It is, by some measures, the toughest fighting force in the world – yet it continues to attract people from across the globe through the promise of a fresh start and adventure.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the origins of the French Foreign Legion, how you join it, and what life is like as a Legionnaire.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the French Foreign Legion.
[00:00:28] It is, by some measures, the toughest fighting force in the world.
[00:00:33] It is notoriously difficult to get into, the training is hellish, the conditions once you’re in are extremely harsh.
[00:00:42] Yet it continues to attract people from all over the world, drawn by the promise of a fresh start and adventure.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode we’ll talk about the origins of the French Foreign Legion, how you join it, what life is like as a Legionnaire, and why it continues to attract thousands of people each year from almost every country in the world.
[00:01:07] OK then, The French Foreign Legion.
[00:01:12] In Britain, people like to eat boiled eggs for breakfast.
[00:01:17] Most popular are soft boiled eggs, eggs that are boiled in their shells, but taken out of the water before the yellow part in the centre, the yolk, goes hard.
[00:01:29] You remove the egg from the boiling water, put it onto a small egg cup, then slice the top of the egg off with a knife, giving you access to the lovely runny yellow yolk.
[00:01:45] And, crucially, while the egg was in the boiling water, you would have made toast and cut it into slices, strips of toast that you can dip into the yolk.
[00:01:58] The name for these strips is “soldiers”, because they look, sort of like a group of marching soldiers. Remember this, it’ll be important.
[00:02:10] Now, you thought you were listening to an episode about the French Foreign Legion but up until now it has been a very basic cooking lesson told by a very amateur chef.
[00:02:23] The reason I mention this is so that you can understand a particularly bad British joke, and that is “what is the difference between a Frenchman and a piece of toast?”
[00:02:37] You can make a soldier out of a piece of toast.
[00:02:41] Now, apologies to all of our wonderful French listeners. There was no offence intended.
[00:02:47] I have many French friends, I have French cousins, I chose to study French at university, I speak French, I’ve lived in France and I love France as a place.
[00:02:57] But, rightly or wrongly, there is a stereotype in Britain of the French not being the most ferocious of fighters.
[00:03:08] There is, however, one branch of the French army having an altogether different reputation, a reputation for extreme skill, bravery, and toughness.
[00:03:21] That branch is, of course, the subject of today’s episode, the French Foreign Legion, or La Légion étrangère, to give it its French name, or simply, the Legion.
[00:03:34] So, how did it all get started?
[00:03:38] Well, the legion was incorporated in 1831, by the second last king of France, Louis Philippe I.
[00:03:48] Initially, it wasn’t intended as some elite fighting force, it was created as a solution to the problem of France being filled with thousands of foreign soldiers.
[00:04:01] France has a long history of bolstering its armies with foreign recruits, ranging from Swiss to German, Polish to Scottish.
[00:04:12] By one estimate, at the end of the 18th century, of the 146,000 soldiers serving in the French army, 42,000 of them were foreigners, so 30%.
[00:04:27] So, what happens to these foreign soldiers when there isn’t a war to fight?
[00:04:34] This was a very real question for France in 1830, when there was a rare moment of peace after the July Revolution. There were thousands of foreign recruits who were milling around, unemployed, at a loose end.
[00:04:50] Many were relatively unskilled, some had joined the army to get away from troubles in their home country, and they were drifting around France. They were a burden on the French state, and they potentially posed trouble.
[00:05:08] But, Louis Phillipe had a solution.
[00:05:12] It was a cunning solution, because it didn’t just solve the problem of the thousands of now unemployed soldiers roaming around France, it also solved a problem on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Algeria.
[00:05:27] France had invaded Algeria in 1830 in a bid to colonise it. After a promising start, French forces met fierce resistance, and reinforcements, more soldiers, were needed.
[00:05:44] And it just so happened that there were thousands of ex-soldiers floating around in France.
[00:05:51] Importantly, thousands of these soldiers were foreigners, they were not French, and so if they died in battle, so be it, they weren’t French after all. The war in Algeria was already unpopular, and it would be politically risky to spill the blood of French soldiers.
[00:06:14] So it was, in March 1831, a royal ordinance was issued, creating a new regiment which foreign nationals could join, but one that was limited to fighting outside of French borders.
[00:06:30] Right from the beginning of the French Foreign Legion, the conditions for who could join were minimal.
[00:06:38] If you did not have identity papers, you could simply declare who you were. You could also enlist under a pseudonym, another name.
[00:06:50] Essentially, who you were or what you had done in the past did not matter. The only important thing was what you would do in the future, as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion.
[00:07:05] Now, we will talk more specifically about the conflicts that the Legion has been involved in, and what life in the Legion is like, but before we do that, I think it’s important to consider the very strange and somewhat conflicted situation that the men of the Legion found themselves in.
[00:07:24] And the Legion is, in fact, all men; there has apparently only ever been one female member.
[00:07:32] So, you have these thousands of soldiers, Swiss, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, even some English, all having sworn allegiance to another country, to France, and being deployed to fight and die for French colonial interests.
