Hubert Lyautey

Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey (17 November 1854 – 27 July 1934) was a French Army general and colonial administrator.

After serving in Indochina and Madagascar, he became the first French Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925. In early 1917, he served briefly as Minister of War. From 1921, he was a Marshal of France. He was dubbed the French empire builder and in 1931 made the cover of Time. Lyautey was also the first one to use the term "hearts and minds" as part of his strategy to counter the Black Flags rebellion during the Tonkin campaign in 1885.

Lyautey was born in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. His father was a prosperous engineer and his grandfather a highly-decorated Napoleonic general. His mother was a Norman aristocrat, and Lyautey inherited many of her assumptions: monarchism, patriotism, Catholicism and the belief in the moral and political importance of the elite. He attended lycée in Dijon, where he recalled he was fascinated with René Descartes' Discours de la Methode.

In 1873, he entered the French military academy of Saint-Cyr. He attended the army training school in early 1876 and in December 1877 was made a lieutenant. After graduating from Saint-Cyr, two months of holiday in Algeria in 1878 left him impressed by the Maghreb and by Islam. He served in the cavalry and was to make his career serving in the colonies, not in a more prestigious assignment in metropolitan France. In 1880, he was posted to Algiers and then campaigned in southern Algeria. In 1884, to his disappointment, he was recalled to France.

In 1894, he was posted to Indochina, serving under Joseph Gallieni. He helped crush the so-called piracy of the Black Flags rebellion along the Chinese border. He then set up the colonial administration in Tonkin and then became head of the military office of the Government-General in Indochina. When he left Indochina in 1897, he was a lieutenant colonel and had received the Legion of Honour.

In Indochina, he wrote:

Here I am like a fish in water, because the manipulation of things and men is power, everything I love.

From 1897 to 1902, Lyautey served in Madagascar, again under Gallieni. He pacified northern and western Madagascar; administered a region of 200,000 inhabitants; began the construction of a new provincial capital at Ankazobe and a new roadway across the island; He encouraged the cultivation of rice, coffee, tobacco, grain, and cotton; and opened schools. In 1900 he became Governor of Southern Madagascar, an area a third the size of France with a million inhabitants; 80 officers and 4,000 soldiers served under him. He was also promoted to colonel in 1900. In Madagascar. he wrote to his father: