I once drank occaisionally with a guy that was in the Foreign Legion. Too spooky, after a few drinks he would always start telling all the ways you could kill a man with bare hands, I think it relaxed him. He was deeply paranoid but not of humans; he thought everything was a carcinogen or tainted with asbestos.
We would order food and he would demand that the waiter bring out the cook to tell him exactly where the food came from. The cook would then have to make up some story to get rid of him:
"These chicken nuggets are from a poultry farm in Kentucky that only use Grade A surplus feed, sir. "
He eventually resigned from my former company because he got stuck in the elevator for 35 minutes and the president of the company refused to issue him a personal apology for exposing him to the tainted air of a confined space. The president was pissed at him because he tore the elevator button board apart with a knife he carried thinking somehow he could rewire it to get out of the elevator.
Until he resigned he would walk up the stairs 8 stories to our office which would always trip the fire alarm.
The guy was insane, but no coward. When we replaced him with another French guy, the new guy was a former French air force major that was a flaming bisexual. When he got fired, we were sure to hire a guy that was not ex-French military and he was downright boring except he would trim his beard everyday in the john at work because he didn't want to plug up his sink at home. The cleaning lady was always bitching at him for this for which he claimed was a sure fire example of the anti-French bias in society. In fact she probably couldn't find France on a map, she was just pissed that she had to clean his hair out of the sink everyday.
In short, from the data I have collected, it is probably not cowardice that doomed the French army, but trying to manage guys like this.
Actually, if I remember correctly, the guy in charge of Human resources had to issue a company memo that didn't refer directly to him, but banned everybody from trimming their beards at work. This seemed to satisfy the beard trimmer as long as the policy applied to everyone and didn't ban him specifically from trimming his beard at work. Also the air force guy was always braggin that at one time he was the youngest major in the entire French Air force. Whenever anyone questioned his decisions he would remind them that there was a reason he became the youngest major in the French Air Force. I swear these guys were nuts.