British Experiences in the French Foreign Legion During the Interwar Period

British Experiences in the French Foreign Legion during the Interwar Period examines how, during the Interwar period, a few Britons joined the French Foreign Legion, in spite of the fact that they had the largest empire on Earth, a still sizeable army and that the Legion was in the service of the 'old enemy'. Frédéric Barthet draws on the memoirs written by many of these British men to reveal fascinating insights into this experience. Did these men describe the reality of their experience in the Legion or did they play on the myths attributed to the Legion by the British public at the time? The book establishes the interaction between myth and reality as depicted by the British ex-legionnaires themselves and reflects on how and why these memoirists deliberately chose myth over reality.
The creation of fictional films, novels and newspaper articles which pre-dated the British enlistment, these Foreign Legion myths - Barthet convincingly contends - bore little resemblance to reality. Yet this vision of Legion life was in fact so powerful that many of the so-called memoirs written by supposed British ex-legionnaires were actually novels disguised as autobiographies, a sort of subgenre of Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels written to appeal to the taste of the British public for French Foreign Legion stories at the time. The book reflects on what this blurring of the line between truth and fantasy can tell us about the British involvement in the French Foreign Legion.

Frédéric Barthet is a post-doctoral honorary research fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, Australia.