DIVIDE AND SCHOOL: BERBER EDUCATION IN MOROCCO UNDER THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE By Adrienne Tyrey A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of History – Doctor of Philosophy 2018 ABSTRACT DIVIDE AND SCHOOL: BERBER EDUCATION IN MOROCCO UNDER THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE By Adrienne Tyrey When the 1912 Treaty of Fes created the French Protectorate of Morocco, the new French administration took charge of a modernization project that included developing a public education system. Avoiding oversight by the Sultan and his government, they instead created separate systems for Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking Moroccan youth in an effort to artificially separate the population along ethnolinguistic and geographic lines. Whereas much of the existing scholarship on the Protectorate of Morocco focuses on urban Arab nationalism, this dissertation addresses the outcomes of French Berber policy within Berber communities themselves. The lens of education reveals a space of unusually intimate interaction between French functionaries and Berber youth. Based on a Berber myth that placed Berbers higher than Arabs on a European pseudoscientific racial hierarchy, the system of Berber schools was meant to train an intermediary elite class that would serve the French colonial project and turn Berber loyalties from the Sultan to France. Instead, the inequalities and injustices of the imperial order spurred student activism in both Arabic- and Berber-oriented schools, confounding the French educators charged with their instruction and discipline. Drawing on archival and oral sources gathered in Nantes, Aix-en-Provence, and Rabat, this dissertation examines the ideological underpinnings, practical implementation challenges, day-to-day administration, and unintended consequences of the bifurcated public education system implemented by the French in Morocco. I first analyze the rise of ethnography as a colonial science and of ethnographic expertise as both justification of colonialism and a means by which colonial administrators jockeyed for rank and authority. Following the development of a colonial ethnographic archive, I examine the practice of sending French ethnographic researchers with the military in their “Pacification” exercises in southern and eastern Morocco from 1912 until 1934. In addition to rendering Berber country legible to the new centralized administration, this enabled the creation of ad hoc schools that focused on teaching French, which later grew into the Berber school system. An examination of the deliberate creation of separate systems for Arab and Berber youth exposes that the Berber schools were intentionally kept secret from the Sultan and his Makhzen administration, despite French promises of transparency. A narrative history of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou as the keystone of this separate, clandestine educational project reveals that efforts to suppress Arabic language education in the Berber schools had both practical and ideological pitfalls, leading to a backlash that rocked the school in a volatile moment of war and rebellion. Finally, through a case study of Arsène Roux, founder of the Collège, I examine the ambiguous role of a talented and well-intentioned educator and scholar within the exploitative colonial system. By tracing the development of the Berber myth and its use in shaping policy in the Moroccan context, this project prioritizes the experiences of Berber and French individual actors and analyzes the creation of Berber schools as the epitome of colonial divide-and-rule strategies. It decentralizes the urban nationalist movement, arguing instead that activities in the supposed “land of anarchy” provide a clearer understanding of the beliefs and practices of the Protectorate administration. Finally, I contribute to the discussion of how deliberately divisive colonial strategies not only created their own resistance within colonized populations but continue to undergird ongoing divisions and inequalities in postcolonial societies. Copyright by ADRIENNE TYREY 2018 Dedicated to those who save their papers v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As my long road to the PhD reaches its end, I find myself in awe of all those who supported me in this endeavor. I am grateful to the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of History at Michigan State University; to the teachers and archivists in Morocco and France; and to my family, friends, and amazing partner. This would not have been possible without them. My dissertation committee has been a constant source of support, encouragement, and motivation to improve as a historian. I would especially like to thank Dr. Leslie Page Moch for her guidance and example. She has been the model of the true scholar: brilliant, hard-working, and collegial, she leads by good humor, thorough and thoughtful feedback, and the crucial reminder to balance academics and life. Dr. Walter Hawthorne not only advocated for me throughout my graduate career, but even more importantly, taught me how to advocate for myself. As a scholar, he taught me to explore the seeming minutiae of the everyday lives of ordinary people and to examine imperialism from both sides. Dr. Karrin Hanshew held me to a high intellectual standard, challenging me to dig deeper into my analyses and arguments. I am grateful that her probing questions precluded me from taking the easy route. Finally, Dr. Sean Forner encouraged me to engage with theory and see the bigger picture. A dissertation is an exercise in minute specialization, and I appreciate that he reminded me to zoom out and place my work into its larger context. I would also like to thank the faculty members of the European History Colloquium for their careful reading and comments on early drafts of my work, especially Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum, Dr. Ronen Steinberg, Dr. Matt Pauly, and Dr. John Dunn. Many thanks go to the MSU Africanist faculty, especially Dr. Laura Fair for her oral history training. The two Graduate vi Directors during my time at MSU, Dr. Pero Dagbovie and Dr. Michael Stamm, were both instrumental to my growth as a scholar and as a teacher. My gratitude is also due to Elyse Hansen and Jeanna Norris for their knowledgeable guidance. I would like to express my gratitude for Dr. Stephanie Nawyn of the Center for Gender in a Global Context, Dr. Sadam Issa of the Department of Linguistics, and Dr. David Wiley and Dr. Roger Bresnahan of the International Social Science Research seminar. Many thanks also to MSU librarians Dr. Peter Limb and Deborah Margolis for their invaluable assistance. Finally, my journey to the PhD did not begin at Michigan State, and I am grateful to the faculty of the University of Tulsa History and French Departments for seeing more in me than I saw in myself – thanks especially to Dr. Christine Ruane, Dr. Joseph Bradley, Dr. Jay Geller, Dr. Jon Arnold, Dr. Lydie Meunier, and Dr. Karl Pollin. Thanks are due to my fellow graduate students at Michigan State. Alison Kolodzy, Carolyn Pratt, Brian Van Wyck, Jake Jurss, Ella Fratantuono, and Anh Le provided boundless support, both academic and social, and I am deeply grateful for their friendship. My thanks also to my Dissertation Writing Group – Richard Mares, Eddie Bonilla, John Milstead, Emily Elliott, Liz Timbs, and Helen Kaibara. I am grateful for the support of the Graduate History Association, Graduate Employees Union, and Migration With(out) Boundaries Committee. I am indebted to the Michigan State University Department of History, College of Social Science, Graduate School, Center of Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, James Madison College, Writing Center, African Studies Program, and Center for Advanced Study of International Development for their financial support, including assistantships, fellowships, awards, and travel to conferences and archives. My appreciation goes also to H-Net, and especially to Dr. Yelena Kalinsky and Dr. Peter Knupfer. vii Special thanks are due to Ali ben Sebaa of the Moroccan Centre for Arabic Studies for his practical assistance, academic support, and friendship. I would like to thank the archivists of the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, and Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in France, and the staff and faculty of the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc and Institut Royale de la Culture Amazighe in Morocco. I am grateful to the families who hosted me in Rabat in 2013 and 2015 and to the Association La Voix de la Femme Amazighe. To the Moroccan women who supported me, Aicha, Mariyam, Zineb, Naïma, Jihane, Amina: thank you. My research journey would not have been possible without the support of Dr. Jim Miller and the staff of the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange and the Fulbright-Hays Program. I am further grateful for the camaraderie of Hélène Picart, Stacy Wheeler, and Dr. Jessica Newman. Beyond my academic life, this degree would not have been possible without the support of my family and friends. My parents, Mike and Geri, instilled in both me and my sister Natalie a deep and abiding love of learning. They taught me the importance of curiosity and exploration, of reading and compassion. Thank you. My oldest friends– Caitlin, Kathleen, Anna, Erin, Colleen, Anne – kept me grounded and connected to home. My newest friends – Ronna, Sally, Kara, Beth, Jen – helped me through a major transition and held my hands through the final stages of writing my dissertation. Finally, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to my partner, Ryan Stoklosa. He supported me through this process both figuratively and quite literally, keeping me fed and hydrated and awake on days I would have preferred to burrow under the covers forever. My survival and that of our cats is his doing. His kindness, intelligence, humor, self-discipline, and conscientiousness inspire me daily. Like everything in my life, I am delighted and grateful to be able to share this achievement with him. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………….……………….…………..xi KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………….……………….…xiii INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….…………………..1 Who Are the Berbers?……………………………………………………………………..4 Divide and Rule…………………………………………………………………………...8 Literature Review………………………………………………………………………...12 Sources and Methodology………………………………………………………………..24 CHAPTER 1: THE BERBER QUESTION: IDEOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND PRACTICE……………………………………………30 Algeria, Racial Science, and the Civilizing Mission…………………………………….31 The Berber Myth…………………………………………………………………………35 The Moroccan Ethnographic Archive……………………………………………………45 Lyautey’s Morocco………………………………………………………………………53 Bled al-Makhzen, Bled al-Siba…………………………………………………………..60 Ethnic Morocco…………………………………………………………………………..68 The Modernization Paradox……………………………………………………………...76 CHAPTER 2: CODIFYING TRIBAL LAW: THE PACIFICATION OF MOROCCO, BERBER CUSTOMARY TRIBUNALS, AND ÉCOLES DE FORTUNE……………………...82 Military Pacification, 1912-1927………………………………………………………...84 Berber Myth to Berber Policy……………………………………………………………89 Fiches de Tribu…………………………………………………………………………..94 Customary Law and the Berber Dahir of 1930…………………………………………103 The Bureau of Indigenous Affairs……………………………………………………...109 Écoles de Fortune………………………………………………………………………121 CHAPTER 3: SEGREGATION AND SECRECY: PUBLIC EDUCATION UNDER THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE………………………...132 Lyautey, Educational Segregation, and Secrecy………………………………………..136 Muslim Education………………………………………………………………………140 Berber Education……………………………………………………………………….146 Moroccan Demands for Educational Reform…………………………………………..151 Istiqlal, Independence Manifesto, and Public Protest…………………………………..156 Post-War Reforms………………………………………………………………………160 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...165 CHAPTER 4: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE COLLÈGE BERBÈRE D’AZROU…………...168 An Epistolary Crisis…………………………………………………………………….171 Administrative Anxieties……………………………………………………………….179 ix The Sultan, Incognito…………………………………………………………………...187 Nationalism and the Student Strike……………………………………………………..196 The Aftermath of the Strike…………………………………………………………….199 The Collège d’Azrou on the Eve of Independence……………………………………..213 CHAPTER 5: ARSÈNE ROUX AND THE COLLÈGE D’AZROU: A CASE STUDY OF A COLONIAL EDUCATOR AND ADMINISTRATOR……………...221 Roux in Azrou, 1927-1935……………………………………………………………..226 Director of Berber Studies, Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines……………………236 Collège Moulay Youssef de Rabat……………………………………………………..244 War and Instability……………………………………………………………………...250 Roux Responds to Reforms…………………………………………………………….260 On Independence……………………………………………………………………….265 Return to France and Berber Correspondence Courses, late 1950s……………………269 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...271 CONCLUSION: “OUR COMPANIONS IN STRUGGLE”…………………………………...273 APPENDICES……………………………………………………….…………………………286 APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY……………………………….…………………………..287 APPENDIX B: LEADERSHIP……………………………….………………………..291 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………….………………...293 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of Morocco under the French Protectorate, 1912-1956…………………………...5 Figure 2: Sultan Moulay Youssef and Maréchal Lyautey in Fes, 1916………………………….58 Figure 3: “The Great Steps of Pacification,” 1927 Marked are the Spanish Zone of the Rif (Zone Espagnole), Middle Atlas Mountains (Moyen Atlas), High Atlas Mountains (Grand Atlas), and Anti-Atlas region……………………………86 Figure 4: Fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou and Aït Yazza, in the Middle Atlas, 1935………………………………………………………………………...97 Figure 5: Table of contents, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou………………………99 Figure 6: Hand-drawn map of neighboring tribes, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou…………………………………………………...100 Figure 7: Photo of Tamazight Berber women playing a leap-frog game, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou…………………………………………………...102 Figure 8: Sultan Moulay Youssef and Maréchal Lyautey, Paris, July 1926……………………107 Figure 9: Photo of French officers in front of the BAI office in Imilchil, constructed in a Berber architectural style, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou……..112 Figure 10: Chart showing the organizational leadership of schools operating in Morocco during the Protectorate Period…………………………………………..142 Figure 11: Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef visiting the 1931 Colonial Exposition, accompanied by Lyautey……………………………………………………………………….144 Figure 12: Welcoming new students to the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, 1929…………………..149 Figure 13: Diagram showing program for urban Muslim Education…………………………..160 Figure 14: Students and faculty of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, undated, but likely 1929, with Arsène Roux in the front row……………………………………………171 Figure 15: Dormitory of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, circa 1940 Director Paul Bisson stands on the left…………………………………………………………173 Figure 16: Illustration to the letter by Zidi Allal ben Mohammed, 1941………………………175 xi Figure 17: Refectory of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, early 1940s……………………………178 Figure 18: The soccer team of the Collège Berbère, early 1940s, Paul Bisson at center………182 Figure 19: Page and signature of Arsène Roux’s memo to Lucien Paye regarding the student letters, 25 June, 1941………………………………………185 Figure 20: Photo of the Collège d’Azrou from “Le reportage du samedi”……………………..214 Figure 21: Arsène Roux………………………………………………………………………...225 Figure 22: First page of the notebook of student Moulay Ahmi, 1931 The front page is marked in Roux’s handwriting “examined December 1952”………………..228 Figure 23: Page from the notebook of Ba-Ahssin, 1932 Drawing of his village (“Isqir”) with two saints’ tombs labeled, as well as a physical landmark (“Stones of Bu-uzzal”)………………………………………...233 Figure 24: Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, Rabat, 1920s………………………………237 Figure 25: Entrance to Collège Moulay-Youssef de Rabat…………………………………….244 Figure 26: Faculty and staff of Collège Moulay-Youssef de Rabat, 1947 Arsène Roux is seated front row center………………………………………………………..264 Figure 27: Aerial photograph of the Lycée Tarik bin Ziyad, as the Collège d’Azrou was renamed after Independence Undated, probably 1970s……………………………………………………………………….280 xii KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS BAI: Bureau of Indigenous Affairs (Bureau d’Affaires Indigènes) CEPM: Certificate of Muslim Primary Studies CESM: Certificate of Muslim Secondary Studies DESM: Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies DIP: Direction of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities (Direction de l’Instruction publique, beaux arts, et antiquités) IHEM: Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines MSM: Mission Scientifique du Maroc SEM: Muslim Education Service (Service de l’Enseignement musulman) Archives: ANOM: Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France BNRM: Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc – Rabat, Morocco CADN: Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, France IRCAM: Institut Royale de la Culture Amazighe du Maroc – Rabat, Morocco MMSH/IREMAM: Maison Mediterranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme – Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans, Fonds Arsène Roux, Aix-en-Provence, France xiii INTRODUCTION In October of 1944, following an alarming pro-nationalist strike by his students, the headmaster of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou was fired from his post. His superior, Director of Public Education Jean Pasquier, declared that the headmaster’s fatal error was “treating these young Berber highlanders in his charge as if they were French students. Insufficiently hemmed in, left to their own devices on outings, these youths were easy prey for nationalist agitators who enticed them into obnoxious demonstrations.”1 Pasquier’s remark reveals several components of the operational ideology of the French administrators of the Protectorate of Morocco. First, the belief, based on pseudoscientific racist theories emerging from nineteenth-century European thought, that the Berbers of North Africa ranked somewhere above Arabs but below Frenchmen on an imagined racial hierarchy. 2 Second, that Berbers were pure but wild “highlanders,” drawing on “Noble Savage” imagery. Third, that the role of the French was to gently, but firmly, civilize the Berbers, while simultaneously maintaining their culture and protecting them from corruption by outside influences. That corruption took the form of Moroccan nationalism, inextricably linked in the French imaginary with linguistic Arabization and religious Islamization. As the student strikes and Pasquier’s 1 CADN 3MA/900/30 Pasquier memo October 1944. 2 For a more thorough discussion of the development of such theories, in France in particular, see Pierre-André Taguieff, La Couleur et le sang (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2002); Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weybright and Talley, Inc., 1970); Jean-Marie Augustin, Georges Vacher de Lapouge: juriste, raciologue et eugéniste, 1854-1936 (Presses de l’Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, 2011). For more on how these theories influenced French imperialism, see Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999). 