At the Edge of the World

The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

An Early History of the Legion

Ernst Jünger, famous German fighter in World War I and writer, joined the French Foreign Legion in 1913. Born to a well-to-do family of Heidelberg, the eldest of seven children, he dreamed of seeing Africa. He showed up at the Legion's office in Verdun, where the recruitment officer welcome him:

"Young man, I hear that you want to go to Africa. Have you thought it over carefully? There is fighting every day down there."

This was naturally music to my ears. And I hastened to answer that I was looking for a life of adventure.

"Not bad. You will do well. I shall now give you an enlistment paper to sign."

And taking a printed form from a pile of papers, he added: "You can choose a new name if you like, if you don't like your old one anymore. We don't ask for documents."

Although the Legion allowed recruits to enlist under a borrowed name, it did demand that they disclose their true identity. Thus Jünger enlisted as Herbert Berger, service number 15308. He took a train to Marseilles and soon found himself performing drills under the hot Algerian sun, in Sidi Bel Abbès, where the main base of the Legion stood. Some twenty years earlier, the Briton George Mannington had faced a more dubious welcome when he showed up at the Legion's recruiting office, armed with equal determination to live adventures on other shores: "No! No! A good dinner at the Moulin Rouge and tomorrow you will be cured, sacré bleu!" said the recruiter as he swatted Mannington away.

This attraction that pulled young men toward the Foreign Legion in the last decades of the eighteen hundreds and until after World War I, with enough resolution to brave one of those surly recruiters of the French army bureaus, and constitute of force of approximately 11,500 men by 1900, is a complex phenomenon to approach. It must first be understood in the context of France's intricate political history and equally turbulent foreign relations and colonial policy and adventures.

Out of political mayhem was the Foreign Legion created in 1831. The French Bourbon kings, restored after the abdication and exile of Napoléon in 1814, hardly reinstated the people's faith in the old monarchy. Louis XVIII died in 1824 and King Charles X succeeded him on the throne to face an economic and political crisis, which, after a series of authoritarian measures aimed at propping up his regime, led to a revolution in July 1830. Paris rioted and barricades blocked the streets of the capital. Charles X's flight from France allowed the Orléans branch of the dynasty to inaugurate a constitutional, more liberal monarchy, and King Louis-Philippe, who would reign until 1848 in this "July Monarchy," incarnated for a while France's deep desire for calm.

Louis-Philippe, in the first months of his reign, faced an unsettled France. European refugees — Italians, Poles, Germans, Spanish — had converged on France in a year when many other capitals were being shaken by political unrest. Other foreigners roamed aimless: the Swiss soldiers of the old monarch's traditional guards who had been disbanded after they defended the king during the July revolution, leftover fighters from regiments that Napoléon had raised abroad — France had had a long history of using foreign-born soldiers for hire. Then there were immigrants, with no work. What to do with a substantial population that could fuel yet more trouble out of misery and boredom? On March 9, 1831, the French legislative assembly voted a law allowing the creation of new army regiments, where foreign-born men between the ages of eighteen and forty could enlist: The French Foreign Legion was born.

Authorities had conceived of the Legion as a temporary solution to a threat to public order. But there was another reason to create the corps: Algeria, where France had launched an uncertain colonial endeavor just a year before, needed an army corps that could face danger and human losses without drawing the political backlash that French-born victims would elicit.

Hence, the Legion's destiny was tied with France's most important colonial venture. Charles X, the monarch chased away in 1830, had thought that he would boost his political fortunes with a resounding foreign coup. On July 5, 1830, after landing in Algeria with a force of twenty-seven thousand men, the French took Algiers. They seized the major ports of the coast, causing destruction and death. The justifications for this occupation appeared as trivial as they turned out to be catastrophic. The representative of the Sultan in Algiers, the dey, had had a quarrel with the French consul over a long-standing commercial dispute. On April 29, 1827, three years before the expedition, tempers had flared and the dey used his fly swatter to strike the Frenchman in the face during an audience. Martial temperaments won out in Paris, and the expedition sailed from the French military port of Toulon. When the news of the landing and taking of Algiers reached Paris, the revolution of July 1830 was already under way, and the reign of Charles X was already irreversibly compromised.

Charles's successor, Louis-Philippe, who created the Legion, inherited an unwieldy situation, and in the turmoil of his first years in power, he could not decide on a firm policy on Algeria. Economic interests in Marseilles were for keeping French control over the main coastal cities, such as Algiers and Oran, and they prevailed against a public opinion that saw nothing of interest in Algeria. In 1832, a year after the creation of their corps, the legionnaires landed in Algeria to fight their first battle on April 7, 1832, south of Algiers, a scuffle during which the corps lost its first officer, Lieutenant Cham. The Legion went at work on infrastructural projects, while disease exacted a terrible toll on its members. Eventually, Joseph Bernelle, the commander of the Legion in 1833, decided to mix soldiers of different nationalities within the battalions; until then recruits had been grouped by region of origin.