[00:07:53] If one takes for granted that a key factor in someone taking up arms and becoming a soldier is a sense of patriotism, well, this reason did not exist for these men, they were fighting for a country that was not their own, typically in areas of the world that they would have had little knowledge of.
[00:08:15] What’s more, they were often sent to the most difficult conflicts and given the most dangerous jobs.
[00:08:23] It is unusual to say the least, but this gives you some idea both of the lack of alternatives that these men must have had, and the serious discipline that must have been required to keep them in-line.
[00:08:39] Now, we need to first talk about Algeria.
[00:08:42] Algeria was the first posting for the Legion, and it has forever been associated with Algeria.
[00:08:51] As you may know, the colonial conquest of Algeria was long and messy, with French forces, by their own admission, committing all sorts of horrific acts.
[00:09:04] To quote one French commission from 1833, "we have sent to their deaths on simple suspicion and without trial people whose guilt was always doubtful ... we massacred people carrying safe conducts ... we have outdone in barbarity the barbarians".
[00:09:23] And this was where the soldiers of the Legion cut their teeth, they got their start and made their name.
[00:09:31] The Legion, however, was not actually involved in the first conflict in Algeria for very long, leaving in 1835, when it was sent to Spain to help Queen Isabella II in her fight against the Carlist uprising.
[00:09:48] In fact, the Legion was handed over to the Spanish briefly during the conflict, and a new iteration of it, the so-called “New Foreign Legion” was formed.
[00:10:00] Here, some important changes were made, changes that persist to this very day.
[00:10:07] Previously, people from the same country were put in the same units: Swiss with Swiss, Poles with Poles, and so on.
[00:10:17] This policy was scrapped, with everyone being mixed.
[00:10:22] And secondly, French was enforced as the language of command.
[00:10:28] Both of these policies still exist today. If you join the Legion, and we’ll talk about that shortly, if you join the Legion, you will find yourself with a range of different nationalities, and you will find that the language you speak is French.
[00:10:46] Now, after its time in Spain, the Legion was and still is sent all over the world to support the French army, and serve the interests of the French state: Crimea, Mexico, Prussia, Sudan, Gallipoli, Vietnam, Algeria again, Korea, Chad, Libya, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
[00:11:12] Essentially, wherever in the world there was the need for French soldiers, for better or for worse, the Legion could be found.
[00:11:22] Now, let’s move on to talk a little bit more about how you actually join the French Foreign Legion.
[00:11:29] It is both very easy and very hard.
[00:11:34] It is easy because you need no qualifications, no university or school diploma. You can be from any country in the world, you do not need to be French. In fact, most Legionnaires are not French, they are foreigners.
[00:11:52] True to the Legion’s origins of not questioning your past, on the Legion’s recruitment website there is no mention of having a criminal record being a barrier to entry, although reportedly the Legion will not accept people who have committed serious crimes: rape, murder, that sort of thing.
[00:12:12] So, on paper, anyone can join, it’s easy!
[00:12:18] Or at least, it might seem easy.
[00:12:21] Actually getting accepted is a different thing altogether.
[00:12:26] First, you have to travel to mainland France and literally knock on the door of one of the recruitment offices.
[00:12:35] There are no online applications, no letters of recommendation, nothing like that.
[00:12:42] Buy a ticket to France, go to a centre, knock on the door. The Legion proudly boasts that it recruits 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, although it does suggest that it’s best to come between 8 in the morning and 5 in the evening.
[00:13:03] When you go there, there is an intense interview process, involving psychological and physical tests to see whether you are cut out for life as a Legionnaire.
[00:13:14] It doesn’t matter if you can speak French or not; if you’re accepted, you will learn on the job.
[00:13:21] After a three-week selection process, you are informed if you have made the cut. Only 10 to 15 percent of applicants make it. For those who don’t, they are told to leave, paid a sum of €40 per day for every day that they have been doing the training, and sent on their way.
[00:13:43] For those who make it, life as a Legionnaire awaits.
[00:13:48] This involves signing a 5-year contract, which is the minimum amount of time that you are required to join for.
[00:13:56] You also receive a completely new identity, and a new name.
[00:14:02] Who you were in the past, or what you have done in the past, does not matter. You have the chance to start from scratch.
[00:14:11] In a sign of how much you leave your previous life at the door when you enter the Legion, you are not allowed to bring any keys with you, house keys, car keys, nothing.
[00:14:23] When you step through the doors, you leave your previous life behind.
[00:14:28] You are literally a new person.
[00:14:32] The salary is modest by French standards; for a basic legionnaire it is a net salary of just under €1,400 per month, but your accommodation and food is all paid for, you have no major costs.
[00:14:49] Especially for recruits from less economically developed countries, be that Nepal, Brazil or Ukraine, the prospect of a new life in Europe with a decent salary is understandably a major attraction.
[00:15:04] What’s more, if you perform well, after three years you can become a French citizen.
[00:15:12] Now, back to the process of actually becoming a legionnaire.