1 response show, paranoia about Arabization infecting formerly “pure” Berber zones appears regularly in the archives of the Protectorate of Morocco, and never more so than in the records of the education system. These young students, who were supposedly the most vulnerable to potential corruption, also represented the intermediary elite that French administrators sought to cultivate. Education granted French administrators direct access to and contact with Moroccan subjects. As youths, their students were particularly susceptible in the face of these “salesmen of empire.”3 Berber policy under the French Protectorate of Morocco had multiple and often conflicting aims. First, the administration sought to bring regions and groups formerly considered “dissident” under centralized state control. Second, they would develop modern systems of communication, transportation, and resource extraction in Berber regions. These first goals would legitimize French intervention by fulfilling promised services to the Moroccan sultan. However, a third, clandestine goal was to direct Berber groups’ loyalties and productive labor away from the Sultan and instead to the French. In order to achieve this, they sought to inoculate Berber regions against perceived infection by Arabizing influences. The franco-Berber school system was created secretly in order to achieve this goal, by training an intermediary elite loyal to France rather than the Moroccan monarchy. However, the former goals were often incompatible with the latter. The pursuit of these aims often led to conflicting policies and were pursued at different times and by different methods by different administrative apparatuses, highlighting what George Steinmetz calls the multivocality of the colonial project.4 3 Spencer D. Segalla, Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 8. 4 George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27. 2 While Berber Studies has long been a subject of intense scholarly inquiry and (often fraught) debate, Berber education has remained on the margins of this historiography.5 Works investigating French education in Morocco have tended to prioritize the elite, urban, Arabophone collèges musulmans, rather than the Berberophone schools in the hinterlands.6 Other scholars have turned their attention to Protectorate Berber policy, but by focusing on its more widely publicized dimensions, such as the judicial system, historians and anthropologists have neglected the quietly insidious attempts at divide-and-rule strategies exemplified by the separate Berber school system.7 Furthermore, much of the literature deals with Protectorate Berber Policy only insofar as it informed the formation of an urban, predominantly Arab nationalist movement. 8 Moroccan scholars since independence have tended to pursue an ideological project of demonstrating continuity between the precolonial and postcolonial Alawite state, and resist examining the ruptures of French colonial intervention.9 While this dissertation aims to address these particular gaps in the scholarship, simply shoehorning Berber schools into the existing literature would fail to consider the full implications of this policy and the ideologies upholding 5 The only book that deals specifically with Berber education under the French Protectorate is Mohamed Benhlal, Le collège d’Azrou: La formation d’une élite berbère civile et militaire au Maroc (Paris: Éditions Karthala et IREMAM, 2005). The topic is touched on briefly in other works, and receives sustained discussion in Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, though Segalla’s focus is on the development of the urban Arabophone school system. 6 See, for instance, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 7 Charles Robert Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Presses universitaires de France, 1972); Robin Bidwell, Morocco Under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas 1912-1956, (London: Routledge, 1973); David M. Hart, Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco (Portland, OR: Routledge, 2000); Moshe Gershovich, French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and Its Consequences (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000). 8 Gilles Lafuente, La politique berbère de la France et le nationalisme marocain (Paris: Harmattan, 1999); Wyrtzen, Making Morocco. 9 Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain (1830-1912), (Paris: Maspero, 1977); Abdallah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: the cultural foundations of Moroccan authoritarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Abdelaziz Ben Abdallah, Les grands courants de la civilisation du Maghrib (Casablanca: Imprimérie du Midi, 1958). 3 it. The clandestine development of separate schools for Berber-speaking youth is a complex phenomenon that illuminates connections to broader historiographies of colonial education, native elites, racial pseudoscience, modernization, anticolonialism, and nationalism. Who Are the Berbers? In this dissertation, I do not seek to trace ancient origins of any ethnic group. Indeed, my research reveals that colonial attempts to do so relied on hierarchical theories of racist pseudoscience and faulty logic, with ongoing political ramifications. Instead, my priority is to determine how French ideologies about various ethnicities shaped policy under the Protectorate of Morocco. Focusing on Berber policy, I investigate how the French interpreted this group’s specificities of language, culture, and history in order to attempt to split Morocco’s population politically along ethnolinguistic lines. In brief, the Berbers are an autochthonous population of North Africa, preceding the seventh century Arab incursion. While precise figures are impossible to calculate, scholars estimate that 40-50% of Morocco’s population spoke Berber as their maternal language during the colonial era.10 In Morocco, there are three spoken dialects of the Berber language: Tarrifit in the northern Rif Mountains (controlled by Spain 1912-1956), Tamazight in the Middle Atlas Mountains (where Azrou is located), and Tachelhit in the High Atlas Mountains and Anti-Atlas region. These areas are depicted on the map in Figure 1. 10 Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4 Figure 1: Map of Morocco under the French Protectorate, 1912-195611 Berber is an externally imposed name, deriving from the same Latin origin as the word “barbarian.”12 Berbers today refer to themselves as Amazigh (pl. Imazighen), meaning “free people,” the currently preferred nomenclature for a cluster of ethnic groups speaking a variety of 11 I made this map; it is therefore a rough approximation. Do not attempt to use for navigation. 12 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (University of Texas Press, 2011), 2. 5 dialects of the Tamazight language all across North Africa. The term Berber is at present deemed pejorative by some activist groups; whereas in French berbère and barbare are different but related words, in Arabic, “a language which is in intense contact with Amazigh, the same entry is used for ‘Berber’ and ‘Barbarian,’… This can perhaps explain in part the irritation that many Imazighen show when addressed as Berbers.”13 Lahoucine Bouyaakoubi, anthropologist and member of Franco-Amazigh activist association Tamaynut-France, calls explicitly for the discontinuation of the word “Berber” to refer to amazighophones in North Africa and Europe, situating his stance within an ongoing “effort undertaken by formerly colonized populations to reappropriate their history and above all to decolonize it.”14 Tracing the etymology of the word Berber, Bouyaakoubi argues that, like many classifications made in the context of conflict and “othering,” the term is derogatory.15 In the colonial context, to deprive the colonized of their own names “has the objective of denying their existence prior to direct contact with the invader. This contact is itself presented as the entrée of these peoples into civilization and history.”16 Likewise, to support his claim that Berber is an externally-imposed pejorative and to give historical credence to the resurgent term Amazigh, Bouyaakoubi cites an 1883 tract by Charles de Foucauld: “The expressions Qebail,17 Chellaha,18 Haratin, Beraber, are some of the words 13 Abderrahman El Aissati, “Ethnic Identity, Language Shift, and The Amazigh Voice in Morocco and Algeria,” Race, Gender & Class 8, no. 3 (January 1, 2001): 58. 14 Lahoucine Bouyaakoubi, ed., Les Amazighs de/en France: L’apport des Marocains dans une identité franco- berbère en construction (Agadir: Souss Impression, 2012), 11. 15 For a discussion of the long history of European “othering” of the Islamic world, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 16 Bouyaakoubi, Les Amazighs de/en France, 12. 17 In Arabic, qba’il means “tribal.” From this term came the French designation Kabyle, and the majority-Berber region in Algeria referred to as Kabylie. 18 Chleuh, from Tachelhit. 6 used by the Arabs to designate a unique race, of which the national name, the only one used by its members, is Amazir, feminine Tamazirt, plural Imaziren.”19 Bouyaakoubi is highly critical of European scholars of North Africa who continue to use the term Berber, whom he accuses of fidelity to a colonialist mentality. The transition away from that term, he claims, is the “first step in the process of changing the representations of ‘Berbers’… into a positive identity, called: Amazigh.”20 In addition to identity-formation, self-naming, shared language and origins, and the importance of raising awareness of said identity within the community (as defined by activists), Bouyaakoubi calls on scholars to reject the term Berber. In this dissertation, I use the term Berber in its historical context, as employed by French administrators, Arab nationalists, and Berbers themselves. As Adam Guerin explains, “we will use the contemporary lexicon – problematic as it may be – as a way to think with the colonial experts… In this sense, the indiscriminant term ‘Berber’ is unavoidable.”21 I use the term Amazigh when discussing postcolonial changes in the group’s identity formation. Preference for the term Amazigh emerged from activist and academic circles in the wake of the 1980 “Berber Spring;” as such, I employ the term after that date but not before. French administrators in Morocco, as well as Algeria and Tunisia, were not preoccupied with how the Amazigh defined themselves, but how they could shoehorn a diverse population into a neat, easily-identifiable category, with parameters defined by European racial theories. Arguments abound as to whether the colonizer fabricated new ethno-racial categories out of whole cloth, a view espoused by many Moroccan nationalists, or whether instead the French 19 Bouyaakoubi, Les Amazighs de/en France, 11. From Charles de Foucauld, 1883. 20 Ibid., 17. 21 Adam Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912–1930,” The Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 3 (September 1, 2011), 377. 7 reified existing divisions and, through rigid codification, hardened them. However, whether the Berber-Arab distinction was a primordial category or the pure creation of French colonialism is, for the purposes of this dissertation, a moot point: ethnic identities are shaped by those who lay claim to them.22 The “groupist rhetoric” of identity activists “has a performative, constitutive dimension, contributing, when it is successful, to the making of the group it invokes.”23 As there is a self-identified Amazigh ethnic group, basing their claims on language, culture, identification with a mythic past, and territorial claims, critics who assert that such an identity is unfounded or invalid are denying a political reality. This process of self-conscious identity-forming has emerged from Amazigh activists, scholars, and politicians since at least the 1960s; previously, Berber identity was codified and crystallized by the French colonial project. However, Amazigh activist groups that turn to ethnographic materials produced by the colonizer as evidence of Amazigh specificity receive criticism, because opponents of the movement interpret this as evidence of collaboration in and nostalgia for French colonial domination. Divide and Rule One of the driving theories of French Protectorate policy in Morocco, as well as much of the earlier literature on Moroccan social and political organization, relied heavily on the idea of a dichotomy between the bled al-makhzen (lands controlled by the Sultan’s state apparatus) and the bled al-siba (lands of dissidence). Makhzen literally refers to the tax collector’s lockbox; thus, bled al-makhzen comprised all the areas that reliably paid taxes to the sultan.24 In such a 22 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 1, 2000): 1- 47. 23 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” 33. 24 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 15. 8 strict view of the Moroccan landscape, the bled al-makhzen comprised the cities and agricultural plains, areas characterized as Arab and Muslim. The bled al-siba thus comprised the mountains and deserts, areas broadly characterized as Berber and pagan in nature. While this dichotomy has been shown to be oversimplified and largely inaccurate, it is a key element for understanding how French officials perceived and conceptualized Moroccan space.25 The supposed bled al-siba would not be fully “pacified” until the last military campaigns in 1934. During the colonial era, one of the major goals of Berber Policy was to render the bled al-siba legible and bring it under French state control, without extending the Arabization and urbanization of the bled al-makhzen.26 Instead, Berber Country was to become what Jacques Berque called “a Berber preserve, a sort of national park which was to be sheltered from the ideologies of the plain, whether Arab or French.”27 French administrators of Berber Policy increasingly expressed growing anxieties about the gradual creep of what they termed “Arabization” into Berber country. Their official and private correspondence reveals that they discussed the prospect of Arabization in the rhetoric of disease: an infection, a spreading cancer, a creeping blight, against which the “pure” Berber areas must be inoculated.28 25 As in Algeria, where the line between Berber Kabylia and the Arab regions was thought to be a stark division along both territorial and ethnolinguistic boundaries, recent scholarship has argued that these borders were actually much more porous than previously claimed. See Nedjma Abdelfettah Lalmi, “Du Mythe de l’isolat Kabyle (On the Myth of the Kabyle Cultural Island)” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 44, no. 175 (January 1, 2004): 507–31; Alain Mahé, Histoire de la Grande Kabylie. XIXe-XXe siècles. Anthropologie historique du lien sociale dans les communautés villageoises (Paris: Editions Bouchène, 2001). 26 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. 27 Jacques Berque, French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars (Berkeley, Calif: Faber and Faber, 1967), 123. 28 Katherine E. Hoffman, “Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (July 1, 2008): 724–52. 9 However, French attempts to partition Arabs and Berbers sparked resistance, contributing to the development of a nationalist movement characterized by an attempt to “create a sense of identity shared by all North African Muslims and to counter the French colonial policy of division between Arabs and Berbers.”29 Ironically, it was the Moroccan Protectorate’s attempt to formally codify the Berber-Arab division that led to the first major outbreak of nationalist protest in Morocco. Following the death of Sultan Moulay Youssef in 1927, Residency leaders sought to wrest greater authority away from his successor, Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef (later King Mohammed V after independence). While the French had been quietly operating a separate Berber judicial system since the early 1920s (discussed in Chapter 2), in 1930 they overstepped by having the Sultan sign a royal decree (dahir) that formalized these courts and placed the Berbers under the French criminal code, rather than Islamic shari’a law. For the most part, this so-called Berber Dahir was merely formalization of status quo of the previous decade, but a new urban class of nationalists seized the opportunity to voice their dissent.30 Basing their ideology in a Salafiyyist vision of national unity, the nationalists attacked the decree as “an insidious attempt to undermine the notion of a single Moroccan nation united under Qur’anic law.”31 They accused the French of trying to ban the use of Arabic in Berber regions and of seeking to convert the Berbers to Christianity. They responded with widespread protests, newspaper editorials, and public prayers: “do not separate us from our brothers, the Berbers.”32 29 Rabah Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009), 222. 30 E. G. H. Joffé, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement: Istiqlal, the Sultan, and the Country,” The Journal of African History 26, no. 4 (January 1, 1985): 292. 31 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 126. 32 Jonathan Wyrtzen, “Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (May 1, 2011), 232. 10 Encouraged by grassroots support in the cities, the nationalist movement began to pick up steam, culminating in a series of riots in 1937 in Meknes, Marrakesh, and Khemisset. Because Khemisset is a predominantly Berber town, authorities were alarmed. Berbers joining the nationalist movement en masse contradicted their ideology based on the Berber myth and belief in a stark divide between the bled al makhzen and the bled al-siba. Their Berber policy was based on an assumption that only the Arabs “with their Middle Eastern links, pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism, represented a danger” to French hegemony.33 Protectorate officials cracked down, imprisoning nationalist leaders and forcing the movement underground until the Second World War unleashed widespread nationalist activity throughout the empire, with the birth of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party in early 1944. The dominant strain of Moroccan nationalism would be characterized by an attempt to “create a sense of identity shared by all North African Muslims and to counter the French colonial policy of division between Arabs and Berbers.”34 This is an early sign of an emergent theme: Arabist claims that the Arab-Berber distinction was fictional or exaggerated for French colonial purposes, used to discount Amazigh claims as invalid or destructively divisive. By claiming that the Berber myth was based on nothing but myth, Arabists could deny the existence of Amazigh difference and claim that Amazigh refusals to conform constituted colonialist betrayal of the cause. By tracing the development of the Berber myth and its use in shaping Berber policy in the Moroccan context, this project prioritizes the experiences of Berber and French individual actors and analyzes the creation of Berber schools as the epitome of colonial divide-and-rule strategies. 33 Joffé, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement,” 294. 34 Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity, 222. 11 It decentralizes the 1930 Berber Dahir and the urban nationalist movement, arguing instead that activities in the bled al-siba itself provide a clearer understanding of the policies and practices of the Protectorate administration. Finally, I contribute to the discussion of how deliberately divisive colonial strategies not only created their own resistance within colonized populations but continue to undergird ongoing divisions and inequalities in postcolonial societies. Literature Review After Moroccan independence, Berber Studies shifted from being a tool of colonial dominance to a subject of scholarly inquiry. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of Berberists began to examine the work produced by their colonial predecessors. In their 1972 volume Arabs and Berbers: From the Tribe to the Nation in North Africa, editors Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud sought to inscribe Berber ethnography before what they considered that group’s inevitable evaporation into Arab nationalism and French modernity. Gellner’s own ethnographic work on religious confraternities in the Rif contributed to his analysis that French colonial sources failed to adequately consider Islam in their conceptualization of Berber identities.35 In his introduction to the collection of essays, Gellner wrote that “Arabic and French cultures share what might be called an imperial or absolutist or world-pervading character,” which would ultimately override any lingering Berber identity.36 Furthermore, “the agent of modernity in North Africa was France,” rather than the Independence regime, and thus the change the Protectorate wrought would be “profound and permanent,” despite Moroccan nationalist assertions that the colonial period represented nothing but a blip in the unbroken 35 Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1969). 