Beau Geste
April 24, 2017 9:05 PM   Subscribe

At the Legion’s tomblike headquarters there is a shrine: a wooden prosthetic hand that once belonged to Legion Captain Jean Danjou, who died in Mexico in 1863 defending a road for a long-forgotten cause. Around the roped off hand-shrine hang placards inscribed minutely with the names of the dead – all 40,000 of them, dating back to the Legion’s inception in 1831. The message is clear. Sacrifice is essential but you will not be forgotten.
posted by Chrysostom (16 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
I read this article a few days ago and it is HELLA FASCINATING, start to finish!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:39 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]


I knew someone whose brother had been in the British Army, deserted and joined the Legion. He summed up the difference by saying that if the SAS did a mission they would aim to pass through the forest and return quietly once it was done; not a leaf would be out of place and no-one would ever know they had been there. If the Legion did the same mission there would be a path through the forest a kilometre wide where everything had been flattened, because when the Legion did something you fucking well knew it.
posted by Segundus at 1:39 AM on April 25, 2017 [9 favorites]


What? No mention of the Legion's march song, Le Boudin? Here you are, blood sausage!
posted by elgilito at 4:25 AM on April 25, 2017


What's interesting to me is you start to look at pictures and realize the tactical cop in Michigan is wearing the same Mechanix gloves as the Legionnaire in Mali, and you think is there some newsletter these guys read? Are they all subscibers to Soldier of Fortune? And you realize they're just all looking at pictures of each other on the internet, and they all want to be elite operators operating operationally, so of course they all wear the same gloves.
posted by valkane at 5:01 AM on April 25, 2017 [7 favorites]


What? No mention of the Legion's march song, Le Boudin? Here you are, blood sausage!
posted by elgilito


Okay, I'll bite - sup with the serious shade thrown at the Belgians in that song?
posted by lazaruslong at 5:43 AM on April 25, 2017


From the wiki:
"The song makes also repeated reference to the fact that the Belgians are "lazy shirkers", this comes from the fact that the King of the Belgians, who wished to remain neutral in the Franco-German conflict, asked the French government to not commit the Belgian Legionnaires into the conflict. France agreed to this request and the Belgian Legionnaires remained in French Algeria (the Legion's home), to the dismay of the rest of the Legionnaires."
posted by domo at 6:11 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Great piece! But it is my job to disabuse you of this romantic linguistic legend:
Oddly enough, one of the few remaining influences of the Legion’s time in Mexico is the widespread acceptance of the French word for marriage to describe wedding musicians: the mariachi band.
Sure, it's possible that mariachi comes from mariage, but it's not particularly likely; the AHD (best dictionary for etymologies) doesn't even mention it: "[Mexican Spanish, perhaps from an indigenous language of Mexico.]"
posted by languagehat at 7:15 AM on April 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


This article is great! As a history of the legion and its culture I love it, but it didn't go so deep into the whole "death cult" mentality as the framing suggested, and I'd love to read a longer exploration of that. Like personally despite rationally having no interest in either hard physical labour or dying young I often find myself daydreaming about like, joining up with the YPG or otherwise going to the other side of the world and fighting somebody to the death, and I'd guess that the psychic background to that would make for a good book.
posted by bracems at 7:49 AM on April 25, 2017


I've often thought that if I were going to create an elite military force, one of my key techniques would be assigning each new recruit a "partner" -- a previous soldier who died in the line of duty. They'd be required to learn about the life and death of their partner, be required to carry their photo at all times, and be strongly encouraged to find parallels between the life of their partner and their own life, as well as what lessons they may personally draw from their partners death.

..then, at every group dinner, one soldier would be picked at random to give a short speech summarizing and honoring the life and death of their partner (thereby, every dinner is in honor of a specific soldier who died).

Witness me, and all that.
posted by aramaic at 8:56 AM on April 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


related note: the 1939 Gary Cooper film 'Beau Geste' is quite interesting.
posted by ovvl at 10:03 AM on April 25, 2017


the tactical cop in Michigan is wearing the same Mechanix gloves as the Legionnaire in Mali, and you think is there some newsletter these guys read?

I think one has to be somewhat careful not to read too much into this, because to some extent it shouldn't be surprising: the Mechanix gloves are cheap and decent, and therefore it shouldn't be surprising that people doing what is essentially the same job favor the same tools. (Separate from the issue of whether a city cop in a First World city where the biggest threat to society is probably drug overdoses really ought to be doing the same job as someone shooting at Islamist rebels in postcolonial West Africa, but that's... a different issue.)

