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Washington DC – When discussing the legacy of France’s occupation and subjugation of Morocco, many Moroccans still naively believe that post-independence Morocco benefited greatly from the infrastructure network that France built during the protectorate period. They also believe that France lifted millions of Moroccans out of poverty and strove to improve their living conditions. This is an overtly sugarcoated reading of history that does not reflect the true motives behind the existence of such an infrastructure.
There is no denying that France constructed roads, bridges, railways, ports, etc. France, however, did not do so in favor of the Moroccan people or as part of its commitment to fully implement the Protectorate Treaty, but rather to serve the interests of French settlers, whose number in Morocco exceeded 400.000 at one point during the protectorate years. In addition, most of the infrastructure that was built between 1912-1934 was meant mainly to facilitate the equipment and movement of French troops during the so-called “pacification campaign.”
Had France genuinely sought to bring about a true economic revolution in Morocco, all Moroccan regions would have benefited from such infrastructure whose erection was entrusted exclusively to French companies. Yet it is an established fact that France left all regions that the first French resident general, Hubert Lyautey, dubbed as “useless Morocco” bereft of any infrastructure.
Moroccan Economy Only Existed to Make France Great
Morocco’s growth largely worked for the benefit of colonists and the French business community as a whole. For instance, Morocco was forced to import all of its goods from France although the prices of French products were tangibly higher compared to those from other countries. This resulted in a chronic trade deficit in the North African kingdom.
As it exploited Morocco’s resources to recover from the repercussions of World War II, France caused 95% of the kingdom’s trade deficit in 1950. Rom Landau’s 1956 book, “Moroccan Drama 1900-1955,” makes a particularly compelling case in support of the thesis that France’s occupation was brutally negative for Morocco’s economic development.
The 1949-1952 French quadruple plan included a text indicating that “Morocco will have an active part in the recovery of France by supplying manganese, cobalt lead ore, canned goods, and agricultural products,” the book reveals, detailing that this enabled Paris to preserve its resources as much as it could.
In 1952, Resident-General Augustin Guillaume said: “The objectives of Morocco’s economy are to obtain hard currency by raising the level of export and putting that currency at the disposal of French society.” All of Morocco’s hard work was being “used and would continue to be used to rescue France’s depleted coffers,” he added.
All the policies that the colonial administration pursued throughout the protectorate were designed mainly to serve the French economy and cater to the needs and ambitions of the settlers. One example of this colonist-oriented economy is that France’s efforts to expand the use of irrigation and mechanization in Moroccan agriculture mainly and only sought to benefit the expansive farms held by French settlers. Meanwhile, small farms owned by Moroccans remained parched and relied on traditional irrigation and cultivation methods.
Not only did France deliberately concentrate its efforts in helping settlers improve their productivity, but it also stood against foreign companies that intended to invest in the irrigation of lands owned by Moroccan farmers. At the beginning of the 1950s, for example, the French government turned down the request of an American company that sought to invest $60 million in the irrigation of 360 acres in southern Morocco, which were owned by Moroccans.
This was by no means an exceptional decision; it was rather the norm that underpinned French colonists’ treatment of Moroccans throughout the protectorate. As the rich landowners’ accumulation depended heavily on their exploitation of an indigent peasantry, they opposed any measure that could lead to the enrichment or improvement of the living conditions of Moroccan peasants.
In an essay published in 1956 in Foreign Affairs, renowned historian Charles-Andre Julien explains how French colonists callously opposed the attempt by a peasant organization in the Meknes region to use tractors owned collectively by their tribe, causing them to renounce its use.
Renowned Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui pointed out this colonial policy in his book, “History of the Maghreb: An Interpretative Essay.” According to Laroui, all the administrative, legal, and financial reforms that France introduced in Morocco during the protectorate era were aimed at serving France’s interests. In addition, infrastructure projects carried out by France were completed thanks to Moroccans’ human and financial resources. Laroui points out that these public works were financed through loans that Morocco contracted from French banks between 1914 and 1928.
