French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Recruitment to the Legion has already been discussed in some detail. Although heterogeneous, it was far from being a rabble of hopeless men with little military potential. There were enough recruits who sought a military vocation, or for whom life in the Legion, for whatever reason, was an attractive, even if temporary, alternative to what they had known before, to build the elements of a proficient force. However, by the turn of the century, subtle changes in Legion recruitment began to take place that had some Legion officers worried. The most noticeable change was a decline in the number of recruits from the “lost provinces” of Alsace-Lorraine. Their increasing absence was particularly regretted by French officers. They had formed an important element in the pre-1870 army, where their strong sense of patriotism and preference for military careers had made them greatly admired. Their willingness to cross the frontier and enlist in the Legion after 1871 in defiance of German law was viewed as an expression of the continued attachment of these annexed areas to France. So prized had these former French citizens become as a political symbol that between 1871 and 1880 the Legion was legally, though not in practice, closed to everyone except men from Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland.1 Indeed, before the doubling of Legion strength in 1884, the Legion was sometimes referred to as le régiment d'Alsace-Lorraine.

  Legion Captain Abel Clément-Grandcourt believed that in 1885 fully 45 percent of the legionnaires were from Alsace-Lorraine,2 although how many of these were Germans who had claimed to be from Alsace to curry favor with recruiting sergeants, or simply to be enlisted, is impossible to know. The numbers must have been fairly substantial, for, as has been seen, the desire to avoid the disorganization of units by eliminating legionnaires from Alsace-Lorraine before the campaigns of the 1890s had been a major argument in favor of retaining the system of the bataillon de marche.3 Nevertheless, their numbers had declined to an estimated 22 percent by 1897. And while there appears to have been a minor surge in enlistments around the turn of the century,4 by 1904 the war ministry estimated that only 5.3 percent of legionnaires were from Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, so worried was the Legion by the virtual disappearance of these men from Legion ranks that they even considered creating separate units for Alsace-Lorrainers, an option eventually rejected both because national battalions had caused problems in the past (and would do so again in the future), and also because there were simply not enough of these men to make such a solution practical.5 By 1913, 6.7 percent of legionnaires, according to one source, claimed to be from Alsace-Lorraine.6

  Why were these men, once a mainstay of Legion recruitment, staying away in droves by 1904? Gaston Moch suggested that an 1889 law that allowed Alsace-Lorrainers to declare French nationality and proceed into the regular French army was one explanation,7 although if this diverted large numbers of these men away from the Legion, officers did not appear to be aware of it. Another reason, of course, was that recruitment from Alsace-Lorraine was bound to dry up as memories of the “année terrible” of 1870–71 receded into the distant past. Clément-Grandcourt believed that the German government had made special efforts to entice men from the recently annexed provinces into the German army, although none had yet penetrated the officer corps. Recruitment was also influenced by news of a campaign—for instance, Madagascar, as dreadful as that campaign was, produced a surge in recruits, as would the Casablanca troubles of 1907–08.8

  But Clément-Grandcourt believed that these external factors alone could not account for the shortfall of recruits from Alsace-Lorraine. Quite the contrary, the Legion was itself to blame because the word was out in Alsace-Lorraine that service in the Legion meant high mortality rates, especially from typhoid in Algeria, tough discipline and “rough punishments.” The spectacle of those returning in the inelegant civilian suit given to departing legionnaires, emaciated and yellow with fever—“In what a state we send them back!”—had served to drive that message home.9 Clément-Grandcourt's views were shared by Raoul Béric, who in a 1907 novel, Les routiers, traced the fortunes of Otto Weiss, a native of Lorraine who, after swearing on the grave of his grandfather, a much-decorated soldier of France, that he will remain loyal to his true native country, joins the Foreign Legion. But he is quickly disillusioned by the brutality of Legion life, by the drunkenness and homosexuality, by the stealing and lack of solidarity. Above all, he is disgusted by the absence of patriotism, by the Germans who “. . . sing in thick voices the ‘Wacht am Rhein’ to insult the country which they serve.” After his release, he tries to settle in Nancy, only to discover that service in the Legion “is not a reference.” So he returns to occupied Lorraine, and to his grandfather's grave to weep, “Grandfather! Grandfather! What must you think of me!”10

