23

French Friends

Although the French became the rulers of Morocco in 1912, they were still not in complete control of the territory. For one thing, the Spanish were agitating to hang on to their ‘rights’ in northern Morocco and parts of the southern Sahara. In Tangier, other European powers fought each other for a slice of the international pie, while paying lip service to the phoney sovereignty of the sultan. The internal politics of Morocco were even more complex: the tribal system was impenetrable to outsiders and although the French had military posts stationed across the country, they had hardly any influence on what happened.

The first task of the resident-general, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, was to impose French rule upon Morocco. His mission was made especially difficult by the fact that Moroccans resented and were openly disloyal to the proxy sultans he appointed. Lyautey’s solution was to appoint political leaders who were loyal to the pre-colonial system and who could enforce their power with the authority of past tradition. This left him free to pursue the policy of a ‘une tache d’huile’, a ‘slick of oil’, by which he meant impressing the natives with French military power and technology, eventually winning them over to the benefits of European modernity. He admired British rule in Nigeria and India, which he saw as employing the same means. He also believed in the separation of Arab (and therefore mainly Islamic) values and Berber tradition, in line with the prevailing colonial theory that the Berbers were an independent-minded people who would one day follow the French creed of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Lyautey was an unusual and impressive man. He had been born into a devoutly Catholic military family from the Lorraine. From an early age, he combined military values with unorthodox views and a taste for literature. He served with great distinction as an officer in the French colonial wars of the late nineteenth century and rose quickly to the attention of the highest military authorities in Paris. He was not a good-looking man, but he was proud of his body, brisk in his movements, and seemed to be in perpetual motion. He supported Dreyfus during the cause célèbre which divided France in the 1890s, stating clearly that this was an anti-Semitic conspiracy and therefore a conspiracy against the Great Nation itself. He also criticized French colonial policy as inhumane, yet was devoted to serving France beyond the mainland. In one sense he was the quintessential Orientalist who revelled in the luxurious, ornamented way of life that he found in the Muslim world, as well developing a deep respect for its languages, politics and belief systems. He was a hard soldier who punished disobedience in all its forms with the utmost severity, but his actions were also driven by compassion and respect for the civilization he encountered – which he did not see as inferior to France’s but simply as ‘other’.

Until the 1970s Lyautey’s biographers were oblique about his homosexuality, just referring to ‘a sensual homophilia’ or his ‘Greek virtues’. In his own era Lyautey was openly homosexual, regularly seducing the best and brightest of his lieutenants as part of their military education. In Paris he frequented literary circles which included the likes of Jean Cocteau (Lyautey admired his erotic drawings of young men) and Marcel Proust (it was rumoured that Lyautey provided the blueprint for the pederast Baron de Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu).

His homosexuality was an open secret. Georges Clemenceau is famously alleged to have said of Lyautey: ‘Ça, c’est un homme admirable et courageux, qui a des couilles au cul. Dommage que ce ne soit pas souvent les siennes.’ (‘That is an admirable and courageous man who has balls up to his arse. It’s just a shame that they are not always his.’)1 It should be noted that Lyautey detested Clemenceau, just as he denounced most Parisian politicians as ‘idiots’. Lyautey’s wife Inès, nicknamed la Maréchale, was worldy wise about the life of a soldier; she is said to have addressed a group of young officers gathered round her husband by saying: ‘Messieurs, j’ai le plaisir de vous informer que cette nuit je vous ai fait tous cocus.’ (‘Well, gentlemen, I have the pleasure of informing you that last night I made you all cuckolds.’)2

Lyautey identified with all manner of rebels. In Algeria, in 1904, for a few weeks he enjoyed a sexual friendship with Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian Jew from Marseilles who had converted to Islam, disguised herself as a man, and was found sleeping in a tent outside Lyautey’s encampment in the south Oranais. Later arrested as a spy, she was a delicious catch for a man whose own sense of style was predicated on transgressing all conventional Western forms of behaviour. The sex with Eberhardt was no doubt important for this man who prized physicality as a form of poetry in itself; but no less important was the sense of exile from Europe. Lyautey did not want to conquer North Africa so much as be absorbed into it, losing himself and distancing himself from Europe and its values. Much of his story reads like a version of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste – the tale of a Nietzschean dandy who finds sexual enlightenment among the boys of North Africa.

In military and political affairs, Lyautey was a hard-headed strategist. Above all, he wanted to avoid what he saw as the errors of French rule in Algeria, and judged the pursuit of war to ‘pacify’ the territory as a waste of time and lives. Instead he made a great show of respecting indigenous institutions, although this did not necessarily apply to the incumbents (one of his first actions on his arrival in Morocco was to replace Sultan Mawaly Abdul Aziz, whom he distrusted, with the more firmly pro-French Moulay Youssef).

