This isn't quite a history of the Legion. It's a collection of anecdotes.
These pages recount situations, atmospheres, and men.
Simple, absurd, tense, or unexpected moments. There's commitment, mistakes, and silences too. And sometimes, yes, absences.
Nothing is embellished. Nothing is resolved either. It's told as it comes.
Those who know will recognize. The others... will see for themselves.

"I want people to understand, as soon as they pass through this door, that they are entering a regiment." Colonel Blevin, Commanding Officer of the 1st Foreign Regiment
Towards the end of the 1990s, the colonel had a daily frustration. It didn't come from headquarters, inspections, or even the budgets, which, in the army, is practically a miracle.

No. His frustration lay in a courtyard.
Every morning, upon entering the regimental headquarters, he was met with the same scene: gray walls, haphazardly parked vehicles, delivery vans coming and going as if in the back yard of a furniture warehouse. The sound of car doors slamming, diesel engines coughing, and sometimes an irate warrant officer adding insult to injury with the kind of language only the army seems to possess.

The colonel watched this with the look of a homeowner discovering he's been given goats in his living room.

"The regiment's entrance looks like a backyard... a real parking lot!" He repeated this phrase often. Not to be witty. Because it genuinely hurt him.
For him, a regiment had to begin before you even entered it. It was essential that, upon entering, visitors immediately understood what they were getting into. Not an administration building. Not a garage. A foreign regiment.

At that time, the Vienot barracks parade ground was under the command of the Foreign Legion Command (COMLE). The 1st Foreign Regiment (1er RE) therefore wanted its own space. Something more discreet. More intimate, too. A place bearing its own mark.
The idea was born: to give a soul to a piece of concrete.

January 1997. I was then assigned to the 1er RE for a few months. After commanding the 5th Foreign Regiment's Support Company (CSB), I had requested retirement. I was placed in the Foreign Legion Recruitment Office (BEI) under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Héberlé, nicknamed "Mein Gott" by legionnaires whose Christian charity had always had its limits.
I no longer had a specific position. I had become that very military thing called "on standby." It's a strange position where you're often entrusted with things that no one really knows how to categorize. One morning, the commanding officer summoned me.

He got straight to the point.

“I need a design for the space between the command post and the regimental store. Make it something beautiful. I want it to break away from this ugliness and have some presence. I want people to understand that this is where the regiment begins.” I asked him what direction he envisioned.

The colonel smiled calmly.

“I’m a monoculture kind of guy… you’re the artist.” Then, after a silence,

“Ah yes… but make sure you include two parking spaces. One for the command post. One for the command post.” Even the noblest dreams always end up bypassing a service vehicle.

The idea came to me almost immediately.
The cradle of the Legion was Algeria. And, whether people say it or not, many of the walls of the 1st Foreign Regiment still carried that memory in their stones. So I imagined a patio with an oriental feel. Simple arcades. Mediterranean light. Nothing exotic in the theatrical sense of the word, more of an atmosphere. Something reminiscent of Sidi Bel Abbès without trying to recreate it like an operetta set.

In the center, I drew a roundabout for deliveries. Because military poetry must always allow trucks to pass.

And in the middle of this roundabout, an olive tree.

It came about naturally. The olive tree belongs as much to Provence as to Algeria. It was a bridge-tree. A tree that knew both shores.

When I showed the watercolor to Colonel Blevin, he looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he simply said,

"It suits me."

Coming from a commanding officer, this sometimes amounts to a lyrical declaration.

He then added,

"And what if we added a fresco... to commemorate our ancestors from the mountains?" “I then made a pencil sketch of a legionnaire patrol marching in the Algerian mountains. Weary figures. Men advancing, unsure whether the silence of the hills concealed the wind or something else.

Then came April, and I left the regiment before work began.
The construction was carried out by the barracks. A corporal mason, whose name escapes me now, which is unfair, directed the work with remarkable care. In the army, some men quietly build things that will long outlive them. I was told that a plaque now bears his name in the courtyard.”
That's the least one could expect.

The fresco, however, was painted by a civilian artist. A nephew of Colonel Bon, it seems. As is often the case in the Legion, serious stories circulate in a fog of contradictory versions, where everyone holds a different truth and defends it vehemently.
The colonel then had my watercolor framed and hung it in the entrance hall of the BEI. Perhaps it's still there. Military buildings sometimes have a longer memory than men.
Even today, the courtyard of the 1st Foreign Regiment still exists. The arcades are reminiscent of Sidi Bel Abbès.
The olive tree still connects Algeria to Provence. And the fresco watches over those who came before, as all old images of soldiers eventually do.
It was initially just an empty space between two walls and a few badly parked vehicles. It became a place.

And in a regiment, that's never a small matter.