French Foreign Legion Research Articles

Changes in the Composition, Equipment and Tactics of the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion during the Indochina War

For nearly a hundred years after its creation, the French Foreign Legion consisted exclusively of infantry units, supplemented only temporarily by “mounted” infantry units, depending on the needs of the theatre of operations. These units did not exceed the size of a company, and their members used their mounts (horses, mules, camels) only to move around, and continued to fight their battles on foot. Based on this positive experience, the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment was created in 1922, and was then successfully deployed in Syria and Morocco between the two World Wars, and with varying effectiveness in France, Tunisia and Germany during the Second World War. The First Indochina War broke out in 1946 and the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment joined the conflict in Southeast Asia in 1947, only to leave in 1955 as one of the last French units. During the war, the ranks of the troop, composed mainly of foreign nationals, were reinforced within a short time by a significant number of local soldiers to alleviate the permanent shortage. In addition, depending on local geography, the unit was equipped with armoured and amphibious vehicles, and sometimes ships, which were used to develop new tactics and operate effectively in these new and very different circumstances. In view of its successes, the unit was greatly improved, originally consisting of 7 squadrons, and by the end of the conflict it had grown to 18 squadrons.

A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria

In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.

The Hungarian Members of the French Foreign Legion in the Battle of France in 1940

In the period between the two world wars, a significant number of Hungarians settled down in France for various reasons. After France entered the war in September 1939, many of the members of the Hungarian diaspora living in France joined the French army. These candidates who did not have French nationality were assigned to the French Foreign Legion by the French military command. These new recruits were trained in the south of France, after which they were deployed against the German army, which was on the offensive in May and June 1940. Many were killed in the fierce fighting, and afterwards many Hungarians were taken prisoner of war by the Germans. The present study attempts, based on the available French and Hungarian archival sources, to present the members of this particular group, as well as a sketch of the history of the units in which these soldiers served during the Battle of France.

Memoirs of the Foreign Legion

Maurice Magnus was 39 years old when he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to join the fight against Germany in World War I. Magnus was an American expatriot living in Rome—a theatrical agent, tutor, newspaper correspondent, writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. He soon discovered his error—the Legion he found consisted largely of German exiles, prison-avoiding felons, and contemptuous French officers. Magnus spent about six weeks training in North Africa before a transfer to southern France provided the opportunity to desert and flee back to Italy. The Memoirs recounts his brief disenchanted tenure as a Legionnaire. After his military service his various enterprises had little success, and in 1920 a run of bad checks caused him to skip from Italy to Malta. Traced there eventually by the authorities, he faced extradition for charges of fraud and in desperation committed suicide. His acquaintances Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence prepared his Memoirs of the Foreign Legion for publication, hoping to clear the debts he left behind, and Lawrence wrote a long unflattering introduction. In the present volume the Memoirs is printed first, so readers have an unprejudiced experience of the text with Lawrence’s essay following for additional context. Magnus’s narrative contains offensive language. Some passages in his manuscript describing homosexual incidents that were excised by the original publisher are restored in this edition.

The Legend of the Legion: Nihilism and the Restoration of the Aristocracy in Ouida’s Under Two Flags

Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) is not a widely read Victorian novel today, but it is offers important insight into the philosophical concerns of a novelist who was hugely popular in her time. In Under Two Flags, Ouida explores what she saw as the epistemological problem developing in the nineteenth century, a nihilistic view that promoted scepticism, aestheticism, and idleness, which is a perspective she believed was responsible for the demise of the aristocracy. Wishing to restore the power and position of the aristocracy, Ouida sends her protagonist Bertie Cecil, a dandy who embodies the aestheticism and ennui of the upper class, to the French Foreign Legion in order to make an important social and psychological point. Ouida draws upon the legend that the French Foreign Legion rehabilitated its wayward recruits to present a society in which something is demanded of Bertie and where he rises to that demand. Symbolically speaking, Bertie regains his inheritance and his title in the novel only after a radical transformation that restores him, and by implication the aristocracy, to a foundational moral and chivalrous code.

