The French Foreign Legion Page 15
The next month saw the archbishop of Paris assassinated in the street in broad daylight. On 21 June the Ministry of Public Works closed its Paris depot, which had been set up to guarantee work at reasonable rates to thousands of labourers in the reconstruction of the City of Light. Employees under twenty-five were ordered to join the army; those over that age were forbidden to stay in the capital unless they could prove at least six months’ residence.
The workers’ reply was swift. Barricades set up throughout the working-class quarters of eastern Paris were attacked with cannon- and musket-fire by the army after Gen Bréa crossed the lines to parley in the hope of avoiding more bloodshed and was slowly strangled by three workmen in full view of his troops. On 26 June as the debris was cleared away, his colleague Gen Louis-Eugéne Cavaignac proudly announced the victory of order over the anarchy provoked by his own brother Godefroi Cavaignac, President of the Society for the Rights of Man. Neither brother was destined to become the first president of the Second Republic.
Living in exile at No. 9 Berkeley Street in London was Prince Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, an opportunist nephew of the great emperor. Demonstrating his commitment to public order, he had served as a special constable in the suppression of the Chartist riots. Although forbidden as a member of the Bonaparte family to set foot in France, he had recently been elected deputy in absentio for the départements of Paris, Yonne, Charente-Inferièure and Corsica. Now, financed by two lady friends – Miss Elizabeth Harriet Howard loaned him over a quarter million dollars and his cousin Mathilde pawned her jewels for him – he installed himself in Paris as the compromise candidate for the presidency of the Second Republic.
When the results of the election were announced on December 20, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was the clear victor with 5,434,226 votes against 1,448,107 votes for his nearest rival Gen Cavaignac. One of the first acts of the Second Republic’s first president was to declare North Africa an integral part of France. He also introduced the system whereby any legionnaire who completed five years’ service with good conduct was entitled to claim French citizenship. In addition, to show solidarity with the suffering Poles, all legionnaires of Polish nationality were allowed to resign. In 1st Regiment at what would become the Legion’s ‘home’ in Sidi-bel-Abbès, south of Oran, twenty-three took advantage of this, but seventeen changed their minds within a month. The 2nd Regiment was harder hit, however when 618 of its Italian legionnaires decided to take advantage of a similar largesse to the Piedmontese ambassador to Paris.
In Algeria, the constant razzias in territory where life was already hard left ground where only hatred could grow. So when the first rumours of unrest in France were carried among the tribes by itinerant Jewish traders, the officers of the Armée d’Afrique expected a country-wide uprising to kick them out of North Africa for good. That this did not occur was because most of the leaders who might have coordinated hostilities were dead or in exile. One action from this period does, however, deserve attention because it illustrates how differently the French conquest might have gone, had not most of its enemies been slowed down by the presence of their families and flocks of animals.
Based in the sub-Saharan frontier town of Biskra, Legion Maj Charles Haillard de St Germain was affected to the Arab Bureau – an organisation running spies among the tribes on the one hand and on the other collecting taxes and attempting to de-fuse tensions before they erupted into open hostilities. Supposedly as the eyes and ears of the army, St Germain was a disastrous appointment without any of the qualities for such a job. Deciding that the town needed a strong fortress, he used 2nd Regiment’s 3rd Battalion as cheap labour and financed the purchase of materials by trebling the annual palm tree tax, which was levied on all trees, not only those bearing dates.
On 18 May 1849, Legion 2/Lt Joseph Seroka entered the fortified village of Zaatcha to arrest its caïd Bouzian for fomenting the unrest at this new measure. After a scuffle with Bouzian’s supporters, Seroka and his escort of Spahis withdrew. A back-up force of twenty Spahis and some goumier native infantry found the village gate locked against them.
Short of troops, St Germain attempted to get another tribe to do his work for him, but they simply used the excuse to settle old scores, which inspired the powerful Ouled-Sahnoun to attack an encampment of their hereditary enemies adjacent to St Germain’s fort. After the Ouled-Sahnoun had threatened some of the legionnaires involved in the construction, a volley saw them off, but not before they had destroyed many of the irrigation channels vital for the township’s food and water supply. This was a pointed reminder that by encouraging the locals to grow their own grain, St Germain had destroyed the market for the Ouled-Sahnoun’s grain, traditionally traded for dates grown in and around Biskra.