Of course, France’s economy was the largest beneficiary of these projects. French banks benefited greatly from the interest rate imposed on these loans, while contracts for the construction of the projects were awarded exclusively to major French companies. Due to the absence of any competitors, France did not even bother to try to reduce the high costs of the projects as long as French companies were benefiting from them, Laroui argued.
Monopolizing Morocco for France’s Imperial Prestige
France was thus keen to exclusively monopolize Morocco’s economy for 44 years, in defiance of the General Act of the Algeciras Conference. The terms of the conference guaranteed the signatory countries’ economic rights in Morocco, with France claiming to preserve British interests in Morocco under the 1904 Franco-British Agreement. Among the key steps that France took to hamper British and American companies’ activities was the decision of General-Resident Hubert Lyautey to establish the Office Cherifien des Phosphates in 1919.
Yet Lyautey’s decision did not in any way intend to protect Morocco’s interests. The goal, rather, was to prevent British and American companies from participating in or sharing France’s exploitation of phosphate resources discovered in the vicinity of Marrakech in 1907. All companies that were active in the mining industry, public works, railroads, etc., operated under exclusive French control. In the few sectors that allowed mixed companies, Moroccan stakeholders had minor stakes with no voting rights.
In addition to their preponderant status in the Moroccan economy, colonists took full control of all levers of power that had a direct impact on the wellbeing and freedom of Moroccans. In the administrative bureaucracy, for instance, the number of French settlers exceeded 24,000 – most of whom were from the island of Corsica, according to French historian Charles-Robert Ageron.
Due to their growing influence and their grip on Morocco’s economic destiny, colonists came to regard themselves as landowners and lords. Meanwhile, Moroccans became third-class citizens who were kept on the fringe of society and discriminated against in all sectors of the economy. In the education and health system, too, Moroccans were outrageously discriminated against, with their family allowances representing a fraction of those of their French counterparts. For example, the family allowance of a Moroccan driver with one child was 16 times lower than that of his French colleague.
Discrimination against Moroccans extended even to sanitation. The French colonial administration built 36.5 kilometers of sewers in the new neighborhood that were built in large Moroccan cities to host the French settler community. Meanwhile, during the same period, as little as 4.3 kilometers of sewers were built to meet the sanitation needs of the medinas which housed Moroccan populations.
To add insult to injury, Moroccans who in their overwhelming majority lived in the countryside and were employed in French-owned farms, the mining sector, public works, and the other sectors of the economy under French control, bore the brunt of the country’s taxation system. Ninety percent of the tertib tax, which constituted 40 percent of the state’s tax revenues, was provided by Moroccan small landowners.
While possessing lands that were fifty times smaller than those of French landowners, Moroccan peasants were forced to pay 24 percent more per hectare than French colonists, who possessed the country’s most arable land and benefited from the irrigation policy pursued by the French administration. Moroccan peasants were banned from buying lands from Europeans, and a dahir promulgated in February 1941 also prohibited them from buying real estate.
Not only were Moroccans prevented from benefiting from the same economic opportunities afforded to French colonists, but they were also forced to live on the fringe of society. The overwhelming majority of Moroccans – 75 percent – lived in the countryside, while Europeans lived in big cities and the new urban centers that sprang up with their massive implantation in the country.
The arbitrary expropriation coupled with the fragmentation of lands owned by Moroccans caused many of them to migrate to the cities and swell the ranks of Moroccans living in shantytowns. To put it simply, Moroccans were invisible to the colonist community whose members made it a rule not to mingle with what they called “the indigenous,” whom they held in contempt and hostility.
Plot to Depose Sultan Mohammed V and Delegitimize Moroccan Nationalists
Forming a pressure group that was adamant about tightening its grip on the country’s economy, the French colonists worked hand in glove to discourage, and even ban, Moroccans from taking any potential steps that would improve their position and living conditions. One egregious example of the settlers’ keenness to infringe on the basic rights of Moroccans was the inability of Moroccan workers to form trade unions. As a result, Moroccan workers performed their work to the pleasure of their French employers who could dispose of them as they pleased without incurring any legal consequences.