The Complexities of Exile, the Other, and the Postcolonial Predicament in Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cáit Murphy argues that Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) expresses an “accented style,” citing Hamid Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema in his 2001 study, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Drawing on Denis’s own exilic background, Murphy analyzes the depiction of contradictory exile in Denis’s film. Working from Naficy’s criteria for accented cinema, such as epistolarity, cultural hybridity, and Bakhtinian chronotopes, Murphy argues that the film’s protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant) and the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti are paradoxical representations of belonging and Otherness.

Anti-Pathos

Anti-Pathos

Professional Adaptation of North Caucasians in Emigration (1920–1930s, France)

This article considers models of the professional arrangement of North Caucasian émigrés in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Using new archival and field ethnographic materials, we explore the social and political activities of North Caucasians as a profession and as a view of life; and the activities of the Caucasian group of oil owners (leader — Nobel), who before the Revolution were engaged in oil production in the Caucasus or owned shares of oil firms. France had the most cars in Europe for the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, it was not surprising that many emigrants from Russia, including North Caucasians, began working as chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and auto mechanics. In addition, they often became employees of auto factories (e. g. as specialists and laborers). Since there were many military people among North Caucasian émigrés, many they decided to join the French Foreign Legion. Emigrants from the North Caucasus pursued publishing, literary, journalistic, scientific, and teaching activities. In Russia many North Caucasians received a legal education but could not work as lawyers in France. Medical activity was also rare. In emigration there were several North Caucasians who became artists, singers, and dancers who performed in restaurants opened by North Caucasians. The children of the first wave of North Caucasian emigrants, as a rule, received higher education in France, and many of them managed to obtain excellent careers.

Dismantling a world: France’s monumental military heritage in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria

ABSTRACT The history of France’s war memorials is a much-studied domain of scholarly inquiry. According to historian Antoine Prost, constructing monuments on a grand scale to commemorate wars was a response to the staggering number of 1,300,000 French dead in World War I. Among those who fought for France in 1914–18 were 343,000 conscripted and mobilised Algerians divided according to colonial categories between French citizens and indigènes, the latter drafted as French subjects. So widespread was the ‘cult of the monument’ that the term ‘statuomania’ was coined by historian Maurice Agulhon to account for 36,000 war memorials erected in the interwar period throughout France and its overseas territories, especially in Algeria, which was integrated as France’s southernmost province. The significance of French colonists implanting statues was well understood by the native Algerian population who linked a colonial Algeria known for a plethora of monuments to the visible and materialised expressions of colonial power and occupation. Analysing how the formerly colonised of Algeria address the enduring material presence of statues, steles, monuments, and other effigies of the colonial past, this essay draws on concepts such as ‘dark heritage’ and ‘difficult heritage’. My case study is the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, headquarters and cradle of the French Foreign Legion until 1962 and the different fates of its two war memorials after Algeria’s 1962 independence from France.

California at War: The State and the People during World War I. By Diane M.T. North

California at War is a well-researched and well-written study that offers something for historians in all fields. World War I propelled California into the modern age and the impact of the conflict affected its citizens from all walks of life. Dividing her book into three lengthy sections, University of Maryland history professor Diane T. North covers the men and women who served overseas, the impact of war on the home front, and lastly, the encroachment on civil liberties, especially through interference by the American Protective League (APL). Californians served overseas with the Allies well before the U.S. joined the fray in 1917. In a chapter titled “The Great Adventure,” North highlights some of these veterans, including in the American Field Service, the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Escadrille. As expected, it is the state’s doughboys fighting with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) who receive the most attention. California was well-represented in all of the 1918 Western Front battles, as well as operations in North Russia and Siberia. Women did their part overseas as telephone operators and American Red Cross volunteers.