Beyond the cities and towns, Lyautey effectively ruled by cultivating good relations with the caïds, the tribal leaders who could raise an army; the tariquas, the spiritual Muslim brotherhoods; and the Berbers, many of whom were anti-Arab rather than pro-French. The French authorities controlled all the ‘modern’ components of governance: health, education, justice and finance were all directly administered by the French.

At the same time, Lyautey recruited Moroccan soldiers into the French army. The outbreak of the First World War interrupted Lyautey’s subtle conquest of Morocco. At a meeting of rural chiefs held in Marrakesh in 1914, it was declared that ‘We are the friends of France, and to the very end we shall share her fortunes, be they good or bad.’ In the next few years, 34,000 Moroccan soldiers were called to fight in the killing fields of northern Europe.

*   *   *

In the wake of the First World War, the greatest challenge to French and Spanish rule came from the Spanish-controlled territories of northern Morocco, in the form of an insurgency in the heart of the stark, impassable Rif mountains led by a Muhammed Ibn’Abd el-Karim al-Khattabi, usually known as Abd el-Krim. The revolt in the Rif lasted five years, from 1921 to 1926, and cost the lives of tens of thousands of European soldiers. Its success has since been hailed by anti-colonialist leaders as the greatest defeat inflicted on a European army in Africa.

Abd el-Krim was a Berber who opposed Spanish, French and Moroccan rule and who aspired to a free state of the Rif. The insurgents had the military advantage of fighting in terrain that they knew intimately. By 1923, having wrecked the Spanish military presence in the region, Abd el-Krim had more or less established the foundations of a state. It was then that he turned his attention to the French.

Alarmed by the apparent efficiency and ruthlessness of Abd el-Krim, Lyautey went up to inspect his northern front. The Spanish collapse had left the French in an extremely vulnerable position: the mountain passes were undefended and the territory between the foothills of the mountains and cities such as Fez was porous. In 1924 Lyautey reported to Paris that this area needed to be occupied and defended quickly if Abd el-Krim’s insurrection was not to catch fire in the French zone. Lyautey’s alarm was not taken seriously – the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 had already overstretched the French military and it was inconceivable that the might of the French army could be challenged by an illiterate bandit.

Lyautey returned to Morocco both angry and frustrated. Inevitably, in 1925 Abd el-Krim began to attack the French zone. Along the way, his army mobilized the local tribal chiefs in a jihad against the unbeliever. The tribal leaders were convinced by Abd el-Krim’s prestigious successes – the war was not only a matter of honour but Morocco could be free within days, so the arguments went. Within two months of the initial assaults, the French had retreated inside Fez’s city walls, losing all their outposts in the countryside. In June 1925 Abd el-Krim made his camp just forty kilometres from the city, and began lobbying the religious leaders of that most holy of Moroccan cities.

The Fassi were not only Muslims but Arabs, and they could not support this Berber upstart from the mountains, who knew nothing of civilization or religion. Most importantly, the scholars argued, if the Rifi Berbers made allegiance with the Berbers who already enjoyed special status under Lyautey, then the whole apparatus of the spiritual world of Morocco – an Arab creation – was under threat.

In Paris Lyautey was dismissed as an incompetent for having let the Rifis flood into the French zone, even though he had given the government due warning. Despite French reinforcements, the military struggle went on. Lyautey was now in his seventies and exhausted. Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was sent to take command and a joint European force finally crushed the rebellion in 1926, with a massive surge of troops burying the insurgents in their mountain heartland. French rule continued.

*   *   *

Not all Frenchmen were supporters of the French or Spanish war in the Rif. In France the loudest and most powerful opponent of the war in the early 1920s was the French Communist Party, which not only enjoyed the prestige of supporting the recent Russian Revolution but also held enormous sway over the French working class. Arguably the rise of the Communist Party constituted the most dangerous and direct threat to the French social order. The Communists opposed the Rif war on the grounds that it was an aggressive act of European imperialism, aimed at subjugating, then economically exploiting a foreign people. With notable exceptions (such as the renegade Communists grouped around the journal Clarté), the Communists were ignorant of local politics, as opposed to French policy, in Morocco. They were indifferent to Abd el-Krim’s status as a tribal chief and knew little or nothing about Islam.

