The French Foreign Legion Read online

  De Gaulle was not noted for generosity to his enemies. Having already disbanded 1 REP and the other para regiments which had mutinied against his authority, why should he keep in existence a single company of the world’s largest mercenary army, whose campaign-hardened soldiers were noted for following their officers to hell and back? Divested of her empire except for a few remaining tropical territories,[81] what further need did France have for the army of foreigners that had fought her colonial wars across the globe for 130 years?

  Part II

  BUILDING AN EMPIRE WITH BLOOD

  Chapter 5: The legion of the lost

  France 1813-1831

  Rome conquered the entire known world by not spilling Roman blood if it could use someone else’s. That awesome war machine which was the Roman legion ran equally well on Spanish, German, Scythian or African blood. In the early Republic, brutally thorough training turned 3,000 men into a single-minded fighting machine that marched, pitched camp, fought and whored as one man. In Caesar’s day the number increased to 4,800 men and was up to 5,000-plus in Augustus’ time.

  The root of the word legion is the same as that of selection. It implies picking the best. Men in the peak of physical condition from any part of the Empire, whom their patrician overlords considered illiterate savages, were deployed in another province far from the land where they had been recruited, and there fought for the might of Rome against people with whom they had no family or tribal constraints – and usually no common language.

  After the Empire’s peak of expansion the 5,000 – 6,000 heavy infantry of the Augustan legion were augmented by cavalry units necessary to fight off invasions of mounted barbarian incomers. With its auxiliaries including archers, slingers and javelin-throwers, the legion acquired its own artillery in the shape of up to ten mobile catapults and sixty ballistae, making it truly a self-contained army, the mere thought of whose approach terrified not only the enemy but also its own distant masters.

  Most foreign-recruited legionaries never made it back home. Although the lucky ones who survived thirty-five years’ service were granted Roman citizenship and a piece of ground to call their own wherever in the Empire they happened to be demobilised, few ever got to see Italy. Fewer still had any idea for what strategic reason they were posted from Britain to Spain, from Spain to the ever-restive limes in the far north of the Empire, and from there perhaps to Syria or Africa.

  Throughout the known world they fought and died in return for regular meals, free clothing and lodging, medical care and a mean level of pay, including the daily allowance of salt that gave the word salary its first syllable. Even their burial arrangements were paid for by the legion’s burial clubs, as witness the memorials of German legionaries on Hadrian’s Wall, Spaniards on the Danube and Scythians in Spain. To desert the legion in which they served merited the death sentence. It had become their country, to which they belonged body and soul. They knew no other loyalty than that towards their NCOs and officers – which is why Rome mistrusted them on Italian soil. Only on the rare occasions of a triumph were any legionnaires allowed within the gates of the City whose wealth came from the empire they had built and policed.

  After the Roman Empire collapsed, the infrastructure of civilisation necessary to organise and pay mercenary armies did not exist in Europe until the early Middle Ages, when the imposition of monarchy and the shift from feudal knight service to scutage tax gave rulers the money once again to hire professional warriors who would stay until the end of their contract and not go home at the end of forty days’ feudal obligation. In the early twelfth century King Stephen brought mercenaries from Brabant to England for his civil war against his cousin Matilda the Empress. For his campaigns both north and south of the Channel, Stephen’s successor Henry II hired mercenaries from Wales, Flanders and Navarre. His bellicose son Richard Coeur de Lion went further afield, hiring specialist slingers from the Balearic Islands and crossbowmen from Genoa.

  So long as discipline was tough and the pay regular, the system worked, but Richard’s unpaid Navarrese mercenaries took their revenge by sacking his city of Bordeaux on the way home in 1176. His similarly cheated Flemings looted, pillaged and raped their way home across northern France in 1199. A few years later, during the campaign of his brother John that lost the duchy of Normandy to Philip Augustus of France, John’s mercenaries under their warlord Louvrecaire robbed and raped the very people for whom they were ostensibly fighting, treating them like enemies, according to the chronicler.[82] At Crécy in 1346 Genoese crossbowmen broke and ran before the superior range of the English longbows and were subsequently made scapegoats for the French defeat. The same century saw the unpaid almogovar mercenaries from Spain turn on their Byzantine masters and ravage Thrace and Macedonia for two whole years.