36 Gellner, “Introduction,” Arabs and Berbers, 19. 12 Alawite dynasty. Gellner concludes that, “the conflict of decolonization was of course as much a war between communities as a war against the colonial government,” a conflict which Arab nationalism won, at the expense of the Berber population, thanks to the unifying factors of Islam and formal written Arabic.37 Like much of the Berber Studies work of this period, the case studies crossed national borders to examine Berber groups in Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere in North Africa. One of the contributors to Arabs and Berbers, David Seddon, published an English translation and commentary on Robert Montagne’s work in 1973, entitled The Berbers: Their Social and Political Organisation.38 Montagne was one of the top sociologists of the French colonial project, and his work on Berbers in southern Morocco in the 1920s and 30s shaped Berber policy through the end of the Protectorate.39 In his introduction, Seddon analyzes Montagne’s conviction of a “Moroccan Vulgate,” a set of stereotypes closely linked to the Berber myth and the belief in a stark bled makhzen/bled siba divide. He, like Edmund Burke III in his contribution to Arabs and Berbers, concludes that rigid adherence to this Vulgate by the French invented a separate Berber ethnic category that did not map onto reality.40 Another school of thought emerged that firmly rejected this claim. Continuing earlier French ethnographic attempts to track down Berber origins, anthropologist Gabriel Camps was a 37 Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud, eds, Arabs and Berbers: From the tribe to the nation in North Africa (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1972), 15. 38 Robert Montagne, trans. David Seddon, The Berbers: Their Social and Political Organisation (London: Routledge, 1973). With a preface by Ernest Gellner. 39 Discussed further in Chapters 1 and 2. Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le makhzen dans le sud du Maroc: essai sur la transformation politique des Berbères sédentaires (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930). For a discussion of Montagne’s legacy, see Francois Pouillon and Daniel Rivet, eds, La sociologie musulmane de Robert Montagne: actes du colloque EHESS & Collège de France, Paris, 5-7 juin 1997 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000). 40 Edmund Burke III, “The Image of the Moroccan State in French Ethnological Literature,” in Gellner and Micaud, eds, Arabs and Berbers. 13 key figure in the reemergence of postcolonial Berber Studies.41 Born in Algeria himself, Camps studied Berber prehistory in Algiers prior to decolonization. After settling in Aix-en-Provence in the 1970s, Camps founded the Encyclopédie Berbère and a Berber Studies cohort that continues today. Published in 1980, his Berbères: Aux marges de l’Histoire traced the autochthonous Berbers of North Africa from the Neolithic era to the twentieth century, concluding that, while “the Berbers have never constituted a nation,” they were nevertheless a set of distinct ethnolinguistic peoples with shared origins, not a category invented by the French.42 However, the events of the 1980 Berber Spring in Algeria would launch a challenge to his denial of a Berber nation. Camps’ colleague in Aix-en-Provence and successor as editor of the Encyclopédie Berbère, Salem Chaker, maintained close ties with the emerging Amazigh ethnolinguistic revival movement across North Africa and France as it emerged in the 1980s. His Berbères Aujourd’hui analyzes the birth of that movement in student protest at the University of Tizi Ouzou in 1980, identifying the movement as a simultaneous rejection of colonialist objectification and Islamist negation.43 He celebrates the “reappropriation” of Berber Studies by North Africans themselves, as it “renders the domain more legitimate, less suspect of ‘colonialism’ and ‘foreign manipulation.’”44 Furthermore, the Berber movement rejected the Arab-centrism of the independence government, in favor of “pluralism, tolerance, diversity, individual and collective 41 Gabriel Camps, Aux origines de la Berbérie: Monuments et rites funéraires protohistoriques (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1961). 42 Gabriel Camps, Berbères: Aux marges de l’Histoire (Toulouse: Editions des Hespérides, 1980). 43 Salem Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). 44 Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui, 61. 14 freedom… it refuses the myth of unity and totalitarian temptation.”45 Chaker’s work revitalized Berber Studies by Berberophones themselves, contributing to a growing cohort of Amazigh scholars.46 Eventually Camps accepted Amazighité as a legitimate collective identity as well.47 Subsequent scholarship resumed consideration of “Berber” as a discrete category of analysis, although Berber Studies of the 1990s and early twenty-first century continued to emerge almost entirely from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.48 Furthermore, they continued the trend of examining Berber society more broadly than the constraints of state borders allow.49 In Berbers and Others, Katherine Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller compiled a selection of essays in direct challenge to Gellner and Micaud’s earlier work. They reject the “a priori dichotomization of Arab and Berber,” and instead, “whereas colonial scholars searched for absolute truths about Berber culture, today's scholars see ethnicity as a constantly changing orientation, shaped and reshaped by forces both within and outside the group.”50 Other interesting contributions to the field include Hugh Roberts’ Berber Government, which analyzes evidence for Kabyle political organization prior to French colonization, and 45 Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui, 63. 46 Many of the scholars I worked with at IRCAM in Rabat and MMSH in Aix-en-Provence were protégés of Chaker, including Dr. Meftaha Ameur. 47 Gabriel Camps, Les Berberes: Memoire et identite, 2e edition (Paris: Errance, 1987). 48 E. G. H. Joffe and C. R. Pennell, eds., Tribe and State: Essays in Honour of David Montgomery Hart, (Cambridgeshire, England: Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1991); Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1996). 49 Hélène Claudot-Hawad, Berbères ou Arabes?: le tango des spécialistes (Aix-en-Provence; Paris: Institut de recherches et d’études sur le monde arabe et musulman, 2006); Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Hammou Belghazi, La culture amazighe: réflexions et pratiques anthropologiques du temps colonial à nos jours, (Fes: CEAS, 2013). 50 Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller, Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) 2, 4. 15 Abdelmajid Hannoum’s Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories, which explores North African identity formation through the legend of the Kahina, a heroine whose tale has been adopted by numerous groups for their own political ends.51 Other anthropologists have limited their studies to Moroccan Berber groups. Katherine Hoffman’s analysis of language and gender in present-day Tachelhit-speaking southern Morocco is one of the first studies to include Berber women’s voices.52 David Crawford examines the ways that global capitalism and labor migration have affected Moroccan Berber communities.53 Lawrence Rosen’s Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew is an oral history of four Moroccan men leading entangled lives through the Protectorate era, painting a vivid and deeply personal portrait of the period.54 Historians of the French Protectorate of Morocco have only occasionally ventured into analysis of Berber policy. Studies in the 1970s from Charles-Robert Ageron and Robin Bidwell examined French administrative practices in Morocco, focusing on the pacification campaigns in the Berber hinterlands.55 Likewise, David Hart’s Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco and C.R. Pennell’s Morocco Since 1830 rely heavily on French colonial descriptions of Morocco.56 51 Hugh Roberts, Berber Government: The Kabyle Polity in Pre-Colonial Algeria, (I.B.Tauris, 2014); Abdelmajid M. Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood, 2001). 52 Katherine E Hoffman, We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 53 David Crawford, Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 54 Lawrence Rosen, Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 55 Charles-Robert Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Presses universitaires de France, 1972); Robin Bidwell, Morocco Under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas 1912-1956, (London: Routledge, 1973). 56 David M. Hart, Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco (Portland, OR: Routledge, 2000); C. R. Pennell, Morocco Since 1830: A History (NYU Press, 2000). 16 Many scholars of Morocco have prioritized the Berber Dahir, which announced a separate judicial system for Berber regions, in their analyses of the colonial era, as in Gilles Lafuente’s La politique berbere de la France et le nationalisme marocain and Moshe Gershovich’s French Military Rule in Morocco.57 While the 1930 Dahir was indeed an important moment for coalescing Moroccan nationalism in the cities, it had far less influence in Berber regions and did not mark an actual rupture in Protectorate policy. Furthermore, while the rise of the Istiqlal party is important to the history of independence, the Dahir itself did not create either the separate judicial system or the Berber schools. The Berber customary law tribunals already existed, as I demonstrate in Chapter Two. Additionally, the commonly accepted view that this Dahir “opened the door to the creation of Franco-Berber schools from which Arabic was excluded” is incorrect: separate Berber schools had existed since at least 1917, and the Collège Berbère d’Azrou was founded in 1927.58 By conflating the Berber schools with the Berber customary tribunals and their resultant backlash, scholars today elide the crucial role played by colonial education in the divisive strategies of the Protectorate. This project decentralizes the 1930 Dahir by examining instead the structures put in place in the decades prior which established the Protectorate’s separate and clandestine Berber Policy. The most comprehensive recent work on French Protectorate policy is historical sociologist Jonathan Wyrtzen’s 2015 book Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the 57 Gilles Lafuente, La politique berbère de la France et le nationalisme marocain (Paris: Harmattan, 1999); Moshe Gershovich, French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and Its Consequences (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000). See also William Hoisington, “Cities in Revolt: The Berber Dahir (1930) and France’s Urban Strategy in Morocco,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, 3 (1978): 433–48. 58 Sadiqi, Fatima. “The Shifting Status of Moroccan Languages in Morocco: Berber and Language Politics in the Moroccan Educational System.” 17 Politics of Identity. Wyrtzen set out to examine colonial policy and the “interactions between state and society” through the lens of three of Morocco’s most marginalized populations: Berbers, Jews, and women.59 Expanding upon Bourdieu’s field theory, Wyrtzen examines how the “spatial dimensions and ordering powers (symbolic and classificatory) of the colonial political field politicized territorial, religious, ethnic, and gendered markers of identity and how various Moroccan actors then relationally defined multiple levels of identity in this space of political struggle.”60 Crucially, he concludes that the narrow definition of Moroccan identity that emerged in anticolonial nationalist circles, which centered Arabic language and ethnicity, Islamic religion, and the Alawite dynasty, “was a contingent outcome,” rather than a “direct continuity with precolonial identity configurations.”61 While Wyrtzen’s work draws together a remarkable variety of sources in a complex, nuanced analysis of Moroccan identity formation, his focus on Berber policy is narrowly tied to the 1930 Berber Dahir. The interactions he examines, therefore, are more about the dispute between French officials and Arab nationalists about Berbers, rather than interactions between Berbers themselves and the French or Makhzen administrations. Along with Wyrtzen, however, whereas many Moroccan histories often emphasize continuity between the pre- and post-colonial periods, this dissertation examines the major social, political, and economic ruptures brought about by French colonial efforts.62 59 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 5. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain (1830-1912), (Paris: Maspero, 1977); Abdallah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: the cultural foundations of Moroccan authoritarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Abdelaziz Ben Abdallah, Les grands courants de la civilisation du Maghrib (Casablanca: Imprimérie du Midi, 1958). 18 This project also contributes to the literature on French colonial education and elite schools throughout North Africa, West Africa, French Indochina, and other territories. Elsewhere in the French empire, as well as in other imperial systems, scholars have recognized the unique role of education in the colonial project. Scholars of French West Africa (AOF) have examined the school system there. Peggy Roark Sabatier, in her dissertation “Educating a Colonial Elite: The William Ponty School and Its Graduates,” contested the narrative that colonial schooling in AOF sought to reproduce metropolitan French education. She also corrected the typical portrayal of Africans as “passive beneficiaries of these educational efforts, if they were discussed at all.” 63 Her examination of the colonial elite trained at the William Ponty Normal School, a teacher training school, analyzes both French educational policy and the role of graduates, first as intermediary functionaries in colonial service, and later as the bureaucratic class of independent Senegal. Crucially, she explores the “inherent contradiction” at the heart of the colonial elite: “whatever prestige and status Ponty graduates had with regard to other Africans was countered by their lack of power and status in relations with the French.”64 This echoes the status of collège musulman graduates in colonial Morocco. Tony Chafer approached the broader question of French education in AOF, using the system to examine an ongoing question about whether French efforts there were more “assimilationist” or “associationist” in their goals.65 Despite the evidence for earlier claims of assimilationism – such as schools run by the government, rather than the church, and the focus 63 Peggy Roark Sabatier, “Educating a Colonial Elite: The William Ponty School and Its Graduates,” Dissertation (The University of Chicago, 1977), 8. 64 Sabatier, “Educating a Colonial Elite,” 7. 65 Tony Chafer, “Teaching Africans to be French?: France’s ‘civilising mission’ and the establishment of a public education system in French West Africa, 1903-30,” Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 56, no. 2 (2001): 190–209. 19 on teaching the French language – Chafer argues that French educators in AOF did not seek to create “Black Frenchmen.” Instead, he argues that “the decision to make education a central arm of colonial policy through the establishment of an official school system which would serve the needs of the colonial administration was inherently contradictory with the civilizing mission.”66 As a result, West Africans rejected what they regarded as an attempt to keep them in a subordinate position to the French. Similarly, in Contesting French West Africa, Harry Gamble expands upon this argument to conclude that the “educational segregation” the French imposed on AOF was “deliberately designed to educate ‘colonial subjects’ and not French citizens.”67 He contributes a discussion of how French colonial officials “struggled to reconcile competing goals,” with education policy shaped by administrative needs to bring Africans into the colonial order while simultaneously maintaining their subordinate status.68 The outcome, explored in James Eskridge Genova’s Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956, was an African educated class both aligned with and spurning French influence.69 This pattern – of elites trained in French schools agitating for independence – reemerges in many colonial situations. Other historians have examined the question of colonial education in comparative and other imperial contexts. In French Colonial Education, Gail Paradise Kelly and David H. Kelly 66 Chafer, “Teaching Africans to be French?” 193. 67 Harry Gamble, Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950 (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 7. 68 Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, 8. 69 James Eskridge Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French- Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 (Peter Lang, 2004). 20 analyze French practices in the schools of French Indochina and AOF.70 Clive Whitehead’s Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858-1983 examines the functionaries of the school system of British India, while in an edited volume J.A. Mangan approaches the question of the supposed benefits of British Education to Indians. 71 Bob White compares French and British imperial approaches to education in Africa, and Ana Isabel Madeira compares educational discourses in the French and Portuguese empires in Africa. 72 Elsa M. Harik and Donald G. Schilling compared educational policies between the French in Algeria and the British in Kenya.73 Finally, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa presents a collection of essays that reveal the crucial and complex roles played by educated Africans in the colonial project, carefully problematizing what editors Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts call the “‘bargain’ of collaboration.”74 In his 1973 essay “Education in French Algeria,” Alf Andrew Heggoy provides a thorough examination of Algerian resistance to French attempts to change them through schools. However, his argument that “the attempt by France to control Algeria through the assimilation of 70 Gail Paradise Kelly and David H. Kelly, French Colonial Education: Essays on Vietnam and West Africa (New York: AMS Press Inc, 1998). 71 Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858-1983 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); J. A. Mangan, ed., “Benefits Bestowed”?: Education and British Imperialism (Manchester University Press, 1988). 72 Bob W. White, “Talk about School: Education and the Colonial Project in French and British Africa, (1860- 1960),” Comparative Education 32, no. 1 (1996): 9–25; Ana Isabel Madeira, “Comparing Colonial Education Discourses in the French and Portuguese African Empires: An Essay on Hybridization,” in International Handbook of Comparative Education, ed. Robert Cowen and Andreas M. Kazamias, Springer International Handbooks of Education 22 (Springer Netherlands, 2009): 181–94. 73 Elsa M. Harik and Donald G. Schilling, Politics of Education in Colonial Algeria and Kenya (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1983). 74 Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 3. 21 Algerians into French culture was no more clearly demonstrated than in the field of education” does not hold up today, particularly considering his own acknowledgment that “the French never built enough schools to educate more than a small minority of school-age Algerian children.”75 While most other studies of education in Algeria focus on the European colons, one exception is Si Belkacem Taieb’s Decolonizing Indigenous Education: An Amazigh/Berber Ethnographic Journey. This unconventional book is an auto-ethnography, in which Taieb revisits his own Kabyle village’s complicated precolonial, colonial, and post-independence past, before developing a theory for Kabyle Amazigh education and proposing a sociological basis for new opportunities of schooling.76 In the Moroccan context, Irene González provides an important examination of education in the Spanish-controlled northen Rif region.77 Most other works focus on the education of men who would go on to become postcolonial political elites. For instance, Pierre Vermeren examined the training of Moroccan and Tunisian nationalist intellectuals, and Moshe Gershovich analyzed the Dar Beïda military academy in Meknes, which trained Moroccan officers in the French military during the colonial period.78 However, the most influential work on Moroccan elite education for this dissertation, and the only study that centralizes Berber education, is Mohamed Benhlal’s Le collège d’Azrou: La formation d’une élite berbère civile et militaire au 75 Alf Andrew Heggoy, “Education in French Algeria: An Essay on Cultural Conflict,” Comparative Education Review 17, no. 2 (1973): 180–97. 