About 100km to the north-east, Col Jean-Luc Carbuccia set out with St Germain, plus 600 legionnaires of the Italian-depleted 2nd Regiment, 400 men of the penal Bataillons d’Afrique and 250 mixed French and native cavalry. To travel into the arid Hodna Plain in mid-summer was inspired lunacy. Their camp surprised just before dawn on 9 July, the Ouled-Sahnoun were massacred, after which Carbuccia’s men claimed as booty 2,000 camels and 12,000 sheep. High on his victory over the Ouled-Sahnoun, Carbuccia set off to teach the recalcitrant caïd a lesson.
The arrival of his column in the oasis on 16 July was enough to bring the headmen of the unfortified villages out in submission. Only Bouzian was missing, safe behind the stout walls of Zaatcha. A sortie from its single gate cost five French dead and twelve wounded. After softening up the walls with artillery, Carbuccia ordered St Germain to attack in the face of sustained fire from the slits in the walls. A few legionnaires almost reached the walls before being stopped by a moat of stagnant water, which a proper reconnaissance would have revealed earlier. By nightfall, when St Germain withdrew, his legionnaires had suffered fourteen dead and seventy-one wounded.
Realising after three days of skirmishing that there was no future in besieging Zaatcha in midsummer, Carbuccia retreated to Biskra. His failure triggered off a series of actions that summer, in one of which St Germain was killed. Revenge began with the cooler weather on 7 October, when a force of 4,493 men under Col Herbillon arrived in the early morning outside Zaatcha after a forced march by night. About a quarter of the force was made up of legionnaires. The sapper colonel proposed a three-pronged attack, but Herbillon refused to divide his forces. Nor did he interdict use of Zaatcha’s only gate, through which reinforcements and supplies reached the village every night.
The siege, with earthworks, barricades of palm trees, cannonry, assaults and sorties, destroyed the oasis, continuing until 8 November when a column of 1,200 Zouaves arrived as reinforcements under Gen Canrobert. The joy of the besiegers was short-lived when they realised that these men had brought with them the scourge of cholera. It was the Zouaves who finally broke into Zaatcha, massacring every inhabitant and presenting Canrobert with the head of Bouzian speared on a lance stuck into the ground outside his tent. Total French losses were confused by the enormous toll of disease, although the Legion appears to have lost 193 dead and 804 wounded – for what gain, is hard to say.
Chapter 10: Chaos in the Crimea
1851 – 1855
Having, in his own eyes at least, successfully concluded his campaign against the Kabyles, St-Arnaud returned to Paris in June 1851. His reward was to be named Minister for War on 27 October in preparation for a coup d’état in which he would play a key part, mobilising 50,000 soldiers on the night of 1-2 December 1851 to seize key points in and around Paris. The National Assembly was dissolved, 240 deputies arrested and 380 protesting workers and liberal sympathisers manning the barricades were shot out of hand.[127]
In the next fortnight a total of 26,884 people judged hostile to the coup were arrested, with some 9,000 transported to Algeria in the same way that the British were transporting their undesirables to populate Australia and other colonies. The most unfortunate were 198 sent to fever-ridden Devil’s Island in Cayenne, from which few e
ver returned. The working and peasant classes had paid a terrible price in lives for Napoléon I’s ambition and had less desire to re-establish la gloire de la France under his nephew than to earn enough money from their wages in factories or be left with enough of the food they produced on the land to live decently. Throughout France, their widespread resistance to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup was ruthlessly suppressed.
The date for the coup having been chosen as the anniversary of Napoléon’s great victory at Austerlitz, exactly one year later on 2 December 1852 the Second Empire was proclaimed, with Louis Napoléon Bonaparte styling himself Emperor Napoléon III. Putting a spin on the truth, he adopted the slogan ‘The Empire is for Peace’, at the same time looking for an easily-won war to show the rest of Europe that France was again a powerful force to be reckoned with. France had neither the army nor the money to wage a full-scale war on its own, but with the sort of luck that sometimes happens to the wrong people, the Crimean campaign fell into his lap and solved the problem.
