Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 27, 1993 TAG: 9306270184
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: AUBAGNE, FRANCE LENGTH: Medium
On March 10, 1831, King Louis-Philippe created a special corps, viewed as temporary, to absorb agitation-prone exiles. It was badly beaten in its first major commitment, a Spanish war of succession.
But the 1830s also marked the conquest of Algiers, France's first big step toward building a North African empire. The public was far more tolerant of foreign outcasts dying of war and disease than respectable Frenchmen. The Legion had a future.
For the next century, the Legion carried France's flag in West Africa, the Crimea, Morocco, Madagascar, Mexico and Indochina.
The battles were of the sort that disturbed and thrilled 19th-century newspaper readers.
In 1885, at Tuyen Quang in what is now North Vietnam, a French garrison of 619 men, including 390 legionnaires, held off 20,000 well-armed Chinese for two months before a relief column reached their isolated fort. Only 180 men were on their feet. The desolated area was littered with rotting corpses.
"Our liberators cannot believe their eyes," wrote the garrison's Protestant chaplain, Th. Boisset.
The Legion gained notoriety as a romantic mercenary corps harboring men with little to lose - criminals, officers from defeated armies, noblemen fleeing scandal.
Most, however, were working-class men, often Germans, who had somehow failed in life and sought adventure or rehabilitation.
A ban on the Legion serving in France was lifted in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and both world wars. A Legion regiment was the second-most decorated French unit in World War I.
The Legion's nadir came with the decline of the colonial world. From 1945 to 1954, it lost 9,092 men in the vain attempt to hold Indochina, culminating in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
Eight years of war followed in Algeria. As France's will to hold Algeria faded, renegade generals backed by Legion paratroops staged a putsch in 1961 to topple President Charles de Gaulle. It failed.
The Legion marched out of its headquarters at Sidi-Bel-Abbes in Algeria in 1962 for the last time, singing a popular Edith Piaf song, "Je ne regrette rien" (I regret nothing).
Though a new headquarters was built in Aubagne, near Marseille, the Legion still frequently intervenes in Africa, usually to protect foreigners or prop up French-backed regimes.
Some 650 legionnaires parachuted on the Zairian mining town of Kolwezi in 1978 to put down a massacre of civilians by Cuban-trained rebels invading from Angola. The Legion chased off the rebels, killing some 200 to the loss of five of its own men.
by CNB