The geographer Yves Lacoste, considered the father of the French school of geopolitics, died on Saturday at the age of 96, we learned on Monday June 22 from Béatrice Giblin, editorial director of the journal Hérodote, founded by Yves Lacoste.
Yves Lacoste died at his home in Hauts-de-Seine, surrounded by his family, she said, confirming information from Le Monde. “He was an exceptional person, of great humanity, someone deeply generous,” underlined Béatrice Giblin, of whom Yves Lacoste was the thesis director.
Yves Lacoste “has rendered an immense service to geography by reintegrating politics into the field of geography and by being at the origin of a French geopolitics that I call democratic and civic,” she added.
It was his work entitled Geography, it serves, first of all, to wage war, published in 1976 by the publisher François Maspero (republished in 2012 by Editions de la Découverte), which laid the foundations for this renewal. “He was a geographer. He never defined himself as a geopolitologist, but as a geographer specializing in geopolitics,” emphasizes Béatrice Giblin.
Criticized by his peers
Associate professor of geography, professor at the University of Paris VIII/Vincennes, adept at field work, in North Africa and Vietnam in particular, Yves Lacoste dynamited this discipline, according to her: “He knew how to do this geographical geopolitics, or this geopolitical geography, that’s what we must highlight. »
The release of his flagship work (he published around twenty others including a Que sais-je on Les pays underdeveloped in 1959) provoked at the time numerous criticisms from his “orthodox” geographer colleagues outraged by what they considered to be a declaration of war on “the geography of teachers”, confining their discipline to the sole study of physical geography.
Yves Lacoste, born in Morocco on September 7, 1929, who admitted to having been “deeply confused” during his geography lessons at the Lakanal high school in Sceaux, reconciled geography and history. Geography, he believed, must first help to think about politics, conflicts and power relations between states or geographical areas.
A time member of the PCF (until the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets in 1956), supporter of the independence of Algeria, Yves Lacoste had become interested in questions of identity in recent years.
