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...