The history and philosophy of the French Foreign Legion.
The legion was formed in 1831 as an all-volunteer corps of the French Army with a special right to hire foreign-born recruits; French citizens were not accepted until 1881. Upon acceptance, the legion became their only country, and they were comprised of outcasts, younger scions of noble families, debt-ridden gamblers, and those escaping scandal, jail, or the noose. Upon entering training, one only need provide a name and proof of physical ability. The training was brutal, pushing men to the limits of human endurance. The legion soldiers were essential in the building of France’s colonial empire, with conquests across Algeria, Indochina, Madagascar, Morocco, and elsewhere. Blanchard (French Studies/Swarthmore Coll.; Éminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France, 2011) eases readers’ confusion about foreign cities and geographic regions by following the career of Gen. Louis Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934), who fought in all the major colonies. His use of and reliance on the Foreign Legion illustrate how perfectly they grew into such a significant force. They were the troop of the last stand, never questioning and never hesitating to answer the call; loyalty and solidarity were the most important assets. As the author follows Lyautey through Algerian pacification and some of the most tumultuous episodes in legion history in Indochina, we see France’s steady progression of colonialism. Like many colonial powers, the French civilized the natives while maintaining a policy of Code de l'indigénat, denying them equal rights with their conquerors. Men of the legion, Lyautey included, suffered from what was termed le cafard, a deep depression resulting from long terms of solitude in remote areas, often ending in suicide. The author deftly captures the romance as well as the horror of life in the French Foreign Legion.
Blanchard’s style, broad knowledge of France, and scholarly research in the legion’s archives make this a detailed and fascinating book of French history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8027-4387-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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