Such was the economic and political influence that the settlers’ lobby succeeded in building not only in Morocco but also within the French government, that French resident-generals were forced to implement their colonialist agenda, lest they lose their position.
Resident-General Alphonse Juin, who was born in Algeria, was a loyal executioner of the settlers’ agenda in Morocco. Juin embodied the settlers’ intrinsic prejudice towards the Moroccan people and their malicious intentions to transform the protectorate system into direct colonization. As soon as he took office in 1947, Juin worked hand in hand with his advisers Philippe Boniface and Marcel Vallat and started putting pressure on Sultan Mohammed V to sign many proclamations that sought to circumvent the protectorate treaty.
In so doing, Juin’s key ambition was to lure the Moroccan King into accepting a proposal to appoint a Council of Ministers that would be entrusted with the constitutional powers of the Sultan as well as to form two municipal councils where around 450,000 French colonists would get the same number of votes as eight million Moroccans.
Juin also pressured the King to condemn, outlaw the Istiqlal Party and dismiss many members of his entourage and administration that supported the party. One of the other proclamations pushed by General Juin was meant to disavow the protectorate treaty and establish a new system based on joint sovereignty between France and Morocco – a demand that was strictly dismissed by King Mohammed V and the national movement. The Sultan’s refusal to sign the proclamations proposed by General Juin caused an unprecedented deterioration in the relations between the two parties.
February 1951 brought the first signs of rupture between them. This was when Juin asked Sultan Mohammed V to sign the proclamations or renounce the throne – and threatened him with dismissal from his position. Those skirmishes marked the starting point of the final break between the two parties, eventually leading to the sultan’s exile on August 20, 1953- on the eve of the Islamic feast of the sacrifice- to Corsica and then to Madagascar.
The colonial lobby, which benefited from Morocco’s resources and exerted control over all newspapers in Morocco, launched a propaganda campaign in 1950 to tarnish Sultan Mohammed V’s reputation and that of the Al Istiqlal Party. Among other things, the Moroccan Sultan was accused of wanting to restore the despotism of medieval times.
The colonial lobby used all available media outlets, most particularly “La Vigie Marocaine” in addition to pushing multiple members of the French parliament to pressure the French government to get rid of Sultan Mohammed V and to replace him with a puppet who would have no qualms about implementing France’s agenda.
Ever since the King expressed Morocco’s aspirations for independence in his historic speech in Tangier in April 1947, France worked relentlessly toward questioning his legitimacy and dismissing the Moroccan nationalist movement’s demands.
The colonists claimed that the Moroccan nationalists’ demands did not reflect the will of Moroccans who did not support the King, and “were mostly supportive of France’s rule over the country.” French authorities also claimed that the burgeoning nationalist movement was an agent of foreign conspiracy concocted by agitators supported by Arab countries.
The central Committee of France, which included all components of the colonial lobby in Morocco, worked equally hard to tarnish the reputation of the Al Istiqlal Party, accusing it of having a feudal mindset and of collusion with Soviet communists.
The campaign’s aim was to preempt the formation of a legitimate independence movement and prevent any such efforts from earning moral and actual support, particularly after the US had offered gradual support to Moroccans’ nationalist demands expressed by both the King and the Al Istiqlal Party. The party’s leaders were all arrested following the December 1952 uprisings in Casablanca.
Weaponizing the Amazigh-Arab Divide
Relying on the time-tested “divide to conquer” policy, France keenly sought to use the issue of Amazigh to spread division among Moroccans and give legitimacy to its occupation agenda. To achieve that goal, it worked to promote a historical fallacy according to which Morocco was divided into two parts: A purely Amazigh part and an Arab part.
To corroborate this misleading claim, a number of French intellectuals and authors set out to push forth the now debunked theory of Blad al-Siba, which held that Amazigh were always outside the authority of the central government and that they had sociological traits that fully distinguished them from Moroccans of Arab descent.
