Auxiliary Troops, Global Recruitment : the Légion d'Orient and the Origins of the French Mandate in Syria, 1915-22

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Part IIIThe New Politics of Empire

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7Global Recruitment: The Wartime Origins of French Mandate SyriaSimon Jackson

On Saturday 6 October 1917, in a French military training camp near the village of Akanthou, on the northern littoral of Cyprus, a man climbed onto a bed and began to speak.1 He was a medical nurse in the sixth ‘Syrian’ company of the Légion d’Orient, a volunteer infantry division composed of Ottoman and diaspora Syrians, Lebanese and Armenians.2 The Legion was organised in 1916–17 to fight with Entente forces in the Middle East against the Ottoman Empire.3 The unit partici-pated in the Entente’s 1918 campaigns in Palestine before its elements were dissolved or transformed into groups of French imperial auxilia-ries. The nurse is named in the French military report simply as ‘Saab’.4 Addressing his fellow Legionaries in Arabic, a language not spoken by most of his French commanders, Saab protested vehemently against the matrix of forces that had brought the company of around 180 men to Akanthou.5 He criticised the committees of Syro-Lebanese diaspora (S-LD) notables in Paris and around the world that had organised the recruitment of the Legion in 1916 and 1917, thus echoing widespread complaints among his fellow Legionaries about these committees’ misleading promises of generous enrolment indemnities.6 From his improvised platform Saab then chastised the Syrian non-commissioned officers who staffed the company and attacked the French officers who presided over its training, calling on his fellow Legionaries, in the inher-ently unreliable words of the French military report, to ‘rebel’.7

Beyond the Cypriot coast, 1917 was a year of mutiny and revolution par excellence, whether in Russia or on the Western Front.8 Amid such turbulence Saab’s speech has been forgotten.9 But the history of the Syrian company of the Légion d’Orient contributes in several ways to rethinking both the French ‘Thirty Years War’ and older iterations of French imperial history. I argue in this chapter that French recruitment


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of Syrian Legionaries during the First World War helped establish the framework for the Mandate system through which France then ruled Syria and Lebanon until after the Second World War.10 It did so first by defining Syrians and Lebanese as literal auxiliaries to French power – as subaltern army recruits and forerunners of the troupes supplétives that fought for France in the Mandate’s militias.11 But the Legion’s estab-lishment in wartime also recruited Syrians and Lebanese more broadly, as a global auxiliary political constituency, nominally willing to back French plans for the postwar Eastern Mediterranean. And though this French definition of Syrians and Lebanese as auxiliaries scarcely cap-tured the S-LD’s broad and complex range of political positions and ambitions in the Wilsonian moment, nevertheless the auxiliary para-digm endured, glossed with the legacy of wartime.12 It came to influ-ence French political and administrative practice in the Mandate, and was varyingly adapted and opposed by Syrian and Lebanese groups in the 1920s and 1930s.13

Crucially, auxiliary recruitment occurred not just in Paris and Beirut or Damascus, but also globally in the late Ottoman diaspora, and across a dense maritime network. This is a fact with ramifications for the his-toriography of French colonial empire. For if the ‘new colonial history’ of the last two decades has definitively revised ‘hexagonal’ methodo-logical nationalism, it has often appropriated its erstwhile opponents’ scalar dogmatism, remaining substantially committed to the imperial space as the pre-eminent unit of analysis, and to the co-constitutive binary of colony and metropole.14 But unlike the West African, Kanak or Indochinese recruits of this period, recruitment of the Legionaries took place in neutral, provincial Brazil, Argentina and the USA, then in the port cities of the French metropole, and later in the military archi-pelago of bases and offshore garrisons, such as Irwad and Kastellórizo, spread across the ‘complicating sea’ that was the Entente’s Eastern Mediterranean.15 The neutral countries of the Americas possessed com-plex legal and political relationships to the First World War, mostly entering hostilities only in 1917 as the balance of geopolitics tilted to the western hemisphere. Meanwhile their Syro-Lebanese citizens had emigrated from the Ottoman Empire, joining an established and diverse diaspora fleeing political convulsions in the Ottoman system that had begun well before the burnished European caesura of August 1914.16 Chronologically dissonant and geographically sited beyond the binary of colony and metropole therefore, the Syrians and Lebanese of the Légion d’Orient consequently require a history attentive to mobil-ity and to varying spatial scales, even as the national state remained a


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pivotal concept locally and globally, whether as war-fighting unit or as post-imperial goal.17

The Syrian Legionaries were neither the idealistic Latin American vol-unteers in the French regular army lately studied by Olivier Compagnon, nor the elite Arab diaspora politicians documented in the 1990s by a generation of political historians such as El’iezer T. a’uber.18 By telling a social history of the Syrian volunteers, this chapter instead gets under the diplomatic-military skin of the Legion. Combing the archives of the French state against the grain we follow the Legionaries’ maritime trajectory from – for example – São Paulo to Bordeaux, to Marseille, Port Said, Monarga, and on to the Entente army in Palestine. In doing so we glean a sense of the welfarist strategies and the actuarial paradigms that underpinned the volunteers’ experience – for instance the administra-tion of pensions, pay and ocean passage.19 Instead of dismissing the unit for its military marginality or political failure, we recover the histo-ries of men declared unfit for service – after the long, submarine-stalked voyage to France – due to the discovery of lurking tumours or tubercular lungs, and who died in French military hospitals, or were repatriated back to the Americas, or worked as ‘economic soldiers’ in French muni-tions factories.20 Finally we find traces of volunteers for whom volun-teering became a mode of mobility – men who disappeared en route, stepping off a steamship in Casablanca or a train in Paris and vanish-ing, temporarily or permanently, despite the best efforts of the French police. For if the recruitment of diaspora Syrians and Lebanese to the sixth company of the Légion d’Orient certainly helped French imperial power to constitute aspects of the political repertoire of Mandate rule, the Legion also became a theatre for the drama of individual desires and for the scripting of collective, diaspora dreams.21

