Here is a translation.. I am using
http://babelfish.altavista.com/ so some of it might be wrong.
Integration through the Legion
by François-Xavier Dupouy
What becomes this institution of the French Army? Questions with the author of an astonishing investigation
In an enthralling book - irregular men -, the journalist Etienne de Montety tells the incredible destiny of 13 former legionnaire. Far from the usual stereotypes, his portraits take a relief particular to the moment when the society butts against the headache of integration and immigration. The author concludes from it in particular that "the game is never over".
Your legionnaires are not the marginal stray ones. Exceptions?
There are not two of them which resemble each other. The Legion is a world by itself, heteroclite, where one needs mechanics, data processing specialists, marksmen. Contrary to a common idea, there are many students, people of a certain social standing. Louts and misfits do not constitute the majority. On the other hand, it is true, they are people in rupture. They flee reality, their environment or sometimes an unhappy love affair. The Legion - where any question about the past of each one is proscribed - induced a cut with its close relations, sometimes a renaming, a renunciation of familiy life. The first leave is granted only after one and a half year of service.
The foreign Legion allows the acquisition of French nationality. On 7800 men, nearly 220 per annum are naturalized. Does the Legion prepare with integration?
They do a lot. One learns there the French laws and history of the country. The first four months, period of instruction, are devoted to learning the French language. The legionnaires are paired : a non-French-speaking person and a French-speaking person. By representing France abroad, they acquire a feeling of membership of the nation.
The Legion acted as social regulator in the past. Is this still the case?
This function evolved/moved. In the past, the wars made it possible "to evacuate", to some extent, certain undesirable elements. Today, the Security Dpt of the Legion inquires into the applicants - it should not be thought that it accomodates rapists and assassins. But a quasi religious image of the Legion persists, by which the redemption is possible. One atones for his faults, initially by telling them, then by the gift of oneself.
----
Week of Thursday February 16, 2006 - n°2154 - Books
Mohamed, Minh, Dragan and others...
A strange Legion
Born in the four corners of the world, enrolled in the foreign Legion, they are today a priest, painter or billionaire. Their life is a novel, it is signed Etienne de Montety
At first sight of another book on the Legion, one says pfew... The tough fighters, ambushes, close combat, hot sand and tattoos, one may think he knows already. And then one opens the book of Etienne de Montety and meets Aymeric, Dragan, Mohamed, Peter, Simon, Minh or Jean-François. He calls them "irregular", because they have nothing to do with the regular one, i.e. the army. They are of another breed. One wonders even if all their existence is not irregular. Because the only regular thing of these irregulars is the friendship and the memories.
What links all these intermittent soldiers is the Legion, stranger than foreign, if one follows well the author, who seeks less to detail the operation of the machine than to get enthusiastic about what it produces: destinies. In this investigation, Montety had the subject of several novels, as many as characters. He preferred the work of an ethnologist. In fourteen portraits of reconverted legionnaires, he makes us believe that there is a death before life. Because all these soldiers went on the dark side, before giving up their own name to go beyond themselves. They left their life to better find themselves; it is at least the case of all those which are introduced to us. Among these veterans, one retains the course of Jorge Saavedra, Chilean from an upper-class family, son of a diplomat nourished of Marx, Engels, then of Oriental wisdom, and which, on Christmas Day 1960, joins in Marseille to find himself one year later with the 1st foreign regiment at Sidi Bel Abbes, in the middle of the Algeria war. An Algerian librarian who will die assassinated makes him discover Simone Weil. From now on, the white kepi does not swear any more but by the Fathers of the Church. Returning in Marseille, he breaks with the Legion to enter the religious life and becomes a priest in Provence.
Destinies like that, there are thirteen others, from the watercolours painter to the manager of an hostel for immigrants, the company manager or the billionaire. They are between 35 and 70. The principle of the total rupture, they know. They made it their second life, somewhere between the walls of barracks, on the theatre of operations or on special missions. Their school was that of discipline, brawls for a matter of honour or bullets risked for the reason of State.
From this abnormal "high school", all did not leave unscathed. Montety stuck to some cases, rather fortunate or at least specimens. It forgets the misfits, the ones badly hurt by life, corroded by alcohol, those unfit for ordinary day-to-day life. "They exist naturally, in asylums, hospitals or prisons of a civil world which they never succeeded in reinstating". A reader of Kessel and Cendrars, Montety is intrigued by this family which vibrates in the name of Camerone and cries with that of Diên Biên Phu. "I measured the difference between what had been their existence and mine. It makes the Legion neither a model nor an example. Just a dream"."Old teenager attraction for this strange world of the foreign Legion". And thus he successively portraits these lives: this para who became billionaire in import-export in South-East Asia, this former Russian spetznaz opening a consultancy firm for the European companies in Moscow, this Serb born in Croatia and having grown in Sarajevo which acknowledges, as director of an hostel for immigrants, he's doing "social mine clearing", this Chinese going from the SMG to the nem as restaurateur in Belleville street (
Belleville is a neighourhood in the East of Paris) or this former REP soldier parachuted at AFP (
Agence France Presse) and covering the lawsuit of Outreau. One should not forget this Morrocan who became a marathonian, this former Marine having served under the white kepi before cultivating the lavender on the hills loved by Giono (
a French writer who was born and lived in Provence), or this legionnaire originating from East Germany which takes opportunity of a leave in Paris to visit the woman of his life, Mona Lisa, whereas all his comrades inspect the clubs of Pigalle (
the 'hot' quarter in Paris).
Montety does not idealize the Legion. He simply describes it, with incidentally some clarifications on the folklore. The famous shout "To me the Legion!" is less often pronounced in a ambush than in a bar when a legionnaire succumbs under the number of the attackers. It is, in the final analysis, in a century corroded by individualism, principles of precaution, overall safety and umbrellas deployed to cover oneself from everything and even of the rest, the need to find a little adventure against fate. These irregular existences are rather rare. One could even say that they are not... legion.
"Of the irregular men", by Etienne de Montety, Perrin, 220 p., 19 euros.
Born in 1965, Etienne de Montety is an editor associated with the "Figaro magazine" (
a French newspaper). He is the author of a study on Kléber Haedens, an excellent biography of Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves (
a famous member of the French Resistance in WWII, captured, tortured and killed by the Gestapo) and of a book of discussions with Hélie de Saint-Marc (
a famous Legion officer who served in Indochina with 2BEP and in Algeria with 1REP) and August von Kageneck (
a former Wehrmacht officer in WWII) in 2002.