76 Si Belkacem Taieb, Decolonizing Indigenous Education: An Amazigh/Berber Ethnographic Journey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 77 Irene González González, Spanish Education in Morocco, 1912–1956: Cultural Interactions in a Colonial Context (Sussex Academic Press, 2015). 78 Pierre Vermeren, La formation des élites marocaines et tunisiennes: des nationalistes aux islamistes 1920-2000 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2002); Moshe Gershovich, “A Moroccan Saint-Cyr,” Middle Eastern Studies 28, no. 2 (1992): 231–57. 22 Maroc. Benhlal crafted an exhaustive archival and oral history of the school, conducting interviews with graduates of the Collège in the 1990s.79 Benhlal’s priority was tracing the outcome of these students’ lives, and their elite position in post-independence Moroccan society. Much of the book is actually devoted to an analysis of the Dar Beïda military academy, which recruited graduates of the Collège to serve as military intermediaries. However, his goal was a politically-motivated one: Benhlal sought to demonstrate that Moroccan Berbers did indeed participate in the nationalist movement, defending against accusations of collaboration and imperial apologetics. Finally, Spencer Segalla’s 2009 study The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 explores many of the same themes as the third chapter of this dissertation, examining the French ideologies at play in the development of a public education system for Moroccan youth. Segalla centers his analysis on the careers of Georges Hardy, director of the General Directorate of Public Education from 1919-1926, and Louis Brunot, director of Muslim education from 1920-1939. He argues that the Protectorate’s education policy was predicated on the notion of inherent difference between the French and Moroccan âme, or soul. The colonial administrators he investigates argued amongst themselves about the degree to which this essential Moroccan soul was Berber or Arab, or whether there were instead separate Berber and Arab “souls.” Segalla argues that eventually the French schools for Moroccan Muslims proved to be “nests of nationalism” because they had created “an allegedly elite educational track that provided students with a second-rate education and limited career opportunities” leading to 79 Mohamed Benhlal, Le collège d’Azrou: La formation d’une élite berbère civile et militaire au Maroc (Paris: Éditions Karthala et IREMAM, 2005). 23 frustration on the part of former pupils, even to the point of open rebellion.80 For instance, Moroccan students, even at the collèges of Rabat and Fes, were barred from access to the Baccalaureate examination until 1934. The 1944 Istiqlal Manifesto, discussed further in later chapters, was penned by several graduates of the Franco-Muslim collèges. Segalla also demonstrates that, “while some aspects of colonial discourse incited a nationalist counteraction, others complemented and reinforced the nationalist conception of Morocco.”81 For instance, French educational pedagogy intentionally encouraged the preservation of an essential Moroccan identity tied to Arabic and Islam; the mainstream of the Moroccan nationalists relied on this unitary definition of the nation in their own attempts to defend Moroccan political sovereignty. However, Segalla does not analyze the differences in educational policy that distinguished Berber from Arab schooling. Sources and Methodology This dissertation draws on archival sources from the Centre des Archives diplomatiques in Nantes (CADN), the Archives Nationales d’Outremer (ANOM) and the Fonds Roux in the Bibliothèque de la Maison méditerrannéenne des sciences de l’homme (MMSH) in Aix-en- Provence, and the Institut Royale de la Culture Amazighe du Maroc (IRCAM) and Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc (BNRM) in Rabat. Sources include the official correspondence of Protectorate officials in the education service; training materials of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs; the tribal questionnaires of the Service Sociologique; the monthly bulletin of the Direction of Public Instruction; the ethnographic library of the colonial training school in Paris; 80 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 217. 81 Ibid., 218. 24 and the personal papers of educator and linguist Arsène Roux. While these sources provide a rich picture of the French administrative dialogue about Protectorare Berber Policy, Moroccan voices only occasionally appear within them. Thus, these few documents are read carefully, both for what they show about Moroccan responses to French education, and what their preservation shows about French anxieties and priorities. In the first chapter, “The Berber Question: Ideology, Ethnography, and Practice,” I examine the emergence of key colonial mythologies that would come to shape Moroccan Berber policy. I trace the emergence of a dichotomous “Kabyle myth” in the Algerian context, and the subsequent development of a Moroccan colonial archive as a discursive process of supposedly scientific ethnography. In pursuit of a modern, rational imperialism, first Resident General of the Protectorate of Morocco, Maréchal Hubert Lyautey, surrounded himself with a cadre of researchers who competed fiercely amongst themselves for recognition of superior ethnographic acuity. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how this vast ethnographic output informed Berber policy in practice. The second chapter, “Codifying Tribal Law: The French Pacification of Morocco, Berber Customary Tribunals, and Écoles de Fortune,” analyzes the colonial logics of the Pacification forces from 1912 until 1934. Along with officer training courses, I examine the practice of sending French sociologists and ethnographers along with the military in their Pacification exercises in southern and eastern Morocco. The records produced by these researchers include a standardized questionnaire to collect the legal and political practices of individual Berber groups, in an effort to codify a separate Berber system of law. Drawing on Scott’s Seeing Like a State, I show how these fiches de tribu represent a quintessential example of state simplification projects that, “like all state simplifications, are always far more static and schematic than the actual social 25 phenomena they presume to typify.”82 In addition to rendering the mythic bled al-siba legible to the new centralized administration, this enabled the creation of a separate Berber judiciary, removed from the authority of the Islamic shari’a courts which were not under the French purview. The development of Berber Policy, from Resident General Lyautey’s anti- assimilationist vision to the eve of the Second World War, relied upon rigid categorization of Moroccan territory and the ideology of the Berber myth. However, like many such state projects, the oversimplification of a complex reality led to an unstable, unsustainable system that ultimately failed. Finally, as the military spread French dominion over larger regions of Berber Country, Indigenous Affairs officers established ad hoc schools that focused on teaching French, many of which grew into the écoles berbères discussed further in the next chapters. After this discussion of the underpinnings and growth of French Berber Policy, Chapter Three, “Segregation and Secrecy: Public Education Under the French Protectorate,” provides an overview of the development of a French education system for Moroccan youth. Unlike earlier works, this chapter examines the deliberate development of separate systems for Arab and Berber youth, revealing for the first time that the Berber schools were intentionally kept secret from the Sultan and his Makhzen administration, despite French promises of transparency. The official correspondence of the Muslim Education Service demonstrates deliberate obfuscation of the Berber school system from oversight by the Makhzen. Paranoid in the aftermath of the tumult surrounding the Berber Dahir and determined to stem the tide of creeping Arabization, education administrators kept quiet and even outright lied to conceal the separate curricula of the Berber schools. Their decision was further reinforced by urban Arab nationalists’ calls for reforms to the educational system in favor of a unitary, Arabized vision of the Moroccan nation. 82 Scott, Seeing Like A State, 46. 26 The fourth chapter, “The Curious Case of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou” is a narrative history of the Collège d’Azrou as the keystone of this separate, clandestine educational project. An examination of administrative records as well as student letters and political action reveals that efforts to suppress Arabic language education in the Berber schools had both practical and ideological pitfalls, leading to a backlash that rocked the school in a volatile moment of war and rebellion. Focusing on three flashpoints in the 1940s, I explore the decade in which the Berber policy of cultural preservation collided with modernization to undermine the foundations of the colonial endeavor. Chapter Five is a case study of a colonial educator and administrator, based on his personal archive housed in Aix-en-Provence. Arsène Roux, the founder and first director of the Collège d’Azrou, went on to direct a more prestigious Franco-Arab school in Rabat and later the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines. He was also a Tamazight linguist who engaged in a personal hobby of collecting Berber folklore, poetry, and songs, often by assigning his Berber students to gather these cultural artifacts – perhaps in service to the French sociological legibility project. Roux’s personal records reveal his shock and sense of betrayal upon Moroccan independence, since he was a devoted believer in the benevolence and benefits of the French colonial system. Roux is an ambiguous figure; at once committed to educating Moroccan youth while simultaneously promoting French imperial ends, he sits at a crossroads of exploitation and benevolence. A biographic account of Arsène Roux’s career as a pedagogue, ethnographic researcher, and agent of the French imperial state reveals the complexities of individual agency and intent in the larger colonial context. With this dissertation I wade tentatively into the debate between proponents of narrative history – accessibly-written accounts of past – and those of academic history, which seeks to 27 empirically brick up the gaps in the historiographic canon. Writing in Perspectives on History, Gordon Wood argued that there is a disjuncture between “popular” historians, who attribute their wide readerships to skillful writing, and academic historians, who “have chosen to write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs” that contribute to the “collective effort to expand our knowledge of the past.”83 They are inaccessible to the average reader not because of the quality of the writing, therefore, but because they are written with the assumption of the reader’s prior historiographical knowledge. Like such analytical work, this dissertation is narrow in scope and specific in its intended readership. However, I argue that engagingly-written stories, analysis, and theory are not mutually exclusive. With this dissertation I seek to respond to Eileen H. Tamura’s call for a “both-and inclusion” of theoretical analysis and narrative.84 I use information gleaned from the primary sources uncovered in archival and oral research to craft comprehensible narratives that, taken together, shape and support my arguments. In Chapter 4, for instance, I recount the story of a confiscated letter sent by a Moroccan schoolboy to his friends at another school. The boys’ conversation, the panicked reactions of their headmasters, and the escalation of the matter to higher echelons of the Protectorate administration reveal official policies of Berber education as well as the cracks in these policies’ implementation. Through this narrative, we discover that French administrators intended to keep the separate, non-Arabic curriculum of the Collège d’Azrou secret from the Sultan’s administration, but that changes in communication technology, school recruitment practices, and the career ambitions of Moroccan students threatened to expose 83 Gordon Wood, “In Defense of Academic History Writing,” Perspectives on History, April 1, 2010, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-2010/in-defense-of-academic- history-writing. 84 Eileen H. Tamura, “Narrative History and Theory,” History of Education Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2011): 150–57. 28 them. For all their carefully-collected ethnographic knowledge base, French administrators’ struggle to control individual Berbers highlights the limits of legibility and the unintended and irrepressible consequences of modernization. Furthermore, the revelation of the French administrative practice of deliberately keeping secrets from makhzeni oversight belies the premise of a temporary Protectorate that the French invoked to justify their presence in Morocco. If the stated goal of education was to prepare an elite class for an eventual assumption of political authority, the creation of separate schools for separate elites reveals the duplicity of French claims. The stories present the evidence for theoretically-engaged analysis. 29 CHAPTER 1: THE BERBER QUESTION: IDEOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND PRACTICE In this chapter, I examine the ideological development of the Berber policy of the French Protectorate of Morocco. What key events and intellectual trends contributed to French colonial ideologies? How were ideologies implemented in policy? What were the goals of this policy, and how was it enacted? How did these preexisting French ideologies shape engagement with Berber groups? Did circumstances on the ground challenge these beliefs, and if so, how? Beginning with the colonization of Algeria, I trace the rise of both la mission civilisatrice and scientific racism as ideological justifications for French imperialism. Both strands of imperialist thought come together in the Berber myth, which portrayed the Berbers of North Africa as simultaneously racially superior to Arabs as well as particularly receptive to and deserving of France’s civilizing mission. After contextualizing the birth of the Protectorate, I situate Lyautey’s conception of Moroccan Berber policy within these mythologies. Full “pacification,” in the French colonial terminology, would not be achieved until 1934. In the meantime, the French undertook great efforts to expand their influence over both the bled al-makhzen and the bled al-siba. The stark dichotomy of the Berber myth was appropriated and altered for the Moroccan case: the old state represented Arabness and was swiftly dominated by the French; the Berber lands were seen as wild and untamed, and it was the duty of the French to not only render these areas legible but to extend the civilizing mission there. This chapter also illustrates the paradox at the heart of the French project in Morocco: Berber policy, which emphasized preserving traditional Berber territory and lifeways while cultivating loyalty to the French Empire, was frequently undermined by the Protectorate’s efforts to modernize, centralize, and economically develop the Moroccan state and landscape. As new 30 roads, railroads, telegraph lines, and print media increasingly connected the Berber hinterlands (the bled al-siba of the French imaginary) to the Arabic-speaking cities (the bled al-makhzen), people and ideas flowed back and forth at a greater clip than ever before. Likewise, work opportunities in the cities and overseas prompted Berber internal and international migration to a greater degree than in the precolonial period, and greater access to Berber markets attracted Arab merchants to Berber towns. In their efforts to render legible and modern the Moroccan countryside, the French had inadvertently demolished any remaining semblance of a barrier between the bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Algeria, Racial Science, and the Civilizing Mission By the time the Protectorate of Morocco was established by the Treaty of Fes on March 30, 1912, France had already been grappling with the “Berber Question” in its control of Algeria since 1830, and, to a lesser extent, in Tunisia since 1881. France seized control of Algiers in the course of a naval expedition in the summer of 1830. The unpopular king at the time, Charles X (r. 1824-1830) had received information that Britain intended to capture Algiers; because the British already controlled the Atlantic and Egypt, Charles hoped to prevent them gaining further footholds in the Mediterranean.85 Additionally, having alienated the French liberals and the public with his conservative policies, Charles hoped that an invasion of Algiers would relieve the growing pressure on the monarchy.86 Unfortunately for Charles, his reign would end in abdication and exile in July of 85 Lahouari Addi, “Colonial Mythologies: Algeria in the French Imagination,” in L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon, Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon (Syracuse University Press, 1997), 94. 86 Phillip C. Naylor, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 153. 31 1830, just weeks after Husain Dey, final regent of the Ottoman Empire in Algeria, surrendered and signed the convention that granted France control of his domain. The justifications given for the invasion included curbing the activities of “Barbary” corsairs, as well as retribution for a grievous insult to the French consul, Pierre Deval, in 1827: frustrated by the consul’s “imperious attitude” on a matter of money owed by the French, Husain Dey struck Deval with his fly- whisk.87 Finally, claims of liberating Algerians from Ottoman imperial domination were short- lived, as the putative liberators were greeted with hostility and resistance rather than gratitude. 88 In the earliest French colonialist writings of the nineteenth century, the Berbers (often referred to as Kabyle in the Algerian context, for the geographic region where they predominated) were considered inherently superior to their Arab neighbors, closer to Europeans in nature, and were thus the intended beneficiaries of the French civilizing mission. According to Alice Conklin, the civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) “rested upon certain fundamental assumptions about the superiority of French culture and the perfectibility of humankind.”89 Seen as an embodiment of the spirit of the French Revolution and secular Enlightenment, the mission promised to educate and modernize colonial populations, “improving” them to the standards of the colonizers.90 One of the main components of this was a redefinition of the French nation. The mission civilisatrice demanded the “willed merger of nation and dynastic empire,” an attempt to incorporate Africa into France.91 The nation could not, therefore, be defined in racial terms. 87 Naylor, North Africa, 154. 88 Addi, in Brown and Gordon, Franco-Arab Encounters, 98. 89 Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1. 90 J.P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. 91 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 86. 