(Re) Burying and Memorializing Marshal Hubert Lyautey in Morocco and France, 1934–61

In 1961, the body of Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the famed first Resident General of French colonial Morocco, traveled to France to be interred next to Napoleon in Paris’s Les Invalides.  Lyautey’s final (?) return, arranged by Morocco’s Hassan II and Charles de Gaulle at the height of French decolonization, was commemorated with what was effectively his third funeral.  First interred in his native Lorraine in 1934, Lyautey’s body was subsequently removed to a special crypt in Rabat as part of a memorialization campaign orchestrated – over Moroccan resistance – by his closest disciples and Moroccan collaborators.  As with so much of Lyautey’s activity in Morocco, his Rabat burial and resting place involved important symbolic elements, including ceremony, art, architecture and urban planning. This paper looks at the shifting political, cultural and heritage contexts of Lyautey’s interments, using documents from French official and private archives.