French authorities also worked to fuel animosity and hostility among many Amazigh tribes towards the Al Istiqlal Party, claiming that all of the nationalist party’s members were Arabs and that Morocco’s independence would keep the country under their control.
To achieve this goal, Juin relied heavily on the collaboration of Pasha Thami Glaoui, who owed his political career wealth to his loyal servitude to France’s colonial agenda. Thami El Glaoui did not hesitate to play the role of docile native informant to his French handlers, who at some point regarded him as a possible successor of Sultan Mohammed V in the event he were to be deposed from the throne.
As part of this plot, Thami put pressure on governors and caids in many regions, where the majority were Amazigh. Around 287 caids and governors were forced to sign a petition siding with the colonial authorities in their row with Sultan Mohammed V and the nationalist movement. Initiated by the resident-general, the petition notably demanded that Sultan Mohammed V step down for supposedly violating an arbitrary law that required him to condemn the Independence Party.
El Glaoui and his supporters resorted to many other hostile maneuvers to intimidate the legitimate sultan into relinquishing his power. In addition to collecting signatures for their petition, they mobilized and brought to Rabat large crowds of tribal supporters to intimidate Sultan Mohammed V.
The crowds, however, were not aware that they would be used in that conspiracy against the rightful sultan, whom they revered and considered as the symbol of Moroccan unity. According to converging historical records, the French colonial authorities had deceived the crowds by telling them that they would go to Rabat to participate in a parade before the King.
As a result, French colonists were surprised when tribes staged protests in front of various county headquarters to demand the dismissal of the caids and leaders who fooled them into thinking they were traveling to Rabat to participate in a parade in front of the king. The protestors also expressed their attachment to the sultan and his legitimacy as the king of the country and its spiritual leader.
Robert Montagne, a former French naval lieutenant, was part of the group of intellectuals and authors that made their calling to support the rights of French colonists and sing the hymns of France’s “civilizing mission” in Morocco.
A fierce advocate of the instauration of a system of co-sovereignty in Morocco instead of the Protectorate, Montagne was also one of the leading exponents of the theory that there existed cultural, intellectual, and racial differences between Arabs and Amazigh. Describing Arabs as culturally backward and averse to modernity and development, this racist and colonization-legitimizing theory held that the Amazigh were domesticable as they were more susceptible to accept French rule because of their alleged Roman origins.
Lyautey Was No Friend of Moroccan Culture or Civilization
Montagne, who became Lyautey’s chief ethnographer and came to be regarded by many as an authority on Moroccan affairs, was part of a cohort of military officials turned ethnographers who made extensive use of an equally racist and imperialist theory that France adopted for its occupation of Algeria. Presenting Arabs as aliens and parasites in North Africa, this theory pushed forth the notion that the “rapacious” and “savage” Arabs invaded the indigenous populations of North Africa in the 11th century and destroyed everything the region contained in terms of natural resources and civilization.
This theory has been widely adopted by French academics who produced a sizable body of work whose intellectual legacy has been the civilizing urge to serve the French colonial agenda and to cement the superiority of Europeans. Montagne, whose goal was exactly to serve this agenda, made disparaging statements about the “Arabs of Morocco” in many of the articles he published in Le Monde between spring and summer of 1953. Among other racist, euro-centrist claims, the articles argued that Arabs were inherently inferior – socially, economically, and culturally – to Europeans due to their religion and traditions.
Montagne claimed that religion lost its value and appeal in Morocco during France’s colonial presence in the country. Mosques became empty, he said, arguing that Moroccans’ only concern was to emulate French customs.
Montagne’s views and attitude towards both Arabs and Amazigh were but a reflection and an extension of the thinking of Lyautey — who is still paradoxically regarded by a large swathe of the Moroccan francophone elite as a statesman who showed utmost respect towards Morocco’s Sultans and the country’s centuries-old traditions.
A firm believer in the alleged intrinsic differences between Arabs and Amazigh, Lyautey was the chief promoter of the idea that Amazigh’s embrace of Islam was superficial and that they were reluctant to regard themselves as subjects of Moroccan sultans.