[00:15:17] After you are selected, there is an even more arduous training process. What actually happens during this process is not public information, but former recruits have shared stories about what their training looked like.
[00:15:34] In one account from a recruit in the 1960s, it involved recruits having to run with stones on their back while their superior whipped them.
[00:15:45] Another account recalls a punishment called “le silo”, the silo, a funnel-shaped hole which misbehaving recruits would be thrown into, only to be retrieved days later.
[00:15:59] And if you are thinking that this sort of grilling, this kind of extreme training, is all a thing of the past, it is not.
[00:16:08] The French Foreign Legion’s unofficial motto is “Marche ou crève”, which you might translate as “sink or swim”, or even “march or die”.
[00:16:20] And this is sometimes taken to its literal meaning.
[00:16:26] In 2008 a 25-year-old Slovakian recruit was on one of the Legion’s famous long marches in the desert, this time in Djibouti, in East Africa. He complained of a pain in his knee, but his commanding officer told him to “stop complaining”.
[00:16:47] Well, one imagines he might have used slightly more colourful language than that…
[00:16:53] Anyway, he told him to get up, and he even took out all of the man’s water and poured it on the floor, ordering the other legionnaires not to give the man any of their own water.
[00:17:07] The soldier continued to complain, and as punishment was made to stay out in the sun, and forced to run all the way up a hill in the 40 degree heat.
[00:17:19] According to one source, he was even beaten.
[00:17:23] He begged for water, but none was given.
[00:17:27] And shortly after, he keeled over and died of a heart attack, a perfectly healthy and fit man, thousands of kilometres from home, his real name not known to anyone around him, dead in the desert aged 25.
[00:17:44] Of course, this is an extreme example, but Legionnaires dying is certainly not uncommon.
[00:17:52] Over the years, 36,000 Legionnaires have died fighting for France, a country that is almost always not their own.
[00:18:03] If you look on the Legion’s website, they provide details of the men who have been killed in action: when and where they died and their original country.
[00:18:14] It is a stark reminder that behind every death statistic is a human being, in the case of a Legionnaire, someone who has left their country of birth, travelled to France, and left their previous life behind.
[00:18:30] And in almost all cases, they are young men.
[00:18:34] Dmytro MARTYNYOUK from Ukraine. 29 years old.
[00:18:39] Anthony Paiba Valverde from Ecuador. 24 years old.
[00:18:45] Bogusz POCHYLSKI, from Poland. 31 years old.
[00:18:50] All young men who fought and died for France.
[00:18:54] Yes, they did so voluntarily, but reading their stories, at least the little that is published about them, makes you wonder what life they must have left behind.
[00:19:05] So, to wrap things up, yes, becoming a legionnaire is an extremely difficult and physically demanding job.
[00:19:13] There is a high chance of danger and death. The pay is modest. And you are fighting on behalf of a country that, in all probability, you have absolutely no link to.
[00:19:26] But there are plenty of rewards. Your unit becomes your new family. You get a roof over your head, and three square meals a day. Yes, the pay is moderate, but it might be a marked improvement on your current situation.
[00:19:44] You get a new identity, a new name, and the opportunity for a fresh start and a new life as a French citizen.
[00:19:53] Clearly, for tens of thousands of men since 1831, this is more than enough to risk dying for.
[00:20:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the French Foreign Legion.
[00:20:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:12] Do you know anyone who has been in the French Foreign Legion? Are you a part of a group of Legionnaires listening to this together? That would be fun!
[00:20:20] And are there similar crack-military units in your country?
[00:20:25] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the French Foreign Legion.
[00:00:28] It is, by some measures, the toughest fighting force in the world.
[00:00:33] It is notoriously difficult to get into, the training is hellish, the conditions once you’re in are extremely harsh.
[00:00:42] Yet it continues to attract people from all over the world, drawn by the promise of a fresh start and adventure.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode we’ll talk about the origins of the French Foreign Legion, how you join it, what life is like as a Legionnaire, and why it continues to attract thousands of people each year from almost every country in the world.
[00:01:07] OK then, The French Foreign Legion.
[00:01:12] In Britain, people like to eat boiled eggs for breakfast.
[00:01:17] Most popular are soft boiled eggs, eggs that are boiled in their shells, but taken out of the water before the yellow part in the centre, the yolk, goes hard.
[00:01:29] You remove the egg from the boiling water, put it onto a small egg cup, then slice the top of the egg off with a knife, giving you access to the lovely runny yellow yolk.
[00:01:45] And, crucially, while the egg was in the boiling water, you would have made toast and cut it into slices, strips of toast that you can dip into the yolk.
[00:01:58] The name for these strips is “soldiers”, because they look, sort of like a group of marching soldiers. Remember this, it’ll be important.
[00:02:10] Now, you thought you were listening to an episode about the French Foreign Legion but up until now it has been a very basic cooking lesson told by a very amateur chef.
[00:02:23] The reason I mention this is so that you can understand a particularly bad British joke, and that is “what is the difference between a Frenchman and a piece of toast?”
[00:02:37] You can make a soldier out of a piece of toast.