  After the Hundred Years’ War ended at the battle of Castillon in 1453, much of western Europe was at the mercy of bands of men who offered to the highest bidder the only skill they possessed: soldiering. In the fifteenth century the ‘free companies’ of professional French, Swiss, Italian and German mercenaries were loyal so long as the pay lasted. When unpaid, they deserted on the eve of battle or, worse still, changed sides and betrayed their former employers, supporting themselves by living off the land and supplementing their irregular revenues by plunder.

  Not until the seventeenth century did a European military leader return to the Roman model of what a legion should be. In the second Anglo-Dutch war after New Amsterdam had been captured by the English and renamed New York, Maurice of Nassau was rewarded with loyal and efficient service by his mercenaries in return for regular pay. Soldiering was respectable again – as exemplified by the Swiss mercenaries hired out by their own cantonal governments to anyone who could pay them, and who came to enjoy such a high reputation that they are still entrusted with guarding the Holy See and the Pope’s person.

  In pre-Revolutionary France, the ancien régime monarchs recruited a quarter of their army from foreign sources. Of 102 line infantry regiments, eleven were Swiss, serving under long-standing capitulation agreements with the cantonal governments; twelve other regiments were also composed of foreigners. The courage and loyalty of these units to the Crown at the time of the Revolution caused the Constituent Assembly to place an early ban of foreign units in the ‘new’ French army. However, with revolutionary anarchy being inimical to what soldiers term ‘good order and discipline’, when Austria invaded on 20 April 1792, the part-militia French army broke and ran on several occasions.

  With Paris threatened in that September, the government recalled approximately four thousand of the trustworthy Swiss mercenaries who had finally been discharged only a month before. Their numbers were swollen by Dutch and Belgian deserters enticed to the French side by the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! and incorporated in the Légion franche étrangère, open to all comers, and the Légion germanique for German-speakers.

  Under the Directory government 1795-99, foreign recruitment continued, helped by a new capitulation agreement with the cantons bringing another influx of Swiss mercenaries. Napoleon, ever-hungry for new blood to replace the enormous losses he incurred in his army of over half a million men, recruited foreign regiments from Liège, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Vistula Legion from Poland – even Coptic and Greek units for use in his unfortunate Egyptian expedition 1798-1801. From 1802 onwards, his bataillons étrangers expanded to régiments étrangers, in which prisoners and deserters from different countries were deliberately mixed to minimise the risk of them conspiring to mutiny when their collective interest lay in turning their coats again. Mistrusting nevertheless their general level of competence, the Emperor preferred to use them for garrison and defence purposes, freeing French regiments for the more crucial roles.

  After the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 the traditional reliance on foreign soldiery uninvolved in French politics continued partly because the enormous casualty-rate of Napoleon’s campaigns had lowered the French birth-rate at a time
when most other European nations were expanding. In addition to the overpaid guards regiments, the paranoid Bourbon king Louis XVIII and his successor Charles X kept themselves in power by employing six regiments of Swiss mercenaries, plus the Hohenlohe Regiment, manned by foreigners from many countries. Being paid twice as much as their equivalent ranks in the French army and having far better conditions of service made the Swiss so unpopular that friction exploded into a regimental-scale war between them and 2nd Grenadiers at Versailles in November 1828.

  Two years later, after several attacks on their men by civilians revenging themselves for the Swiss firing on the mob while defending Louis XVI in August 1792, the colonels of the mercenary regiments were obliged to obtain safe-conducts from the provisional regional commanders and move their troops out of the country as swiftly as possible. The scene was set for the creation of a truly foreign legion, which might however, never have been created except for a tangled story known as L’Affaire Bacri.