Being fully aware that Arabic was the means through which all Moroccans learned and recited the Quran, and that Islam key to the bonds that kept Moroccans together as people under a ruler they respected and revered as the “Commander of the faithful,” Lyautey strove to avoid that Arabic be taught or spoken in Amazigh villages.
Hence the decision to establish Amazigh schools, where Arabic was banned and replaced by French. Lyautey and his comrades regarded this measure as their gateway to preventing unity between the different components of the Moroccan nation.
De-Arabizing Morocco
Reducing the influence and use of Arabic in the daily life of Moroccans was the overarching goal of a colonial administration whose agenda ultimately rested on assimilating Moroccans, especially the Amazigh — who were viewed as predisposed to embracing France’s language and culture. The goal, obviously enough, was to atomize Moroccans as a society and obliterate their cultural, religious, and historic identity.
This was to be achieved through the closure of all old Quranic schools where school age Moroccans used to learn the first notions of Arabic, as well as the precepts of Islam. Every effort was made to ban the use of Arabic in public venues and replace it with French. As regards the Amazigh population, the lucky among its members who were afforded access to education were to be educated in French. Lyautey was so keen to limit the use of Arabic in the so-called Bled Esiba that he urged French civil controllers to learn Amazigh to avoid the use of Arab interpreters.
Lyautey and his successors’ Berber policy relied heavily on the theory developed by Captain Courtés who, like Montagne, had no academic credentials and was a pure product of the French army. Courtés is one of the leading ideologists that gave pseudoscientific legitimacy to the widespread claims underpinning the misleading Bled Siba/ Bled el Makhzen divide.
He was one of the leading propagandists who breathed real life into the claim that Morocco was never an Arab country, and that Amazigh never fully embraced Arabic or even Islam. Tracing back the Amazigh’s origin to the Aurignacians, Courtés claimed that in the same way that Amazigh resisted the occupation of Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the Roman and Byzantine Empires, they also resisted the Islamization and Arabization that resulted from what he purposefully describes as “Arab invasions.”
According to this theory, the impenetrability of the Atlas Mountains — where most Amazigh dwelt — made Moroccan Amazigh more immune to Arabization and Islam than their Algerian counterparts. Aided by geography, Courtés argued, the Amazigh succeeded in maintaining an “organized Berber State” with the Arabs being confined to the plains. For Courtés, this geographic divide explained the Bled Siba/ Bled el Makhzen dichotomy, further giving credence to the claim that Amazigh were superficially Islamized.
To further support his claims, Courtés spoke about the existence of a pure Amazigh race which, despite the spread of Arabic and Islam and in spite of living close to the plains inhabited by Arabs, remained “unchanged” for the most part. But he also claimed, rather paradoxically given his theory of the existence of a “pure Amazigh race,” that Arabs living in the plains were responsible for Arabizing their Amazigh neighbors.
Following in the footsteps of his colleague Montagne, Jacques Chastenet, a member of the French Academy, called for strengthening the presence of French-Amazigh schools and for giving the Amazigh language a Latin alphabet. Given that Amazigh are fascinated with Arab culture, the goal of such an endeavor, Chastenet insisted, would be to get them to be fascinated with, or admire, French culture and language instead.
The Myth of Arab Destructiveness
To lend some degree of legitimacy to such spurious claims, the theorists of the colonial movement altered some of what Ibn Khaldoun said in his book “Al Muqaddimah” (Introduction), according to which the arrival of the Banu Hilal tribes from the Arab East to North Africa was among the reasons that deepened the economic and social backwardness of North Africa.
Yet, as French economist and author Yves Lacoste later demonstrated, because these theorists’ main goal was to legitimize colonization and western superiority, they did not hesitate to manipulate Ibn Khaldoun’s words and take them out of their actual historical context. According to Lacoste, these imperialist theorists dealt selectively with what was included in Ibn Khaldoun’s “Introduction” by conveniently ignoring whatever refuted their thesis.
