Documented: Cardinal Mazarin, 17th century, is the earliest sourced version, est-il heureux over est-il habile. The Napoleon attribution is documented as unevidenced, he said many quotable things and inherited this one by fame. Eisenhower's variant is attested. The doctrine's logic is documented in military historiography: command is decision under irreducible uncertainty, so the observable signal of luck, repeated survival of low-probability outcomes, carries real selection information even if luck itself is unmeasurable.
The folk reading: lucky general is what skill looks like from outside, the commander who notices the page-two announcement of battle, terrain, weather, morale, the enemy's mistake, reads as charmed because the seeing is invisible. Pasteur's documented line is the folk synthesis: chance favors the prepared mind, so the lucky general is just the one who counted fewer photographs than he saw.
The claim: some players run hot past any survivorship explanation, and the archive names this the favor of the house, moira with a promotion list, the system rewarding pieces that serve the game. The counter is the documented math: with enough generals, some are always lucky, and the house needs no favorites.
What does it mean that the men paid to eliminate chance kept hiring for it?