  Of course, it would have been utterly counterproductive for this internationally recruited service to make patriotism an essential element in its ideology. But the complaints about the Legion ran deeper than that. Nor were they confined to pan-Germanists and antimilitarists. French officers, too, observed that the quality of recruitment to the Legion had reached such a nadir that the more decent soldiers, those for instance who might be motivated by patriotism, found the atmosphere of the Legion uncongenial, even hostile. In 1905, Colonel Boutegourd looked back nostalgically to the decade after the Franco-Prussian War when the Legion was composed mainly of Poles, Swiss and Alsace-Lorrainers, when courts-martial were few and usually involved an old soldier enlisted before 1870.11 The better discipline of these men may well have disguised a lack of training and an absence of dynamic leadership during that decade. However, the situation in the Legion was so serious that even ministerial interest was aroused, and in May 1905, the colonels of the two Legion regiments were asked to list measures that would bring about an improvement in service conditions. The infantry director insisted in 1905 that the bad recruits had driven out the good: “The presence of this sort of bandit. . . has sent away the honest people from the Legion, those from Alsace-Lorraine in particular, who are not, like many foreigners, men who have lost hope.”12 Clément-Grandcourt also believed that the tragedy of those from Alsace-Lorraine was that many came over the frontier at a young and impressionable age to avoid service in the German army, only to be thrown in with a rabble that quickly introduced them to drink, or worse.13 These complaints became all too common after 1900, and agreement virtually unanimous that recruitment to the Legion was “incontestablement en décadence.’”14 “Even for the least informed observer,” wrote General Trumelet-Faber in 1913, “this magnificent unit is degenerating and soon will resemble the Bataillons d'Afrique.” 15

  The problem, everyone agreed, was that the traditional sources of Legion recruitment were drying up, only to be replaced by a less desirable sort of soldier. The increasing reluctance of men from Alsace-Lorraine to enlist was soon matched by that of the Germans. In 1905, Captain C. Mangin reported that the number of Germans in the Legion was declining because wars in German colonies had siphoned off potential recruits, and because of an active propaganda campaign in Germany against the Legion. But also, a crackdown on NCO brutality in the German army had reduced the flow of deserters seeking refuge in France.16 It appears that the percentage of Germans in the Legion declined from 34 percent in 1904 to around 16 or 17 percent just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914.17 One of the results was fewer volunteers: For instance, recruits for the 1er étranger dropped from 1,612 in 1903 to only 800 in 1904, and the total strength of the Legion dipped from 12,000 to 11,000 men after 1900.18 And while the events of 1907–08 brought in a slight influx of recruits, it was fairly short lived, for strength hovered below 11,000 men until the outbreak of war in 1914.19 In 1913, General Antoine Drude, commander of the Oran division, complained that the 1er étranger was 1,000 men short while the 2e étranger needed 500 men to fill out its ranks.20 It was the shortage of men, especially of good men, that helped to abort demands for the creation of a cavalry regiment and an artillery battalion in the Legion after the turn of the century.21

  Faced with falling enlistment, the Le
gion was forced to take recruits where it could get them, and that too often meant enlisting increasing numbers of Frenchmen. Of course, as has been seen, the fact that Frenchmen joined the Legion was hardly new—Frenchmen appear to account for between 25 and 30 percent of legionnaires in the 1880s and 1890s. After 1900, however, fully 45 percent of legionnaires appear to have been French,22 and this may have been an underestimate. Nor might the numbers of Frenchmen coming into the Legion have been a bad thing in itself— but what Frenchmen! Jacques Weygand was told by his sergeant in the interwar years: “The French are all good, or all bad, but in every case des grandes gueules [loudmouths].”23 Before 1914, it was the bad sort who preoccupied officers. Already in 1905 the infantry director complained that the Legion “is being invaded by the sweepings of our nationals.”24 General Herson, commander of the Oran division, agreed: “We throw them out the door, and they climb back in through the window,” he wrote in 1905. “We can only gain by getting rid of the bad elements which encumber the Legion and of which the largest part, I am sad to say, are French nationals.”25

