French Military Rule in Morocco

Colonialism and its Consequences

Moshe Gershovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136325878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This analysis of French colonial ideology and interest in Morocco delineates the manner in which the agents of the protectorate regime sought to conquer the country and control its indigenous inhabitants. Numerous comparative perspectives are offered, placing the French policy towards Morocco in a wider context, making this study relevant to not only North Africa, but also to other parts of the post-colonial world.

1

France and its Overseas Empire

During the whole interwar period, France’s power dwindled in proportion to the growth of her appetite and her responsibilities. She was forced to increase her demands on her colonial empire at the same time as these were being fiercely challenged. She asked for more than she received, she promised more than she performed, she undertook more than she could accomplish.¹

COLONIALISM AND NATIONAL SECURITY: THE FRENCH PARADOX

The Colonial Exposition held in Paris in 1931 celebrated a century of French domination over Algeria. This date was used to present the glory of the French colonial enterprise. The visitor traveling along the pathways of the Bois de Vincennes was offered a glance at far-flung and exotic places united by their adherence to the second largest empire of the time. Alone in their refusal to accept the French order were some isolated Berber tribes settled at the summits of the Atlas mountains. Their submission had already begun and would be completed by early 1934.

Yet the demonstration of imperial greatness was misleading. At no time in their history were the people of France made more aware of the strategic weakness of their country than during the decade which started with the Colonial Exposition and ended with the ‘strange’ defeat of June 1940. In the course of that decade French decisionmakers were absorbed in a futile effort to check the revival of the German military menace. Its vast empire notwithstanding, France of the 1930s was no longer a first-rank power capable of independent action to safeguard its own interests, let alone those of its smaller allies.

This gap between the empire’s apparent strength and the metropolitan weakness did not characterize only France of the 1930s. It was rather a typical theme of the Third Republic throughout its existence. Born as a result of the defeat in 1870-71, the Republic could not escape the notion of threat from the east. Even the victory in 1918 and the severe conditions of the ensuing Versailles peace treaty could not relieve France’s political and military leaders of their fears that another round of hostilities with their neighbor across the Rhine was inevitable. In a sense, the political, diplomatic and military dimensions of French history during those 70 years could be seen as a constant quest for national security.

What interests us about that quest is the relationship which existed between France’s problems within the European power-balance system and its pretension for world power through the building of an overseas empire. Why did France indulge itself in the expansion of its territorial gains overseas? Given the post-1871 revisionist spirit on the one hand, and the realization of France’s lack of an independent offensive option due to its military inferiority vis-à-vis Germany on the other hand, was it not unwise to invest precious national resources outre-mer rather than concentrate on the European arena? Were the advocates of colonialism guilty of distracting their country from its real problems by offering France ‘twenty domestic servants’ for the ‘two children’, Alsace and Lorraine, it had lost?² Or were they proposing to their nation a way out of its political isolation and a means to enhance its power in the preparation for the next round?

The First World War seemed for a brief moment to have resolved the issue. The French overseas empire, by then a consolidated entity, mobilized to the defense of the metropole. Its contribution to the final victory and its potential strategic value could no longer be ignored. Given the importance of the empire, was a serious effort made during the interwar period to integrate it into the new French doctrine of national defense? Were the possible implications of a commitment to imperial defense discussed in that context? Was a possible compromise on some of France’s colonial interests considered in Paris in order to improve its ties with other colonial powers? Or was the integrity of the empire too valuable an asset to sacrifice? If so, why did the leadership of June 1940 refuse to consider a continuation of the war from France’s colonial possessions while it attempted to prevent foreign meddling in their affairs? Finally, given the role played by colonial troops in the revival of France’s military power and its liberation from Nazi domination, could that factor help explain why so many Frenchmen, the military high command in particular, refused to accept the loss of their empire and dragged their nation into a series of bloody conflicts which tore apart the precarious structure of the Fourth Republic?

These questions will be discussed below. Before examining them, however, we should define the nature of the French colonial tradition and characterize the attitudes which prevailed among the French military establishment regarding their overseas empire.

French Colonial Tradition from the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic

Stretched between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, France possesses the geographical prerequisites to aspire to a global empire. But a third body of water has been at least as dominant in the shaping of France’s place in the sun: the Rhine river. Its status within the continental balance of power dictated France’s overseas expansion no less than the conditions which prevailed in the areas where it sought to establish its rule.

The first episode of French military colonialism took place in the context of an overall European expansionist drive. French kings and knights spearheaded the Crusades and created European settlements in the heart of Islam, thus establishing France’s special ties with the Levant which centuries later would be used to justify its domination over this region.³ Some 300 years after the end of the Crusades, as of the mid-sixteenth century, France was involved in another immense European movement -the discovery of the New World and the mastery of the oceans. French explorers, missionaries and settlers participated in that adventure and extended the sovereignty of their nation to create the first French colonial empire.