[00:02:41] Now, apologies to all of our wonderful French listeners. There was no offence intended.
[00:02:47] I have many French friends, I have French cousins, I chose to study French at university, I speak French, I’ve lived in France and I love France as a place.
[00:02:57] But, rightly or wrongly, there is a stereotype in Britain of the French not being the most ferocious of fighters.
[00:03:08] There is, however, one branch of the French army having an altogether different reputation, a reputation for extreme skill, bravery, and toughness.
[00:03:21] That branch is, of course, the subject of today’s episode, the French Foreign Legion, or La Légion étrangère, to give it its French name, or simply, the Legion.
[00:03:34] So, how did it all get started?
[00:03:38] Well, the legion was incorporated in 1831, by the second last king of France, Louis Philippe I.
[00:03:48] Initially, it wasn’t intended as some elite fighting force, it was created as a solution to the problem of France being filled with thousands of foreign soldiers.
[00:04:01] France has a long history of bolstering its armies with foreign recruits, ranging from Swiss to German, Polish to Scottish.
[00:04:12] By one estimate, at the end of the 18th century, of the 146,000 soldiers serving in the French army, 42,000 of them were foreigners, so 30%.
[00:04:27] So, what happens to these foreign soldiers when there isn’t a war to fight?
[00:04:34] This was a very real question for France in 1830, when there was a rare moment of peace after the July Revolution. There were thousands of foreign recruits who were milling around, unemployed, at a loose end.
[00:04:50] Many were relatively unskilled, some had joined the army to get away from troubles in their home country, and they were drifting around France. They were a burden on the French state, and they potentially posed trouble.
[00:05:08] But, Louis Phillipe had a solution.
[00:05:12] It was a cunning solution, because it didn’t just solve the problem of the thousands of now unemployed soldiers roaming around France, it also solved a problem on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Algeria.
[00:05:27] France had invaded Algeria in 1830 in a bid to colonise it. After a promising start, French forces met fierce resistance, and reinforcements, more soldiers, were needed.
[00:05:44] And it just so happened that there were thousands of ex-soldiers floating around in France.
[00:05:51] Importantly, thousands of these soldiers were foreigners, they were not French, and so if they died in battle, so be it, they weren’t French after all. The war in Algeria was already unpopular, and it would be politically risky to spill the blood of French soldiers.
[00:06:14] So it was, in March 1831, a royal ordinance was issued, creating a new regiment which foreign nationals could join, but one that was limited to fighting outside of French borders.
[00:06:30] Right from the beginning of the French Foreign Legion, the conditions for who could join were minimal.
[00:06:38] If you did not have identity papers, you could simply declare who you were. You could also enlist under a pseudonym, another name.
[00:06:50] Essentially, who you were or what you had done in the past did not matter. The only important thing was what you would do in the future, as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion.
[00:07:05] Now, we will talk more specifically about the conflicts that the Legion has been involved in, and what life in the Legion is like, but before we do that, I think it’s important to consider the very strange and somewhat conflicted situation that the men of the Legion found themselves in.
[00:07:24] And the Legion is, in fact, all men; there has apparently only ever been one female member.
[00:07:32] So, you have these thousands of soldiers, Swiss, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, even some English, all having sworn allegiance to another country, to France, and being deployed to fight and die for French colonial interests.
[00:07:53] If one takes for granted that a key factor in someone taking up arms and becoming a soldier is a sense of patriotism, well, this reason did not exist for these men, they were fighting for a country that was not their own, typically in areas of the world that they would have had little knowledge of.
[00:08:15] What’s more, they were often sent to the most difficult conflicts and given the most dangerous jobs.
[00:08:23] It is unusual to say the least, but this gives you some idea both of the lack of alternatives that these men must have had, and the serious discipline that must have been required to keep them in-line.
[00:08:39] Now, we need to first talk about Algeria.
[00:08:42] Algeria was the first posting for the Legion, and it has forever been associated with Algeria.
[00:08:51] As you may know, the colonial conquest of Algeria was long and messy, with French forces, by their own admission, committing all sorts of horrific acts.
[00:09:04] To quote one French commission from 1833, "we have sent to their deaths on simple suspicion and without trial people whose guilt was always doubtful ... we massacred people carrying safe conducts ... we have outdone in barbarity the barbarians".
[00:09:23] And this was where the soldiers of the Legion cut their teeth, they got their start and made their name.
[00:09:31] The Legion, however, was not actually involved in the first conflict in Algeria for very long, leaving in 1835, when it was sent to Spain to help Queen Isabella II in her fight against the Carlist uprising.
[00:09:48] In fact, the Legion was handed over to the Spanish briefly during the conflict, and a new iteration of it, the so-called “New Foreign Legion” was formed.
[00:10:00] Here, some important changes were made, changes that persist to this very day.
[00:10:07] Previously, people from the same country were put in the same units: Swiss with Swiss, Poles with Poles, and so on.
[00:10:17] This policy was scrapped, with everyone being mixed.
[00:10:22] And secondly, French was enforced as the language of command.
