Félix Fuchs

Félix Fuchs
Fuchs, pictured as Governor-General in 1913
Governor-General of the Belgian Congo
In office 20 May 1912 – 23 December 1915
Monarch	Albert I
Preceded by	Théophile Wahis
Succeeded by	Eugène Henry
Personal details
Born	(1858-01-25)25 January 1858 Ixelles, Belgium
Died	23 February 1928(1928-02-23) (aged 70) Ixelles, Belgium

Félix Alexandre Fuchs (1858–1928) was a Belgian colonial civil servant and lawyer who served as Governor-General of the Belgian Congo between 1912 and 1915.

A lawyer by profession, Fuchs joined the administration of the Congo Free State in 1888 as a jurist and quickly rose through the ranks. Considered a Liberal, Fuchs' civilian background and attitudes distinguished him from the majority of colonial administrators who had begun their careers in the military. Rising to the highest ranks of the administration in the late 1890s, Fuchs eventually became Governor-General after the Congo's annexation by Belgium and presided over the Congo's entry into World War I.

Fuchs was born into a family of Prussian origin in Ixelles, Brussels in Belgium on 25 January 1858. He was naturalised as a Belgian citizen in 1862 and, in 1876, went to study Law at the Free University of Brussels. He later practiced as a lawyer at the Court of Appeal in Brussels.

In 1887, Fuchs began working for the foreign service of the Congo Free State, a state in personal union with Belgium's monarch Leopold II, which had been created in 1885. In 1888, he left Belgium for the Congo where he took a senior post at the Department of Justice and as a supplementary judge at the Congo's Court of Appeal. After a return to Belgium in 1889, Fuchs was sent as an envoy to negotiate the Congo's frontiers with Portuguese Angola and was named Secretary-General of one of the Congo's three administrative departments. By 1892, Fuchs had become Director-General of the Department of the Interior and, in 1893, State Inspector (Inspecteur d'état) and thus the deputy to the Congo's senior civil servant, the Governor-General. Involved in the trials of the colonial officer in the Stokes Affair of 1895, Fuchs was promoted to the presidency of the Congo's Appeal Tribunal, giving him a status equivalent to the Congo's Vice-Governors-General and remained in the Congo on senior government functions.