French Foreign Legion information. An online project dedicated to the famous Foreign Legion.
In summer 2026, the French Foreign Legion saw five changes of command at the regimental level, reflecting the French Army’s regular two-year command rotation cycle. These changes affected units stationed in metropolitan France and overseas, including some of the Legion’s most prominent operational formations.
Read moreForeign Legion: 2026 Changes of Command in Five Regiments
On August 1, 2026, Brigadier General Christophe Passerat de La Chapelle took officially command of the French Foreign Legion and became the new Père Légion, or “Father of the Legion.” He succeeded Major General Cyrille Youchtchenko, who had led the elite corps for the past three years.
Summer is traditionally a quiet season for Legion news, but a nice photo slideshow is well worth a look while things wind down. Posted on YouTube by an Italian former legionnaire, the video takes viewers through his five years of service in the French Foreign Legion, from August 1987 to August 1992, most of it spent with the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP).
Read moreAn Italian Legionnaire’s Photo Journey Through the Legion, 1987–1992
On July 19, 2026, the French Foreign Legion held a White Kepi Ceremony (Remise des Képis blancs) on the ramparts of the historic port city of Saint-Malo, in Brittany, a historical region in the north-west of France. During the ceremony, forty recruits from the 3rd Platoon, 1st Company of Enlisted Volunteers of the 4th Foreign Regiment (4e RE) — the Legion’s training regiment — donned the white kepi for the first time and took the Legion’s traditional oath to serve France “with honor and fidelity.”
July 14 marks France’s national holiday, Bastille Day. Beyond the main military parade in Paris, where the French Foreign Legion was represented once again this year, Legion units also take part in local celebrations held across the country and in France’s overseas territories.
In early July 2026, a French Foreign Legion sergeant serving with the 2nd Foreign Engineer Regiment (2e REG) died during a training course in the Alps. He was 32 years old.
Paris marked Bastille Day (France’s national day) on July 14, 2026, with its annual military parade down the Champs-Élysées, running from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde in front of President Emmanuel Macron — his last such parade before his term ends in 2027. As usual, the French Foreign Legion participated.
Starting in early July 2026, legionnaires of the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (2e REI) will form the core of a forward battalion held at 48-hour readiness for a one-year rotation as part of NATO’s Allied Reaction Force (ARF) — the alliance’s revamped rapid response mechanism, which replaced the earlier NATO Response Force.
In northern France on July 4, 1916 — American Independence Day — a tall, twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate rose from a wheat field near the village of Belloy-en-Santerre and charged a line of German machine guns. He was not French, and his country was not yet at war. He was Alan Seeger, member of the French Foreign Legion, and within minutes he would be dead on the ground he had chosen to defend two years earlier. Today he is remembered as one of the most famous foreign volunteers ever to serve in the ranks of the Legion. A poet whose life, and whose death, became a symbol of the Franco-American bond forged in the trenches of the Great War.
Read moreAlan Seeger: The American Poet in the French Foreign Legion
From June 29 to August 28, 2026, the Citadel of Calvi in Corsica will once again host its annual public exhibition dedicated to the French Foreign Legion’s 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP).
In mid-June 2026, the 13th Foreign Legion Demi-Brigade (13e DBLE), a regiment-sized infantry unit of the French Foreign Legion, held three days of celebrations at Camp Larzac in southern France to mark the 84th anniversary of the 1942 Battle of Bir Hakeim.