  Why was the Legion attracting so many bad French recruits? The shortfall in recruitment that caused the Legion to be less selective offers one reason. However, the real problem occurred because the Legion after 1900 increasingly became the dumping ground for rejects from other corps. Joseph Ehrhart offers but one example of a man directed into the Legion because his conscript military record was so bad that the metropolitan army would not reenlist him.26 Around 1900 the marines also appear to have begun to squeeze out the less desirable elements, who came to the Legion to complete the fifteen years service that would make them eligible for a pension. Also, the left-wing Waldeck-Rousseau government of 1899, and its reforming war minister, General Louis André, sought to end criticism of the penal Bat d'Af by retaining only the most hardened criminals there. Those whose records suggested a glimmer of rehabilitation were often deposited into the Legion. General Trumelet-Faber was of the opinion that the Legion had been corrupted by these men: “... today it has become the refuge of all the outcasts of the Bataillons d'Afrique, of the armée coloniale and of the tirailleurs algériens who, because of their deplorable records, were refused reenlistment in their original corps.”27 Clément-Grandcourt agreed in a 1913 report that bad French were chasing out good Swiss, Germans and Alsace-Lorrainers.28

  The influx of bad elements into the Legion was made worse by the fact that many of the best legionnaires, in particular those who opted for French nationality after five years’ service, which made them eligible to serve in French units, were departing for other corps where the moral tone was superior and the career prospects brighter. This was not a new phenomenon, but one that had affected the Legion from its early days in Algeria for the simple reason that, in career terms, the Legion was frequently seen as a stepping-stone to something better.

  Before the Franco-Prussian War, something better usually meant the zouaves, whose prestige peaked during the Second Empire. Although in 1904 the German Raimond Premschwitz reported that the zouaves were “the pride of France,”29 in fact their prestige rapidly declined after 1870. This occurred because they became a corps of European and Jewish conscripts from Algeria whose service obligation of only one year, until 1905 when it was raised to two, made them even less professional than metropolitan conscripts. When, soon after the turn of the century, the zouaves arrived by train for an important review by the president of the French Republic in western Algeria, legionnaires and tirailleurs who had marched for several days with full kit to get there expressed their contempt by bombarding the zouaves with their tent pegs. Dangy believed that the zouaves only appeared in dangerous areas “to show off. They are well looked after perhaps because in the past they did some good work, and since then they have rested on their laurels.”30 This was not quite true—the zouaves had performed well during the Bou Amama uprising of 1881-82 in Algeria, had fought in Tonkin and were included in the China expedition of 1900. However, they had certainly lost their edge after 1871. Silbermann, who saw them in China, believed that their uniform of turban, short jacket and Turkish trousers was not only impractical, but also gave them “the appearance of an eccentric woman.... In China, the uniform of the zouaves provoked general hilarity among the troops of foreign nations,” he wrote. “Even the Chinese roared with laughter to see them walk past.”31

