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I saw the French Foreign Legion just once, marching slow, dire and perfect at the end of a Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysees. They marched at the funereal legion pas, 88 steps a minute instead of the standard 120—carrying not rifles but polished axes, and wearing buffalo leather aprons as if intending fabulous and deliberate carnage in their white kepi hats, their white gloves, their beards.
These were the Pioneers, a unit that harks back to the Legion’s founding in 1831, when foreigners with axes were recruited to demolish defenses of the great unwashed of Algeria. Legionnaires were the worldwide muscle of the French empire, la mission civilisatrice which would come full circle and end in defeat for the Legion in Algeria in 1962. Some of those defeated legionnaires had been defeated earlier in Indochina, and many of those in turn had been defeated as Wehrmacht Germans in World War II.
There has been much defeat in Legion history—it’s easy to name catastrophes, hard to recall victories.
A Legion general in the 1880s: “You legionnaires are soldiers marked for death and I am sending you where you can die.”
America’s Alan Seeger, an upper-class bohemian legionnaire, became immortal in poetry anthologies by writing: “I have a rendezvous with death.” He died in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.
The trick is to find glory in death, in the manner of the Alamo. Here lies the Legion’s allure—in its reveling in lost causes, in fighting to the last man, in the old tattoo credo: Death Before Dishonor. This is one of the deeper, crazier and more eternal mysteries of manhood, and probably no one is better than the Legion at making it a philosophy.
Its greatest holiday commemorates the defeat at the Battle of Camaron in 1863.
Under Captain Jean Danjou, who had a prosthetic hand carved from wood, 65 men vowed to fight to the death against 3,000-or-so Mexican soldiers. They fought, they died. When the last five ran out of ammunition, they attacked the Mexicans with their bayonets. Three survived, along with the wooden hand, which resides now in the Legion’s Museum of Memory in France, a relic displayed every year on the battle’s anniversary.
This sort of grisly romance provokes the writing of books. The latest is from N.J. Valldejuli, recalling his youth as a prep-school kid who graduated from Kenyon College and then in 1986 disdained the bounties of America and joined the Legion.
“Contented men do not volunteer for the kind of service and commitment the Foreign Legion demands,” he writes in Inside the Foreign Legion: Adventures With the World’s Most Famous Fighting Force.
The stereotype of Legion candidates is spurned lovers or criminals on the run. Valldejuli was neither, he says. But something was wrong. He was working at sales jobs, teaching Spanish at a military school. He read a memoir of the Legion. He flew to France and survived the Legion’s fierce winnowing to become one of the foreigners who constitute 85 percent of the 9000 legionnaires. He lasted two years of a five-year commitment until a medical discharge.
And now, decades later, he has compiled a sizable volume of notes on both his experience and his later research.
Trashed Talk
With no major combat to report from his short enlistment, he might have dwelled more on the beauty of military life in the Legion mode—the fastidious perfection, the self-abnegating discipline, the pride. But Valldejuli seems more fascinated by the squalor of discontented men who have stranded themselves outside civil society.
“When a good legionnaire isn’t whoring, he’s usually drinking and later fighting,” he says.
Young men of this ilk, everywhere in the world, are looking for trouble. They find it in bars, on motorcycles, in riots at soccer stadiums, in gang wars. They tend to say “I’m not looking for trouble,” but they are, and they find it. And some of them turn pro by finding their ways into elite military outfits.
Valldejuli writes: “No legionnaire joins thinking of future college financial aid, health care benefits or impressing a civilian employer. A man joins the Legion to fight.”
For some reason hidden in male chromosomes, the ecstasy of violence and vandalism exists side by side with brutal discipline: unquestioning obedience, pointless precision, turning everyday behavior into precise rituals—making beds, shining shoes, walking down the street. Elite military training is ferocious in its suppression of individuality, which in the Legion goes as far as the assigning of new names.
It’s all part of a male pursuit of self-sacrifice, as in the old Marine Corps joke: “The Corps is the finest machine ever devised for the killing of young American men.”
With no imperial wars at hand, the Legion now functions as a sort of constabulary in former French possessions in Africa, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and in South America.
On duty in French Guiana, for instance, they guard against illegal gold miners.
Off duty, they delight in disorder. One night, Valldejuli writes, an English legionnaire was killed by civilians in a brawl. His buddies returned a few weeks later with nightsticks. “They just started from one end of the street to the other. Just destroyed everything. Cars, people, shops, everything.”
One legend tells of the “Dance of the Flaming Asshole” in which a Guiana legionnaire shoved newspaper up his anus and set it on fire.
Bar Stool Stories
The book provides little of the colorful history of the Legion and a lot of these stories, the sort of stories veterans swap—rueful but nostalgic anecdotes of outrage and humiliation. Often they are true but the charm they have for the teller does not always survive the telling. This is history as told from the next bar stool.
Men like to pretend that women are the mysterious half of our species but books like this are reminders that men can also exist in a bewildering world of self-absorbed illogic. And we need them there. Not too many of them, mind you, but enough to endure grotesque pain, take ridiculous chances and fight to the death when honor or duty calls, which it does sometimes.
As it happens, there are no women legionnaires. Hard to imagine such a thing, especially the Pioneers commemorating mayhem by slow-marching down the Champs Elysees on Bastille Day, wearing leather aprons, each right shoulder bearing a well-shined axe.
Inside the French Foreign Legion: Adventures With the World’s Most Famous Fighting Force
by N.J. Valldejuli
Stackpole Books, December 2023
Inglorious Bastards
Very interesting. Very few Americans served in the Legion during WWII. One who did, and with distinction was John F. (Jack) Hasey. He clearly had a desire to be where the action was. A young American living and working in Europe at the time, he volunteered to drive an ambulance in Finland's Winter War with the Soviet Union.
Following that, when Great Britain and France went to war with the Axis, Hasey enlisted in the Legion. He was seriously wounded in action. While in the hospital, he received a personal letter from General de Gaulle, which said in part:
"Just as you were the first American citizen to shed his blood to free France from the oppressors, so I wish you to be the first American citizen to become Comagnon de l'ordre de la Liberation."
That medal was given only to those who rallied early on to join de Gaulle's Free French forces and was a very high honor.
After the war, Hasey joined the CIA where he served a long career as a case officer, which is where I met him.
For those interested in reading about Hasey's service in the Legion, he tells it himself in a book entitled "Yankee Fighter: The Story of an American in the Free French Foreign Legion."
Larry Brown
Ex-CIA case officer
Colonel (Retired), Military Intelligence, US Army Reserve
An occasion to mention Gen. Christian Piquemal, Commandant of the Foreign Legion from 1994 to 1999. Christian Piquemal is the retired Commandant of the Legion (1994 to 1999)..
At 75, he was struck off the generals of the 2nd section for breach of the duty of reserve and loyalty after participating in a far-right anti-migrants political demonstration in 2016 around the Calais Jungle (alongside the RN's Marine Le Pen, the German anti-Muslim PEGIDA and the Putin-supported Night Wolves bikers (serving military in France are subject to a strict "obligation of reserve" until thy reach 2ème section ie semi-retirement). In 2021, Piquemal was one of the signatories of a letter from former generals admirals and retired military personnel calling for the overthrow of President Macron should he sign the Marrakech accord which basically says one should be nice with migrants. He did sign.
Piquemal is active on LinkedIn as an anti NATO, anti-EU and pro-Russian, pro-"Eurasia" propagandist. As I had been fighting hard on LinkedIn those right-wing extremists and enemies of democracy, Piquemal took the step of writing a circular letter as former Commander of he Foreign Legion, designating me as a dangerous actor to be barred from all "patriotic and Christian" LinkedIn groups/ So I just se proxies.
Note that Gen Martinez (another would-be putschist prominent far-right retired general) and Piquemal have contacts with Vostok France Solidarité Donbass, a GRU outfit which used to recruit mercenaries to fight with the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas. They are at 10 Impasse du Bocage, Annecy-le-Vieux, Haute-Savoie, France.