One of the key theorists who used the theory of Arab destructiveness and their alleged role in obstructing the development of countries in North Africa was Emile-Felix Gautier. In his numerous writings on the topic, Gautier lent credence to the false historical thesis of centuries-long hostility between Arabs and Amazigh people in Morocco.
Gautier was also one of the leading proponents of the myth that Amazigh were biologically closer to southern Europeans than to Arabs. In 1929, he claimed that “anthropologists agree that the Berbers (Amazigh), in bodily structure and the shape of their skull, are connected with Southern Italians and Southern Spaniards rather than with African and Oriental races”.
Diana K. Davis, an American author, has argued that French imperialist authors’ manipulation of historical facts is still invoked today to accuse Arab nomads of being brutal invaders who destroyed the fertile agricultural environment the Romans left in North Africa.
Among other misdeeds fabricated by this cohort of imperialism-legitimizing historians and writers, Arabs were also accused of causing deforestation and desertification in the region. Needless to say, manipulating and misreading the history and the geographical data of the region paved the way for justifying the French colonizers’ forceful, illegal seizing of fertile lands in North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
The French colonizers also presented themselves as the legitimate heir of Roman civilization in North Africa. Orientalists have often considered Nomadic Arabs as aliens to North Africa, a region they argued previously belonged to Romans. One of their claims is that the Arab nomads did not have the capacity and industriousness to improve and develop agriculture to the same level as it was during the Roman era.
And so, as it undertook the task of reviving the alleged peasant glory of North Africa and putting an end to the neglect and destruction to which the region was subjected when it was under Arab control, France claimed to be the legitimate successor and representative of Roman civilization in the region.
The challenge of restoring fertility to agricultural lands in the region and developing the sector’s production were among the most important features of France’s supposed civilizing mission in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Based on this theory, it was only natural for French colonists to take over one million hectares of the most fertile lands in Morocco, while one million indigenous small-scale farmers shared the remaining four million hectares. French colonists owed their large-scale land holding to the Dahir that Lyautey promulgated in 1914 as he claimed that the domains seized from Moroccans would be used for “public utility.”
As Rom Landau wrote in his authoritative book on the destructive legacy of French colonization in Morocco, colonists owned an average land area of 200 hectares, when the average land area owned by Moroccans did not exceed three hectares. This fragmentation of cultivated land exposed Moroccan farmers to extreme precariousness, scarce yields, and indebtedness, causing many of them to be absorbed by deep-pocketed French landowners.
What Is to Be Done?
As I stressed in a previous analysis, Morocco is going through a watershed moment in its history. The fulfillment of the country’s grand ambitions to reclaim its erstwhile standing on the regional and continental stages will depend closely on Moroccans owning their history and realizing the fact the strategic geography, the rich culture of their country, as well as their own industriousness as nation can transform Morocco into the regional powerhouse that it once was.
But this can only be achieved if Moroccans take upon themselves to demystify their history and cleanse it from all the unfounded theories and fallacies that have been spread for more than a century about their country. The 44-year hiatus of France occupation was both a disastrous accident in Morocco’s centuries-old history and a dark spot that should be cleansed by deconstructing the ideology that underpinned France’s colonial policy in Morocco and its continued legacy in some intellectual circles.
Moroccans should show determination to break from what French historian Daniel Rivet described in his book, “Histoire du Maroc,” as the “comprehensible collective amnesia” they embarked on following King Mohammed V’s return from his forced exile in November 1955. Moroccans have the right to know what happened during France’s occupation of Morocco. They have the right to have a clear understanding of France’s policies, especially its schemes to disintegrate the country and negate its glorious history in order to turn it into its eternal appendage.
It is the duty of the government, public and private schools, universities, academics, intellectuals, and the media to shed light on the multiple facets of the symbolic and visceral cruelty of French colonialism in Morocco.
The goal of such a clear-wide engagement with the country’s history is to provide our youth and future generations with a clear picture about France’s wicked intentions and designs to keep Morocco under its yoke by sowing internal divisions and obliterating the country’s cultural, linguistic, historical, and religious identity.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