32 Instead, language and culture became the gauges by which an individual’s inclusion in the French nation was measured. In contrast to Algeria, Morocco fell under French control late in the Empire’s period of expansion, at a moment of debate over the feasibility of the civilizing mission. Raymond Betts refers to this moment as a shift from “assimilationism” to an ideology of “association,” which he defines as “a more flexible policy which would emphasize retention of local institutions and which would make the native an associate in the colonial enterprise.”92 Conklin argues that this framework, of assimilation or association, is too simple, and instead calls for attention to ideologies, “however misguided, self-deluding, or underfunded.”93 Conklin argues that earlier histories of imperialism have too often “underestimated the cultural and ideological dimension of modern French colonialism,” instead dwelling “either on the economic motivations for acquiring colonies or the nationalist, political, and military reasons leading to overseas expansion.”94 Her analysis of ideologies links the preeminence of the civilizing mission in French policies in West Africa to “the persistence of a certain liberal republican vision among France’s governing elite” prior to the First World War.95 Gary Wilder, however, criticizes Conklin’s analysis of the supposed failure of France’s civilizing mission. By focusing on “the motivations of individual policymakers in order to determine whether their intentions were disinterested (genuine) or self-interested (in the service 92 Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914, 2nd edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) xv. 93 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 10. 94 Ibid., 3. 95 Ibid., 7. 33 of political objectives),” he writes, Conklin fails to explore how the colonial state “was sincerely republican and genuinely colonial,” and as a result, “France’s oppressive practices there appear to be anomalous (e.g., ironic or cynical failures).”96 Wilder argues that “We cannot adequately understand the national-imperial order if racism and colonialism are treated as signs of the absence or failure of republicanism,” because this “effectively protects an idealized republicanism by pointing to its supposed violation rather than exploring its actual operation.”97 According to Wilder, the tension between the universalizing values of republicanism and the particularizing nature of colonialism was a “structural feature of colonial modernity” and the imperial nation-state.98 Likewise, Wilder finds Betts’ discussion of associationism inadequate. While agreeing that the turn of the century represents a moment of shift from policymakers’ arguments in favor of assimilationism to arguments in favor of associationism, Wilder posits that the latter did not merely replace the former. Instead, “the old civilizing mission would be supplemented by a new colonial welfarism,” in which native policy would be based on “ethnographic knowledge and cultural preservation, economic development through social improvement, [and] reliance on indigenous intermediaries.”99 This ethnographic knowledge and identification of potential intermediaries became the sphere of a group of experts, with both academic training and on-the- ground administrative or military experience. Their politically conservative critique of assimilationism argued that European mores and institutions would be incompatible with 96 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude & Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7. 97 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 6. 98 Ibid., 10. 99 Ibid., 54. 34 preserving indigenous lifeways and would “disrupt their proper evolutionary trajectory.”100 Instead, French experts would identify their stage of evolution and the most efficacious methods for gently easing them into modernity. As France gained power over Morocco at precisely this moment of debate – between the assimilationism of the civilizing mission and the associationism of paternalist cultural relativism – French authorities in Morocco had options for the paths they would take toward an effective native policy. Led by paternalist first Resident General Hubert Lyautey and his cadre of Orientalist ethnographic researchers claiming expertise in Moroccan culture, the Protectorate administration largely rejected the particular republican vision of assimilationism. As a result, while questions of the civilizing mission emerged within Protectorate circles, the ideologies driving French domination of Morocco drew more from theories of innate cultural differences linked to biological race. This chapter seeks to examine French colonial ideologies in a moment of a cultural shift, away from the civilizing mission and instead toward belief in a racialized hierarchy of cultures that ought not be mixed. As it emerged in the Algerian context, the Berber myth sits at the intersection of these ideologies: simultaneously based on Republican civilationist ideals and dependent on supposedly scientific claims of racial difference. The Berber Myth A hallmark of European colonial rule, in Africa and elsewhere, was the attempted “one- to-one mapping of people with some putatively common characteristic onto territory.”101 French attempts to make sense of African societies led to projects to describe, categorize, and 100 Ibid., 51. 101 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” 24. 35 administrate the various “tribes” they encountered.102 The Berber myth encompasses the idea that the Berbers of North Africa were more assimilable to French Republicanism than Arabs and therefore deserved preferential treatment from colonial authorities.103 Relying on a “dichotomous anatagonism,” the myth portrayed Berbers as fiercely independent, hardworking, and less devoutly Muslim and Arabs as lazy, intransigent, and superstitious.104 Within the first years of French control of Algeria, the Berber myth began to emerge as part of an attempt to win the Kabyle population to the French cause, as well as to undermine attempts at broader Algerian solidarity. Scholars have demonstrated in Algeria the influence of a “Kabyle Myth,” which posited that the Berbers held a higher rank on a hierarchy of race and civilization than their Arab compatriots.105 The supposedly scientific identification of Kabyles with Christianity, republican values, and European racial ties was a major component of the civilizing mission, “a complete mythological system in which France, land of human freedoms and rights, a European and Christian power, had the moral duty to enlighten peoples in decline, populations whose customs and beliefs had enslaved them.”106 This mission was particularly crucial in reconciling imperial conquest and settler colonialism with the French self-image as uniquely politically moral. 102 “…a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” Scott, Seeing like a State, 1-2. 103 Silverstein, “Realizing Myth: Berbers in France and Algeria,” Middle East Report, no. 200 (July 1, 1996): 11. 104 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 47. 105 See especially Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Charles-Robert Ageron, “Du mythe kabyle au politique berbère,” Cahier Jussieu, 10, no. 18 Le mal de voir (Paris, 1976): 331-349; Alain Mahé, Histoire de la Grande Kabylie. XIXe-XXe siècles. Anthropologie historique du lien sociale dans les communautés villageoises (Paris: Editions Bouchène, 2001); Slimane Hachi, “Note sur la politique berbère de la France,” Tafsut 1 (1983): 29-33. 106 Addi, “Colonial Mythologies: Algeria in the French Imagination,” in L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon, eds, Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon (Syracuse University Press, 1997), 93. 36 The Berber myth represents what George Steinmetz refers to as an ethnographic discourse. With Edward Said, he claims that precolonial ethnographic discourses “often contained explicit or implicit recommendations for the practical governance of the people being represented” and thus shaped colonial interventions.107 However, he pushes farther than Said by arguing that such discourses are multivocal, that is to say, constructed by numerous actors with different priorities and conclusions. Drawing on Bourdieu, Steinmetz depicts colonial discourse emerging within the confluence of a state field and “environing colonial field of power.”108 These “competing authors painted radically differing pictures of the non-Western Other and thus suggested differing techniques of colonization.”109 In Algeria, therefore, different iterations of the Berber myth emerged based on the priorities of different theorizers and administrators. This “symbolic competition” between French stakeholders – rival researchers, policymakers, military officers, and different branches of the administration – will be hugely influential in my analyses of Berber policy in Morocco. This myth was thus bolstered by nineteenth century racial ideologies – early ethnographers sought evidence of European genetic origins for the Berbers – as well as Second Republic ideals.110 The village-level Berber political organization, the jemaa council, was seen as “Republican” because of its use of debate and voting. Early ethnographers hypothesized that the Berbers descended from Romans, Gauls, Vandals, or perhaps the refugees of Atlantis. Others 107 George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 For an examination of nineteenth century French sources that developed the Kabyle myth, see Camille Lacoste- Dujardin, “Génèse et évolution d’une représentation géopolitique: L’imagerie kabyle à travers la production bibliographique de 1840-1891,” Connaissances du Maghreb (Paris, 1984). 37 searched even earlier for Berber origins. For instance, Louis Rinn, former chief of the Algerian Indigenous Affairs Service, published in 1889 his Les Origines Berbères: Études Linguistiques et Ethnologiques. In the book, he argues that the Berbers descended from a “plurality of races.”111 He identifies linguistic (and therefore racial) ties to Iberians, Basques, and Etruscans, among other ancient European groups. Additionally, he claims links to prehistoric groups who crossed the Red Sea from the Middle East and India, including the Amazons, who were clearly responsible for the matrilineal nature of many Berber groups.112 After 400 pages of such claims, he dedicates a “glance [coup d’oeil] at the role of the principal non-Berber peoples who have occupied the north of Africa after the formation of the Berber races – Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Israelites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Semites.”113 According to his analysis, the Berbers were a prehistoric group born of the combination of multiple European and Asian races – notably lacking any African contribution. The positive characterization of Berbers contributed to the creation of corresponding negative stereotypes of Arabs. Viscount Amédé de Caix de St. Aymour, French historian and archaeologist, writing in 1891: Arabs cannot be transformed while Kabyles can be assimilated.... Arabs are lazy, soft, slow, introverted, dreamy, cold and almost sad and fanatical.... The Berber is hard- working, enterprising and practical; he is outgoing, energetic, exuberant, quick and happy ... he is thrifty, honest, alert and basically not very religious.114 111 Louis Rinn, Les Origines Berbères: Études Linguistiques et Ethnologigues (Algiers: Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, 1889), 183. 112 Rinn, Les Origines Berbères, 282. 113 Ibid., 400. 114 Amédé de Caix de St. Aymour , quoted in Marnia Lazreg, “The Reproduction of Colonial Ideology: The Case of the Kabyle Berbers,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October 1, 1983), 384. 38 The viscount thus argued for the Kabyles’ eligibility for the mission civilisatrice, while simultaneously disqualifying the Arabs from its purported benefits. In a 1903 essay, French colonial administrator Joost Van Vollenhoven spelled out the resultant dichotomy between “good” Berbers and “bad” Arabs. Van Vollenhoven, himself raised in Algeria, rose to the highest ranks of colonial service as the Governor-General of French West Africa, and was killed in the Battle of the Marne in 1918. He employed the term indigène to refer to both ethnic groups together. Writing on the Arabs, he explains that, to their two main characteristics of “limited intelligence and complete apathy” one may add a whole long series of vices, certainly here born of laziness: dissimulation and dishonesty, mistrust and improvidence, love of pleasure, lust and carousing. We recognize that this painting, not at all exaggerated, is the opposite of what it takes to create a good and industrious farmer, who loves his land.115 Van Vollenhoven thus linked civilizability, productivity, and the capacity for modernization to agriculture. In another section, Van Vollenhoven compares Arabs and Berbers directly: “If Kabylia is represented by the country’s elite, by a powerful bourgeoisie, enriched by their labor and good sense, then it is feudal chiefs, pompous nonentities, decorative loafers, who are the apparent representatives of the Arab people.”116 In his estimation, intrinsic Arab ethnoracial characteristics made it impossible for them to be productive, modern farmers, thereby justifying the massive expropriation of their land. If they could not be trusted with it, it would be turned over to European settlers, who could use it properly. Kabyles, on the other hand, were good 115 Joost Van Vollenhoven, Essai sur le Fellah Algérien (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1903), 169-170. 116 Van Vollenhoven, 240. 39 farmers (according to Van Vollenhoven) and therefore worthy of keeping their land and benefitting from French civilization and modernization. Comparing three instances of German imperial intervention, George Steinmetz posits that competing colonial authorities emerged from different social classes and backgrounds, leading to an “intraelite class struggle” for control of the colonial field. Thus, each would select “tropes and narratives from the ethnographic archive that promised to showcase its socially constructed strengths, its existing holdings of capital.”117 While the social classes that made up the French colonial administration differed from Steinmetz’s German example, the idea that they would promote different policy approaches based on their strengths and priorities holds true. Van Vollenhoven, for instance, as the son of settlers, was “attuned to evaluative categories like idleness and usefulness” in an effort to “transform the colonized into interchangeable laborers or versions of Homo economicus.”118 Likewise, the academic Rinn sought interpretations of the colonized that “relied on hermeneutic and linguistic skills and that were distant from motives of money and violent military domination, which they dismissed as undignified and unrefined.”119 Of course, Steinmetz acknowledges, “ethnographic preferences were not stamped like number plates on the backs of European actors,” but recognizing their social contexts aids in identifying priorities within the competitive colonial field.120 The mythology represented by these writers was broadly accepted as ethnographic truth and inscribed in the training materials of the École Coloniale in Paris, where generations of 117 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 49. 118 Ibid., 50. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 51. 40 colonial officers and administrators were formed.121 By conferring worthiness for the civilizing mission along ethno-racial lines, the Berber myth represents a blurring of the distinction between the supposed egalitarianism of the civilizing mission and the strict hierarchy of scientific racism. By this logic, only those capable of becoming civilized should be the targets of the mission, and that capacity could be determined by allegedly immutable ethnic characteristics. Some French writers, perhaps drawing their ethnographic priorities from their perspective and background as devout Catholics, framed the conflict between France and Algeria in religious terms. French Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot, in his 1841 tract Les français en Algérie, wrote: The final days of the Islamic movement have come; our century is doubtless destined to watch it leave the shores of Europe, not only of that old Europe which it once invaded and so long threatened, but of that new and greater Europe which has grown up wherever the former Europe has borne the Cross. Attacked from all sides, the Crescent is breaking up and fading away.122 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim leaders throughout North Africa declared jihad against incursion by European Christians.123 They saw colonization as an attempt to attack Islam itself; clearly, some Christians saw the struggle in the same terms. The Berber myth was conscripted to the service of this religious warfare narrative. 124 As French ethnographers sought to trace Amazigh origins to Europe, they repeatedly cited 121 William B. Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1971). 122 Addi, in Brown and Gordon, Franco-Arab Encounters, 99. 123 See Pessah Shinar, Modern Islam in the Maghrib (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2004); Amira K. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretation in Pre-Colonial Morocco: State-Society Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria (New York: Routledge, 2002); Edmund Burke III, “Pan-Islam and Moroccan Resistance to French Colonial Penetration, 1900-1912,” The Journal of African History 13, no. 1 (1972): 97–118. 124 Dahbia Abrous, La Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique à l’épreuve du mythe Berbère (Paris: Peeters, 2008). 41 supposedly weaker ties to Islam as evidence of Christian roots. For instance, writing in the 1840s, Colonel Daumas and Captain Fabar, leaders of Algerian regiments called spahis, posited that The Kabyle people, partly Germanic in origin, after having known Christianity, did not completely change under their new religion. They accepted the Qur'an, but they did not embrace it.... In contrast to the universal results of the Islamic faith elsewhere, we discover in the Kabyle an obedience to the sacred law of work, a near-rehabilitation of women, and a number of customs which breathe the spirit of equality, of Christian commiseration.125 Similarly, would-be evangelists Dr. Warnier and Jules Duval claimed in 1865 that “there is only one trait that links all groups [in Algeria], and that is religion.... But Kabyles differ from Europeans on one point only: religion.”126 Thus, Christian missions in Algeria were disproportionately centered in Kabylia, particularly Charles Lavigerie’s Pères Blancs and Soeurs Blanches, founded in 1869.127 Despite very low levels of conversion, this further attempt to divide Amazigh Muslims from Arab Muslims served to increase tensions between these groups and resentment toward the colonial power. While missionaries were far less welcome in the Moroccan Protectorate, the idea of Berbers’ merely superficial adherence to Islam informed French policy in the judicial realm there, discussed further in the next chapter. 125 M. Daumas and M. Fabar, La Grande Kabylie: Études historiques (Paris: L. Hachette et Cie, 1847). 126 Marnia Lazreg, “The Reproduction of Colonial Ideology: The Case of the Kabyle Berbers,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October 1, 1983), 386. 127 Naylor, North Africa, 156. 42 This myth thus subjected the Berbers of Algeria’s Kabylia region to the mission civilisatrice, with its assimilationist educational goals and access to jobs in the French military and in the metropole. The French hailed their supposed educational success in Kabylia as the “Kabyle miracle,” and taken as proof of Berber superiority, aptitude for assimilation, and proximity to Frenchness.128 In her study of Algerian schoolteachers – largely Kabyle in origin – trained in French public schools, Fanny Colonna argues instead that French education in Kabylia was less widespread than claimed, and that educated Kabyles represented an elite seeking to escape the dire economic situation of their region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.129 Scholars have since argued that perhaps the Kabyle population picked up French with such facility because of centuries of bilingual practice with Arabic.130 In Algeria, the appropriation of religious properties, including Qur’anic schools, and opposition by European colonists to indigenous education, all but wiped out schools for native Algerians by 1870.131 Settler colonialism in Algeria was enabled by massive expropriations of land from local populations. 132 The Great Kabyle Revolt of 1871, sparked by instability brought on by drought and famine, was brutally repressed and punished with the expropriation of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land.133 Patricia Lorcin argues that the revolt represents a 128 Fanny Colonna, Instituteurs algériens: 1883-1939 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1975). 129 Ibid. 130 Nedjma Abdelfettah Lalmi, “Du Mythe de l’isolat Kabyle (On the Myth of the Kabyle Cultural Island),” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 44, no. 175 (January 1, 2004), 519. 131 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006), 61. See also Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013). 132 For a discussion of Algerian settler colonialism, see Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2011). 133 Tahar Oussedik, Mouvement insurrectionnel de 1871 (Algiers: ENAG Éditions, 2005). 43 turning point for the Kabyle Myth; first, settlers portrayed the victory as that of modernity over the barbarity of the past, and second, they cast doubt on the proposition that Kabyles were good candidates for assimilation.134 Lorcin cites Auguste Pomel, a proponent of the Kabyle myth, who cautioned after the insurrection that Kabyles, for all their aptitudes for civilization, were inherently more “barbarous” than the French.135 The Kabyle case represents thus a multivocal colonial situation, wherein European settlers co-created the ethnographic knowledge that drove native policy, in competition with more sympathetic officials.136 As the settlers gained greater influence over the course of the nineteenth century, their version of the Berber myth increasingly emphasized inherent inferiority and advocated instead for economic and political domination by the French. Indeed, in all of Algeria from 1830 to 1940, over 3,445,000 hectares were taken by the colonizers. 137 This massive loss of land was a major driving force in migration, both internal (to cities or to European-owned plantations) and external, particularly to France. Additionally, the Third Republic imposed the indigénat, a native code that governed Algerian Arabs and Berbers on much different and harsher terms than European-origin colonists or Algerian Jews.138 As a result, despite early attempts to divide Arabs and Berbers and to promote Kabyle interests, by the turn of the century the realities of settler colonialism meant that no native Algerians, whether Berber 134 Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 175. 135 August Pomel, Des races indigènes de l’Algérie et du rôle que leur réservent leurs aptitudes, (Oran: Veuve Dagorn, 1871), quoted in Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 175. 136 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 27. 137 Naylor, North Africa, 155. 138 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, De l'indigénat - Anatomie d'un «monstre» juridique : Le droit colonial en Algérie et dans l'Empire français (Paris: Zones, 2010). 44 or Arab, were the beneficiaries (intended or unintended) of the French undertaking in Algeria. Thus, although the ideology of the Berber myth developed in the Algerian context, it had little material effect on policy there. Morocco, over which France gained control 80 years later, was a different case. The Moroccan Ethnographic Archive Ethnography, as a purportedly scientific means of gaining expertise, became a crucial tool of and justification for French intervention in Morocco. In the years preceding the establishment of the Protectorate, ethnographic researchers scuffled for “recognition of their ethnographic acuity, their discernment in understanding ‘natives,’” both within the French context and against external imperial competitors.139 Edmund Burke III, in his 2014 work The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam, describes the development of a “scientific imperialism” in the Moroccan context, designed in part to allay metropolitan fears of a repeat of mistakes made in Algeria.140 This also included the rise of ethnography as a scientific pursuit, first as a means of competition with other European powers interested in Morocco, and later as a means for developing native policy. In the immediate pre-Protectorate decades, Burke explains, anthropologie referred to physical methods such as craniometry (skull- measuring), whereas sociologie referred primarily to a study of French social institutions, and “eschewed the study of colonial societies and the practice of fieldwork.”141 Early ethnographers, therefore, while often highly educated academics, had not been formally trained in what would 139 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 48. 140 Edmund Burke III, The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014), 6. 141 Ibid. 45 today be considered ethnographic methodologies. The cohort of what Burke refers to as ethnographers, therefore, included trained academics (linguists, geographers, Orientalists) as well as explorers and those who gained expertise with North African societies through military service (particularly in Algeria). He refers to the creation of a “Moroccan colonial archive” in the Foucauldian, rather than politically administrative, sense, as the collection of French writings from the period 1880-1930 that sought to collect and organize knowledge about Morocco “based on then relevant assumptions, which over time could and did change.”142 This Moroccan colonial archive emerged especially in the period 1900-1912, broadly referred to as the Moroccan Crisis, as France sought to acquire knowledge that would give a competitive edge over England, Spain, and Germany in the quest to gain control of Morocco. Lyautey himself, prior to the Treaty of Fes, lamented that these other powers were “irremediably handicapped by shortcomings in national sensitivity and responsiveness,” preventing themselves from truly understanding Morocco.143 In contrast, he believed that France was uniquely suited for and held exclusive legitimacy in its Moroccan intervention. Lyautey’s much-vaunted understanding of the “Moroccan soul,” compared to Britain’s fixation on trade and Spain’s contempt for the indigènes, rendered France matchless in its claims to Morocco.144 Additionally, though the archive collected new information about Morocco’s particular geography and other specificities, many of the assumptions that emerged in this new colonial archive derived from the existing ethnographic discourse on Arabs, Berbers, and Islam in Algeria. Therefore, while the Berber myth changed shape in the Moroccan archive from its 142 Ibid. 143 Pablo La Porte, “Lyautey l’Européen: Metropolitan Ambitions, Imperial Designs and French Rule in Morocco, 1912–25,” French History 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 99–120. 144 Ibid. 46 Kabyle form, and different points of emphasis were highlighted by researchers with particular policy aims, a Moroccan Berber myth nevertheless continued to assert inherent differences between Arab and Berber populations and emphasize the intrinsic superiority of the latter. During this precolonial period, the ethnographic charge was led by the Mission scientifique du Maroc (MSM). Created in 1903 and based in Tangier, the MSM published reports on Moroccan history, culture, religion, and geography in its journal Archives Marocaines.145 This group, led from the outset by Albert Le Chatelier, Georges Salmon, and Édouard Michaux- Bellaire, emerged in deliberate competition with the formalized academics of the École d’Alger, who had considered themselves the natural choice to lead ethnographic forays into Morocco. The first part of Burke’s Ethnographic State delves in admirable detail into the academic rivalries and political wranglings of these two groups before the Protectorate. Ultimately, neither prevailed fully – in 1920, the MSM became the Service sociologique of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, and academics of the École d’Alger assisted the creation of the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines in 1921. Therefore, these competing groups both held sway in the development of native policy, and both had Lyautey’s ear. The portrait Burke paints of Le Chatelier is one of an eccentric and ambitious man. Not university educated, he began his career as a military officer of indigenous affairs in Algeria in 1876, where he served for ten years. His mentor, Colonel André de Saint-Germain, promoted a style of native administration whereby “the chef de poste became the administrator, advocate, and judge of the natives in his charge.”146 Le Chatelier thus created a school and a court under his jurisdiction and introduced public health measures and public works projects. His future 145 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 72. 146 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 53. 47 endeavors always bore the stamp of this early experience, with repeated efforts to promote this type of hands-on native policy. After quitting the army, Le Chatelier dabbled in exploration and business, including speculation in colonial railroad construction. When one particular enterprise failed in 1895 with great financial loss, Le Chatelier evidently dueled and killed his business rival – who, unfortunately, was a founding member of the Comité de l’Afrique française (CAF).147 Le Chatelier’s relationship with that influential group was thus soured, and in the future the CAF would back the ethnographic excursions of the École d’Alger, Le Chatelier’s academic rivals. However, Le Chatelier soon found powerful political patrons, who backed his ascension to a newly-created chair in Muslim sociology and sociography at the Collège de France. Burke portrays the naming of this chair as a cynical appropriation of “the newly minted term sociologie” that enabled Le Chatelier to present his work as scientific and modern. 148 The terms of the chair included the creation and funding of the Mission scientifique du Maroc, as well as the publication of its journal Archives Marocains. Its first hire was Georges Salmon, a young up- and-coming Arabist and archaeologist who emerged from humble origins as a postal worker. Salmon’s first collaborator, and eventual successor, was Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, whose origins appear shrouded in mystery. Upon his appointment to the MSM in 1903, he had lived in Morocco for over twenty years, working as a merchant and occasional French consul, dressing in Moroccan attire and living with a Moroccan woman.149 His language skills, cultural savvy, and personal contacts with Moroccans made him an invaluable colleague. After Salmon’s 147 Ibid., 55. 148 Ibid., 57. 149 Ibid., 88. 48 untimely death of dysentery in 1905, Michaux-Bellaire took over the editorship of the Archives Marocains. He later explained that the goals of the journal: To compile the catalog of Morocco so to speak, its tribes, its cities, its brotherhoods, and to discover the origins, the ramifications, the rivalries and the alliances…to explore, in a word, in the measure of the possible the terrain on which we might one day be called to operate, to allow us to act in full knowledge and to devise a native policy, without too many errors, without weaknesses as also without useless violence and to create an administration supple enough to apply to the characters of the different tribes without ceasing to be coherent.150 In 1908, Michaux-Bellaire published what would become a highly influential essay on Moroccan society, “L’Organisme Marocain,” discussed further below. In 1920, it was he who Lyautey appointed as head of the Service sociologique of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. The rivals of the MSM for ethnographic authority in Morocco, the École d’Alger cohort, included René Basset, Edmond Doutté, and William Marçais, renowned for their folklore studies (a field newly in vogue at the time). Doutté and Augustin Bernard conducted research trips in Morocco in the first years of the twentieth century, and in 1911 Bernard published Le Maroc, which became the leading guidebook to Morocco and went through numerous editions. 151 Many of their research trips were funded by the Comité de l’Afrique française and the associated Comité du Maroc, the leading private sponsors of such excursions.152 Their studies were conducted with no formal policy plan and without overt collaboration with the French state – 150 Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, “La Mission scientifique du Maroc,” Archives marocaines, 1925, 1– 22. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 61. 151 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 49. 152 Ibid., 93. 49 granting the latter plausible deniability of adventuring in a country where it had no official authority. Despite spending thousands of francs on efforts to catalogue Moroccan geography, geology, religion, and culture, the results were largely haphazard, and their study missions came to a halt after the 1907 murder of Émile Mauchamps in Marrakech.153 Burke employs Bourdieu’s theories to describe this tug-of-war between competitive research groups as “a struggle over symbolic capital.”154 This echoes Steinmetz’s reminder that this precolonial ethnographic discourse was inherently multivocal, developed by a variety of researchers with varying priorities and recommendations for effective conquest and control: “European ethnographic discourse tended to organize itself as a field, that is, as a conflictual symbolic space, which meant that opposing positions emerged almost automatically.”155 In addition to the competition over ethnographic acuity, the struggle between these groups in precolonial Morocco also reflected metropolitan political priorities and fears. The two groups mapped roughly onto a split opinion on the best strategy for an eventual takeover of Morocco. The MSM was associated with what was called the “makhzen policy,” which proposed working with the sultan’s government to institute reforms and gain an administrative foothold. The École d’Alger scholars and the CAF, on the other hand, favored the “tribes policy,” which called for “the gradual conquest of Morocco on a piecemeal, tribe-by-tribe basis starting from Algeria.”156 As we shall see, French authorities ultimately adopted strategies from both proposals in their actual conquest of Morocco, but at the time, the two seemed incompatible. To the 153 Ibid., 96. 154 Ibid., 67. 155 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 517. 156 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 76. 50 administration at the Quai d’Orsay, the tribes policy seemed far more risky, promising as it did frequent skirmishes and the potential of negative international attention. In addition, the École d’Alger seemed risky on another front, as it “exposed the French position in Morocco to the potentially destabilizing influence of colonial Algerian groups and factions.”157 Already seeking to keep Morocco from becoming another Algeria, French diplomats had no interest in engaging the Algerian settler lobby further west. As a result, they threw their backing behind Le Chatelier’s publicly-funded MSM, and the French legation in Tangier began denying École d’Alger scholars permission to conduct further research in Morocco. While Burke searches the production of these researchers to analyze the development of “its most important product, Moroccan Islam,” his methods can be deployed for an examination of Berber ethnography in the immediate pre-Protectorate years. 158 His analysis reveals that, prior to the intensifying of the Moroccan Crisis in 1905, it was not a foregone conclusion that the Kabyle myth (what Burke refers to as the “Kabyle gospel”) would propagate and mutate into a Moroccan Berber myth. Indeed, in these early years, several ethnographers expressed skepticism in any clear divide between Arab and Berber and between bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Edmond Doutté, for example, wrote in 1901 that The expression of bled el-makhzan opposed to that of bled el-siba is incorrect, for all of Morocco under different forms and to varying degrees undergoes the action of the makhzan…. While a European might interpret the persistent conflict between the makhzan and the tribes as mere anarchy, all this is not disorder, but an order; in this apparent chaos all the living forces ended up by finding an equilibrium: the play of 157 Ibid., 68. 158 Ibid., 11. 51 classes and of parties of all kinds resulted in a kind of social stasis that constitutes a durable state, as much in the tribes as in the cities.159 Interestingly, this analysis mirrors James C. Scott’s discussion of the relationship between “hill peoples” and “valley states” in The Art of Not Being Governed. The two types of societies, Scott argues, have “always existed in symbiosis” with one another.160 Furthermore, Doutté wrote in the same report that “the ethnic division of natives into “Arabs” and “Berbers” is a vain distinction, because no criteria can be invoked on which to base this distinction. One can find Arab speakers who used to speak Berber and vice versa, just as one can find nomadic and sedentary populations among both groups.”161 This, too, squares with Scott’s “healthy agnosticism” about the category of ethnicity.162 Drawing on Ernest Gellner’s 1969 Saints of the Atlas, Scott asserts that the divide between the two categories is political in nature, “distinguishing the subjects of a state from those outside its control.”163 Thus, “ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.”164 While rejecting ethnic distinctions, Scott’s analysis bears remarkable similarity to the 159 Edmond Doutté, “Une mission d’études au Maroc,” Renseignements coloniaux, 1901, 166. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 20. 160 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 26. 161 Doutté, “Une mission d’études au Maroc,” Renseignements coloniaux, 1901, 166. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 20. 162 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 328. 163 Ibid., 30. 164 Ibid. 52 concepts of bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Like the more nuanced ethnographers of the early twentieth century, Scott recognizes the contingency and slipperiness of such categories. Where French policymakers would long struggle was in attempts to definitively nail down the border between them. That such conclusions emerged from the ethnographic research of the turn of the century is indeed compelling. However, they did not last, even from Doutté himself. While he may have believed that the distinction between Arab and Berber was not based on any biological reality, he nevertheless disliked Arabs “(here perhaps displaying his Algerian colonial roots)” and promoted policies that would combat Arabization of the Berbers, writing that “this arabization, at least in the limits of our present field of observation, generally coincides with a recrudescence of fanaticism in religious sentiment and with a considerable lowering of morality.”165 As Burke observes, a “tendency to abandon complexity in favor of cultural binaries” proved seductive.166 Thus, the Kabyle myth proved a fruitful source of existing binaries that could be transplanted to Moroccan soil. Lyautey’s Morocco The French Protectorate of Morocco was formally established in March 1912 with the Treaty of Fes, officially normalizing a situation that had been developing for several years. Distinct from Algeria and Tunisia in that it never fell under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, Morocco maintained independence into the twentieth century despite encroachments by the 165 Doutté, “Troisième voyage d’études au Maroc: Rapport sommaire d’ensemble,” Renseignements coloniaux, 1902, 158. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 130. 166 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 11. 53 British, Spanish, and French. However, the Alawite monarchy weakened and lost considerable authority throughout the latter nineteenth century, in large part as a result of the failings of individual sultans.167 Morocco increasingly became a pawn in the “Greater Game” of European imperialism: the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 was sparked when German Kaiser Wilhelm II affirmed Moroccan sovereignty to test the strength of the French-British Dual Entente. The Act of Algeciras, brokered by American President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, established that Morocco fell under France’s growing North African sphere of influence. 