French Stereotypes of the Auxiliary

Recruitment of auxiliaries goes to the heart of how the First World War catalysed the reinvention of relationships and political practices developed in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and S-LD.22 Through the Legion the wartime French authorities laid the foundation for Mandate rule by re-ascribing a specific set of cultural and anthro-pological attributes to the Syrian volunteers, in a bid to control the complex ‘south–south’ networks connecting the S-LD and the Eastern Mediterranean.23 For example, as in the British imperial army, alloca-tion to specific units within the Légion d’Orient was determined by race and religion – blurred categories in which race was determined through


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an orientalist canon of expertise that assigned martial prowess and forms of masculine virility to certain groups over others. This latter policy was in keeping with wider French military-colonial ideology dur-ing the First World War, which as Richard Fogarty has noted, decisively shaped the fate of the half million men recruited:

French authorities relied upon racial distinctions among the various subject peoples over whom they ruled in the colonies, distinguish-ing between what they called ‘races guerrières’ [warlike races] and ‘races non-guerrières’ in making decisions about where and how intensively to recruit. This could involve general comparisons among people in different colonies – Moroccans were allegedly more warlike than Tunisians, West Africans more than Indochinese – or among different ‘races’ within single colonial possessions.24

The military experience of the Légion d’Orient reinvented the political stereotype of the Syrian or Lebanese recruit as a commercial individual-ist, purportedly incapable of military discipline but innately available as an economic auxiliary to French rule. As the unit’s immediate com-mander, Captain Beuscher – an officer approvingly described by his own superior as having ‘25 years of Algeria’ – put it,

Each [Syrian volunteer] pursues a personal goal [in the Legion]. One hopes to rid himself of an illness not curable in the miserable cir-cumstances in which he lived, another seeks a temporary refuge from persecution – due to his attitude – in his own milieu. The cleverest are taking out mortgages on the political-economic advantages that victory will bring them, by obtaining cheaply the right to the admira-tion and gratitude of those of their peers who did not take up arms.25

The French Foreign Ministry (MAE) as a bureaucracy generally accep-ted this stereotyping characterisation from the Ministry of War (MG), but explained it as the outcome of the Syrians’ experience of subjuga-tion under Ottoman rule, and noted the ‘positive’ ancillary outcome that ‘their ability to assimilate makes them generally docile to our instructions’.26

Such characterisations deeply informed the French approach to the Syro-Lebanese diaspora during the Mandate period that followed the war. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, French officials continued to speculate politically on the resources of the Syrian diaspora, on its purported cultural and historical sympathy for France, and even on the


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prospective return to Syria of thousands of diaspora migrants, bringing with them capital to invest in the development of the Mandate’s econ-omy, much as the manpower shortage of wartime had seemed to make the diaspora a plausible well of fighting recruits. In 1927, for instance, in the wake of a costly counter-insurgency campaign, the Mandate’s intelligence service argued that

The Syro-Lebanese, of whom many make their fortune [once they emigrate], own quite considerable material resources that could finance by themselves, or nearly, the mise en valeur [economic devel-opment] of their country of origin, by sending the requisite capital there. If we suppose that only a tenth of them, 100,000, could invest a few thousand francs in each of the industrial and agricultural busi-nesses that will regenerate Syria, one sees what prosperity they could guarantee the country.27

The military-economic documentation and categorisations the French state generated around the Syrian Legionaries in wartime thereby fore-shadowed influential genres of bureaucratic writing and administrative practice that would underpin the Mandate civic order.28 As Ann Stoler has pointed out, the colonial ascription of such characteristics is in this sense both ‘expectant and late’, perpetually struggling to respond to an over-whelming social complexity, even as it produces new categories of rule.29

Complex Recruitments

On 16 August 1916 the French consul in neutral São Paulo, Brazil, wrote to the MAE describing the desire of Syrians living in that country to join up to fight in the Entente forces.30 The consul’s message partly reflected the mobilisation of elite members of the S-LD around the world, for whom the war presented an opportunity to advance a variety of simmer-ing plans for the geopolitical future of the post-Ottoman Middle East. These plans emerged at the crossroads between the pre-war strategies of Syro-Lebanese anti-Ottoman reformists and the wartime evolution of Arab nationalism, Syrian federalism and Lebanese Christian particularism.31 For some of the jockeying S-LD leaders – notably among the Maronite Christian diaspora and Francophile Syrian federalists – participation in the Légion d’Orient recruiting project became a way to contribute to the Entente cause and shape the postwar political outcome in the Middle East. Political rivalry among factions was never absent, as shown in the terse telegram of Na’um A. Mokarzel, a New York-based Maronite


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newspaper editor, to his colleagues in Paris: ‘volunteer movement must be ours’.32 On 21 August 1916 Georges Samna, ‘a Greek Melchite writer born in Damascus who had spent many years in France’, therefore came to the Quai d’Orsay to discuss the prospect of Brazilian S-LD volunteers, their possible military role and the likely modalities of recruitment and propaganda.33 Along with Shukri Ghanim, a Maronite Christian from Beirut who had long lived in France, Samna ran the Comité Central Syrien (CCS), which acted as the central agency for Syrian recruitment to the Legion over the next two years. Subsidised in the tens of thou-sands of French francs by the MAE, the CCS worked with a network of correspondents across the Americas, using the MAE to send encrypted telegrams and the diplomatic valise to transfer money to its agents and subcommittees.34 The CCS also dispatched a two-man mission con-sisting of Jamil Mardam Bey and César Lakah to tour South America for several months and drum up recruitment and funds there.35 The relationship between the MAE and the CCS was complex. The loyalism of Ghanim and Samna allowed them in turn to steer the selection of personnel and direction of policy regarding the Legion, and to deploy the support of the MAE against their rivals – Maronite, Arab nationalist, pro-British or even pro-United States – in the diaspora.

