Lyautey and the French conquest of Morocco

Abstract

Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, by William A. Hoisington, Jr. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. xi + 207 pages. Notes to p. 253. Bibl. to p. 263. Index to p. 276. $45. Reviewed by Julia Clancy-Smith Historical memory of France's colonial moment in Morocco inevitably evokes the figure of Marshal Louis-Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934), the first resident general named to that country after the 1912 imposition of the French Protectorate. Indeed, Jacques Berque, the noted scholar of all things North African and a former colonial officer himself, opens his personal reminiscences, Memoires des deux rives, with an anecdote about General Lyautey presiding over commencement exercises at an Algerian lycee in 1907.' Lyautey's career and life have been the object of numerous books, articles, dissertations, and studies, including hagiographic accounts by French military writers and officers, who lionized the man as France's overseas empire began to crumble after World War II. And Lyautey himself wrote extensively about his own exploits and campaigns long before he was appointed resident general of Morocco, in April of 1912, by the French president, Armand Fallieres. The abundance of written and other kinds of historical data on Lyautey has rendered the historian's task rather more difficult, not least because what the Marshal preached or advocated as colonial policy was frequently very different from practice. A paradoxical individual who sincerely admired many aspects of North African Arab culture, studied Arabic, fretted over the corrosive effects of European civilization upon the Maghrib, and yet relied upon force majeure when faced with opposition to French Lyautey presents his biographers with not a few intractable problems of interpretation. It is greatly to William Hoisington's credit as a scholar and historian that he has grappled so skillfully with the personality, real and legendary, of Lyautey, effortlessly weaving the colonial officer's own story into a much grander, more complex narrative of fin-de-siecle France, the culture of the military establishment, and French imperialism world wide. Hoisington's study is the first truly scholarly full-length biography of Lyautey in English, and it rivals the recent three volume work in French by Daniel Rivet.2 It is the product of years of painstaking research in at least six major archival collections, including the protectorate archives in Rabat, which have not been used extensively by scholars. It draws together numerous other sources of documentation that will be mined eagerly by those studying the French empire. Morocco at this critical juncture in time is treated in a systematic and sympathetic fashion, so that the Moroccans, and other North African figures and leaders, emerge fully as actors in the unfolding drama. Such a treatment is the mark, once again, of mature historical analysis, since Hoisington is able to deal with both sides of the colonial equation without consigning the colonized to a shadowy existence as mere supernumeraries. This is really a biography about two Lyauteys-the soldier-administrator who advocated the novel idea of peaceful penetration and indirect rule, and a second, somewhat more elusive figure, who rashly proposed in 1891 that the army in the Metropole assume the role of a vast field of social action (p. 4), and later engaged the famous urban planner, Henri Prost, to safeguard Islamic Rabat's cultural patrimony against the inroads of modernity. To flush out the multiple dimensions of his life and thought, the author follows Lyautey in the first chapter from his early years at St. Cyr (1873), through his first encounters with L'Algerie Francaise in the 1870s and 1880s, and subsequent posting to French Indochina in 1894, followed by five years in Madagascar. These years and experiences solidified his views on the nature of empire as well as his definition of French colonialism's mission, which also coincided, as Hoisington shows, with the elaboration of a vocal colonial lobby in France supported by a parti colonial in the French legislature. …