The bulk of that empire did not survive for long, however. The gradual loss of control over India and the south-eastern part of Canada to Great Britain as a result of a series of military defeats during the eighteenth century culminating in the Seven Years War, dealt a death blow to the French political presence in most of North America and south Asia. The treaties which followed these defeats reduced France to a second-rank colonial power, and limited its rule to several isolated tropical islands and trading posts in West Africa, India and South America. The revolutionary regime showed no inclination to challenge that reality and Napoleon’s aspirations to extend France’s might beyond Europe ended with his ill-fated expedition to Egypt. The post-Napoleonic order solidified the notion that France had lost its appetite for world power. Even though it had regained rights over some possessions (e.g., Madagascar) there was no sign that France was going to enforce them. For all intents and purposes, the first colonial empire was gone.⁴

It did not take long for the second one to emerge, however. A minor diplomatic incident which took place in Algiers in 1827 was magnified beyond proportion three years later by the unstable regime in Paris which sought desperately to divert public attention from its domestic problems.⁵ The expeditionary force which had landed on Algerian shores in June 1830 was instructed to dispose of the Dey (local ruler under the Ottoman system) who had offended the local French representative, to restore French honor and to secure France’s commercial interests along the North African coastline. The political upheavals in Paris, however, allowed the expedition’s command to extend its mission and penetrate the Algerian hinterland. By the time Paris had become fully aware of what was happening there, it was faced with the fait accompli. Any retreat from Algeria would have become a national insult. French presence there became a reality for which a suitable ideology had to be fabricated. Algeria was to form the core of France’s Mediterranean Arab Kingdom’⁶ and the bridgehead to further penetration into Africa. Divided after 1871 into three départements, Algeria became an immanent part of the French state, an integral extension of the metropole.⁷

Some of the actions taken during the conquest of Algeria were repeated in other French colonial incidents five to six decades later. It was not uncommon for military commanders or civilian representatives either to exploit a local event or to initiate a move in defiance of governmental directives or explicit orders. As a result France often found itself entangled in costly affairs from which it could not retreat without losing face. The conquest of Western Sudan by the French marine corps serves as a useful example as it ‘graphically illustrated the difficulty of controlling military agents on the frontiers of the empire’.⁸ The lack of central control over the military conquest of the empire could be explained in part by tactical considerations and operational necessities, but it could not be fully grasped unless the general meaning of colonialism in the framework of French society during the era of that expansion was considered.

Colonialism in Republican France

Although the Algerian expedition is generally used to mark the birth date of France’s colonial empire, the empire did not become a prominent factor in French politics until the turn of the twentieth century. The popular colonialist propaganda which spread after the capture of Algiers failed to ignite the average Frenchman to active participation in the colonial enterprise. Those who elected to immigrate were driven to do so primarily by economic motives, although their expectations of rapid prosperity rarely materialized. A significant portion of the early European settlers (colons) of Algeria did not come from France, but originated in a variety of other Mediterranean communities. Most of them received French citizenship in 1889 through legislation, but maintained their unique identity which was very different from that of mainland France.⁹

For most French citizens the empire had very little meaning in the course of their daily lives. While most of them supported its growth and proudly cheered every victory which raised the glory of France, the actual existence of the empire was rarely an issue on their agenda. The lack of real public interest in the affairs of France d’outre-mer was one of the most prominent features of the colonial episode throughout the existence of the Second Empire and the Third Republic. It also affected the behavior of metropolitan politicians who tended to concentrate their attention on other issues which were of greater interest to their constituencies. The latent approval of colonial expansion by both the public and its representatives was guaranteed as long as it seemed to be prosperous and cheap. The overseas possessions were left to themselves and France’s representatives there were allowed to act virtually free of supervision, provided they did not run into too grave a problem which would require metropolitan intervention. This state of affairs culminated in the 1898 Fashoda crisis, which brought home to Paris the possible consequences of such irresponsible behavior.¹⁰

One sector which had an interest in the development of France overseas was the business community. A prime motive behind the emergence of European world empires has been the economic gains associated with the acquisition of protected, underdeveloped markets. The rise of Great Britain to world primacy was a result of the integration of its empire into the economic system which evolved from the industrial revolution. The French case is far more complicated and inconclusive. While in pre-First World War Britain external investment in the empire reached 45 per cent, French financial circles invested less than 10 percent of their external capital in the colonies, while investing 25 per cent in Russia.¹¹

The concurrent balance of trade between the metropole and the outre-mer was similarly marginal and involved only a limited portion of the French economy. Only after the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, as the Russian market was by and large out of reach, did the French financial community ‘discover’ the empire and augment its investments in overseas territories to such a degree that by the late 1950s the metropolitan and colonial economic spheres seemed to many Frenchmen inseparable.¹² Certain financial firms and manufacturers did have a stake in extra-European activity and an interest in the uninterrupted continuation of colonial expansion.¹³ Members of these segments of the business community joined hands with other pressure groups with similar interests, such as the political representation of Algeria’s colons, to form an effective lobby known as the Parti colonial.¹⁴

This loose block which cut across the political structure of the Third Republic proved to have been an effective vehicle in transforming the public image of the colonial issue from a dubious adventure to a respectable, even glorious venture. The extra-parliamentary activities of the colonialist camp, such as publications and lectures sponsored by the numerous comités devoted to French interests in various parts of the world, were an important means of achieving this change in public opinion. Most popular among the publications was a series of firsthand accounts of military operations composed by officers shortly after their return from a mission they had participated in or commanded. In a society where, military defeats and political scandals notwithstanding, the honor of the army was still widely, albeit not universally cherished, this kind of literature helped shape the heroic image of colonial expansion.

This was merely a marginal side effect of the army’s involvement in the spread of France’s colonial rule. ‘We are a military people both by origin and by education’, explained one of France’s representatives overseas. ‘Our whole political life throughout our history has been dominated by military preoccupati...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Case Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• Foreword by Philip S. Khoury
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Glossary of Terms
• 1 France and its Overseas Empire
• 2 Pre-colonial Morocco: Demise of the Old Makhzan
• 3 Lyautey’s Protectorate and Legacy
• 4 The Quest for Maroc Utile
• 5 The Rif War and the End of ‘Pacification’
• 6 ‘Splendid Mercenaries’: Moroccan Soldiers in French Uniforms
• 7 The Impact of French Rule on Contemporary Morocco
• Select Bibliography
• Index