Within the French state a further complication was the relationship between the MG and the MAE, with the former more sceptical about the value of the Legion – and especially of its Syrian component – as a fighting force than was the MAE.36 Officials at the MG had seen such proposals come and go in 1914 and 1915, and could point to appropri-ate existing destinations, such as the Foreign Legion, for enthusiastic volunteers. In a message of 12 September 1916, for example, the MG cited the wide range of volunteer units and ‘national Legions’ that had failed to deliver on expansive promises, notably in the case of the Serbs and the Armenians earlier in the war.37 The MAE by contrast, especially under the influence of François Georges-Picot in December 1917 and early 1918, thought about the Syrian company and the Legion as a whole less in terms of military utility and more for the propaganda value it offered. The Legion, believed the MAE, would help France pre-sent its role in the Middle East as a collaborative, anti-Ottoman libera-tion rather than as a colonial occupation.38

Under ‘the free skies of Brazil’: Print Cultures of Recruitment

Recruitment of S-LD volunteers to the Syrian company of the Legion was encouraged notably in the autumn of 1916 by news from Ottoman


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Bilad-al-Sham of widespread starvation, as living conditions collapsed under the burden of locust plagues, the Entente blockade and the recruiting policies of the Ottoman Army.39 Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Syria and Palestine, thus acquired in this period an infamous status in the eyes of anti-Ottoman activists in the S-LD as ‘Jamal the starver’. News of the famine was broadcast and debated by a vibrant diaspora print culture that, as Steven Hyland, Jr, has shown, worked intensively during the war both to bind and divide the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora, escaping as it did from the censorship imposed in the traditional S-LD cultural centre of British Egypt.40 In a recruiting message published jointly across coastal and provincial Brazil a few months later by the Syrian Patriotic Committee, the Committee of the Renaissance Libanaise and the Commission for Voluntary Recruitment of São Paulo, the starvation in Bilad-al-Sham was described in the strong-est terms in order to raise consciousness and bring forward volunteers:

Here is the situation: the miserable inhabitants throw themselves on orange peels in the street to calm their hunger, the ill are laid out inert in the streets and covered in flies; those of the young who remain are recruited to their deaths on the Galician, Russian or Balkan fronts and those who remain of the women and children await the last assaults of starvation to consign them to their tombs alongside their fathers and ancestors.41

The same recruiting message noted that since the launch of the cam-paign for volunteers, five months prior, in the autumn of 1916, enrol-ment had been disappointing. It appealed to

The half million Syrians in the countries of emigration, you of whom the majority live in ease and safe from need … you seem uninterested in the fate of your brothers and your homes … what a shame it is for any Syrian if the rights of freedom and autonomy are bought only by the blood of others and by the gift of foreigners.42

But these facts were equally noted by diaspora newspapers hostile to the Legion project, such as Al-Marid, edited by José Nassif Daher, which stated that after these disappointing results the French government would see through the illusion created by its CCS advisers in Paris, ‘of thousands of Syrians in Brazil who wouldn’t hesitate to take up the sword and go to fight the Turks under the French flag’. Instead, it warned, they would find ‘not hundreds nor even tens’ of volunteers.43 In a letter accompanying these materials the French consul in São Paulo


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noted that the need to conduct the recruitment campaign discreetly, for fear of provoking the neutral Brazilian government – which was con-cerned about the large German minority in the country – had led the committees to distribute materials only in Arabic, a fact that symbolises the political-linguistic tension between Arabic and French as official and officielle languages throughout the Legion’s history.44 But, despite this discretion, the consul observed that the propaganda campaign had been widely noticed, and Latin American S-LD newspapers hostile to France had begun to criticise the endeavour.45

Despite these disappointments, French diplomats continued to be optimistic about recruiting in early 1917, as they mediated between the CCS in Paris, propaganda activities in the influential Egyptian S-LD and local notables in the Americas. They busily forwarded letters from Shukri Ghanim of the Paris CCS to Nami Jafet and his brothers, Farès Samaan Nijm, Nejib Trad, Aziz Nader and other community leaders in São Paulo friendly to the idea of the Legion.46 The Jafet brothers in particular were important sponsors – immensely wealthy Paulista textile entrepreneurs, they exercised considerable influence in the Brazilian S-LD and later endowed the library of the American University in Beirut.47 By means of such correspondence Ghanim struggled gamely to replicate his own newfound hegemony in the Paris S-LD, urging newspaper editors such as Chekri Al Khouri of the Sphinx to build unity among the Syrian Paulistas.48 Such unity would facilitate recruitment, but also grant Ghanim in his turn greater leverage with the MAE.