[00:10:28] Both of these policies still exist today. If you join the Legion, and we’ll talk about that shortly, if you join the Legion, you will find yourself with a range of different nationalities, and you will find that the language you speak is French.
[00:10:46] Now, after its time in Spain, the Legion was and still is sent all over the world to support the French army, and serve the interests of the French state: Crimea, Mexico, Prussia, Sudan, Gallipoli, Vietnam, Algeria again, Korea, Chad, Libya, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
[00:11:12] Essentially, wherever in the world there was the need for French soldiers, for better or for worse, the Legion could be found.
[00:11:22] Now, let’s move on to talk a little bit more about how you actually join the French Foreign Legion.
[00:11:29] It is both very easy and very hard.
[00:11:34] It is easy because you need no qualifications, no university or school diploma. You can be from any country in the world, you do not need to be French. In fact, most Legionnaires are not French, they are foreigners.
[00:11:52] True to the Legion’s origins of not questioning your past, on the Legion’s recruitment website there is no mention of having a criminal record being a barrier to entry, although reportedly the Legion will not accept people who have committed serious crimes: rape, murder, that sort of thing.
[00:12:12] So, on paper, anyone can join, it’s easy!
[00:12:18] Or at least, it might seem easy.
[00:12:21] Actually getting accepted is a different thing altogether.
[00:12:26] First, you have to travel to mainland France and literally knock on the door of one of the recruitment offices.
[00:12:35] There are no online applications, no letters of recommendation, nothing like that.
[00:12:42] Buy a ticket to France, go to a centre, knock on the door. The Legion proudly boasts that it recruits 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, although it does suggest that it’s best to come between 8 in the morning and 5 in the evening.
[00:13:03] When you go there, there is an intense interview process, involving psychological and physical tests to see whether you are cut out for life as a Legionnaire.
[00:13:14] It doesn’t matter if you can speak French or not; if you’re accepted, you will learn on the job.
[00:13:21] After a three-week selection process, you are informed if you have made the cut. Only 10 to 15 percent of applicants make it. For those who don’t, they are told to leave, paid a sum of €40 per day for every day that they have been doing the training, and sent on their way.
[00:13:43] For those who make it, life as a Legionnaire awaits.
[00:13:48] This involves signing a 5-year contract, which is the minimum amount of time that you are required to join for.
[00:13:56] You also receive a completely new identity, and a new name.
[00:14:02] Who you were in the past, or what you have done in the past, does not matter. You have the chance to start from scratch.
[00:14:11] In a sign of how much you leave your previous life at the door when you enter the Legion, you are not allowed to bring any keys with you, house keys, car keys, nothing.
[00:14:23] When you step through the doors, you leave your previous life behind.
[00:14:28] You are literally a new person.
[00:14:32] The salary is modest by French standards; for a basic legionnaire it is a net salary of just under €1,400 per month, but your accommodation and food is all paid for, you have no major costs.
[00:14:49] Especially for recruits from less economically developed countries, be that Nepal, Brazil or Ukraine, the prospect of a new life in Europe with a decent salary is understandably a major attraction.
[00:15:04] What’s more, if you perform well, after three years you can become a French citizen.
[00:15:12] Now, back to the process of actually becoming a legionnaire.
[00:15:17] After you are selected, there is an even more arduous training process. What actually happens during this process is not public information, but former recruits have shared stories about what their training looked like.
[00:15:34] In one account from a recruit in the 1960s, it involved recruits having to run with stones on their back while their superior whipped them.
[00:15:45] Another account recalls a punishment called “le silo”, the silo, a funnel-shaped hole which misbehaving recruits would be thrown into, only to be retrieved days later.
[00:15:59] And if you are thinking that this sort of grilling, this kind of extreme training, is all a thing of the past, it is not.
[00:16:08] The French Foreign Legion’s unofficial motto is “Marche ou crève”, which you might translate as “sink or swim”, or even “march or die”.
[00:16:20] And this is sometimes taken to its literal meaning.
[00:16:26] In 2008 a 25-year-old Slovakian recruit was on one of the Legion’s famous long marches in the desert, this time in Djibouti, in East Africa. He complained of a pain in his knee, but his commanding officer told him to “stop complaining”.
[00:16:47] Well, one imagines he might have used slightly more colourful language than that…
[00:16:53] Anyway, he told him to get up, and he even took out all of the man’s water and poured it on the floor, ordering the other legionnaires not to give the man any of their own water.
[00:17:07] The soldier continued to complain, and as punishment was made to stay out in the sun, and forced to run all the way up a hill in the 40 degree heat.
[00:17:19] According to one source, he was even beaten.
[00:17:23] He begged for water, but none was given.
[00:17:27] And shortly after, he keeled over and died of a heart attack, a perfectly healthy and fit man, thousands of kilometres from home, his real name not known to anyone around him, dead in the desert aged 25.
[00:17:44] Of course, this is an extreme example, but Legionnaires dying is certainly not uncommon.