Ostensibly, this war was about religion. In the Ottoman province of Palestine the Church of the Nativity in Judean Bethlehem marked the site where the Roman Emperor Constantine’s formidable mother St Helena had been persuaded that Christ was born. Russian Orthodox monks wanted to place a star on the roof, but were resisted by Roman Catholic monks in a struggle so violent that several died. In his capacity of ‘protector of Orthodox believers in the Ottoman Empire’, Russia’s Tsar Nikolai I alleged that the local authorities had deliberately incited the murders and therefore declared war on Turkey to protect the Orthodox monks from further violence, while Catholic France naturally took the other side in the dispute.
The real causes of this war are rooted in the struggle of successive tsars to ‘drive to the sea’, expanding their territorial possessions from the tiny land-locked principality of Muscovy northwards to the White Sea, westwards to ice-free ports in the Baltic, eastwards to the Pacific and southwards to the Black Sea. In the process they created an empire stretching from St Petersburg right across northern Europe and Asia to Vladivostok. After Peter the Great travelled to Holland and Britain to study shipbuilding, they also had a steadily growing navy, its usefulness hampered by being split into four widely separated fleets.
The White Sea Fleet based in Archangel could only put to sea when the ice permitted. The Far Eastern Fleet was too distant from Europe to be of any use there and was essentially to guard the Asiatic seaboard from Japanese and American incursion. Deployment of the Baltic Fleet was dependent on whoever controlled the Danish straits, and the Black Sea Fleet could only emerge into the Mediterranean by permission of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the Bosporus and Dardanelles.
That right was guaranteed by treaty, but Nikolai I saw unfettered control of the straits as the first step in Russia becoming a world power. In July 1853, he invoked his responsibility to the monks killed in Bethlehem as an excuse to invade the Danubian principalities to the west of the Black Sea in what is now Romania. The move was just the latest in a serious of earth tremors at the interface of the expanding Russian Empire and the collapsing Ottoman Empire which had been going on since 1676, and by which Russia had progressively shifted its European borders southward to the Black Sea, southwest to the Prut River, and south of the Caucasus Mountains in Asia.
France and Britain owed the Sublime Porte no favours but neither wanted to see the Russian Black Sea fleet freely coming and going into the Mediterranean. In a volte-face worthy of George Orwell’s 1984, France’s on-again, off-again hostilities with Ottoman Turkey over Greek independence were called off and Napoléon III was granted by the Sublime Porte the status of ‘protector of the holy places of Jerusalem’. England’s motive was simpler: an abiding suspicion of Russia’s covetous eye on India.
Louis-Philippe and the young Queen Victoria had paid state visits to each other’s countries to mark the beginning of what eventually became known as the Entente Cordiale, and Napoléon III himself had spent happy years of exile north of the Channel. A joint war against distant Russia seemed to both countries a good chance of showing the potential of their young alliance to impress Austria, the great power of Europe, without disturbing the continental balance of power.
On 23 September 1853 the Royal Navy was ordered to Constantinople. Thus encouraged, the Turkish army under Omar Pasha attacked the Russian occupiers in the Danubian principalities on 4 October and won a victory at Oltenitza, the effect of which was more than cancelled out when the Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet shortly afterwards off Cape Sinop, 300km northeast of Ankara.
On 3 January 1854 both French and British warships engaged Russian vessels in the Black Sea to protect Turkish transports. Undeterred, on 20 March Russian troops drove south into Ottoman territory in what is modern Bulgaria. Seven days later, Britain and France declared war against Russia. Under the treaty of alliance dated 10 April, the first Anglo-French troops reached Varna in Bulgaria on 30 May, landing in the middle of a cholera epidemic.