On 27 May 1917 Paul Claudel, then diplomatic station chief in Rio de Janeiro, wrote to Paris to say that 32 Syrian and Lebanese volunteers had just left the ports of Santos and Rio, bound for France. ‘The recruit-ing movement is gathering pace and larger departures are to be fore-seen’, he augured, adding that the CCS mission delegates were eagerly awaited.49 The missionaries, Mardam and Lakah, duly covered much ground during their tour in the summer and autumn of 1917. They found success in Rio de Janeiro, where a meeting was held at the restau-rant ‘Assyrio’ that saw once-rival newspaper editors embrace, 150,000 francs raised, and some attendees promise a third of their fortune to the cause.50 Likewise, though to a lesser degree, their visit to São Paulo was encouraging. Figure 1 shows the delegates and Claudel, along with fundraisers and volunteer Legionaries prior to their journey to France and then Cyprus.

But after success in the coastal cities, a tour of the Brazilian interior proved discouraging. In late July Lakah complained to French officials in Rio that Ghanim in Paris ‘sees and judges with a poet’s soul’ and


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that under the ‘beautiful, liberal and free skies of Brazil’, the diaspora community was too far from a war they felt would be won by others. Moreover, there were powerful anti-French campaigns underway in numerous newspapers, and to counter this influence the MAE would have to spend heavily on the penniless pro-French press. Meanwhile, rival S-LD leaders such as Khayrallah Khayrallah and Ibrahim Naggiar were reportedly dividing the community with their writings. Lakah and Mardam continued their campaign in Argentina and Chile through the autumn and eventually, having spent their budget on subsidies to the press, requested emergency funds from the MAE to pay their passage home from Santiago in February 1918.51 The two delegates felt the results obtained were meagre, but a trickle of S-LD volunteers flowed continuously across the Atlantic in these months. A group of 16 that left Montevideo aboard the Ouessant on 12 November 1917, bound for Le Havre, was a relatively large contingent, but its members were representatively unmarried, with an average age in their early 20s, and included Elias George Azar, 24, Alfredo Baroudy, 18 and Joseph Ibrahim El Chemmas, 22.52 Many were members of Christian sects or were Jewish. A set of five Syrians who left Rosario, Argentina on 8 February 1918, for example, were all Christians or Jews, including Georges Ael, a Christian born in Aleppo and aged 27, and Salamon Mouas, a Jew from Damascus aged 22.53

Figure 1 ‘Paulista’ recruits, donors and the Lakah-Mardam Mission, São Paulo 1917. Source: Antunius Yafith (1934) Na’mi Yafith: Hayatuhu Wa-A’mailuhu wa-Atharuh (São Paulo: Antunius Yafith, 1934) 104. My thanks to Stacy Fahrenthold for this image.


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The Risks of Recruitment

The departing volunteers entered an administrative-legal framework rapidly improvised by the French MG after it decided to back the Legion project in November 1916. As military auxiliaries the Legionaries were subject to a highly specific yet shifting set of legal and economic rules separate from that of the French regular army. Indeed they technically constituted an autonomous corps supported materially by France, since by the law of 16 August 1915 the French Army was forbidden from recruiting either enemy subjects – such as the Syrian deserters from the Ottoman army who constituted the first elements of the Syrian company – or the subjects of neutral countries, such as the Legionaries enrolled in South America or the USA.54 A specific actuarial paradigm was thus devised, organising the risk of military service such that, for example, an injury resulting in an 80 per cent reduction in the ability to work brought a sous officier 971 French francs per month and a private soldier 715 francs. These terms were not mere technicalities, but proved critical to attracting volunteers. From mid-1917, after French junior officials lobbied about the detrimental effect on recruitment of weak insurance, widows in their turn received 500 francs per month, to be shared between wives in the event of a polygamous Muslim volunteer’s death.55

This core welfarist regime, handed down by the MG, was adapted to contingent circumstances at local scales. For instance, recruitment to the Legion in the Egyptian S-LD foundered partly on competition – and higher pay – from the British Army, which employed Syrian migrants as storehouse guards and later as muleteers for its forces in Salonika.56 During his early recruiting efforts Lieutenant Colonel Louis Romieu, the French commander of the Legion on Cyprus, was told clearly by Yusuf Darian, the Maronite Archbishop in Egypt, that without higher pay the drive for volunteers among his flock could only prove disappointing.57 Moreover, the large and long-established S-LD in Egypt was in some cases legally subject to military service there, or at least to buying out this obligation through a money payment.58 In the Americas mean-while, numerous volunteers departed for France having been told by their local recruitment committees that they would receive a substantial bonus for signing up. The reality of the pay regime – two French francs per day – proved a great disappointment, not least given the plunging value of that currency.

Recognising the deterrent effects of these conditions on enrolment, French military and diplomatic officials in Egypt, Argentina and elsewhere


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lobbied Paris regularly for higher pay, the extension of pension benefits to Legionaries’ families in the event of a soldier’s death and then for the right of French consular officials to pay for volunteers’ passage across the Atlantic in advance.59 The MG, increasingly concerned in 1917 by the physical health of the recruits arriving in Port Said and Cyprus, resisted these changes for the most part, noting that a full legisla-tive dispensation had already been needed to extend formal benefit rights to the families of Algerian auxiliary spahis. It observed further that Moroccan goumiers, with their roots in pre-war militias, Algerian auxiliary moghaznis and colonial transport auxiliaries were all subject to the minimal pay and actuarial regime offered to the Legionaries.60 Anticipating the dynamics of the interwar Syrian Mandate, the colonial Maghreb here provided the template for French administrative reflexes in the Levant.