[00:17:52] Over the years, 36,000 Legionnaires have died fighting for France, a country that is almost always not their own.
[00:18:03] If you look on the Legion’s website, they provide details of the men who have been killed in action: when and where they died and their original country.
[00:18:14] It is a stark reminder that behind every death statistic is a human being, in the case of a Legionnaire, someone who has left their country of birth, travelled to France, and left their previous life behind.
[00:18:30] And in almost all cases, they are young men.
[00:18:34] Dmytro MARTYNYOUK from Ukraine. 29 years old.
[00:18:39] Anthony Paiba Valverde from Ecuador. 24 years old.
[00:18:45] Bogusz POCHYLSKI, from Poland. 31 years old.
[00:18:50] All young men who fought and died for France.
[00:18:54] Yes, they did so voluntarily, but reading their stories, at least the little that is published about them, makes you wonder what life they must have left behind.
[00:19:05] So, to wrap things up, yes, becoming a legionnaire is an extremely difficult and physically demanding job.
[00:19:13] There is a high chance of danger and death. The pay is modest. And you are fighting on behalf of a country that, in all probability, you have absolutely no link to.
[00:19:26] But there are plenty of rewards. Your unit becomes your new family. You get a roof over your head, and three square meals a day. Yes, the pay is moderate, but it might be a marked improvement on your current situation.
[00:19:44] You get a new identity, a new name, and the opportunity for a fresh start and a new life as a French citizen.
[00:19:53] Clearly, for tens of thousands of men since 1831, this is more than enough to risk dying for.
[00:20:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the French Foreign Legion.
[00:20:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:12] Do you know anyone who has been in the French Foreign Legion? Are you a part of a group of Legionnaires listening to this together? That would be fun!
[00:20:20] And are there similar crack-military units in your country?
[00:20:25] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the French Foreign Legion.
[00:00:28] It is, by some measures, the toughest fighting force in the world.
[00:00:33] It is notoriously difficult to get into, the training is hellish, the conditions once you’re in are extremely harsh.
[00:00:42] Yet it continues to attract people from all over the world, drawn by the promise of a fresh start and adventure.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode we’ll talk about the origins of the French Foreign Legion, how you join it, what life is like as a Legionnaire, and why it continues to attract thousands of people each year from almost every country in the world.
[00:01:07] OK then, The French Foreign Legion.
[00:01:12] In Britain, people like to eat boiled eggs for breakfast.
[00:01:17] Most popular are soft boiled eggs, eggs that are boiled in their shells, but taken out of the water before the yellow part in the centre, the yolk, goes hard.
[00:01:29] You remove the egg from the boiling water, put it onto a small egg cup, then slice the top of the egg off with a knife, giving you access to the lovely runny yellow yolk.
[00:01:45] And, crucially, while the egg was in the boiling water, you would have made toast and cut it into slices, strips of toast that you can dip into the yolk.
[00:01:58] The name for these strips is “soldiers”, because they look, sort of like a group of marching soldiers. Remember this, it’ll be important.
[00:02:10] Now, you thought you were listening to an episode about the French Foreign Legion but up until now it has been a very basic cooking lesson told by a very amateur chef.
[00:02:23] The reason I mention this is so that you can understand a particularly bad British joke, and that is “what is the difference between a Frenchman and a piece of toast?”
[00:02:37] You can make a soldier out of a piece of toast.
[00:02:41] Now, apologies to all of our wonderful French listeners. There was no offence intended.
[00:02:47] I have many French friends, I have French cousins, I chose to study French at university, I speak French, I’ve lived in France and I love France as a place.
[00:02:57] But, rightly or wrongly, there is a stereotype in Britain of the French not being the most ferocious of fighters.
[00:03:08] There is, however, one branch of the French army having an altogether different reputation, a reputation for extreme skill, bravery, and toughness.
[00:03:21] That branch is, of course, the subject of today’s episode, the French Foreign Legion, or La Légion étrangère, to give it its French name, or simply, the Legion.
[00:03:34] So, how did it all get started?
[00:03:38] Well, the legion was incorporated in 1831, by the second last king of France, Louis Philippe I.
[00:03:48] Initially, it wasn’t intended as some elite fighting force, it was created as a solution to the problem of France being filled with thousands of foreign soldiers.
[00:04:01] France has a long history of bolstering its armies with foreign recruits, ranging from Swiss to German, Polish to Scottish.
[00:04:12] By one estimate, at the end of the 18th century, of the 146,000 soldiers serving in the French army, 42,000 of them were foreigners, so 30%.
[00:04:27] So, what happens to these foreign soldiers when there isn’t a war to fight?
[00:04:34] This was a very real question for France in 1830, when there was a rare moment of peace after the July Revolution. There were thousands of foreign recruits who were milling around, unemployed, at a loose end.
[00:04:50] Many were relatively unskilled, some had joined the army to get away from troubles in their home country, and they were drifting around France. They were a burden on the French state, and they potentially posed trouble.
[00:05:08] But, Louis Phillipe had a solution.