Communist rhetoric was mainly couched in the language of classical Marxism. Young French workers had their first glimpse of the conflict from newsreels played in the cinemas. Outside, militants handed out pamphlets which exhorted young proletarians to ‘join with their African brothers’ and to ‘raise the red flag and do not embark as corpses-in-waiting for African soil!’ Communist leaders sent a telegram to Abd el-Krim, urging victory and saluting his war ‘against bankers and industrialists’. The First World War was still vivid in the memory of the French population and it was easy for the Communist newspapers to shock their readership with accounts of 100-kilogram bombs, tanks, poison gas and aircraft being used against a population armed mainly with ancient rifles.

As the Moroccan war continued and the slaughter spread, the insurgents also found supporters in the unlikely form of the Surrealists. In 1925 this was an extremely young but influential movement of avant-garde iconoclasts who had come together with the stated aim of overcoming all previous forms of self-expression. Indeed, the original caucus of the Surrealists – more of a gang than a movement – led by the mercurial figure of the poet, essayist and polemicist André Breton, had been founded in 1924 to liberate the unconscious mind, thereby unleashing ‘a revolution of the mind’. The Rif war was the first chance for these angry middle-class rebels to back a political cause of their own.

They did this in words and deeds. ‘The war in Morocco surpasses in implausibility, stupidity and horror anything we can expect from those people,’ wrote André Breton, who had seen the carnage of the Great War at first hand. ‘After this who can still talk about writing poems and all the rest? No written protest is sufficient against such a thing. What is to be done?’3 Breton and the other Surrealists were extremely wary of the Communists, dismissing their fetish for the proletariat as ‘cretinous’ and their belief in revolution as ‘mysticism’. But, for a brief moment, Breton considered making common cause with them, and nineteen Surrealists showed their good faith by signing a petition organized by the Communist newspaper L’Humanité. Given that the popular press in France dubbed Abd el-Krim ‘Abd el-Kriminel’, giving public support to Abd el-Krim at that time was the rough equivalent of praising Saddam Hussein in Washington at the height of either of the Gulf Wars.

However, the prospect of collaboration with the Communists became an impossibility at an unlikely literary banquet held on 2 July 1925 at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant in Paris, organized by the journal Mercure de France in honour of the distinguished and now elderly poet Saint-Pol-Roux. The literary banquet was an old-fashioned mark of literary recognition, popular during the 1890s, and it had angered the Surrealists that such an ‘outmoded’ form of celebration should be held for Saint-Pol-Roux, whom they venerated as a Symbolist and a forerunner of Surrealism. It also happened to take place on the day when the petition in L’Humanité was published.

The banquet kicked off with Breton exchanging insults with art critics. Other staple provocations led some of the guests, sick of Breton’s elegant barbs, to try to push him through the window on the second floor. This triggered a real brawl, with Surrealists hurling plates, glasses and obscenities. The police were called, but not before cries of ‘Vive les Riffs’ and ‘Down with France!’ had attracted an angry crowd to the restaurant and passers-by started beating up Surrealist ‘traitors’.

In truth, the Surrealists were anarchistic Romantics who, like the Communists, knew nothing of Morocco, the Rif or Abd el-Krim. They declared themselves to be against Western civilization and especially France, but really this was just an inverse Orientalism. None the less, the fiasco at the Closerie des Lilas was a significant moment in the history of the anti-colonialism of the French avant-garde. In the 1950s, at the height of the Algerian War, groups like the Lettrists and Situationists would deliberately provoke public anger with their pro-Algerian, pro-Moroccan and pro-Tunisian sympathies. For now, however, it was an obscure battle between élitist Parisian factions which no one in Morocco had ever heard of.

*   *   *

Throughout the 1930s, French colons settled in almost every part of Morocco where money could be earned. The illusion of a protectorate which would shelter Morocco’s independence and autonomy fell away: although the legal status was different, by now this was well and truly a colony on the Algerian model.

As poverty forced Moroccans in the countryside to move to the cities (where they often ended up worse off), the complex political affiliations that held tribes and villages together began to crumble. Alongside this process, there were the first real stirrings of political resistance to the French.

One of the catalysts was a clumsy attempt by the French to divide the Arab and Berber population. In 1930 the French authorities announced a dahir (decree) which declared that Berber laws would hold in Berber-controlled parts of the country rather than the Sharia law which applied to all Muslims. The French had really only meant to pacify Berber aspirations. But across Morocco it was argued that this was the first step towards converting all Moroccans to Christianity, that the protectorate was a sham, and that this was another crusade by the Frankish infidels. This argument turned into a full-blown protest movement, with riots in every Moroccan city – easily quashed by French force of arms. Before long the most hard-line protesters went underground. Towards the end of 1930, a group of young men, some of whom had been educated in the French system and others in the Middle East, set up a secret society called the Zawiya (Assembly, or Group), and began to distribute a propaganda sheet, L’Action du Peuple. The cultural schizophrenia in Morocco was apparent in the Arabic name of the organization and the French title of the newsletter.

