Hubert Lyautey
Hubert Lyautey invented the French protectorate in Morocco, governed it for thirteen years by a method he described as showing force so as not to have to use it, and was removed by a government that preferred to use it. He was a cavalry officer from Nancy, a monarchist and a Catholic in a republican army, who wrote an essay in 1891 on the social role of the officer that made him a name and enemies. He learned colonial government under Gallieni in Tonkin and Madagascar in the 1890s: the tache d'huile, the oil-stain method of extending control by markets and roads rather than columns. He applied it on the Algerian border after 1903, and when the Treaty of Fez made Morocco a French protectorate in 1912 and Fez rose against it, he was sent as the first Resident-General. His rule was the rule of a man who admired what he was governing: the sultan kept his throne and his ceremonies, the old cities were left untouched and the French built new ones beside them - Rabat, Casablanca - with the architect Prost, the notables were governed through and not over, and the interior was taken tribe by tribe by a mixture of markets, subsidies and force. In 1914 Paris ordered him to send his troops to France and abandon the interior; he sent the troops and kept the interior with what was left. He was war minister for three months in 1917 and went back. The end came with the Rif war, when Abd el-Krim's victory over the Spanish in 1921 spread into the French zone in 1925 and Paris sent Pétain with a hundred and sixty thousand men and a doctrine of crushing rather than containing; Lyautey resigned in September 1925 and left Morocco on a warship with no French official at the quay. He was made a marshal, organised the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, and died in 1934. He asked to be buried in Rabat and was, until 1961, when Morocco sent him back to the Invalides.
- Lived: 1854 CE – 1934 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: general, colonial_administrator