That said, there's definitely something going on there. The Legion appears to spend a fair amount of effort, and does a particularly good job, I think, in maintaining and burnishing its own internal mythology for the benefit of new entrants and as a way of building their institutional culture. There's a quote from the linked article that I found particularly resonant:
Rollet knew that an army doesn’t march on its feet, or even its stomach. It marches on the stories it tells itself.
At least in the US Army, there's less -- absent a few attempts here and there, e.g. Shinseki's "Task Force Soldier" program in the early 2000s -- of an effort across the board to drive culture other than the blunt instruments of formal doctrine and policy. What internally-maintained mythology and historical continuity exists, tends to do so at the level of units (particularly regiments, which arguably exist for that purpose) or sometimes schools (e.g. Jump School has a set of traditions and history that are very consciously incorporated into training). This creates a sort of vacuum, filled, in my experience, by myths and history created elsewhere. Which leads, at times, to slightly bizarre life-imitating-art-imitating-life moments, like hearing young guys in Afghanistan quoting Full Metal Jacket without a trace of irony while going out on combat patrols, and realizing that their understanding of Vietnam probably comes almost entirely from Hollywood, because where else would it come from?

I've often thought that if I were going to create an elite military force, one of my key techniques would be assigning each new recruit a "partner"

At some point in highschool or college I ran across a description (some iffy translation or commentary on Vegetius, probably) of the ideal Roman contubernia / centuria, suggesting that, at least in the more-storied and longstanding legions, and under normal conditions where new recruits would replace killed or departing members to maintain a constant strength, the new soldier would receive a numbered signaculum -- basically, a dog tag -- and that the signaculum may have been reused, only going out of circulation when someone surrendered to the enemy or deserted (or, I suppose, if the entire unit were defeated and bodies not recovered). I don't know if this has much historical truth behind it in practice, but it always struck me as sort of a neat idea: each member of the unit receives a number which is recycled when they leave for whatever reason, and maintains the oral history of the previous members to hold the same. It wouldn't be especially hard to implement in any unit of fixed strength, particularly given the US military's slight obsession with "challenge coins", which are pretty close to signaculi already.

I've mentioned this over time to a few people, and been told that some variation of the concept is used by DEVGRU and the German Fernspäher (who had explicitly fixed-size units), and possibly also the Russian KSO, but of course it's intentionally difficult to separate what about any of those organizations is real and what is myth.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:57 AM on April 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


That some had served in the SS is a rumour many legionnaires like to promote but one that’s hard to believe. Members of the SS had their blood group tattooed on their arm, and even those with the tattoo removed would have found post-war recruiters far from sympathetic.

Not all Waffen SS, in particular non-German units, had the tattoo, so it's credible. The Legion was a good way path to an instant ID wash, which, for one reason or another, a lot of people wanted in the late forties.

About the time Beau Geste the book came out, D. H. Lawrence had arranged for the publication of Memoirs of the French Foreign Legion, the work of Maurice Magnus, an oddball American who had recently committed suicide rather than go to prison for fraud. To boost sales, Lawrence also did the intro (described by Lawrence himself as his "best single piece of writing, as writing"), which prompted German/Scottish writer Norman Douglas to defend his dead friend with A Plea for Better Manners (featured in Douglas' collection of essays Experiments) which resulted in a letter by Lawrence to The New Statesmen defending self.

All very 1920s, but of some interest if you're into that sort of thing.

(A more measured biography of Magnus was published in 2007 by Louis Wright, to whom we can assume Magnus did not owe money.)
posted by BWA at 1:12 PM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


Nearly forgot! You can buy Foreign Legion wine, made on their land by retired members. Is it good? No idea. At the very least, I have to assume it is fort

But what I really want is what Schwartzkopf got....

In case my life ever turns Hollywood.
posted by BWA at 1:32 PM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Which leads, at times, to slightly bizarre life-imitating-art-imitating-life moments, like hearing young guys in Afghanistan quoting Full Metal Jacket without a trace of irony while going out on combat patrols, and realizing that their understanding of Vietnam probably comes almost entirely from Hollywood, because where else would it come from?

Jarhead, the original book by Anthony Swofford, talks about this thing in detail. He describes how Marines would avidly consume anti-war 'Nam flicks, and discard the anti-war part, just eating the blowing-stuff-up aspect.
posted by ovvl at 4:04 PM on April 25, 2017


who died in Mexico in 1863 defending a road for a long-forgotten cause

That would be the second French intervention in Mexico, which ended with the execution of the foreign-backed first and only emperor of Mexico, Maximillian I.

The first French intervention in Mexico was less important, but more amusing, as it was fought over reparations for stolen pastries.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:21 AM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


There was a previous short-lived First Mexican Empire, reigned over by Agustín I. Maximillian was the ruler of the French-backed Second Empire.

I feel a bit bad for Maximillian. He wouldn't take the job without a popular vote asking for him (the French staged this) and he made a lot of liberal reforms. Of course, when backed into a corner, he did resort to violence, which just goes to show.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:49 AM on April 26, 2017


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