A bureaucratic tug of war thus took place between the recruitment committees and MAE on one hand, and on the other the MG, which was sceptical from the beginning about the utility of the Legion and unwilling to incorporate its members into the actuarial paradigms governing regular troops. At times local officials advanced ideas that ran well ahead of what Paris could tolerate, such as Paul Claudel’s idea in late June 1917 to offer ‘alliadophile’ peddlers in the Brazilian S-LD ‘patents of Syrian nationality and pro-Entente sentiment, on paper headed by interlinked French and Lebanese flags and carrying the visa of the French consul’. Claudel argued that such documents, far beyond the mere certificates of good morals requested by the MG for each volunteer, would afford protection to travelling S-LD peddlers. These salesmen, who were often designated in South America as ‘Turcos’ and resented before the war for the commercial competition they gave other retailers, needed such shielding, especially following German sub marine attacks on Brazilian shipping in 1917, when they were increasingly sus-pected of sympathy for the Central Powers.61 This is a good example of the way that the recruitment of auxiliaries during the war reinvented French relationships with the S-LD – both with actual volunteers and with the wider diaspora community.

‘Bad soldier … good businessman’: Bodies of Recruits

Meanwhile in the French ports of arrival, the CCS and MAE greeted the incoming volunteers, conscious that reports would filter back to the diaspora in the Americas, perhaps encouraging future recruit-ment efforts.62 Reports reached the MAE in May 1917 about volunteer


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Legionaries trapped in Marseille without funds, and of others arriving ‘from far off, tired, homesick … [not] … speak[ing] French and … not yet fitted out as soldiers’, and prompted action. An internal MAE note suggested the arriving volunteers be shepherded to Port Said by deco-rated Syrian volunteers from the Foreign Legion.63 And in Bordeaux Georges Samna of the CCS furnished cars to take arriving volunteers from boats to the barracks of the 144th infantry regiment, where the regional CCS committee and an Arabic–French interpreter, the Abbé Fhégali, greeted them. Money, clothes and laundry services were avail-able and a ‘soldiers’ hostel’ was created, complete with drinks, newspa-pers and theatre and cinema tickets.64

Not all volunteers benefited, however, as army medical check-ups found them too unwell for military service. Jacob Koram Rizcallah, for example, arrived on 9 May 1917 from the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts and was hospitalised at the barracks in Bordeaux before eventually being repatriated at his request to the USA, at the expense of the Paris CCS.65 Miguel José Cham by contrast, arrived in Bordeaux on 4 January 1918 and was diagnosed with testicular cancer, treated, and sent on to the foreign-workers’ depot in Marseille for labour in war factories.66 Unluckier still was Dimitri Samaha, who died of tubercu-losis in the Pasteur hospital at Le Havre on 8 September 1916, having volunteered to serve in the Legion in the first swell of enthusiasm dur-ing that autumn.67

Indeed by 1918 the dynamics of the volunteer process had markedly evolved. As Paul Claudel in Rio put it, in a vein typical of the French diplomatic corps’ wider attitudes through into the Mandate period,

most of those leaving do so because they can’t do any business here … But … [the recruiting] … efforts have to an extent brought together this dispersed, wilfully anarchist community, and woken its obligations to France. As much as the Syrian is a bad soldier, he’s a good businessman and these numerous Levantines – if we use them right – can be a precious instrument in the future.68

In the same months, seven volunteers disembarked at Casablanca from the liner Dupleix, en route from Buenos Aires to Le Havre. Nassim Moffareg, Mahmoud Cassen Salka, Miguel Assad Farah, Fuad Zugaib, Robert Bassoul, Elias Taurus Gebrayel and José Abrao, all aged in their twenties and all from Beirut or the Lebanese mountains, did not rejoin the boat. Later found and sent on to France by the Resident-General in Rabat, their decision to break their journey bespeaks the way in which


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transnational enrolment in the Legion, especially at the end of the war, was fraught with opportunity to evade the conventions of conscription and to subvert the act of volunteering, appropriating it for other pur-poses, such as professional or business advancement.

Conclusion

During the lengthy armistice era, the Légion d’Orient was split by the French military into two separate corps, partly because of the perceived friction between Armenian and Syrian groups. As N.E. Bou-Nacklie has shown, the Armenian Legion pursued hostilities against Kemalist forces in southern Anatolia, part of the effort to acquire ‘the Ottoman California’ around Adana for the French. It fought there until it muti-nied in 1921, in the context of the Franco–Turkish treaty ceding the region to the Turkish government, and was demobilised. A mainly Christian ‘Syrian Legion’ remained in Lebanon, supplemented by recruitment of highland minorities such as Druze from the south of Syria and heterodox Muslim Alawis from the north-west, who were considered particularly martial by the French.69

At the social level, armistice-era trajectories varied richly – often within an influential matrix of familial and gender norms. February 1918 already saw protests at the Legion’s Port Said base by 39 Syrian and Armenian volunteers, detained in the camp as unfit for military service and angered by the racial insults they suffered at the hands of Captain Mingrat, an Arabic-speaking officer whom, they added, had stolen their personal effects.70 Desertion was a frequent phenomenon and courts martial duly followed.71 Other Legionaries also sought an exit in order to take up family duties. Egyptian volunteers, against a backdrop of great political tension due to the revolution of 1919, were particularly likely to make such requests. Tanious Nassar, for instance, was requested home in Port Said by his mother in a letter to the French Consul at Port Said, on the basis that her son was a minor, and needed to care for her acute eye illness.72 Indeed letters from family members petitioning for the release of their relations from service in the Legion, or from Legionaries claiming back pay for wartime service, requesting repatriation to the Americas or asking for leave in exceptional fam-ily circumstances constitute a significant part of the correspondence associated with the postwar Legion. In August 1920 Emilie Abdalla Jousef wrote to ask for her brother Abdou to be released from service because he too had been an underage volunteer, but also because she was ‘alone here in Port Said and he could relieve my suffering’.


