Does having been in the French Foreign Legion give you immunity from prosecution in France?
Nope:
There was a programme on TV about the FFL quite recently because the chief NCO at the time was British. What they do is that if you are wanted in a particular country, they do not send you to that country.
There is no immunity for crimes committed in France, of course.
Like the US military, the French it seems also gave people charged with some crimes the option of joining the FFL instead of prison time.
In the movie Baiser Rouge(?) the guy is offered the choice of prison or joining the FFL on the charge of statutory rape; so off he’s going to fight in French Indochina. Interestingly enough, the movie also mentions that sex with an underage girl is the one French crime in which once the complaint is made, the complaintant (the father in this case) cannot change his mind and withdraw the charge. Also, it would qualify as kiddie porn in North America because the girl in the fairly explicit sex scene is supposed to be 15 or 16.
On the plus side, it has some great “galloping on horseback across the sand with Mont St Michel in the background” scenes, IIRC.
The US military does not give people such an option.
I imagine he’s referring to the (outdated at this point) idea of a judge telling a defendant that charges would be dropped if he joined the army.
As it happens, I just read the short-story collection Warriors, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, which included “My Name is Legion” by David Morrell. It has some good stuff on the FFL just before and during WW2, including hard fighting between Vichy- and Free France-aligned FFL units in North Africa. Talk about divided loyalties.
I heard somewhere that some ex-Nazis (or at least ex-Wehrmacht servicemen) joined the FFL after WWII. Any truth to that?
Thanks.
I vaguely recall someone’s memoirs of the choice as a major troublemaker, the judge gave him the option to either take prison time or join the US military. It was not a serious crime like murder, but one of those “kids with time on their hands doing really stupid things”.
I’m not sure how widespread the practice was, I don’t recall if it was during WWII or not.
Yes, as Cecil’s column (linked to in the second post) states. Today, there are more than three times as many Germans in the FFL than from any other single country. See here and scroll down a little to the chart: French Foreign Legion - Wikipedia.
Not very, because the US Marines (don’t know about Army or Navy) have always had a policy of sending you back to the judge if they found out about it during basic.
Do you mean if they thought you had been arm-twisted into recruiting, or if they found out you had skipped out on an arrest warrant?
I always saw the choice as the legal system’s equivalent of sending problem children to military school.
Both. If the USMC found out that a judge said “Marines or Jail”, the Marines just sent you back for the judge to deal with. If there was a warrant involved, that was an automatic “remand into custody”. Again, don’t know Army or Navy policy. It might have been/ might currently be different.
No. The Legion certainly isn’t picky when it comes to recruits, but isn’t a safe haven for criminals.
The notion that being in the Legion gives one a “get out of jail free” card probably comes from its tradition of anonymity : when you join up, you can give any name and nationality you like, that’s how they’ll call you and put on your military documents. No background check, no proof of ID necessary, no questions asked.
However, that new name is only valid within the Legion itself, it’s not a “real” identity - it’s not automatic French citizenship, you can’t marry under it, or get voting rights, or anything like that. It’s an internal convenience, nothing more.
While it probably makes you somewhat harder to track down, you’re on your own if you ever leave the unit or your past manages to catch up to you in whatever godforsaken hell hole you end up getting deployed to.
If that ever happened, it doesn’t any more.
The French military doesn’t, either. Although historically the legion had taken in people “no question asked”, nowadays, they make a background check and even though they might overview minor issues you had with the law, they won’t let you in if you commited serious offenses .
You enlist under an assumed name (mandatory, in fact), sometimes an assumed citizenship (particularly true for French members of the Legion, who often enlist as Belgians or somesuch) but the Legion itself knows who you really are.
The movie “Baiser Rouge” happened in the late 50’s (IIRC, around the time just after Stalin’s death) and at that time the FFL needed recruits for some war down in their possessions in Indochina where the locals were demanding independence.