https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/k...gion-kxzdj7wxs
Ketchup on foie gras? That’s too foreign for the Franch Foreign Legion
The French Foreign Legion is never short of recruits. They come from more than 140 countries and join in the search for adventure, discipline and a new identity to put aside past troubles. But the French themselves seem reluctant to sign up to what is widely considered to be the toughest branch of the army.
Now the legion has begun a recruitment campaign on France’s beaches in the hope of wooing homegrown candidates. Officers have been driving to the country’s most popular resorts in a van marked:
Légion étrangère, rejoins nos valeurs (Foreign Legion, join our values). Their mission is to try to convince young, single French men that a legionnaire’s life is more attractive than it has been made to seem in novels such as
Beau Geste, the 1924 work by the British author PC Wren.
The legion has always incorporated Frenchmen, including General Thierry Burkhard, who was appointed head of the country’s army last month. However, their numbers are falling and less than 10 per cent of the 10,000 or so people who apply to join the legion every year are French.
Sergeant Major Sang-Jin Lee, who is involved in the recruitment drive on the beaches, said that the legion’s foreign recruits are no longer adopting French customs because of the absence of homegrown legionnaires to act as guides. He said that the problem was underlined recently when three foreign recruits put ketchup and mayonnaise on their
foie gras. He said that the force, which was founded in 1831, needed French recruits to “transmit the language and the culture”.
The need has been made more acute by the modernisation of the French army’s light armoured vehicles, tanks and missile launchers and their link-up with information technology systems. The programme, codenamed Scorpion, involves an overhaul of equipment and requires a good level of French to understand it, according to specialists.
The legion is struggling because only 16 per cent of its members are from French-speaking countries. Its aim is to increase the proportion to at least 20 per cent by 2025.........