Hungarians Fighting for France in Indochina

After the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of young Hungarians became prisoners of war (POW). Most of them were transported to the east, to the Soviet Union, but still large numbers were captured by French, British or American troops after the collapse of the Third Reich. Hungarians and Germans joined the French Foreign Legion (FFL) in large numbers due to the terrible living conditions of the prison camps. Thousands of former Honvéd soldiers and members of the Hungarian Royal Levente Movement joined the Légion Étrangère to escape those camps, just to die for France in Indochina, from the mountains of Cao Bang to the fields of Dien Bien Phu. This period of the FFL is less researched than the well-known “périod hongrois” (Hungarian Period), the wave of refugees after the ill-fated 1956 Revolution. This article is about those young men, who went from a war to another just to fight on an even more lethal battlefield.

Colonial Violence and the Roots of Fascist Writing

Abstract This article explores the connection between fascist writing and modern colonialism through the analysis of several works produced by F.T. Marinetti, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, and Ernst Jünger. Each of them visited Africa at some point in their lives. Marinetti spent fall 1911 in Libya, where he reported on the Turco-Italian War; his chronicles were collected in La Bataille de Tripoli (1912). Sánchez Mazas was sent to Morocco in fall 1921 as the war correspondent for El pueblo vasco, a daily that published his series of articles - “La campaña de África” - on the Rif War. Jünger went to Algeria in 1913 to receive training as a new member of the French Foreign Legion, an episode that he would novelize in Afrikanische Spiele (1936). This study contends that the stay of these three writers in Africa was an event that, together with other factors, determined their fascism.

Seven years follow-up of early repolarisation patterns in French elite special forces.

The early repolarization pattern (ERP) may be a marker of increased risk for sudden cardiac death (SCD). Influence of ethnicity on the ERP has not been extensively studied. The aim of this study was to evaluate the epidemiology of ERP in a male multiethnic population. ECG analysis was performed among consecutive recruits from the French Foreign Legion. ERP was characterized by a J-point elevation ≥0.1mV in two continuous inferior-lateral leads, and high amplitude early repolarization (HAER-potentially malignant pattern) by an elevation ≥0.2mV. Ethnical affiliation and level of physical activity were recorded. A total of 2508 healthy men (24±5years old) from 105 different native countries were divided into three ethnic groups: 1689 Whites, 388 Afro-Caribbean, and 431 Asians. ERP was found in 489 recruits (19%), 14% in Whites, 33% in Afro-Caribbeans, and 27% in Asians without any difference according to age and physical activity. Sub-Saharan Africans or Caribbeans had the highest rate of ERP (30%), and Hispanics the lowest (8%). People from occidental countries, Middle East, Central Asia or India had a rate of 12%-18%, East and South-Asia 20%-25%. Madagascar was an exception with only 16% of ERP. HAER (2.9%) was more frequent among Asian recruits. After 5±2years of follow up, one SCD occurred in the ERP group (p=0.042). This study reports a large multiethnic analysis of ERP. HAER was more frequent in recruits from East and South-East Asia where sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome is endemic.

Spanish or Catalans? Competing identifications among Spaniard volunteers in the French foreign legion during WWI

Despite Spain’s neutrality during the First World War, 2000 Spaniards (a thousand of them from Catalonia) fought with the French Foreing Legion. The majority of them were scarcely politicized immigrants living and working in France when the conflict broke out. Catalan separatism used the enlistment of those natives from Catalonia for propaganda purposes. Separatists aimed to internationalize the nationalist cause and sought support from the Allies. The creation of a Catalan Committee of Brotherhood in Barcelona and a Spanish Patronate of Brotherhood in Madrid distorted the life of those combatants. Through the correspondence maintained with one or both organizations the volunteers from Catalonia became aware of their national identity. They realized that modelling their national adscription to the Spanish or the Catalan project could be useful to obtain parcels, with first aid products, food, money and newspapers, from one or both committees. This paper explores this process and shows the instrumentalization of self-identities during the First World War among Spaniard combatants.

A Sociology of the Total Organization: Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion

A Sociology of the Total Organization: Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion

The Limits of Democracy and the Postcolonial Nation State: Mali's Democratic Experiment Falters, while Jihad and Terrorism Grow in the Sahara (Summary and Final Chapter)

The legitimacy of not just “democracy” but of the African State itself, is challenged by the crisis in Mali, The crisis provoked by the coup d’etat of March 2012, led to the collapse of the democratic Malian state, a jihadist Al Qaida take-over of North Mali, and the return of the French Foreign Legion to the Sahara after 54 years of Malian Independence. Why did the Malian State collapse in 2012? Were the various Tuareg revolts in North Mali a symptom of State failure, rather than its cause? What were the causes and sources of the jihadi take-over of North Mali in 2012, led by Algerian drug smugglers and Pakistani preachers? Why did the French intervene militarily in January 2013 and will they now stay? What chance has Mali of determining its own future, confronted by the power of international corporations: extractive corporations, criminal mafia corporations, and religious corporations? With 12,000 UN peacekeepers (MINUSMA) and the election of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2013, what now are the prospects for peace and democracy on Mali? What mechanisms exist within Malian society, that might build a sustainable peace economy? How can women mobilize family networks to promote peace and to create employment? Will their efforts avert another round of civil war in 2030?

The Garibaldian Volunteers in France during the First World War

The Garibaldian Volunteers in France during the First World War This article traces the history of some 2300 Italian volunteers who formed part of the Garibaldi Legion, which was incorporated into the French Foreign Legion, from November 1914 to March 1915. Led by Peppino Garibaldi, Giuseppe Garibaldi's grandson, the Legion consisted of Italian immigrants who lived in France as well as artists, political activists and others who came from Italy. The article examines the diverse motivations that prompted these volunteers to enlist. It also assesses the wartime conduct of the Legion, which was decimated by German troops in Argonne in December 1914 and January 1915. Finally, the article illustrates how, once their military role ended, the memory of these Garibaldian volunteers was used to serve various propagandistic and political purposes. In spring 1915, the fallen volunteers and the veterans were used by interventionists to urge neutral Italy to join the war on the Allies’ side. During the interwar period, their memory was exploited by both fascists and the anti-fascists.

Melanoma in a Chinese dragon tattoo

A 42-year-old white man presented to our clinic in October, 2015, with itching in the nasolabial fold and around the eyebrows, with accompaying erythema and desquamation consistent with seborrhoeic dermatitis. We noted multiple naevi on whole body dermatological examination, as well as a multicoloured tattoo of a Chinese dragon covering almost his entire back, arms, and chest. On closer inspection he had one clinically dysplastic pigmented naevus, sited within a scale of the dragon's tail (figure). He reported having the tattoo done 1 year previously, but the naevus had been present at least 5 years earlier, and the tattoo artist had purposefully worked around the existing lesion. The patient had type II skin with blonde hair and blue eyes, and had previously worked in the French Foreign Legion during which time he had had prolonged sun exposure. He reported no medical history apart from multiple painful sunburns in childhood, took no medication, and family history for dermatological disease was negative. We did total surgical excision with 1 cm surgical margins. Histological examination confirmed the diagnosis of superficial spreading melanoma with tumour thickness 0·26 mm, and the tumour was classified as IA according to the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system. Additional screening tests were within the normal range. We have given sun care education and planned follow-up in line with the AJCC recommendations for melanoma stage IA. The patient remains well with no signs of further disease.

The RAF's French Foreign Legion: De Gaulle, the British and the Re-emergence of French Airpower 1940-45

The RAF's French Foreign Legion: De Gaulle, the British and the Re-emergence of French Airpower 1940-45

Mercenaries, hybrid armies and national security: private soldiers and the state in the 21st century

1. Introduction 2. Non-state Warriors 3. Soldiers and national security 4. The French Foreign Legion 5. Executive Outcomes 6. American contractors 7. Citizens, soldiers and state control 8. Conclusion