The demands made by Zawiya were relatively modest. In 1934 they called for reforms to governance and administration but did not dare even to suggest that the then resident-general, Charles Noguès, should leave. At times Moroccan politics seemed to be a perverse mirror image of what was happening in France. For example, as France exulted in the late 1930s in the worker-led Popular Front government, Noguès was obliged to legalize the Communist Party and trade unions, but Moroccans were forbidden to join them.

When Moroccans went on strike in mines in the south of the country, Noguès sent in the army. Nationalists were rounded up and imprisoned. There was more rioting, but Noguès prided himself on his ruthless methods when faced with the mob; the Moroccans were not armed, they were disorganized and easily cut down by a bullet or a sword.

Towards Freedom

Everything changed with the Second World War. In 1939 the sultan explicitly sided with France and thousands of Moroccans scrambled to join the French army, as they had in the First World War. By 1940, with the Fall of France, over 47,000 Moroccans were enlisted in the French military, motivated by a desire to escape the poverty of their native land, curiosity for travel and adventure, and, occasionally, a skewed patriotism for ‘France’, a land that most of them had never seen.

One of the complications in the early part of the war was that Noguès sided with Vichy and came to an agreement with the Germans to maintain the protectorate. One of his first acts of defiance was to refuse to allow the Germans to round up Moroccan Jews. Under the protectorate, the Jews had no status as French citizens. The sultan cleverly saw this as a loophole – a perverse form of French anti-Semitism – to oppose both Vichy and the Nazis.

This gave the sultan high prestige with the Allied forces who landed on the Moroccan beaches of Casablanca, Safi and Kenitra in 1942 as part of ‘Operation Torch’. Noguès ordered his troops to fight the Americans. Moroccans were confused by this, and wondered what had happened to French authority. More to the point, they saw that it could be challenged by force of arms.

In contrast to their despised status under the French authority, Moroccan Jews, who generally wore European clothes but were poor, noted that the Allied forces treated Jewish fighters with respect. There were tough Jews, some of them Zionists, who refused to be subordinate to the so-called superior races. Moroccan Muslims were also impressed by the efficiency and glamour of the American troops. The French forces, shabby in comparison, who were in disarray and demoralized, were capable of offering only a token resistance to the Allied landings. By this time, Morocco was no longer the busy and fruitful colony that the French had built up since 1905: the phosphate mines had shut down, harvests were poor and food strictly rationed; there were epidemics of plague and cholera. Worst of all, in 1941, there was famine in the north, which was occupied by Spanish troops in the wake of the Fall of France. The Spanish were not, strictly speaking, participants in the Second World War, but they loosely sided with the Axis powers and were keen to grab as much land in Morocco as they could from the Allies. The real victims of this cynicism were the Moroccans, who went hungry as their former colonial masters fought over territorial rights.

For the Moroccans, the most momentous event of the war was the arrival in 1943 of Roosevelt and Churchill at Anfa, near Casablanca, to discuss the future. Although Roosevelt gave no formal word in support of Moroccan independence, it was rumoured that he had privately expressed his views to the sultan that the French in Morocco were a spent force. Meanwhile, the Nationalist movement gathered pace. On 11 January 1944, a new grouping, Istiqlal (Independence), published its manifesto for a free Morocco, led by the sultan, Sidi Mohammed V, with a democratic charter and a constitutional monarchy.

At the level of the street, this movement was given impetus by the encounter with the Americans: this was the first time that Moroccans had come into contact with a culture outside the Spanish or French-speaking world. After years of wartime shortages, they were dazzled by the chocolate, cigarettes, nylons and the jazz music that the Americans brought with them. The folksinger Houcine Slaoui celebrated this in his song ‘Al Mirikane’, in which he sings ‘zin u l’ainaz-zarqajanabkulkhir’ (The beautiful blue-eyed ones brought us all good things), with references to ‘shwing’ (chewing-gum) and English words such as ‘OK, OK, come on, come on, bye-bye’. Most importantly, the Americans seemed bring with them the promise of liberation from the French.4

For their part, the French were naturally suspicious of the Americans. This mistrust intensified in 1947 when Moroccan Nationalists established the Office of the Arab Maghreb in Cairo – an organization that decided political strategy and took propaganda far beyond the reach of the French. Many in the French government saw in this an Anglo-American plot to destabilize French North Africa. Suddenly Morocco and Moroccan Nationalists were the most dangerous threat to the stability of the region.