  After the turn of the century, the character of the zouaves as a regiment of North African pied noir (settler) conscripts became even more evident. “In the zouaves there are some local chaps who are loaded,” Flutsch was told by an ex-zouave. “They always splash it around right under your nose . . . and you who don't have a penny to your name, that cheeses you off. In the Legion, you don't have to worry about that. Everybody's broke.” Thoroughly alienated, Flutsch's friend decided to desert the zouaves and enlist in a more masculine organization after he witnessed a legionnaire single-handedly hold off a barroom full of policemen. “A zouave isn't dangerous, you know.”32 Less than dangerous, they had become in the eyes of some legionnaires almost timid. “The legionnaire hates a zouave more than he hates an Arab,” English legionnaire A. R. Cooper wrote in 1933.33 When a young zouave appeared in a bar in Morocco in the interwar years, legionnaire Jean Martin and a few other “old soldiers began, at his expense, to make the classic jokes about the zouaves, ‘Lyautey's little girls’. But the recruit—I couldn't believe it!—smiled without understanding anything.” “La mère Simon,” the bar owner, jumped out from behind her bottles: “ ‘What are you doing here, kid?’ she screamed at him. Then she grabbed him by the arm: ‘Go, go! Get out of here! Don't stay with the legionnaires, you're too young. Don't you see they are going to hurt you, little fool?’ ”34

  But if the Legion had outlasted competition from the zouaves, they discovered in the 1880s that la coloniale had relegated them to second place in the pecking order of colonial regiments. Backed by a strong colonial lobby, the marines ensured themselves a pay scale and promotion system far superior to that of the Legion. In Tonkin and Madagascar, where both marines and legionnaires served, Leon Randin claimed that the former took advantage of their “prime garrisons” in the rear to intercept the gifts of food and tobacco sent by the charitable “Dames de France” which never reached the Legion's posts lost in the bush.35 And even though, as has been seen, the performance, certainly the endurance, of the Legion during these colonial expeditions was generally superior to that of the marines, who included too many young volunteers in their ranks, they still continued to look down upon the Legion.

  In 1839 the Legion was deliberately excluded from the organization of the marines, for it was felt that its reputation for getting out of hand would compromise the task of pacifying native peoples.36 The superior attitude of the marines toward the Legion was obvious to Legion Lieutenant Langlois in Madagascar when a marine captain said, “ ‘Monsieur, you must learn,’ he told me, completely out of the blue by the way, ‘that when troops belonging to the war ministry march with marines, they must display the good taste to remain to the rear.’ ”37 In 1908, Legion Captain Met was denounced by a marine officer in Tonkin when he sent his trumpeters to play in a church service.38 This incident had its origins in the tense political atmosphere following the Dreyfus affair and the separation of church and state in 1905. But it also demonstrated the rivalry between the two corps that continues today. Despite this rivalry, however, the attractions of marine service were only too obvious to underpaid legionnaires—both Dangy and Silbermann enlisted in the marines after completing their tours in the Legion. Legionnaire Lucien Jacqueline even called upon the help of the deputy for his native Calvados to get into the marines after his five years of Legion service expired in 1907.39

  It would have been remarkable if this decline in quality recruitment was without consequence for the Legion. And indeed, one of the first results was a discipline crisis that began to shake the Legion in the new century. The infantry director complained in 1905 that“... for the last few years, too
many unstable and vicious people had joined who do no service. The scenes of indiscipline have multiplied to the extent that, the commanding general of the Oran division, in a special report, 10 April 1905, no. 1641 J, had to ask for new disciplinary powers to use against the soldiers of the Foreign Legion.”40 Colonel Désorthès of the 2e étranger at Saïda complained that punishments of thirty to sixty days in prison had been inflicted in his regiment on 1,482 occasions in 1905, together with 370 discipline councils and 334 courts-martial.41 General Herson reported that the selling or destruction of equipment and the smashing up of the barracks had reached epidemic proportions.42

  Flutsch's colonel agreed that things had gone too far when he could hand out a quarter-century's worth of confinements in one day and when 20 percent of his soldiers were behind bars: “If I can congratulate you on your combative qualities,” he told his assembled legionnaires,

  you should realize that I am far less proud to think that, in my one regiment, there are more men under lock and key than in the 163 regiments of the metropolitan army. I don't hope to change things. It was like this before I came. It will be like this after I leave.43

  He was certainly correct about that. In March 1912, General Trumelet-Faber complained that the Legion was going through (yet another) discipline crisis: