HispanicVista Columnists

Defeat is Spelled F-R-E-N-C-H

By Raoul Lowery Contreras/HispanicVista.com

May 9, 2005

     Cinco de Mayo, the 5^th of May, will comes and goes with lots of beer consumed by revelers celebrating something they mistakenly think is Mexican Independence Day.  Hundreds of thousands of people will mill around Los Angeles streets celebrating the enormous victory of Mexicans over a French Army touted as it was as Europe’s best on the 5^th of May, 1862.  Few will pay attention, however, to April 30, 1863.

The 5^th of May and April 30 both refute alleged “scholarly” papers circulating among the white supremacists among us that claim that Mexicans have never defeated a white European Army, or any European military.

4000 Mexicans under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza killed and wounded 2000 French and Mexican conservative soldiers at the May 5^th Battle of Puebla while Mexican cavalry under future Mexican President Colonel Porfirio Diaz routed French ostrich-plummed cavalry.  The Battle of Puebla forever doomed “Emperor” Napoleon III’s plan to destroy the United States of America.

His plan was simple, conquer Mexico and use it as a supply route to arm Confederate troops through Mexico and Texas across the Mississippi River at Confederate held river town of Vicksburg.

The plan was disrupted because the Mexicans so heavily defeated the French army at Puebla that the French retreated and didn’t return for a year.  In the meanwhile, Union forces under General U.S. Grant captured Vicksburg and Napoleon’s dream evaporated for he could never supply the Confederates through Mexico, ever, not with the Mississippi River in Union hands. Historians note that the Confederacy failed because it didn’t have enough cannon at the critical battle of Gettysburg on July 1-2-3 of 1863.

So what does April 30 have to do with anything, especially April 30, 1863? The answer lies in “THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force” by Douglas Porch.

On that day, the French Foreign Legion sent 62 Legionnaires and three officers into a Mexican town named CAMERON (the French spell it CAMERONE). Led by Legion Captain Jean Danjou, a one handed Crimean War veteran who wore a wooden prosthetic hand, the Legionnaires were surrounded by Mexican horsemen.  The Legionnaires held their own until they retreated into an enclosed hacienda.  The Mexican horsemen dismounted, surrounded the Legionnaires and held until Mexican infantry arrived.

Water and bullets ran out and the Legionnaires were killed one by one until only five remained alive.  Captain Anjou died in the hacienda while foolishly parading around like a French Army martinet.

Finally, the five French survivors ran out of ammunition, fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans.  Heroic, according to the French who have made April 30 a holiday. Nonetheless, the victorious Mexicans respectfully spared the five.

This victory by Mexican guerillas over French Foreign Legionnaires on April 30, 1863 came almost a year to the day after Cinco de Mayo, the 5^th of May 1862.

Three years later (February 28, 1866), 185 French Legionnaires attacked a Mexican held farm at Santa Ysabel.  The battle was disastrous for the French.  It turned when someone in the Mexican lines shouted “Retreat” in French over and over until the mostly French and German Legionnaires retreated and were chased, cut down and killed by Mexican cavalry. 102 Legionnaires and officers were killed and 82 survivors surrendered.

In June, four months later, Mexicans attacked a combined Austrian and Mexican force at Camargo on the Rio Grande River and captured 1,000 prisoners, eight cannon and three hundred wagons.

The French met some success in Mexico between 1862 and 1867, but they also met their match from time to time in embarrassing ways that the French and their fellow Europeans (Germans, Belgians and Austrians) cannot bury by declaring a total military defeat a “heroic” victory.

French Foreign Legion Lt. Diesbach de Torny wrote of the Mexican guerilla war against his French Army:

“Even though we are victorious, we cannot travel without fighting…Send 40 men alone and they will be massacred by the small bands of four or five hundred (Mexicans) who come out of nowhere and who are elusive, protected by the inhabitants of the towns and countryside who keep them abreast of what we do.”

While American white supremacists fantasize that Mexicans cannot defeat white men in combat and never have, perhaps French Foreign Legion Lt. Diesbach de Torny said it best in 1864. Two years after the huge French defeat on Cinco de Mayo and after two years of shedding French, German and Austrian blood in Mexico to Mexicans; he wrote:

“This damned war…this damned country.”

Contreras’s newest book—THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA published by Floricanto Press is available and reviewed at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com