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A French Marshal In Morocco
Contemporary Review, June, 2000 by Allan Ramsay
FRANCE'S colonial history has all too often been ignored or dismissed in the English-speaking world yet it has had great influence not only on Prance, but on large portions of Africa and Asia. One of the best ways to understand it is to describe the career of one of the greatest French colonial administrators, Marshal Lyautey, France's first Resident General in Morocco.
Hubert Lyautey was born in his parental home in Nancy in 1854. His family on both sides belonged to the upper middle classes. His great-grandfather had risen to the position of Inspector General of Artillery under Napoleon. His grandfather and great-uncles had also served the Emperor. The maternal side were minor landed gentry from Lorraine with a tincture of Norman blood.
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Lyautey's upbringing and education were, superficially at least, conventional. At the age of a few months a fall from an upstairs window, where he had been taken to watch the parade for the baptism of the Prince Imperial, was thought to have severely damaged his spine. An operation was followed by two years in bed and years of painful convalescence. The experience does not seem to have affected his physical vitality, either in his youth or later in life. But enforced idleness and the solicitude of his maternal aunts and grandmother, both women of lively intelligence, encouraged a taste for reading. Once on his feet he became the undisputed leader of a small group of friends. He did well in his studies and passed as a cadet into St Cyr.
In France Lyautey's subsequent career is well documented. There is a limited number of studies in English of his time as Resident General in Morocco. So far as I am aware there is no full-length biography in English, certainly no recent one. Maurois' biography was translated on publication before the war. It is a partisan study, based on personal acquaintance with its subject, not always an advantage. This is altogether very little for one who was such a seminal figure in France in his time.
Of Lyautey's active life thirteen years were spent as Resident General in Morocco, a career interrupted by nine months unhappy experience as Minister of War in 1917. He was first appointed to Morocco in April 1912 and finally recalled in August 1923 a sad and disappointed man, his return to France virtually ignored until his death in 1934. Reparation was made years later when his tomb was placed beside that of Napoleon. Earlier generations of Lyauteys would have regarded it as the consummation of all their earthly hopes, second only to death in battle against the enemies of France. Later, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death a statue was erected, a tribute to all those who had lost their lives in the service of the French administration abroad. In Morocco itself his equestrian statue stands just inside the grounds of the French Consulate General in Casablanca surveying the busy main square but safe from the attentions of the crowds. There is a portrait of him in the entrance to the Ambassador's office in the French Embassy in Rabat, hanging above his campaign trunk. Looking at it, it is easy to believe that while one might have admired him one might have found it difficult to like him; the gaze that meets yours is so disconcertingly full of unshakeable self-regard.
Lyautey's reputation in Morocco remains ambivalent. He is admired for having tried to temper the autocratic tendencies of French administration, and the greed of French colons by protecting as much as possible of the country's indigenous structure and institutions and setting clearly defined limits to the scale of the mission civilisatrice. But no matter how personally sympathetic, he perhaps misunderstood the extent to which the Moroccans looked beyond the man to the government whose servant he ultimately was. What they saw they disliked; the more perhaps for his attempts to give French policy a presentational colour that appeared to respect both the spirit and the letter of the French mandate. A French priest once said of Lyautey that he was 'un f[acute{e}]odaliste envoy[acute{e}] [acute{a}] gouverner un pays f[acute{e}]odale'. But there are differences in feudal systems and Lyautey, as convinced as any Frenchman of the benefits of French administration, failed to grasp the subtlety of the Moroccan version and the delicate nature of the mutual obligations between the ruler and his subjects.
Lyautey's was a complex character. The enlightened principles he applied to the care of his soldiers as a cavalry officer, like the ideal of partnership he sought to develop later, first as a disciple of Gallieni (whom he thought was a man in the mould of Cecil Rhodes) in Indo China and Madagascar and later in Morocco were regarded as eccentric. Though widely read Lyautey was not a pensive solitary. He was an ardent and imaginative young man, though he was never one to [acute{e}]pater la bourgeoisie. He enjoyed social life and applied himself conscientiously to his profession. Even as a young man he appears to have had a well founded sense of his own capabilities. What was unusual was that the circles in which he moved and felt most at home were literary ones where it was rare indeed to meet an army officer. He went, not simply to listen but to contribute. In his own way he was something of a celebrity from quite an early age.
