The French Foreign Legion

Why does the french foreign legion still exist?

So france can project power among its former colonies in Africa without risking the lives of actual citizens.

Cool.

t. Teenager that did join the French Foreign Legion. But you don't know if I am bullshitting or not because we are on the internet.

The stereotype of the criminal who wants to start anew in a foreign country under a new alias was pretty romantic.

Literally cannon fodder.
They were created so French men wouldn't die in a backwards shithole in the middle of nowhere but instead some poor European exile would.
However it was this treatment that Made them good as they were hard done by grunts who never gave up despite the harshest of conditions. After the battle of Camaron they gain that sort of mysticism that all good military units have and thus they were considered better.
FFL in the 21St century arnt elite, they just have that ethos that gives them a different mindset to the regular French army, and that is the legion is their home and you either serve your five years or die because you have nothing else left being a poor exile turned legionary.

>They were created so French men wouldn't die in a backwards shithole in the middle of nowhere but instead some poor European exile would.

Explain why half of Legion troops were French before the 20th century then
Just look the names of Camaron soldiers, there are more Frenchthan foreigners

You join the army to fight, and the FFL does the most fighting because they are expendable (plus all commanding officers are French so might have skewed the statistics). It's like when bits join the rifles because they do fighting not necessarily because they are "elite."

Also cont. From Camaron was that moment in the FFL history where it transitions from unrespectable to respectable. Look at the amount of SAS applications after the Iranian embassy seige, no doubt Frenchmen would want in on a unit that has that mystique attached to it.

The FFL was literally made by France in early 1800's post napoleon to deal with the massive amount of European exiles roaming around the continent givening them the opportunity for a new start and giving France some expendable man power.

>You join the army to fight

in the case of the foreign legion you usualy join to get away from shit, like debts, threats or prison

Also you can change your name when you join so people choose French names

You can't join the FFL with a criminal record and whilst you can still use a pseudonym once you're in you can no longer enlist under an assumed identity

sounds comfy desu

>Black flag army

we wuz pirates?

That's probably been the way it always has been. Do you think the French military spent good, scarce money that it could use on its own soldiers on training facilities, equipment, funds, and on giving them additional troops, for foreigners? Probably the adversity helped, not hindered them, being shoved into any colonial conflict where the French weren't willing to deploy their conscript soldiers and learning and dying on the job. Hell that's still the way it is, they're still useful because France can push them into zones where deploying their own soldiers wouldn't be politically possible.

A lot of them after 1870 were volunteers from Alsace-Lorraine, so while they were French they weren't from France the state.

What does the modern FFL even engage in? Does it still fight in its former colonies because France still has an economic stake in a lot of those countries?

Yeah they're in Mali and the Central African Republic presently