Hubert Lyautey

Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey (November 17th 1854 with Nancy - July 27th 1934 with Thorey) is a soldier French, officer during the colonial wars, Minister for the war at the time of the First World War, then Marshal of France. He was academician.

Biography

A military education

Resulting from a family of soldiers inhabitant of Franche-Comté (common of Vellefaux), it had his childhood marked by a fall at the two years age of a balcony on the first floor. There was then looked after by the surgeon Velpeau but had to carry a corset during ten years obliging it to remain confined to bed a long time. It lute much. It entered to Saint-Cyr military school in 1873 then was sent in Algérie during two years as an officer of cavalry of 1880 to 1882 where it discovered the Moslem company. It never made mystery of its royalist opinions.

It was used in Indo-China of 1894 for 1897, initially with the staff of the body of occupation in Hanoï (Tonkin), then in the capacity as chief of the military office of the general governor Armand Rousseau. It was in Tonkin which it met Gallieni that it was to join with Madagascar where it was used as 1897 with 1902. In 1895, it expresses its doubts about the business Dreyfus:

What adds to our skepticism, it is there that it seems to us to distinguish a pressure of the so-called opinion or rather of the street, peat It howls with dead against this Jew, because it is Juif and that today, the anti-semitism holds the cord.

It became Colonel in 1900, Brigadier general in 1903, Major general in 1907.

Morocco

With the Morocco, it was charged in March 1907 to occupy Oujda, in reprisals of the assassination with Casablanca of Doctor Mauchamps; it repressed then rising in the area of the Blessed-Snassen in November 1907, and was named High-Commissioner of the government for the Moroccan zone occupied in the area of Oujda.

In March 1912, the convention of Fès establishes French protectorate on Morocco, from which Lyautey was the first Police chief-resident general. He undertook the “pacification” of Morocco, in spite of the beginning of the First World War.

It is as a general resident that it will leave a deep trace in the company and the Moroccan Urbanisme. Attached to the local culture like its collaborator Isabelle Eberhardt, it enacted several laws in particular aiming protecting the old centers from the big cities (the colonial cities will be built with the periphery of the Médina S) or at laying down strict rules leaving to the Morrocans spaces of freedom (prohibition for the not-Moslems to penetrate in the mosques).

During the First World War, Lyautey was Minister for the War in the government of Aristide Briand, between December 1916 and March 1917.

It went back then to Morocco, and was made Marshal of France in 1921. But, under the government of Paul Painlevé, he lives himself to withdraw the command of the troops engaged against the rebellion of Abd-el-Krim which was entrusted to Philippe Pétain. Lyautey resigned and returned definitively to France in 1925.

It was charged to organize the colonial Exposition of 1931. He died on July 27th, 1934 in his castle of Thorey. He was buried in Rabat but its ashes were repatriated in France to be deposited with the Invalides in 1961.

At the time of its passage to the Morocco, he had affirmed that “France must be a Moslem great power”. He had also informed, in the foreword with the French translation of the Mein Kampf of Hitler: “Any French must read this book”. It was by no means about an approval, of course, since the translation had appeared against the will of Hitler which did not want any that the French were informed of what awaited them.

Currently, the College Lyautey of Casablanca east one of the largest French colleges out of France. The portrait of Lyautey decorating the establishment was carried out in the years 1990, on a proposal of Management, which raised a debate among the pupils as for the glance to be related to the work and the responsibilities for the Lyautey Marshal. At the same period, a French flag, hung by the direction without the Moroccan flag, was withdrawn by pupils. The Lyautey college is opened to the girls starting from the independence of the country.

He judged his work in Morocco thus:

“At the bottom, if I succeeded in Morocco, in the task which the government of the Republic had entrusted to me over there, it is for the same reasons which returned to me unusable to France… I succeeded in Morocco because I am monarchist and that I was there in monarchical country. There was the Sultan, of which I never ceased respecting and to support the authority… I was monk, and Morocco is a religious country… I believe that it there does not have possible national life and thrives, and natural, which does not make its place with the religious feeling, in the religious disciplines… I believe in the benevolence, with the need for a hierarchical social life. I am for the aristocracy, for the government of best… I saw that there were schools where the children of such classes went, other schools where went from the children of other mediums and who did not mix… I respected all that, at the same time because this tender with the fact strengthened my own policy and because my own convictions showed me legitimacy of it and the nobility But all that had been impossible to me in France And therefore I would perhaps not have succeeded in Strasbourg. ”

Its idea of France

“Me, I am a man of North, Lorraine, Norman, Rhenish; there is of all these bloods in my blood; but nothing which comes from below the Loire… I ever could look at Toulouse like a compatriot. ”

Homosexuality

Georges Clémenceau had said of him: " Here is a man admirable, courageous, who always had testicles with the bottom… even when they were not the siennes." This pleasant allusion to the sexual orientation of the Marshal is in particular reproduced by Christian Gury in his book Lyautey-Charlus (Kimé Editions, 1998, p. 86), devoted to the reports/ratios of Lyautey and the Homosexualité. Gury shows in particular how Lyautey was used as model to the Baron Charlus, character of the Research of the wasted Time of Marcel Proust celebrates it. However, the irony of Clemenceau towards all the Catholique S practitioners leads certain co-religionists or simply ignoramuses, to believe that this sentence concerns only the Calomnie towards Lyautey, considering the opprobrium traditionally attached to the Homosexualité. It is certain, nevertheless, that Clemenceau does not make use in a completely innocent way of an aspect manifestly known and documented life of Lyautey to make a subject of joke of it.

Distinctions

He was brilliantly elected (with 27 votes) with the French Academy in 1912 with the armchair 14, accommodated by the modernistic historian Louis Duchesne which wrote its speech of reception.

He was high with the dignity of Marshal of France the February 19th 1921. This same day, it accepted from the Duke of Orleans the Plate of the Holy Spirit. It also had the Military decoration of the marshal Canrobert and the Medal of Grey waxbill which an old peasant had given him because his son with who it would have bequeathed it had died in the Field of Honor.

Member of the committee of patronage of the Scouts of France at once after their foundation (1911), as well as that of the Unionistic Scouts, it to him was also offered the presidency of honor of Scouts de France in 1929. It should be noted that neither the Guyot general the Saline ones, nor the Cornette canon would have agreed to offir the presidency of honor of a catholic movement to a man who could have lent the side to an even light criticism with respect to the catholic principles of the time (cf Payment of Scouts de France 1920 and 1924 ED SPES - to enter the Play of Paul Coze - Various editions with the Editions Scouts de France)). He was also general police chief of the colonial exposure of 1931 and, for this reason, made build with the Gilded Door, in Paris, the building which was going to shelter to recently the museum of African arts and océaniens, and from now on the national City of the History of Immigration. The portrait of him by Laszlo was hung besides in this building.

Anecdotes

Jacques Benoist-Méchin will write his biography in its famous series of the longest Rêve of the History under the title of Lyautey the African, or dreams It immolé (1966). Andre Maurois in 1931 with the Plon Editions and Marie André in 1940 with the Alsatia editions had brilliantly evoked before its life and its work.

Works

the social role of the officer (1891)
Of the colonial role of the army (1900)
In the South of Madagascar, penetration military, political situation and economic (1903)
Letters of Tonkin and Madagascar: 1894-1899 (1920)
Words of action: 1900-1926 (1927)
Letters of youth: 1883-1893 (1931)
Towards Morocco: letters of the South-Oranian: 1903-1907 (posthumous, 1937)
Notes of youth: 1875-1877 , in Radiation of Lyautey (posthumous 1947)

Gallery

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