Meanwhile, Austria was not idle, massing 50,000 men under arms in Galicia and Transylvania to counter the Russian threat in the Danubian principalities. That the war did not escalate and set all Europe in flames was largely due to a Prussian cavalry officer with an extraordinary talent for diplomacy. Edwin von Manteuffel was sent by King Frederik Wilhelm IV of Prussia to St Petersburg, where he persuaded Tsar Nikolai I to withdraw the Russian troops from the Danubian principalities. Travelling immediately from there to Vienna, he next dissuaded Austria in return from joining the war against Russia. Despite this, the Tsar refused the settlements proposed by France, England, Austria and Prussia at the peace conference in Vienna on 8 August 1854, but at least von Manteuffel had the satisfaction of knowing a European war had been avoided.
At this point the western powers had shown their mettle and Russia had backed down with a bloody nose. Yet, despite the impossibility of conquering the country that had destroyed Napoléon’s Grande Armée in 1812, Paris and London decided to send land forces to capture and destroy the main Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula as a way of putting the bear firmly back into his cage for a long time to come.
As French Minister of War, St-Arnaud feared the consequences of distracting the Armée d’Afrique from its mission of conquering and policing Algeria. However, it was now the only body of campaign-tested troops that France possessed. Accordingly, on 10 May Napoléon III decreed that Algeria should furnish contingents for the expeditionary force to compensate for the poor state of training in the regular regiments on French soil. For the Legion, this meant that each of the two regiments had to furnish two infantry battalions to a joint brigade for the Crimea. A fifth battalion, also drawn from the 1st Regiment, was to man the brigade depot stationed in the Turkish naval base at Gallipoli on the European side of the Dardanelles strait.
The reason for Bonaparte overriding his Minister for War in this way may lie in the advice he received from Corsican Bonapartist Gen Jean-Luc Carbuccia, who had lived down the shame of his defeat at Zaatcha by unquestioning devotion to the new emperor of France during and after the coup. Whatever the full story, the five Legion battalions were among the French and English troops that landed in Turkey that summer, to be cut to pieces by their old enemy cholera before ever seeing a Russian. Illness too, rather than protest at Napoléon III’s decision, caused St-Arnaud to resign as Minister for War. He was dying of consumption and coughed blood into his handkerchief with embarrassing frequency. Accepting the position of commander-in-chief of the French expeditionary force seemed to guarantee him at least one last taste of glory before he died.
Gen Canrobert had, like Carbuccia, taken an active role in the coup of December 1851, and was rewarded with command of a division in the initially 37,000-strong French contingent with its 3,200 horses and mules. He made a point of reviewing the battalions of the 2nd Regiment, of which he had been colonel, and selected eight elite companies to form a bataillon de marche that would replace his heavy losses fr
om cholera.
Although the way history is taught in British schools implies that Lord Raglan’s British contingent were the main force in the Allied armies, after losses from cholera, dysentery and typhus they were actually the smallest contingent, being outnumbered two to one by the 22,000 Turks on the Allied side and eventually nine to one by French troops. London’s limited interest in the campaign was obvious in the choice of Raglan as C-in-C of the British contingent. Having served as the Duke of Wellington's military secretary forty years before, the 67-year-old peer frequently referred to the Russian enemy as ‘those Frenchies’. It was not an auspicious characteristic in the joint command shared with St-Arnaud.
This convoluted tale explains how 4,500 men who had joined the Legion to fight France’s war in Africa came to land on the Crimean peninsula in September 1854 for the long investment of the fortress-port of Sevastopol, garrisoned by 135,000 Russian sailors, marines and soldiers.
On 14 September 120 troop transports and supply ships disembarked the first wave of the combined force on the shores of Kalamitsky Bay, 50km north of Sevastopol – the city of Caesar, as its Greek-speaking founders had baptised it. St-Arnaud’s command included elements of line regiments, Zouaves, Algerian tirailleurs, Spahi cavalry, the Legion and the penal Bataillons d’Afrique. Also in the French contingent, to the mystification of the British, were les cantinières – women, usually wives of NCOs, who ran the canteens, provided extra rations in return for payment, toured the camps selling wine and spirits, sometimes serving as nursing orderlies.