woefully inadequate. Therefore, the army was forced to billet the soldiers in private homes, which made them almost impossible to control: “In fact, the dispersion of the men in the houses of the inhabitants and in a town without gates or walls means that there is no way to establish a guard or patrols,” Clavet Gaubert complained. Nor had the government furnished them with the accoutrements of military life: “Neither arms, nor equipment, nor uniforms to maintain, from which results idleness which favors the natural tendency of the Germans for drink.”28 Stoffel agreed. The army had not created a regiment, but merely a holding pen for foreign undesirables. Give them a flag, a band, create elite companies of grenadiers and skirmishers, make them “proud to wear the uniform”—then, Stoffel insisted, the Legion could become “le plus beau corps de France”29 All of these requests were met in 1832.

  In fact, the poor organization of the Legion was a major impediment to the creation of anything resembling a harmonious regiment. On the contrary, it contributed substantially to a cycle of indiscipline and insubordination that was contained only with difficulty. The basic problems began with poor and perhaps even dishonest accounting methods. In the nineteenth century, individual units had far more control over their own accounts than do modern armies. This was an outgrowth of the pre-1789 system of the “regimental chest,” from which all troop needs were met. To the regimental and company sergeant-majors fell the responsibility for keeping check on the masse individuelle or basic allocation of money given to each soldier for his uniform, equipment, soap, polish and food.

  Ensconced amidst his numerous ledgers in a small, poorly lighted room, the sergeant-major tried to balance his books, stopping the pay of men in prison or the hospital or charging torn or lost equipment against accounts. Once his calculations were made, the money was counted out to the lieutenants or corporals, men responsible for purchasing the food for their sections and giving the unspent money to the soldiers. Needless to say, the possibilities for corruption in all this were immense, as were the possibilities for misunderstanding. In August, Stoffel complained that he had been obliged to give over the command of companies to second lieutenants who “spent the pay of their men. Then the sergeant-majors and sergeants, most of whom do not understand the French language, and nothing at all of accounting, contributed a great deal to the confusion because they did not keep an exact register of the equipment which they distributed.”30

  Quite naturally, irregular or even nonexistent pay could hardly have improved the temper of the troops, many of whom were frequenting local cafes and selling their food or shoes and underclothes to buy drink. The command reacted by holding back their pay to replace the equipment or by sending them to prison for indefinite periods. The prefect complained that the local jail contained up to fifty-six legionnaires per cell, many of whom had simply been forgotten by the serg
eant-majors, who neglected to provide money for them to eat, as the jail was not responsible for feeding military prisoners.31 By mid-May, the “tendency to insubordination and indiscipline” had reached crisis proportions, with rumors of a general revolt circulating in the companies. Clavet Gaubert and Salomon de Musis assembled one hundred National Guards who, during noon roll call, watched over the assembled legionnaires while police arrested several ringleaders and led them off to jail.32 Also in May, twenty soldiers were arrested to break up a “desertion plot,” only for it to be discovered that they had yet to sign their enlistment papers and therefore could not be court-martialed.33 Stoffel feared that when the army tried to move the legionnaires toward the ports of embarkation and Algeria, they would simply “melt en route.”34 His fears proved exaggerated, and few legionnaires seized the opportunity to escape during the march between Bar-le-Duc and the south coast.35 The prefect of the Meuse and the mayor of Bar-le-Duc must have breathed a sigh of relief when, on November 25, the Legion depot in their town closed its doors and transferred to Toulon.36 The transfer of the Legion to Toulon and then to Algiers was a gradual process, however, for the depot of the Spanish battalion at Agen remained open until 1832 because of a lack of Spanish recruits.

  IN 1831, THEREFORE, the Legion saw for the first time the country that for the next 130 years was to be at once its spiritual home and the crucible that would forge its unique character. From the troopships, Algiers appeared wildly exotic, a fortress town plucked from the Middle Ages, a northernmost outpost of Africa that clasped the rugged Barbary Coast. The tricolor proclaiming French occupation curled and snapped above the round bastion that anchored the crenellated outer wall of the harbor. However, the domes, minarets and whitewashed houses, a chaos of cubes brilliant in the autumn sun, that spread up the hill beyond were defiantly African.