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This correspondence wound its way through the French bureaucracy, often attracting consular support to the extent that the requests con-formed to norms of patriarchal familial morality, but also channelled by the formalities of the volunteers’ contracts. Abdou Jousef, for example, had declared himself without family on enrolling and had no formal right to leave the Legion on that basis, as his commanding officer in Beirut confirmed when he denied Emilie Jousef’s request, which had been forwarded by the French Consul in Port Said.73

Such letters – fragments trawled from the mass of French admin-istrative correspondence – encapsulate the social history of the sixth company in the Légion d’Orient sketched here. Escaping from an older historiography of the Legion that emphasised its military marginality, elite origins and political failure, they instead convey something of its multi-faceted operation for those who volunteered and their families. The Syro-Lebanese Legionaries joined up for a wide variety of reasons, and contested or conformed to the unit’s disciplinary strictures and actuarial architecture in equally diverse ways. Recruited around the world and operating throughout France and the maritime Eastern Mediterranean, the volunteers were certainly at the core of a wider French imperial effort to recruit the S-LD, as the post-Ottoman future swam into focus during the First World War. The Legionaries became the metonymic targets of a reinvented wartime French cultural and political typology of the diaspora, aimed at securing Syria and Lebanon for France – a typology that would endure in French administrative practice in the Mandate throughout the interwar period. Through their circulation between the Eastern Mediterranean and the diaspora of the Americas the Legionaries also surpass the standard frameworks of impe-rial space and French colonial historiography, illustrating the way in which the era of global war requires an equally global history of empire.

Notes

1. My thanks to Stacy Fahrenthold and Steven Hyland, Jr, for comments on an early draft of this chapter, and to the volume editors and anonymous readers for their useful comments. On the Cypriot context see A. Varnava (2009) British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester University Press); M. Aymes (2010) Un grand progrès sur le papier: histoire provinciale des réformes ottomanes à Chypre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Peeters).

2. On the Armenian politics of the Legion, not treated here, see A. Beylerian (1983) Les Grandes Puissances, L’empire Ottoman et Les Armé niens dans Les Archives Franç aises (1914–1918) (Paris: Université de Paris I); D. Bloxham (2005) The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the


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Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press); and in a denialist register U. Keser (2000) Kıbrıs, 1914–1923: Fransız, Ermeni Kampları, Ingiliz Esir Kampları ve Atatü rkç ü Kıbrıs Tü rkü (Levent, Istanbul: Akdeniz Haber Ajansı).

3. See for older work on the Legion’s origins, legacies and history through to the Second World War, N. E. Bou-Nacklie (1993) ‘Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, 1916–46’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25, 645–60; E. Tauber (1994) ‘La Légion d’Orient et La Légion Arabe’, Revue Française d’histoire d’outre-Mer, 81, 171–80; E. T. a’uber (1993) The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass) 165–231.

4. For a recent theorisation of this issue in the colonial archive see Ann Laura Stoler (2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton University Press) 47; see also Ranajit Guha (1994) ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in N. B. Dirks, G. Eley and S. B. Ortner (eds) Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton University Press) 336–72.

5. Some Legion officers did speak Arabic, however. Some had pre-war back-grounds in colonial social science, such as the Arabic linguist and infantry lieutenant Gaston Wiet, from the University of Lyon. Archives of Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve, France (AMAE), Guerre 1914–18, Turquie (note all AMAE citations are from this series, and given simply by carton number and document details below), Carton 891. 4 December 1916, Lt Col. Louis Romieu report from Port Said, sent 18 December 1916 with political dispatch no. 526 from Cairo to Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris (hereafter MAE).

6. The hyphenated term S-LD refers to a diverse global diaspora of out-migrants from the Syrian provinces and Lebanese mountains of the Ottoman Empire, which at the close of the First World War contributed to the articulation of various visions of post-Ottoman political community in the Eastern Mediterranean (and in their varied countries of residence), even as the emergent political units that later became Syria and Lebanon had not yet crystallised during a period of political flux that culminated in two decades of joint rule of those countries – as a League of Nations ‘A’ Mandate – by France. Names of diaspora members known for their writings are rendered in keeping with the conventions of Arabic transliteration, while all others are given as listed in archival documents. For recent work on the Syro-Lebanese and wider Arab diaspora see J. Tofik Karam, M. del Mar Logroño-Narbona, P. Gabriel Hilú da Rocha Pinto (eds) (forthcoming) Crescent of Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean and Latino U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press); D. Abdelhady (2011) The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab Immigrant Experience in Montreal, New York, and Paris (New York University Press); A. K. Arsan (2011) ‘Failing to Stem the Tide: Lebanese Migration to French West Africa and the Competing Prerogatives of the Imperial State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53, 450–78; I. Blumi (2013) Ottoman Refugees, 1878–1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World (New York: Bloomsbury Academic); G. Bré gain (2008) Syriens et Libanais d’Amé rique Du Sud (1918–1945) (Paris: Harmattan); R. Bailony (2013) ‘Transnationalism and the Syrian Migrant Community: The Case of the 1925 Syrian Revolt’, Mashriq & Mahjar, 1, 8–29; S. Fahrenthold (2013) ‘Transnational Modes


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and Media: The Syrian Press in the Mahjar and Emigrant Activism during World War I’, Mashriq & Mahjar, 1, 30–54; S. Hyland, Jr (2011) ‘“Arisen from Deep Slumber”: Transnational Politics and Competing Nationalisms among Syrian Immigrants in Argentina, 1900–1922’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 43, 547–74; M. del Mar Logroño Narbona (2007) ‘The Development of Nationalist Identities in French Syria and Lebanon: A Transnational Dialogue with Arab Immigrants to Argentina and Brazil, 1915–1929’, PhD thesis (University of California, Santa Barbara); C. Pastor de Maria y Campos (2011) ‘Inscribing Difference: Maronites, Jews and Arabs in Mexican Public Culture and French Imperial Practice’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 6, 169–87; E. Alsultany and E. Shohat (eds) (2012) Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

7. Dirks, Eley and Ortner, Culture/Power/History, 340.8. L. V. Smith (2007) ‘The “Culture de Guerre” and French Historiography of

the Great War of 1914–1918’, History Compass, 5, 1967–79.9. Study of the First World War is increasingly turning away from the classic

sites of analysis, however. See, for example, R. Fogarty and A. Jarboe (eds) (2014) Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris).

