Fighting over Foreignness: The French Foreign Legion, Desertion, and Propaganda in the Algerian War

This paper examines how the French Foreign Legion became a central object of struggle in the propaganda politics of the Algerian War of Independence. While historians have emphasized the Legion’s operational importance in French counterinsurgency, less attention has been paid to how the Legion’s foreignness – long a pillar of French imperial power – was reworked by the anticolonial Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) into a source of political vulnerability. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s writings in El Moudjahid (the FLN’s French-language newspaper), press interviews with deserters, and French military intelligence reports, this paper argues that the FLN transformed the figure of the legionnaire into a powerful symbol of colonial illegitimacy and moral collapse.

At the center of this effort was Fanon’s influential portrayal of the “demoralized Foreign Legion,” which recast desertion as a process of political awakening and liberation. Stripped of conscience by colonial discipline, legionnaires were ultimately redeemed through contact with Algerian freedom fighters. This narrative was quickly amplified in El Moudjahid, through staged interviews, exposés of forced enlistment, and appeals that framed the Armée de Libération Nationale (the FLN’s military wing) as a site of restored dignity.

Yet this discourse did not remain solely an FLN production. Anti-Legion narratives circulated in the European press, giving international visibility to claims of brutality, statelessness, and internal collapse. Even as the French army continued to rely on legionnaires in combat, it increasingly confronted a political paradox: the very foreign troops meant to secure empire were now being mobilized to discredit it.

By tracing foreignness as a contested identity during the Algerian War, this paper shows how FLN propaganda transformed the Legion from an asset into a liability – and how the figure of the foreign soldier became a site for redefining loyalty, legitimacy, and internationalism in late colonial conflict.