168 France began to test the limits, both of the sultan’s ability to stop them and the willingness of other European states to look the other way. In 1907, for instance, the March 19 murder of Dr. Émile Mauchamp by a mob in Marrakech became a cause célèbre in the French press.169 Supposedly in retribution, French forces, led by Lyautey, attacked and occupied the city of Oujda near the Algerian border, from whence they began to seize control of greater swaths of border territories.170 Likewise, the French responded to the murder of eight foreigners on a newly-constructed railway in Casablanca by bombarding the city from the port and then occupying it. With French troops pushing at the borders on all sides, the sultan was indecisive: when Berber chiefs from surrounding areas offered armed resistance, he instead sought to suppress it, fearing that they would “only incite France to penetrate further.”171 Thus, although in 167 For the most thorough history of modern pre-Protectorate Morocco, see Edmund Burke III, Prelude to a Protectorate in Morocco: precolonial protest and resistance, 1860-1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 168 Naylor, North Africa, 162. 169 Jonathan Katz, Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 170 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 75. 171 Ibid., 70. 54 1911 the French had no legal claim to Moroccan territory, French troops had penetrated over 200 miles inward from the Algerian side, and more troops were marching northward from French West Africa. The Moroccan government (makhzen) was unable to respond effectively to French encroachments because economic vulnerability and increasing social tensions were compounded by civil war. Sultan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz came to power in 1894 at age 14, and was by all accounts eccentric, self-involved, and uninterested in governance. In 1907 his brother, ‘Abd al-Hafiz, led a year-long insurrection and seized the throne. ‘Abd al-Hafiz had been the state’s representative in the South and was thus in a position to enlist the aid of the powerful Amazigh tribes of the Atlas Mountains. The ulama (Islamic leadership) of Fes, which held the traditional religious power to confer kingship, was infuriated that ‘Abd al-Hafiz had circumvented their authority. The ulama ultimately granted ‘Abd al-Hafiz their support, but only on the conditions that he reclaim Oujda and Casablanca from the French, ban his brother’s unpopular (but lucrative) gate taxes, and resume jihad to repel the Christian Europeans.172 Unable to fulfill these obligations, and alienating his Berber supporters as well, ‘Abd al-Hafiz found himself increasingly unable to govern. When Middle Atlas Berbers, enraged by new taxes and the government’s practice of borrowing money from France, attacked and besieged Fes in 1911, the sultan could not fight back. He turned to the French, who pacified the city and seized control of the entire Moroccan army, installing their own officers. Spain and Germany protested weakly, but in 1912 the Sultan signed the Treaty of Fes, and then immediately abdicated, “ending the fiction of Moroccan independence.”173 172 Ibid., 77. 173 Ibid., 78. 55 The complex task of reconfiguring the makhzen (the Moroccan bureaucratic administration headed by the Sultan) while incorporating French administrative control fell to longtime French colonial civil servant Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, the first Resident- General of Morocco.174 Famously eccentric, Lyautey was born in Lorraine and descended on his mother’s side from Norman nobility. One legacy of this upbringing was a sense of unjust exile following the loss of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. An unapologetic elitist, Lyautey trusted neither the French Third Republic nor the lower-class European colons of Morocco and worked to impose a top-down paternalistic model of modernization for the gradual “evolution” of Morocco.175 Lyautey believed firmly in both traditional social hierarchies and strong, intrinsic national characters. In his view, then, any attempt to “Frenchify” Moroccans was both undesirable and doomed to failure. He sought assiduously to maintain Moroccan institutions and culture, while overlaying a French administration that increasingly took over the economic, political, and educational functions of the state. Lyautey’s policies promoted “preservationist approaches to modernization, and ethnographically informed paternalism.”176 He held a romanticized view of the Protectorate as just that: protection for Morocco's “soul” while France gently guided it forward into modernity. The ultimate goal, he wrote, was that it would be “developed, civilized, living its own autonomous life, detached from the metropole.”177 174 The most thorough biographies of Lyautey in Morocco are Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du Protectorat français au Maroc, 1912-1925 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988); William A. Hoisington Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Arnaud Teyssier, Lyautey : Le ciel et les sables sont grands (Paris: Le Grand livre du mois, 2004); Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). For more recent discussions of Lyautey’s personal life and homosexuality, see Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 2002). 175 William A. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco. 176 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 54. 177 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 90. 56 In 1912, after breaking the siege of Fes, Lyautey replaced the contentious sultan ‘Abd al- Hafiz with his younger brother, Moulay Youssef, thus preserving the ancient Alawite dynasty. He made sure that the Sharifian court maintained its traditional pomp and ceremony, enraging other colonial officials by holding the sultan’s stirrup to help him dismount at state functions (symbolically recognizing the sultan’s sovereignty).178 Lyautey spoke openly of this preservationist policy in typical self-congratulation: “Yes, in Morocco, and it is our honor, we conserve. I would go a step further, we rescue. We wish to conserve in Morocco Beauty – and it is not a negligible thing.”179 This policy was developed from his earlier colonial experience in Madagascar and Indochina, as well as his firm belief in natural aristocracy: Offend no tradition, change no custom, and remind ourselves that in all human society there is a ruling class, born to rule, without which nothing can be done... enlist the ruling class in our service... and the country will be pacified, and at far less cost and with greater certainty than by all the military expeditions we could send there.180 However, political control of Morocco could not be so easily achieved. Insurrection broke out immediately in Fes, as Moroccan troops turned against their new French military leaders.181 The exiled ‘Abd al-Hafiz was replaced as sultan by his youngest brother, Youssef, in August of 1912. The new French administrators hoped that the young sultan would be pliable and passive.182 Immediately, however, a rival to the throne, Ahmed el Hiba, declared himself 178Burke, The Ethnographic State, 1. 179 Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 40. Capitalization in the original. 180 Hubert Lyautey, Lettres de Tonkin et de Madagascar (1894-1899) Vol. 1 (Paris: A Colin, 1920) 71. 181 William A. Hoisington Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). 182 Abdelhadi Alaoui, Le Maroc et la France 1912-1956: Textes et documents à l'appui (Rabat: Fanigraph, 2007). 57 sultan in the south, gaining the support of many of the Berber groups of the High Atlas and Anti- Atlas regions. He managed to occupy Marrakech before French troops, led by Charles Mangin, conquered the city and chased el Hiba into the mountains in September of 1912.183 This began the long period of warfare that the French euphemistically called “Pacification,” which lasted until the last insoumis Berber tribes signed treaties with the French in 1934. The goal of this campaign was to bring all “dissident” groups under the authority of the central government. Figure 2: Sultan Moulay Youssef and Maréchal Lyautey in Fes, 1916184 183 Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 95. Mangin was a powerful proponent of incorporating colonial, and particularly West African, troops into the French military. He conquered Marrakech with a primarily Senegalese force and went on to advocate the use of the tirailleurs sénégalais as a general in the First World War. See Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 184 Chronique de mémoire, http://jpbro.unblog.fr/2018/02/28/protectorat-au-maroc-une-politique-coloniale-2/. 58 After effectively enlisting the traditional Arabophone ruling class of Morocco’s cities to oversee the religious and cultural affairs of the country, Lyautey established an “efficiently French” administration alongside the truncated makhzen, which usurped the true execution of power.185 He saw his role in the civilizing mission as his own devoir social, a personal mission to, as he wrote in a 1900 article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, “open to the peoples of color the industrial, agricultural, and economic way of life and also... a higher moral life, a life more complete.”186 Lyautey rejected equality in favor of what Paul Rabinow calls “a paternalistic démo-philie: ‘I love the people, among whom I live. But if I love with all my heart, it is as a protector (patron) and not a democrat.’”187 Interestingly, Lyautey combined paternalism toward the people of Morocco with distrust for the European colons, whom he considered stupid, arrogant, and opportunistic. Their speculation posed a threat to his dream of an urban project imposed benevolently from above. 188 Lyautey’s policies limited European access to land purchases, preventing Morocco from following the Algerian model of a settler colony. The 1926 census revealed less than 100,000 Europeans living in Morocco’s French Zone, compared to a native Moroccan population of approximately five million. Furthermore, the European population was predominantly urban; one estimate claimed that for every 100 Moroccans in the countryside, there were .23 Europeans. 189 185 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 91. 186 Naylor, North Africa, 163. 187 Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 283. 188 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 142. 189 1MA/285/441 Captain Courtès, “Conférence sur le Maroc ethnique,” 1928. 59 This represents a marked contrast to Algeria, where the economy of the massive European-origin settler population relied heavily on agriculture and viticulture. Director of Agriculture Émile Miège estimated that there were approximately 1,000 rural colons in 1920 and 1,500 in 1927.190 These were Lyautey’s carefully selected “gentlemen farmers,” juxtaposed with the “riff-raff” of Southern Europe who had settled Algeria.191 However, although the expropriations and numbers of settlers were considerably lesser than in Algeria, this was not a policy of beneficence; the lands that were expropriated were the most fertile of the plains.192 These massive European mechanized farms drove Arab farmers to the edges of farmable land or to pursue new opportunities in the cities. Thus, in Morocco, both Arabs and Europeans were predominantly urban populations, leaving the mountains and deserts of the hinterland to the Berbers and thereby fortifying the imagined distinction between the bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Bled al-Makhzen, Bled al-Siba This dissertation argues that Protectorate Berber Policy developed as a set of strategies for bringing dissident Berber groups under state control while simultaneously drawing their loyalty away from the Sultan. The circumstances of both conquest and governance differed from those in Algeria in many ways, and the Berber myth was thus used differently. During the two decades of so-called “pacification” (1913-1934), the concepts of bled al-makhzen and bled al- siba, adopted from the pre-protectorate system, were reified and calcified by the French. As 190 Joseph Luccioni, “De Lyautey à Steeg : un témoignage,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 36, no. 1 (1983), 67. 191 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 113. 192 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 88. 60 Jonathan Wyrtzen explains, the result was that the bled al-makhzan came to be “rigidly equated with the plains and coasts, urban centers, Arabization, and Islamization” and the bled al-siba with “mountains and deserts, the countryside, Berber language, and superficial, syncretic Islam.”193 Therefore, Berber policy was developed in Morocco based largely on improving the haphazard approach taken in Algeria. When Lyautey came to power in Morocco, he needed as much ethnographic material as possible, both to support the legitimacy of French involvement and to efficiently build the modern “technocolony” he envisioned.194 As the installation of the Protectorate rendered moot the political rivalry between the MSM and the academics of the École d’Alger, Lyautey could consult freely with both groups. Under Lyautey’s patronage, a Moroccan contingent of Berber experts emerged who, like their counterparts in Algeria, “believed they could exploit Arab– Berber animosity and who romanticized the ‘noble savages’ of la montagne berbère as France’s natural allies.”195 Many of the ideas for Protectorate Berber Policy emerged from this circle of Orientalist intellectuals with whom Lyautey surrounded himself. The logic of nineteenth-century French language policies, particularly under the III Republic, was that the language is the soul of a nation, and thus in order to unify a nation-state one must have a unitary language.196 Lyautey too believed that language represented the soul of a 193 Jonathan Wyrtzen, “Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (May 1, 2011), 230. 194 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 111. 195 Wyrtzen, “Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” 231. 196 For the quintessential study of linguistic unification of France, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). See also Ralph D. Grillo, Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge University Press, 1989). 61 nation, but in the case of Morocco, he sought to preserve rather than to unify the dual “souls” he found there – Arab and Berber. While paying lip service to the Sultan, his 1915 writings reveal his clear preference for one of these souls over the other. This preference was predicated on suspicion of Islam and belief in the Berber myth: “Arabic is an important factor in Islamicization, because it is through this language that one learns the Qur’an. Our interests, however, clearly dictate that we help the Berbers evolve outside the bounds of Islam.” 197 Furthermore, the logic of empire renders the linguistic unification of a subject population undesirable, as national unity could lead to colonial defiance of French rule.198 The Orientalist researchers in Lyautey’s circle helped elaborate his ideology. Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, editor of Archives Marocains, had in 1908 published his influential essay, “L’Organisme Marocain.” In it, he strongly promoted a conflation of the makhzen/siba, Arab/Berber binaries. He proposed a view of Morocco divided into the “makhzen organism” and the “Berber organism,” mixing in some Kabyle myth claims about Berber indomitability: The situation of the makhzan vis-à-vis this national [Berber] organism is about the same as that of the ancient Phoenician and Roman conquerors; like them, it is incapable of finishing its conquest and organizing it, and it has been unable to absorb for its benefit the Berber vitality, to assimilate it; all that it can do is to resist it, to contain it within its limits and to declare itself responsible for its actions vis-à-vis Europe in order to justify an authority which it is moreover incapable of exercising by its means alone. 199 197 Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, Lyautey l’Africain: textes et lettres du maréchal Lyautey, presenté par Pierre Lyautey Volume III: 1915-1918 (Paris: Plon, 1954). 198 Katherine Hoffman, “Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (2008): 724-752. 199 Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, “L’organisme marocain,” Revue du monde musulman 9 (1908): 1-33. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 79. 62 According to Burke, Michaux-Bellaire’s essay represents a quintessential distillation of the “Moroccan colonial gospel.”200 Lyautey appointed Michaux-Bellaire as the delegate representing the Sociological Service of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs to the Residence. Michaux-Bellaire, however, did not speak Berber himself, and thus Lyautey turned to more tactically experienced officials for guidance. Maurice le Glay, a respected scholar of the Maghreb, began his career as a soldier in Algeria and participated in the earliest Moroccan Pacification campaigns. One of Lyautey’s advisors on Berber society, Le Glay was a firm proponent of the Berber myth and opponent of the spread of Islamization and Arabization, which were inextricably linked in his conception. Le Glay also held unique ethnographic legitimacy as the only officer who had substantive experience with the Tamazight-speaking Berbers of the Middle Atlas. Around 1913 or 1914, an essay by Le Glay circulated in administrative circles, entitled “How to Administer the Berbers: Preliminary Measures.”201 In the essay, he writes that the French Empire is responsible for the undesirable Islamization of “le Soudan” (present-day Mali and Mauritania), but that such a fate is avoidable in Morocco if certain preventative measures are taken. The most important of these was to stop the spread of Arabic language into Berber- speaking regions. It is likely that his work was directly responsible for the widespread adoption of the bled al-siba/bled al makhzen dichotomy, because he confidently declared that the Moroccan population is split into “two large divisions, corresponding essentially to peoples of different ethnicities: what is called the bled makhzen and the bled siba.”202 The bled al-makhzen, 200 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 80. 201 CADN Morocco DAI 59, Maurice le Glay, “Notes contributives à l’étude de la question berbère. No. 4: Comment administrer les Berbères?” n.d., probably 1914. Le Glay had a terrible habit of not dating his work. 202 Ibid. 63 he claimed, “is completely Islamized.” The bled al-siba, however, was Berber and Berber- speaking, practiced customary rather than shari’a law, and could be protected from Islamization. In order to accomplish this, he proposed that officers of the military and the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs study Berber themselves and immediately begin teaching French to recently soumis populations. Just as in the mythology developed in Algeria, officials in Morocco believed the Amazigh followed Islam only superficially.203 Writing in his 1925 ethnographic study, Victor Piquet announced that “The Berber peasant understands nothing of the laws of Islam and is completely ignorant of all doctrinal questions. The Berbers are not Muslims; they simply think they are.”204 The reality was that Berber society was no less committed to Islam, and to Muslim identity, than other Moroccans. Patricia Lorcin observes that this “was a cruel paradox, and an indication of the extent to which mythology can obscure reality.”205 As a result, the Protectorate’s Berber policy attempted to protect the Amazigh from Islamization as a corollary to Arabization, seen as contaminants to an idealized Berber nature. In 1915, Lyautey convened a Berber Studies Committee of Berberist ethnographers, anthropologists, and linguists, along with officials of the BAI and military officers. To the chagrin of Le Chatelier and Michaux-Bellaire, this group was drawn largely from the scholars emerging from the École d’Alger, who had greater experience in Berber matters.206 This group was charged with codifying Berber traditions and creating a map that would mark a clear divide 203 Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 237. 