What had been planned by Charles X's and his army leaders as a punitive excursion and a takeover of Algeria's ports became an unplanned full colonial invasion. Often in European wars, taking the capital of a country signaled victory for the invaders. In Algeria, however, this did not apply. Even though the dey had been removed, the French found a population determined to resist their advance and send them back to their shores on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Algeria at that time can hardly be characterized as a body of people united by a national sentiment, but it was not a mere patchwork of populations, either: Many texts refer to it as the Country of Algeria, and that country existed under one religion. After Roman legions had settled the land during the first two centuries of the Christian era, a fact not lost on the French legionnaires who would fight there, the Arabs had swept through North Africa during the second half of the seventh century and the eighth century, bringing their religion to the indigenous Amazigh populations. Centuries later, in the early sixteenth century, Algeria remained a land of Islam under the domination of the Ottomans, known as the Regency of Algiers. Although to most French people the name Algeria evoked the pirates who used Algiers as a base to attack their vessels, seize the goods they transported, and sell their passengers into slavery, most Algerians supported themselves through agriculture and herding, in groups that viewed themselves first and foremost as belonging to a village of tents, a douar, and then identified by tribe. This population numbered about three million at the time of the French landing.

The Emir Abdelkader is remembered as a national hero by Algerians for organizing the Algerian people's resistance against the French. Other local potentates also played important parts. The hostility shown the French by Ahmed, the bey of Constantine, led to a French expedition in October 1837 to take over his city. Thanks to a bold rush through a breach opened through the fortifications (when the rallying cry Oh! La Légion! would have been first heard), the legionnaires, led by Achille de Saint-Arnaud, at great cost, forged at Constantine an important link in a history of brave, resolutely cool charges under extreme fire. Still, the name that stands out in the history of the Algerian resistance remains that of Abdelkader. A learned, pious young man from a prestigious family of religious figures, this leader was also an excellent warrior.

Abdelkader fought the French in a holy war until 1837. Then, the Algerian leader struck a compromise with the invaders. By the Treaty of Tafna, he received the right to rule over large parts of Algeria, while the French retained sovereignty over Algiers and other regions of the coast. Abdelkader used the peace times to create a federation of Algerian tribes, with its own army, fiscal system, and religious authority. In short, a state took shape alongside the colonial establishment of French Algeria. By then, French settlers were already arriving to occupy the country. By 1839 it had become apparent that colonization would extend much farther than was originally agreed, and Abdelkader repudiated the treaty and relentlessly attacked French settlements, as well as the military outposts and the convoys that moved between them.

This is when the Legion found more opportunities to strike and further reinforce an emerging esprit de corps. Governor-General Thomas Robert Bugeaud arrived in 1841 to strike back at Abdelkader's forces. Bugeaud, who stemmed from the lesser nobility of the Périgord region and had risen as a politician, was also a seasoned military man, already a veteran of Algeria (1836–1837) and a lieutenant-general at the time of his appointment as governor-general. German legionnaire Clemens Lamping, who served under Bugeaud, described him this way:

He appears to be fifty, and has an air of great determination and coolness. He is of middle size and strongly built; his face is much sunburnt, but pleasing; and he would be taken for a younger man than he is, did not his snow-white hair betray his age. Bugeaud is a man of restless activity, and keeps everyone alert by his continued presence.

Blunt authoritarianism and resourcefulness thrived under Bugeaud's determination and coolness.

When Bugeaud arrived he found a relatively small array of corps, composing the Armée d'Afrique. Throughout the history of their corps the legionnaires fought alongside soldiers from other formations, especially in the wars of colonial conquest. Some of these corps were first raised in Algeria for the needs of the colonial occupation. The Zouaves, a unit founded in 1830, was recruited first from the Berber Zwawa tribes of Algeria (hence their name), and eventually from the French and European settler population. The Algerians also contributed to the Skirmishers, an infantry troop, and the Spahis, a cavalry unit known for its flamboyant uniform with a cape. Present on the colonial war theaters, alongside the Armée d'Afrique, were the Troupes de Marine belonging to the navy. Nicknamed Marsouins, they took the name Troupes Coloniales in 1900. After Bugeaud's arrival in 1841, the Legion troops forming five battalions split into two regiments — the Second Regiment went to Saïda in western Algeria. By 1847, the Armée d'Afrique under Bugeaud had grown to one hundred thousand soldiers.

