Lyautey: An Interpretation of the Man and French Imperialism

Abstract

The impulse to make colonies has been assigned patriotic, commercial, religious, or atavistic-aggressive motivations, among others.' Few historians see colonizing as a wholly beneficial or good enterprise, which is not surprising. But some refuse it a partially beneficial or interesting character, which even J.S. Mill and socialists like Bernstein and Jaures have done. The Manichaeanism of a Jean-Paul Sartre, widely echoed, holds colonialism as an immoral block to be rejected totally.2 Invoking a perpetually youthful Marx in a variety of forms, such rejectionists have seen colonialism as a synonym for the lining of certain key pockets, ignoring the fact that racketeering sometimes preceded and definitely post-dated colonial efforts. Hubert Deschamps comes closer to a useable description of the French colonial enterprise in particular, referring to it as 'a beautiful chaos'.3 This was not true for every place or time period, but Deschamps points the way to elasticity. The heyday of French colonialism (1880-1930) saw many ingredients: economic, in some areas and among certain pressure groups;4 and the well-known missionary and/or civilizing impulse going back to both Catholic history and the Revolutionary epoch. But in French imperialism one also discerns a kind of serendipitous romanticism, gamble after gamble supported, of course, by superior armament technology. Above all, one finds contradictions that do not fit. If nationalistic and patriotic, colonialism in cases like Morocco also reveals anti-national impulses on the part of its individualistic fomenters or at least antiParisian, anti-centralizing impulses. Also, if serendipity implies a lack of organization, colonies such as Morocco between the world wars were great enterprises in organization, and in the celebrated Resident General Hubert Lyautey one sees the sometimes neglected virtue of creating administrative order. As a final ambivalent note, one could safely say that the modern colonial enterprise often attracted the best and the worst, and that while it could bring out the expediency-