[00:05:12] It was a cunning solution, because it didn’t just solve the problem of the thousands of now unemployed soldiers roaming around France, it also solved a problem on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Algeria.
[00:05:27] France had invaded Algeria in 1830 in a bid to colonise it. After a promising start, French forces met fierce resistance, and reinforcements, more soldiers, were needed.
[00:05:44] And it just so happened that there were thousands of ex-soldiers floating around in France.
[00:05:51] Importantly, thousands of these soldiers were foreigners, they were not French, and so if they died in battle, so be it, they weren’t French after all. The war in Algeria was already unpopular, and it would be politically risky to spill the blood of French soldiers.
[00:06:14] So it was, in March 1831, a royal ordinance was issued, creating a new regiment which foreign nationals could join, but one that was limited to fighting outside of French borders.
[00:06:30] Right from the beginning of the French Foreign Legion, the conditions for who could join were minimal.
[00:06:38] If you did not have identity papers, you could simply declare who you were. You could also enlist under a pseudonym, another name.
[00:06:50] Essentially, who you were or what you had done in the past did not matter. The only important thing was what you would do in the future, as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion.
[00:07:05] Now, we will talk more specifically about the conflicts that the Legion has been involved in, and what life in the Legion is like, but before we do that, I think it’s important to consider the very strange and somewhat conflicted situation that the men of the Legion found themselves in.
[00:07:24] And the Legion is, in fact, all men; there has apparently only ever been one female member.
[00:07:32] So, you have these thousands of soldiers, Swiss, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, even some English, all having sworn allegiance to another country, to France, and being deployed to fight and die for French colonial interests.
[00:07:53] If one takes for granted that a key factor in someone taking up arms and becoming a soldier is a sense of patriotism, well, this reason did not exist for these men, they were fighting for a country that was not their own, typically in areas of the world that they would have had little knowledge of.
[00:08:15] What’s more, they were often sent to the most difficult conflicts and given the most dangerous jobs.
[00:08:23] It is unusual to say the least, but this gives you some idea both of the lack of alternatives that these men must have had, and the serious discipline that must have been required to keep them in-line.
[00:08:39] Now, we need to first talk about Algeria.
[00:08:42] Algeria was the first posting for the Legion, and it has forever been associated with Algeria.
[00:08:51] As you may know, the colonial conquest of Algeria was long and messy, with French forces, by their own admission, committing all sorts of horrific acts.
[00:09:04] To quote one French commission from 1833, "we have sent to their deaths on simple suspicion and without trial people whose guilt was always doubtful ... we massacred people carrying safe conducts ... we have outdone in barbarity the barbarians".
[00:09:23] And this was where the soldiers of the Legion cut their teeth, they got their start and made their name.
[00:09:31] The Legion, however, was not actually involved in the first conflict in Algeria for very long, leaving in 1835, when it was sent to Spain to help Queen Isabella II in her fight against the Carlist uprising.
[00:09:48] In fact, the Legion was handed over to the Spanish briefly during the conflict, and a new iteration of it, the so-called “New Foreign Legion” was formed.
[00:10:00] Here, some important changes were made, changes that persist to this very day.
[00:10:07] Previously, people from the same country were put in the same units: Swiss with Swiss, Poles with Poles, and so on.
[00:10:17] This policy was scrapped, with everyone being mixed.
[00:10:22] And secondly, French was enforced as the language of command.
[00:10:28] Both of these policies still exist today. If you join the Legion, and we’ll talk about that shortly, if you join the Legion, you will find yourself with a range of different nationalities, and you will find that the language you speak is French.
[00:10:46] Now, after its time in Spain, the Legion was and still is sent all over the world to support the French army, and serve the interests of the French state: Crimea, Mexico, Prussia, Sudan, Gallipoli, Vietnam, Algeria again, Korea, Chad, Libya, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
[00:11:12] Essentially, wherever in the world there was the need for French soldiers, for better or for worse, the Legion could be found.
[00:11:22] Now, let’s move on to talk a little bit more about how you actually join the French Foreign Legion.
[00:11:29] It is both very easy and very hard.
[00:11:34] It is easy because you need no qualifications, no university or school diploma. You can be from any country in the world, you do not need to be French. In fact, most Legionnaires are not French, they are foreigners.
[00:11:52] True to the Legion’s origins of not questioning your past, on the Legion’s recruitment website there is no mention of having a criminal record being a barrier to entry, although reportedly the Legion will not accept people who have committed serious crimes: rape, murder, that sort of thing.
[00:12:12] So, on paper, anyone can join, it’s easy!
[00:12:18] Or at least, it might seem easy.
[00:12:21] Actually getting accepted is a different thing altogether.
[00:12:26] First, you have to travel to mainland France and literally knock on the door of one of the recruitment offices.
[00:12:35] There are no online applications, no letters of recommendation, nothing like that.
[00:12:42] Buy a ticket to France, go to a centre, knock on the door. The Legion proudly boasts that it recruits 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, although it does suggest that it’s best to come between 8 in the morning and 5 in the evening.