10. For an introduction to the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon see E. F. Thompson (2000) Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press); K. David Watenpaugh (2012) Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton University Press).

11. D. Neep (2012) Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space and State Formation (Cambridge University Press).

12. E. Manela (2007) The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press).

13. Thompson, Colonial Citizens.14. F. Cooper (2005) Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley:

University of California Press); R. Bertrand (2011) L’histoire à parts égales: récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil); A. L. Conklin (1997) A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford University Press).

15. G. Mann (2006) Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press); A. Muckle (2008) ‘Kanak Experiences of WWI: New Caledonia’s Tirailleurs, Auxiliaries and “Rebels”’, History Compass, 6, 1325–45; T. Stovall (1993) ‘Colour-Blind France? Colonial Workers during the First World War’, Race & Class, 35, 35–55; D. Abulafia (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lane), 573–82. The former island is a mile offshore from present-day Tartus on the northern Syrian coast and the latter lies just off present-day Kas on the southern coast of Turkey; I. Hofmeyr (2012) ‘The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32, 585; I. Khuri-Makdisi (2010) The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press).


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16. For the Great War and its chronology as the ‘war of the Ottoman succession’ see S. McMeekin (2011) The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 4; and for a new chronology of the same con-flict focused on the rise of the United States see A. Tooze (2014) The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916–1931 (London: Allen Lane).

17. I draw here on S. W. Sawyer (2014) ‘Ces nations façonnées par les empires et la globalisation. Réécrire le récit national du XIXe siècle aujourd’hui’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 69, 134.

18. O. Compagnon (2013) L’adieu à l’Europe: l’Amérique latine et la Grande guerre Argentine et Brésil, 1914–1939 (Paris: Fayard); T. a’uber, The Arab Movements in World War I.

19. On the rise of the actuarial paradigm in French governmentality at the turn of the twentieth century see M. C. Behrent (2010) ‘Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the ‘Anti-revolutionary’ Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’, The Journal of Modern History, 82, 585–624.

20. R. Porte (2006) La mobilisation industrielle: premier front de la Grande guerre? (Saint-Cloud: 14–18 éditions); P. Wagner, B. Zimmermann and C. Didry (eds) (1999) Le travail et la nation: histoire croisée de la France et de l’Allemagne (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme) 29–55.

21. See paradigmatically L. Capdevila, F. Rouquet, F. Virgili, D. Voldman (eds) Hommes et femmes dans la France en guerre: 1914–1945 (Paris: Payot).

22. A. Arsan, ‘“This Age Is the Age of Associations”: Committees, Petitions, and the Roots of Interwar Middle Eastern Internationalism’, Journal of Global History, 7, 166–88; D. Rodogno (2011) Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton University Press).

23. Hofmeyr, ‘The Complicating Sea’, 584.24. R. S. Fogarty (2008) Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French

Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 25.25. AMAE, Carton 893, 13 November 1917, MG to MAE forwarding report of

15 October 1917, Romieu, Cyprus, no. 21, to MG.26. AMAE, Carton 891, 19 February 1917, MAE to MG.27. Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères, Nantes (hereafter referred to

as CADN), Fonds Beyrouth, Premier Versement-Cabinet Politique, Dossiers de Principe 1920–41, Carton 419, Colonies Syro-Libanais à l’étranger, 15 November 1927.

28. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 4; Neep, Occupying Syria under the French Mandate; Thompson, Colonial Citizens.

29. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.30. AMAE, Carton 890, 16 August 1916, Consul São Paulo to MAE. 31. For an overview see T. a’uber, The Arab Movements in World War I.32. AMAE, Carton 891, 12 May 1917, telegram sent via MAE from Mokarzel NYC

to Mokarzel Paris (his brother), for transmission to Ghanim.33. T. a’uber, The Arab Movements in World War I, 205; Arsan, ‘This Age Is the Age

of Associations’, 167. For the visit see AMAE, Carton 890, 21 August 1916, internal note, ‘Visite du Dr Samné’.

34. AMAE, Carton 892, 4 June 1917, 10,000 francs from Jean Gout to CCS. 35. The former a prominent Damascene Sunni politician and future nationalist

opposition leader in the Mandate period, and the latter a medical doctor in


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the French Army. The absence of a Maronite delegate, after the French failed to recruit a candidate in Cairo, riled many in that community.

36. AMAE, Carton 890, 12 September 1916, MG to MAE, suggesting volunteers’ incorporation in Foreign Legion.

37. Idem. See also T. a’uber, The Arab Movements in World War I, 247; on the Jewish Legion see D. J. Penslar (2013) Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton University Press) 166–200.

38. AMAE, Carton 893, 30 November 1917, Georges–Picot, Cairo, to MAE.39. S. Tamarı (2011) Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s

Ottoman Past (Berkeley: University of California Press); A. Jacobson (2011) From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press); T. a’uber, The Arab Movements in World War I, 167–8.

