Dubonnet, the French Foreign Legion, and International Arbitration

In March 1831, King Louis Phillipe of France issued an ordinance to allow for foreign nationals to enlist to serve France in the Légion étrangère – more popularly known as the French Foreign Legion. The Legion was created in part as a way to employ the numerous foreign nationals who had immigrated to following the collapse of the Bourbon Restoration in the July Revolution of 1830.  Concerned that these foreign nationals – many of them veterans – might pose a security threat if left without employment, Minister of War Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult encouraged King Louis Phillipe to put the veterans to work defending France. 

The French Foreign Legion was a unique military entity – it allowed enlistees to change their name and enlist under a pseudonym, known as their ‘Legion name’.  Enlistees did not need identification papers to enlist, only a simple ‘declaration of identity’.  The promise of leaving one’s identity behind contributed much to the modern-day ethos of the Legion as a mysterious institution where one could engage in noble and courageous acts on behalf of a ‘glorious Republic’.  However, the reality was that Legionnaires were, at least in the early decades of the Legion, considered “undesirables” – as Minister of War Soult had himself written in 1834, ‘the Foreign Legion was formed with the only purpose of creating an outlet and giving a destination to foreigners who flood France and who cause trouble… the government has no desire to look for recruits for this Legion.  This corps is simply an asylum for misfortune.’  It would be decades before the Legion would be considered an elite fighting force, one that attracted ‘romantics, artists, writers in search of existential experiences and emotional challenges’.

Among the first campaigns of the Legion was the 1831-1844 campaigns in Algeria.  Legionnaires serving in North Africa were susceptible to malaria, and the conventional preventative and curative for malaria was (and remains to this day) quinine – derived from the bark of the Peruvian native Cinchona tree.  Quinine is a very bitter substance, and the French government was keen to find a way to disguise the taste, to encourage its consumption among those posted in Africa.  To that end, a competition was reputedly created to produce a palatable substance in which quinine could be incorporated – in 1846, Joseph Dubonnet, a French chemist, added cinchona bark to red wine and, with the addition of other herbs, spices, and sugar, created the aperitif known as Dubonnet.  In much the same way that British forces consumed gin and tonics to combat malaria (tonic water also being infused with cinchona) in Asia, so too did French forces drink Dubonnet in Africa.  Indeed, historians have noted that it was quinine that facilitated European colonization in Africa and Asia – ‘it was quinine's efficacy that gave colonists fresh opportunities to swarm into the Gold Coast, Nigeria and other parts of west Africa’.

Not everyone who joined the Legion was eternally committed to adventuring – in 1909, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) heard the case of the Deserters at Casablanca.   This case related to the September 1908 desertion of six Legionnaires – three of whom were German - who sought asylum in the German Consulate in Casablanca.  The Consul granted safe passage to the deserters and were duly conveyed to the port of Casablanca by German consular agents.  While attempting to board a German vessel, French forces attempted to retrieve the Legionnaires through force.  

The dispute between France and Germany came before the PCA, with France alleging that Germany has acted wrongfully in attempting to ‘have embarked, on a German steamship, the deserters from the French Foreign Legion who were not of German nationality’.  Germany countered that France has ‘attacked, maltreated, outraged and threatened’ the German nationals who were under consular protection.  Ultimately, the arbitration held that while the deserters were subject to French military jurisdiction, they were under de facto German consular protection, and that France should not have forcibly interfered with the German nationals but rather should have returned them to the consulate so that the question of competent jurisdiction could be resolved.