  In 1796 two Jewish merchants of Algiers named Bacri and Busnach had furnished grain to the Directorate to combat starvation due to peasants neglecting their fields during the Revolution. In gratitude for the grain, a June edition of Le Moniteur informed Parisians that, ‘While all Europe stands against a free France, Algiers in Africa remains loyal, recognises the Republic and swears friendship to it.’[83]

  Fine words, but business is business. Bacri and his partner subsequently sold the French debt at a discount to Dey Omar, the Turkish governor of Algiers. Napoleon, intending to conquer North Africa in the near future, could see no point in repaying the debt and went so far as to despatch a sapper major by the name of Boutin in 1808 to make a reconnaissance of Algiers for a possible invasion. About this time, Busnach was killed in an anti-Jewish riot that also cost the life of his protector Dey Ahmed Khodja. After the Bourbon Restoration, Louis XVIII settled accounts with the heirs of Bacri and Busnach, but their French creditors seized the money against their continental debts, leaving the Algerian debt still unpaid.

  Fourteen of the thirty deys who ruled Algiers between 1710 and 1830 were assassinated, so it was no surprise when the current dey was strangled in a palace intrigue in 1817 and replaced by Ali Khodja, known to Europeans as Crazy Ali. He died of the plague the following year and was replaced by Dey Hussein – the man indirectly responsible for the Foreign Legion’s long connection with Algeria.

  On 29 April 1827, the eve of the Muslim feast of Id el-Seghir, Consul Deval representing French interests in Algiers called on Dey Hussein in his palace overlooking the Casbah, as was the custom each year to present the French government’s compliments. Reminded by Hussein of the outstanding debt due, Deval replied less than courteously and was rewarded for his insolence by a glancing blow from Hussein’s fly-whisk. Construed as an insult to France, the incident was used to justify a blockade of the port by the French navy, preparatory to an invasion.

  With many domestic worries on his plate, Charles X hesitated for three years, so it was not until 16 May 1830 that his Minister of War Count Louis de Bourmont embarked 36,450 men in a fleet of 675 vessels at the port of Toulon. After a storm drove them back into harbour, they eventually landed at Sidi Ferruch 15km west of Algiers at 0100hrs on 14 June 1830. Fifty minutes later, the Turkish artillery on the hills overlooking the invasion beaches fired its first shell that killed a sailor on board the Breslaw, but could not prevent the French establishing a bridgehead, where men and equipment were landed during the next four days.

  Hussein had at his disposal an army of 7,000 Turkish janissaries, 13,000 men sent by his ally the Bey of Constantine, 6,000 from Oran and 18,000 Kabyles – all encamped at Staoueli, a strategic position blocking the road to Algiers. Too wary of the warships’ cannons to attack the bridgehead at its most vulnerable, this large but ill-coordinated army waited until the evening of 18 June before marching down to Sidi Ferruch. In this engagement and the counter-attack on the camp at Staoueli the next day, the French suffered fifty-seven dead and 473 wounded. Once his supplies and reserves of munitions had caught up, Bourmont pressed inland, following the plan prepared by Napoleon’s spy Boutin twenty-two years before.

  He had a deadline for the capture of Algiers, but the Turks and their allies fought back hard in bloody hand-to-hand combat, selling every inch as dearly as possible. The bloodiest combats of 26-28 June brought Bourmont’s force onto the plateau of El-Biar. The fort called Bordj Taos, manned by 2,000 janissaries, was blown up by the despairing defenders, enabling Bourmont to send a despatch to Paris that he had taken the city on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, although the surrender document was not signed until the following day in the palace of Djenane er-Raïs.

  Back in Paris, Charles X had already dissolved the troublesome Chamber of Deputies in March of that year. Receiving the good news from Algiers on 9 July, he over-estimated his subjects’ enthusiasm for overseas possessions. The newspaper Le Globe summed up popular feeling about the invasion of Algeria thus: ‘The motives are futile, the purpose suspect and the result uncertain to say the least.’[84]

  Riding for a fall, Charles issued four repressive ordinances including the suppression of press freedom just over a fortnight later. It was the last straw. The ensuing revolution of the three ‘Glorious Days’ at the end of July not only saw him forced to flee to asylum in England with the liberal Duke Louis-Philippe of Orleans chosen by the bourgeoisie as replacement monarch, it also rang the death knell of the hated guards regiments that had kept Charles X in power. In the six weeks between 14 August and the end of September 1830 the Swiss were paid off, leaving only one foreign regiment, composed of a mixture of nationalities.

