Conceived in fear and mistrust, this fighting force of unmanageable misfits and deserters survived, thrived and earned its country’s grudging respect.
Time was, films about the French Foreign Legion were themselves legion. P.C. Wren’s 1924 romantic novel, Beau Geste, unleashed a sandstorm of popular legion-inspired celluloid. Filmmakers have since released at least four movies directly based on the novel, with stars ranging from Ronald Colman to Gary Cooper and Telly Savalas, while scores of other legion-related films produced in the 20th century practically constitute their own genre of outback swashbucklers. But moviegoers’ ardor for films about stouthearted maverick legionnaires has faded so in recent years (the latest iteration was Deserter in 2002) that the most commonly asked question about the French Foreign Legion today is, “Mon Dieu, does that thing still exist?”
The legion was conceived as a provisional solution to a fleeting problem —the migration of undesirable persons into France in the wake of revolutions throughout Europe in 1830–31.
In retrospect, a military remedy to illegal immigration appears both contemporary and imaginative. The July Revolution of 1830 had resuscitated the French Revolutionary concept of a citizen army and led to disbandment of the Swiss Guards and other foreign formations that had enforced Bourbon mastery of such uprisings. To address the resulting coagulation of refugees in French cities, King Louis-Philippe on March 9, 1831, signed into law an act creating a ghetto foreign force within a citizen army. Recruiters quickly enlisted the undesirable aliens and packed them off to Algiers — et adieu, la Légion!