The French were really only deluding themselves, as George Orwell had noted in his diary while convalescing in Marrakesh almost a decade earlier: ‘When you walk through a town like this – two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in – when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.’ And Orwell wondered ominously: ‘How long can we keep on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?’5

Now it seemed that his questions were being answered by the sporadic violence which occasionally broke out in Morocco, with serious uprisings in Rabat and Fez in January 1944. Anxious to convince the British and the Americans that they still had a grip on the Muslim population, the French described the uprisings as pro-German rebellions. They were nothing of the kind. In 1947 sixty-seven people were shot dead in Casablanca by Senegalese sharpshooters. Again, this was dismissed as trouble-making and treason rather a real bid for independence.

At the same time, Mohammed V began making appeals to the wider Arab world for support; in April 1947 he made a visit to Tangier, where he attracted international attention by proclaiming Morocco’s ties to the Arab nation without making any reference to the French. This was expressly against the orders of the resident-general, a liberal named Erik Labonne. One eyewitness to the sultan’s visit, Abou Bakr Lamtouni, a ten-year-old boy scout, described the European inhabitants of Tangier as being profoundly shaken by Mohammed’s speech, which was delivered to Moroccans who had travelled from all over the country to hear this first open declaration of an anti-European strategy.

Moroccan Resistance

The French cracked down hard. They insisted first of all that Mohammed V disassociate himself from Istiqlal. He had no choice but to pretend to do so, even as demonstrations and clashes continued. One of the most unsettling mutinies, at least from the French point of view, took place in Tangier in 1952.

The riots began quietly enough. At around 1 p.m. on Sunday 30 March, a group of protesters gathered outside the Cinema Rex on the Grand Socco, chanting ‘Istiqlal, Istiqlal!’ They were soon joined by young lads from the district, eager to taunt the Europeans who often came to watch Hollywood films in the cinema (which occasionally showed Casablanca for whole weeks at a time). For young Moroccans, the cinema was not only a mark of the separation between rich Europeans and poor Moroccans but also a symbol of the barbarity of the Western world.

The crowd was being monitored fitfully by the French chief of security, François Wilbers, who was practically alone that weekend – all his senior officers and half his men were attending the final of a boules competition at Souk El Arba du Gharb. As the crowd grew, so did Wilbers’ unease. There had been rumours in the Arabic-speaking community that something big would happen in Morocco on 30 March – the fortieth anniversary of the French protectorate. All morning, young Moroccans had been tearing around the streets of the city, carrying red banners and insignias. The European population was oblivious to all of this. When a shopkeeper on the Avenue d’Espagne lowered his shutters, warning of trouble, the police forced him to open up again.

Wilbers sent a pack of men into the crowd to try to get hold of the ringleaders, but the police were met by a hail of stones, bottles and iron bars. The crowds then moved to the Medina, smashing windows in the rue Semarine and rue des Siaghines. Shots were fired into the air. And then, as the police lined up a machine gun at the entrance of the Medina, automatic rounds were fired into the rioting young men. At least eleven rioters were killed and dozens seriously injured. By five o’clock the police had control of the town. Moroccans were in tears, lamenting the dead and fearful of more shooting, as they poured out of the city through Place de France and rue de Mexique. Most Europeans, who had spent the day as a holiday, had no idea what had happened and by early evening aperitifs were being poured as usual on the fashionable terrasses of the city.

Worryingly for the French, the disorder in Morocco was now starting to be matched by violence in Tunis. On 5 December 1952 La Main Rouge (The Red Hand), a French vigilante group allegedly close to the French secret services, murdered a Tunisian trade unionist called Farhat Hached, whom they had identified as one of the key leaders of the rebellion in Tangier. And then on 8 December, in Casablanca, police, colonial troops and the French Foreign Legion surrounded the shanty town known as the ‘Carrières Centrales’, where white-robed Nationalists filled the streets in protest. Light aeroplanes buzzed overhead, dropping tear gas. Some of those who managed to get out of the shanty towns attacked Europeans, wounding seven of them. Hundreds of Moroccans were arrested, beaten or killed. British Pathé News, sensitive to the Cold War agenda of the period, described the insurgents as ‘Communists’ or ‘simple-minded folk’ who been ‘led astray by Communists’. In fact, most of the rioters were angry young Muslims, living in wretched poverty, often literally starving. Among them were shoeshine boys, porters or newspapers sellers – ‘yaouleds’, or street-kids. Most of them had never heard of Marx nor knew what Communism was. There was no official recognition in France or any other country that this could be a Nationalist anti-colonial rebellion.