International audience The life and work of Gustave Maillard (1860-1891) remain widely unknown today. Yet, this Swiss-born geologist who followed Eugène Renevier's teaching, then Albert Heim's, and who became Auguste Michel-Levy's assistant for the geological survey of the 1/80 000 "Annecy" sheet, has left us works whose stratigraphic value and quality of the tectonic analyses are absolutely remarkable. In particular, Maillard made distinctions between several sedimentary fields in the Savoy Alps, which he referred to as areas of the Chablais, the Faucigny, and the Savoy Pre-Alps facies. He was also the first to try to apply to the Annes and Sulens klippes the hypothesis of the overlapping by a recumbent fold developed in 1887 by Marcel Bernard regarding the Beausset Triassic area. Besides, he claimed that part of the folds of the Bornes massif joins up to those of the Haut-Giffre massif, on the right bank of the river Arve, contrary to Marcel Bertrand who wrongly persisted in trying to set their correspondence with the folds of the Chablais Prealps. He also suggested that the deep folds of the inner strata of the Platé massif are an extension of those of the Dents du Midi, sketching out in that way the first outlines of the extension of the Morcles Nappe in France. His premature death prevented him from carrying out his research to an end, so depriving the scientific community of a synthesis on the stratigraphy and the tectonics of the subalpine massifs, which would undoubtedly have made its mark in the history of the geological exploration of the Western Alps.