The sheer number of troops was less important to Bugeaud than the method of warfare, however. For Bugeaud, military success against Abdelkader depended on rejecting the war methods of an army that still wanted to relive the epic of the great Napoleonic campaigns: all swaggering attacks and French fury. The urgent question that the French faced at that juncture was how to wage war in extremely hostile terrain such as the arid mountains and the desert. The tribesmen of Abdelkader had a decisive advantage against columns weighed by artillery, water, and forage for their mounts. "We must forget those orchestrated and dramatic battles that civilized people fight against one another, and realize that unconventional tactics are the soul of this war," Bugeaud wrote.

The Legion entered here in a redefined role. Aiming to create mobile units that could survive on their own with few resources and rapidly reach Abdelkader's bands, notably in the mountains of Kabylia, Bugeaud gave the troops an opportunity to test their mettle. The Legion of those years had first failed to impress Bugeaud: He found it to be quite a ragged lot, and even considered dissolving the corps in 1842. Political refugees, coming from Spain in the wake of the Carlist wars, filled the ranks in the early 1840s. Desertion, even to Abdelkader army, was endemic, stoked by poor leadership. The dangers of drinking the water made wine a preferable choice, enabling alcoholism.

Legionnaire training under Bugeaud strained the men to their maximum capacity. Under the relentless North African sun, soldiers marched on for hours. Lamping describes a march dreadful enough to push a man to suicide. At last they would reach an enemy position, usually a remote village. What followed was ugly. There was another, much less savory aspect to Bugeaud's strategy for establishing permanent French colonial order over the Algerian territory, an aspect that also gave the Legion troops a ruthless reputation among the local populations.

Bugeaud was convinced that, since the Arab and Amazigh fighters did not fear death, his best chances of getting both psychological and concrete advantage was to destroy their property and make livelihood impossible over his enemy's ancestral lands. On and on, during raids called by their Arab name, razzias, villages were devastated, crops burned, palm trees and orchards felled, herds seized or destroyed.

Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on French colonialism, justified these tragedies as those "unfortunate necessities" of waging war with Arabs. Among soldiers, rationalizations of this kind are harder to discern. For those indigenous elements who had joined the French army, and who had often been at war themselves against Abdelkader troops, looting was in the order of things. Soldiers from Europe, enraged by the indigenous customs of torturing and mutilating the bodies of fallen, responded in kind. In France, there was a growing awareness of how Bugeaud's techniques contrasted with the self-declared civilization of its culture.

Abdelkader's forces ceded terrain from the beginning of the resolute campaign led by Bugeaud. In 1843, the French captured the encampment of Abdelkader, his smala, while he was absent — this smala must have numbered twenty thousand people, and several thousand fighters. When the Algerian emir sought and received the help of the Moroccan sultan against the French, Bugeaud won the Battle of Isly against the Moroccans, on August 14, 1844. On March 18, 1845, the peace treaty of Lalla Maghnia was signed between France and what would eventually become another of its colonies, in 1912. The Sultan of Morocco and France, in the treaty, agreed on a set border between the kingdom and French Algeria.

At long last, on December 23, 1847, Abdelkader surrendered, marking the end of a decisive phase of Algeria's colonial conquest and an era during which the Foreign Legion emerged as a most useful asset of colonial warfare. There was to be more sporadic violence in Algeria in the following years and decades. In 1849, for example, legionnaires from the First and Second Regiments besieged the oasis of Zaatcha, a costly operation for the French forces. Another battle involving Legion troops took place at Ischeriden, in 1857, against Kabyle warriors of Amazigh origin.

Lamping had noticed that although legionnaires appeared "brutal and undisciplined," they "formed a band, who, under an energetic leader, might do great things." Until Bugeaud, French military leadership had manifested damaging neglect. Inspectors from Paris "know nothing about the soldiers, and care nothing about them." With a leader such as Bugeaud and much opportunity for action, the performance of the corps improved significantly, as did solidarity created by a shared history. One Belgian legionnaire, Louis Lamborelle, commented: "Courage is also a bit of a matter of habit, and often one does not find it in itself on the first day. One must not forget either that courage has an older sibling called: the sentiment of honor and duty."

The colonization of Algeria proceeded at a steady pace beyond the coast and the rich Tell region that runs parallel to it. Bugeaud left an interesting legacy in the perspective of colonial settlement, for there was even more to his philosophy of war in a colonial context. In Burgeaud's view, the Legion had a role to play. Colonial authorities had seized vast expanses of land, and yet Algerian land often proved to be particularly difficult to exploit for Europeans who came with dreams of rapid wealth in the colonies, and often no practical experience in agriculture. Native agriculture, essentially geared to the needs of the douars, hardly provided principles of efficiency and high yields.