40. AMAE, Carton 891, 9 January 1917, DeFrance, Cairo Legation forwards a report from Lt Col. Romieu, commander of the Légion d’Orient, quoting Michel Lutf’Allah, a wealthy member of the Syrian diaspora in Egypt and member of the Syrian Union Party; Hyland, Jr, ‘Arisen from Deep Slumber’, 560; Hofmeyr, ‘The Complicating Sea’, 586.

41. AMAE, Carton 891, 21 April 1917, Brazil Legation to MAE, Annex 1: Committee Appeal.

42. Ibid.43. Ibid., Annex 2: Al-Marid, 14 February 1917, ‘Things and Thoughts’.44. P. Bourdieu (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press). Bourdieu notes the interplay of formal (officielle) situations and official (state) languages in this context.

45. AMAE, Carton 891, 21 April 1917, Brazil Legation to MAE, cover letter from French Consul Birlé, São Paulo, to Paul Claudel in Rio de Janeiro.

46. AMAE, Carton 891, 25 May 1917, MAE to French Legation in Rio de Janeiro.47. My thanks to Steven Hyland, Jr, and Stacy Fahrenthold for additional infor-

mation on the Jafets.48. AMAE, Carton 891, 31 May 1917, MAE to Birlé, São Paulo attaching message

from Ghanim to Chekri Al Khouri.49. AMAE, Carton 891, 27 May 1917, Claudel, Rio de Janeiro, to MAE.50. AMAE, Carton 892, 6 September 1917, Claudel to MAE. Claudel requested

the appointment of a Syrian attaché to help him deal with this issue.51. Ibid., 26 June 1917, CCS to MAE, forwarding Lakah report from Rio; 29 June

1917, Claudel to MAE detailed note on the visit of Lakah and Mardam to Rio and describing support for the Legion from Russian consul Scherbatskoy; 29 July 1917, Lakah to Wiet, French consul in Rio de Janeiro expressing disappointment; 30 July 1917 Claudel to MAE enclosing note from Lakah to Ghanim at CCS about S-LD political divisions and press. Carton 893, 20 January 1918, Santiago French Embassy to MAE enclosing message from Lakah to Ghanim requesting funds.

52. AMAE, Carton 893, 19 November 1917, telegram from Lefaivre in Montevideo to MAE.

53. Ibid. 8 February 1918, Consul in Rosario, Argentina to MAE.54. M. Aksakal (2010) The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire

and the First World War (Cambridge University Press); AMAE, Carton 891, 24 December 1916, MG to MAE.


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55. Ibid., MG to MAE, 24 December 1916 citing MG instruction no. 7966–9/11 of 26 November 1916. See also AMAE, Carton 892, 13 August 1917, MG to MAE on pensions paid to Legionaries’ families.

56. P. G. Elgood (1924) Egypt and the Army (London: Oxford University Press); M. M. Ruiz (2009) ‘Manly Spectacles and Imperial Soldiers in Wartime Egypt, 1914–19’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45, 351–71; K. Ulrichsen (2011) The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); AMAE, Carton 890, 18 May 1916, Lt Giraud to Capt. Jaureguiberry. On mules see W. G. Clarence-Smith (2012) ‘Donkeys and Mules in the Indian Ocean in the Long Nineteenth Century’ (paper pre-sented at ‘Donkey Conference @ SOAS 2012’, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 8–9 May 2012).

57. AMAE, Carton 891, 18 December 1916, Cairo to MAE, political dispatch 526 containing Romieu’s report from Port Said of 4 December 1916.

58. Ibid., 9 January1917, DeFrance, Cairo to MAE.59. Ibid., 2 February 1917, MAE to MG.60. D. Maghraoui (2004) ‘The “grande Guerre Sainte”: Moroccan Colonial

Troops and Workers in the First World War’, The Journal of North African Studies, 9, 1–21; AMAE, Carton 891, 24 December 1916, MG to MAE.

61. AMAE, Carton 892, 29 June 1917, Claudel to MAE.62. Ibid., 22 June 1917, MAE to MG.63. AMAE, Carton 891. On trapped volunteers, 19 May 1917, Abboud, Marseille

to Lakah, Paris. Internal MAE note dated 21 May 1917. Paul Daher, a Syrian holding French citizenship and with four sons in the French army was sub-sequently named by the MG as responsible for volunteers as they shipped through Marseille or remained there as foreign-war workers.

64. Ibid. 20 June 1917, CCS to MAE.65. Ibid. 13 June 1917, MAE to Ministry of Interior.66. AMAE, Carton 893, 17 January 1918, MG to MAE.67. AMAE, Carton 892, 7 January 1917, CCS to MAE.68. AMAE, Carton 893, 28 January 1918, Claudel, Rio to MAE.69. Bou-Nacklie, ‘Les Troupes Spéciales’. 70. CADN, Port Said, Consulate, 542PO/1 Carton 67, Dossier Romieu Mission, 3

February 1918, Legionaries to French Consul Laffon, Port Said.71. Ibid. 31 May 1917, Laffon to St. Quentin, Saab (deserter) arrested, held at

consulate. It is not clear if this is the same person referred to at the start of this chapter.

72. Ibid. 21 February 1918, Nassar to Laffon.73. CADN, Port Said, Consulate, 542PO/1 Carton 68, Dossier Syrian/Armenian

Legions, 11 August 1920, Jousef to Laffon. 18 August 1920, Legion com-mander, Beirut, to Laffon, declining to release Jousef.


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Auxiliary Troops, Global Recruitment : the Légion d'Orient and the Origins of the French Mandate in Syria, 1915-22

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