[00:13:03] When you go there, there is an intense interview process, involving psychological and physical tests to see whether you are cut out for life as a Legionnaire.
[00:13:14] It doesn’t matter if you can speak French or not; if you’re accepted, you will learn on the job.
[00:13:21] After a three-week selection process, you are informed if you have made the cut. Only 10 to 15 percent of applicants make it. For those who don’t, they are told to leave, paid a sum of €40 per day for every day that they have been doing the training, and sent on their way.
[00:13:43] For those who make it, life as a Legionnaire awaits.
[00:13:48] This involves signing a 5-year contract, which is the minimum amount of time that you are required to join for.
[00:13:56] You also receive a completely new identity, and a new name.
[00:14:02] Who you were in the past, or what you have done in the past, does not matter. You have the chance to start from scratch.
[00:14:11] In a sign of how much you leave your previous life at the door when you enter the Legion, you are not allowed to bring any keys with you, house keys, car keys, nothing.
[00:14:23] When you step through the doors, you leave your previous life behind.
[00:14:28] You are literally a new person.
[00:14:32] The salary is modest by French standards; for a basic legionnaire it is a net salary of just under €1,400 per month, but your accommodation and food is all paid for, you have no major costs.
[00:14:49] Especially for recruits from less economically developed countries, be that Nepal, Brazil or Ukraine, the prospect of a new life in Europe with a decent salary is understandably a major attraction.
[00:15:04] What’s more, if you perform well, after three years you can become a French citizen.
[00:15:12] Now, back to the process of actually becoming a legionnaire.
[00:15:17] After you are selected, there is an even more arduous training process. What actually happens during this process is not public information, but former recruits have shared stories about what their training looked like.
[00:15:34] In one account from a recruit in the 1960s, it involved recruits having to run with stones on their back while their superior whipped them.
[00:15:45] Another account recalls a punishment called “le silo”, the silo, a funnel-shaped hole which misbehaving recruits would be thrown into, only to be retrieved days later.
[00:15:59] And if you are thinking that this sort of grilling, this kind of extreme training, is all a thing of the past, it is not.
[00:16:08] The French Foreign Legion’s unofficial motto is “Marche ou crève”, which you might translate as “sink or swim”, or even “march or die”.
[00:16:20] And this is sometimes taken to its literal meaning.
[00:16:26] In 2008 a 25-year-old Slovakian recruit was on one of the Legion’s famous long marches in the desert, this time in Djibouti, in East Africa. He complained of a pain in his knee, but his commanding officer told him to “stop complaining”.
[00:16:47] Well, one imagines he might have used slightly more colourful language than that…
[00:16:53] Anyway, he told him to get up, and he even took out all of the man’s water and poured it on the floor, ordering the other legionnaires not to give the man any of their own water.
[00:17:07] The soldier continued to complain, and as punishment was made to stay out in the sun, and forced to run all the way up a hill in the 40 degree heat.
[00:17:19] According to one source, he was even beaten.
[00:17:23] He begged for water, but none was given.
[00:17:27] And shortly after, he keeled over and died of a heart attack, a perfectly healthy and fit man, thousands of kilometres from home, his real name not known to anyone around him, dead in the desert aged 25.
[00:17:44] Of course, this is an extreme example, but Legionnaires dying is certainly not uncommon.
[00:17:52] Over the years, 36,000 Legionnaires have died fighting for France, a country that is almost always not their own.
[00:18:03] If you look on the Legion’s website, they provide details of the men who have been killed in action: when and where they died and their original country.
[00:18:14] It is a stark reminder that behind every death statistic is a human being, in the case of a Legionnaire, someone who has left their country of birth, travelled to France, and left their previous life behind.
[00:18:30] And in almost all cases, they are young men.
[00:18:34] Dmytro MARTYNYOUK from Ukraine. 29 years old.
[00:18:39] Anthony Paiba Valverde from Ecuador. 24 years old.
[00:18:45] Bogusz POCHYLSKI, from Poland. 31 years old.
[00:18:50] All young men who fought and died for France.
[00:18:54] Yes, they did so voluntarily, but reading their stories, at least the little that is published about them, makes you wonder what life they must have left behind.
[00:19:05] So, to wrap things up, yes, becoming a legionnaire is an extremely difficult and physically demanding job.
[00:19:13] There is a high chance of danger and death. The pay is modest. And you are fighting on behalf of a country that, in all probability, you have absolutely no link to.
[00:19:26] But there are plenty of rewards. Your unit becomes your new family. You get a roof over your head, and three square meals a day. Yes, the pay is moderate, but it might be a marked improvement on your current situation.
[00:19:44] You get a new identity, a new name, and the opportunity for a fresh start and a new life as a French citizen.
[00:19:53] Clearly, for tens of thousands of men since 1831, this is more than enough to risk dying for.
[00:20:03] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the French Foreign Legion.
[00:20:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:12] Do you know anyone who has been in the French Foreign Legion? Are you a part of a group of Legionnaires listening to this together? That would be fun!
[00:20:20] And are there similar crack-military units in your country?
[00:20:25] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