  The Hohenlohe Regiment was stationed near the old port of Marseilles in the Fort St Jean, which coincidentally would see many later generations of Foreign Legion volunteers killing time within its walls until they were shipped out to Algeria to begin training. Apart from giving band concerts to entertain the townsfolk in the afternoons, the regiment had kept a low profile during the July Revolution, in return for which the Marseilles National Guard commander declared them naturalised Frenchmen with the honour of sporting a regimental number on their shakos instead of the H for Hohenlohe, which indicated foreign status.

  The government did not agree and decided on 12 December to despatch these embarrassing aliens to the French garrison of Morea near Patras, which was supporting Greek independence fighters in western Greece. Less than a month later the government changed its mind and ordered the regiment disbanded on 5 January 1831. For a brief period, France had no foreign soldiers in her pay.

  At the time, Paris could claim literally to be the City of Light, with several streets lit by gas lamps. Victor Hugo was campaigning against the death penalty after witnessing a public guillotining that went hideously wrong. Louis Braille had invented his system of embossed dots enabling blind people to ‘read’. A nation-wide daily postal service was starting. The Academy of Sciences was divided by the debate over the theory of the origin of species.

  An outbreak of cholera in Stains on the outskirts of Paris claimed fifteen victims, but for those with money the capital offered distractions a-plenty. Virginie Dejazet, an actress specialising in male roles, was playing Bonaparte to full houses. Rossini had just produced his opera William Tell at the Peletier Hall and Hector Berlioz heard the first performance of his Symphonie Fantastique after marching in the streets during the July Revolution.

  From all corners of Europe, deserters and dissidents were flooding into France, whose post-Revolutionary governments had made it a pays d’accueil, or country of asylum, by unilaterally revoking the extradition treaties with the monarchist governments of Europe, imposed by the Congress of Vienna. Penniless, homeless and workless, the newcomers were tinder awaiting a spark. Riots, broken glass and burning buildings had been everyday scenes towards the end of Charles X’s reign, and Louis-Philippe’s government was all too well aware that violence could break out again.

  Napoleon’s veteran Marshal Soult,
having expiated his loyalty to the Emperor by his own exile after the Hundred Days, was appointed Minister of War. It is he who is generally credited with the idea of creating the Foreign Legion, much as the English preferred to hire unemployed and dispossessed Scots and Irishmen or British-officered colonial forces to fight their imperial wars, rather than waste their own industrial manpower. The Indian army had been recruiting since 1765 and Britain’s famous Gurkha mercenaries had been fighting for the Crown since 1817 when the Cuttack Legion was raised.

  Soult was a soldier who had taken a leading part in the greatest military gamble since Rome. Yet, with the growth in political and military power of the German states, it was obvious that France’s much-reduced army could not hope to extend French influence in Europe again in his lifetime.

  Additionally, the army had lost so many French lives under Napoleon that it was understandably not popular since his fall, whereas the comparatively unbesmirched French navy held the key to the next phase of French expansion, with the Ministère de la Marine or Admiralty controlling the transport facilities and having the weaponry and the know-how to bombard and seize major seaports around the world, and then to put ashore les marins-soldats of its marine regiments who could garrison the captured cities and thus win colony after colony for France.

  By creating under the War Ministry a regiment exclusively for deployment abroad composed of foreigners with previous military experience, Soult was giving the army a new lease of life in the only area of expansion still open to France: the winning of an overseas empire to replace Napoleon’s lost European one. Put another way, he was playing the old game of inter-service rivalry at the same time as ridding France’s cities of their dangerous dross. However, to get around the anti-military feeling of the time, he argued publicly for a legion of foreigners as a good way of getting off the streets and into uniform the dissidents with military experience who had been so prominent in the riots that unseated Charles X.