204 Victor Piquet, Le Peuple Marocain: Le Bloc Berbère (Paris: Librairie Émile Larose, 1925). Housed at ANOM in the library of the École Coloniale. 205 Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 237. 206 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 135. 64 between zones of Arabic language and Qur’anic law and zones of Berber language and customary law, mapping on to the bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Thus began a decades-long campaign of conducting questionnaires (fiches de tribu) in each newly pacified community, in an attempt to clearly delineate these groups and to establish in writing the customs of land ownership, inheritance, marriage and divorce, and other judicial concerns. From the very beginning, the Orientalist research community in Morocco worked hand in glove with the Protectorate administration to assist in better controlling Moroccan populations. Dissident voices pointing out the lack of clear division between Arab and Berber communities were strategically ignored. Writing in 1914, geographer Augustin Bernard, who emerged from the École d’Alger, concluded that it was impossible to characterize the population of the Maghreb as either Arab or Berber. However, Bernard’s theory differed from his old colleague Doutté’s claim that the distinction was solely political, rather than ethnic. Bernard argued instead that it was Arab ethnicity that was doubtful. He depicted the Moroccan landscape as a gradient of Arabization over a core Berber essence: “Even in the regions the most completely Arabized in appearance it suffices to scratch a bit of the Muslim varnish, the superficial Arab coating, to find Berber traces in the languages, mores and traditions.”207 However, like Doutté, he concluded that this meant that “it would be impossible in North Africa to devise a policy based on the opposition between Arabs and Berbers.”208 However, Doutté and Bernard’s more complex portrayal would not fit on the ethnographically color-coded maps that Lyautey’s administration demanded. Their argument for nuance was at odds with the state’s demand for legibility. 207 Augustin Bernard, “La politique berbère dans le Maroc Central,” Rabat: Résidence Générale, 1914, 2. 208 Ibid. 65 The complexity of the Moroccan situation is that the 1912 Treaty of Fes essentially created two separate yet overlapping states, installing the French Protectorate authority around the Sultan’s Makhzen. Whereas bled al-makhzen referred to lands and groups that had traditionally provided taxes, tribute, and troops to the Sultan, this had always fallen into the pattern of indirect rule, which “required only a minimal state apparatus but rested on local elites and communities who had an interest in withholding resources and knowledge from the center.”209 The French project, in contrast, while paying lip service to the idea of indirect rule of the Berbers, in practice pursued very direct rule indeed. Though appointing indigenous intermediaries like the caïds, it was the district officers of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs who held fairly autonomous positions of strict local control. As Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, drawing on Charles Tilly’s classic analysis of state-making, “direct rule sparked widespread resistance and necessitated negotiations that often limited the center’s power, but for the first time, it allowed state officials direct knowledge of and access to a previously opaque society.” 210 In Morocco, French officials sought to hoard that knowledge and access for their own ends, rather than grant access to the Makhzen. This aim would massively increase the urgency of constructing Burke’s Moroccan colonial archive and Steinmetz’s ethnographic discourse. As linguistic, cultural, and political Arabization appeared to gain traction in Berber villages with increasing ties to the Arabic-speaking cities, French administrators grew frantic to stem the tide of change. According to the logic of the Berber myth, Berbers who abandoned their language and traditions in favor of Arab ones would lose those superior traits that the French 209 Scott, Seeing Like A State, 77. 210 Ibid. See also Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990 - 1992, Revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992). 66 prized in their would-be allies. It did not matter whether the distinctions between Arab and Berber, bled al-makzhen and bled al-siba, were ethnic or political. In either case, berberité and siba were worthy of preservation, and Arabness and the Islamic makhzen were to be contained. Therefore, the French sought to impose their rule on the bled al-siba, incorporating it, not into the bled al-makhzen, but into the French empire, at the sultan’s expense. For example, in the earliest stages of pacification, officers in conflict with Middle Atlas groups like the Aït Ndhir realized that they could achieve their aims more efficiently by strategically omitting reference to the makhzen. In 1913, Lieutenant Colonel Henrys, the regional commander of El Hadjeb, realized that local dissident groups “saw the terms of their surrender as representing formal acceptance of the political authority of the sultan, as well as makhzan administration,” and thus as a threat to their customary autonomy.211 To combat this, Henrys changed the wording of the treaties, replacing the term makhzen with dawla, meaning state – and referring in practice to the French colonial state. Henrys recommended the continued use of the term dawla, “which the mountain-folk will learn in course to respect as soon as they see the difference between the dawla of today and the makhzan of yesterday.”212 Thus, creeping Arabization, spreading along the roads and within the administrations that the French themselves had built, was the greatest threat to the “Berber preserve” they sought to defend.213 Following military pacification, law and education, specifically the promotion of the French language at the expense of Arabic, were the central tenets of this project, and are the subjects of the next chapters. 211 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 139. 212 Ibid. 213 Berque, French North Africa, 123. 67 Ethnic Morocco There can be no doubt that the compilation of the Moroccan ethnographic archive shaped not only native policy, but its practical on-the-ground application for decades onward. Lyautey, inspired by British native administration in India, cherished fantasies of meritocratic recruitment and rigorous training of indigenous affairs officers, as well as the wide dispersal of ethnographic handbooks and pamphlets. In 1913, Lyautey and Le Chatelier had envisioned the creation of a selective training school for this staff, including intensive language and ethnography courses. 214 Though this plan never came to fruition, a variety of training regimes emerged that sought to impart France’s hard-won ethnographic expertise to the foot soldiers of the empire. The Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, for instance, hosted annual conferences attended by academics, policymakers, and military officials. Beginning after the First World War, the IHEM also housed Arabic and Berber language courses and brevet examinations that would grant officers access to bonus pay. Lyautey had particularly hoped that the contrôleurs civiles in Berber regions would speak Berber dialects, reducing the need for interpreters and limiting the use of Arabic in the bled al-siba. In practice, however, there were never enough Berberophone officials, and Lyautey’s promise of “scientific imperialism” was “more of a marketing device than a reality.”215 That said, even the truncated training programs relied on the Moroccan ethnographic archive for their curricula. In a 1928 training lecture to a group of young military officers, for instance, Captain Courtès spelled out the extent to which French policy in Morocco relied upon this ethnographic output. “In this country,” he announced, “more than anywhere else in the world, the indigenous 214 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 112. 215 Ibid., 194. 68 populations’ mode of grouping, their way of life, and, to a certain extent, the distribution of races, are directly dependent upon physical geography.”216 His audience consisted newly-arrived military forces from the metropole, sent to assist in the final phase of the pacification of the bled al-siba. The speech reveals the crucial roles that race theories played in the administration of the country, particularly the primacy of the Berber myth. Courtès’ speech especially demonstrates how the ethnographic research of the turn of the century and the first decades of the Protectorate contributed to the working knowledge and ideologies of on-the-ground agents of empire, particularly the officers of the military and the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. Courtès systematically expounds upon Morocco’s racial composition. Setting aside the comparatively small population of European settlers, Courtès enumerates five racial elements: “Berbers, Arabs, Moors, Jews, and Negroes.”217 He then explains each “race” in depth, from how and when each arrived in Morocco to their phenotypes and supposedly inherent traits. Courtès commented self-deprecatingly that he was ill-suited to deliver a lecture on such a complex academic subject. He apologized that Robert Montagne, head of the sociological library of IHEM, was indisposed for the day – evidence of the ongoing influence of the Orientalists in league with the Protectorate administration. The theories these sociologists and linguists devised – and the mountains of ethnographic field notes they compiled to support them – shaped military, judicial, administrative, and educational policies for the duration of the Protectorate. Robert Montagne was a naval lieutenant who, after serving in the First World War, was posted at Port-Lyautey in Morocco.218 He began to study Arabic and Berber in his free time, and 216 1MA/285/441 Captain Courtès, “Conférence sur le Maroc ethnique: aux officiers de marine de l’Edgard Quinet,” 1928, 3. 217 1MA/285/441 Courtès, 5. 218 Robert Santucci, “Robert Montagne (1893-1954). Un sociologue au déclin de l’Empire,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire 80, no. 300 (1993): 443. 69 soon came to the attention of Lyautey, who invited Montagne to pursue one of the indigenous affairs training courses at IHEM. After distinguishing himself there, Lyautey gave Montagne a remarkable mission: to conduct an ethnographic research tour in the Tachelhit-speaking south in service to the upcoming pacification campaign. His linguistic and ethnographic expertise would come in handy during the Rif war. Afterward, he returned to his studies at IHEM, where he headed the sociological section and gave regular conferences. He published numerous articles in the top journals, and in 1929 his thesis was published as Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le Sud du Maroc.219 Montagne’s theories of Berber political organization will receive greater attention in the next chapter. It is no surprise that Courtès started his lecture with the Berbers. He tells his pupils that “The essential idea, which must be grasped, is that the Moroccan people is not Arab. Morocco is a Berber country, partially penetrated by an Arab population, but which was never governed by the Turks like Algeria or Tunisia.”220 He divides the Berbers into a brunet type and a blond type, the latter more commonly found in the high mountains. According to Courtès, all of North Africa prior to the arrival of Arabs in the seventh century was populated by “an absolutely white race, similar in more ways than one to the populations of Western Europe, speaking its own language, and which we call the Berber race.” An adherent of the Berber myth, Courtès here exhibits its mechanisms of linking Berbers to whiteness and emphasizing their supposed similarities to Western Europeans. Evidently, by 1928 this racial pseudoscience had progressed since its origins in the nineteenth century: 219 Regards sur le Maroc: Actualité de Robert Montagne (Paris: Le Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Modernes, 1986). 220 1MA/285/441 Courtès, 5. 70 The Berbers were long considered the autochthones of North Africa. Today we believe that we have sorted out [débrouillé] how this population, as it existed in the first centuries of the Christian era, resulted from the mix of two races: 1. The true autochthones, who would have been Aurignacians, parents of the Celts that covered our country, who left several megalithic monuments that recall the dolmens, menhirs, and cromlechs of Gaul. 2. Invaders, of the Semitic race, who came from the Orient with the Berber language. This would simultaneously explain the presence of blonds, who would be the descendants of the autochthones, as well as the similarity of traits between some Berbers and the Assyrian type.221 This new interpretation accomplished several things in service of the Berber myth. The identification of a common ancestor – these Aurignacians – of both the Berbers and the French explained how the two groups were inextricably linked. However, the introduction of a new group of “Semitic” invaders served to explain phenotypic difference between Berbers and Western Europeans, and also justified ranking the Berbers lower on the racial hierarchy (on the racist logic that the white Aurignacian population had been adulterated). Furthermore, this origin story posited that the Berbers were not the “true autochthones” of Morocco, but rather that both they and the French shared equal claim to the territory on the basis of shared ancestry from this ancient proto-Mediterranean Aurignacian group. Courtès then sketches a history of the Berbers, which echoes earlier versions of the Berber myth. Channeling the writings of Michaux-Bellaire, Courtès claims that ancient Berbers 221 Ibid., 6. 71 resisted incursion by all invaders for centuries, from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the Roman and Byzantine Empires: “In sum, by the seventh century, Morocco had already risked on several occasions being absorbed by the various Mediterranean hegemonies; but the combined energies of her sun and her people resisted these waves, however powerful, and neutralized their influence.”222 Then came an even more powerful wave, because the seventh century Arab invasions “printed a new physiognomy onto North Africa.” However, Courtès claims, Arab influence was felt even less in Morocco than in Algeria, because the Atlas Mountains and the force of an “organized Berber state” meant that Arabs were only able to settle in the plains – the birth of the divide between bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. Courtès mentions the three Berber dialects, claiming that the Tamazight-speakers of Morocco’s mountainous interior are the most interesting. “This is where the Berber race and civilization have been preserved intact. Some of the great tribes of this group have remained, since time immemorial, so confined in their mountains and so little mixed with the movements of populations that History makes no mention of them.”223 Courtès further claims that many of Morocco’s Arabs are not even that, but simply Arabized Berbers – a clear reference to the ethnographic theories of Augustin Bernard. “Thus,” he announced, “the Berber essence remained robust, and if the language and the law of the Arabs spread in the wake of their religions among the Berbers closest to the plains, the Race itself was little changed.”224 Hence, the final tenet of the Berber myth, which held that their Islamization was superficial. 222 Ibid., 8. 223 Ibid., 11. 224 Ibid., 10. Capitalization in the original. 72 The next section of his lecture deals with Morocco’s second group: the Arabs, “or, more precisely, the Arabized Berbers,” who dwell on the Western plains and plateaus and adopted the Arabic language. Perilously close to insulting the Cherifien royal family, Courtès dismissively states that, in order to claim Arab authenticity, “they invoke Arab origins that are most often fanciful, attempting to attach themselves to the descendants of the Prophets or his companions.”225 However, almost directly quoting Bernard, Courtès conspiratorially confides in his comrades, “you don’t have to scratch the Arab polish very deep to find the Berber beneath!”226 Based on the 1926 census which counted roughly five million Moroccan indigènes, Courtès indicates in a handwritten marginal amendment that there are “approximately three million Berber-speaking Berbers against two million Arabized and Arabic-speaking Berbers.”227 Although my focus is on the Arab/Berber dichotomy of Protectorate ideology, I include here all of the groups Courtès introduced both because it hints at the true complexity and heterogeneity of Moroccan society – evading easy categorization – and because it reveals how Protectorate officials sought to condense this heterogeneity into easily-grasped lessons that ultimately rely on racial stereotypes. Courtès’ lecture is a lesson in legibility, exposing its inherent limitations. Additionally, he reveals the enduring influence of the Moroccan ethnographic archive on the formation of colonial officers. The Moors and the Jews, he continues, while not large populations, nevertheless play important social roles. He identifies the Moors as those pushed into Morocco from the Iberian 225 Ibid., 12. 226 Ibid., 13. 227 Ibid., 13. He uses the term “Berbères arabisés et arabophones,” intriguingly distinguishing between Arabization as a linguistic and ethnic category. 73 Peninsula during the Reconquista, “of a European type, but very lymphatic.”228 They settled in the larger cities, especially Rabat and Fes, to form a wealthy, literate commercial bourgeoisie. Courtès asserts that they are disciplined and proud, with refined manners and courtliness, and, “despite their appearances, a profound Muslim fanaticism. The scorn the Berbers for their ruggedness, their harshness, their avarice and their lack of civilization, and never cease to ridicule them.”229 He then entertained his audience with a number of impolite jokes of the type that the Moors of Fes supposedly liked to tell about Berbers. He claims that both the Berbers and the Arabs disdained the urban Moors, especially those in Fes, as soft, effeminate, and cowardly. According to the 1926 census, the French Zone included about 108,000 Jews, whom Courtès praised for their “activity, vitality, and admirable facility of assimilation.”230 He cites several different waves of Jewish immigration, from as early as the destruction of the second Temple in the first century C.E. to more recent expulsion from Iberia during the Spanish Inquisition. The Jews of Morocco, Courtès explains, are the principal bankers and merchants of the country, masters of silver and gold metallurgy and jewelry. It is only in Courtès’ discussion of Morocco’s Jews that he makes mention of France’s Christian mission: “All but enslaved by the Muslims, the Moroccan Jews have been saved by the Christians. It can be said, almost without exaggeration, that the principal result of our occupation has been to first make the Jews’ fortune, and then to completely emancipate them.”231 His earlier reference to assimilation is clarified here: “Desirous of escaping the Muslim yoke, they threw themselves into the arms of 228 Ibid., 13. In its archaic use, to be lymphatic was to be “pale, flabby, sluggish” (OED). 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid., 15. 231 Ibid., 17. 74 France, set themselves to learning French, and more and more dress in the European style.” Additionally, he praises their swift adoption of modern technologies, such as the typewriter, telephone, telegraph, and automobile. Finally, Courtès discusses Morocco’s black population, which he estimates at 10% of the population, or 500,000 individuals. Most, he claims, have descended from the slave trade abolished under French control, but others arrived through constant cross-Sahara migrations. Most, he claimed, lived in small communities in the south along the desert and its oases. Then Courtès takes a turn toward the lascivious, while adhering to pseudoscientific racial theories about the “vigor” of black genetics and Orientalist images of the Moorish harem: The mixing of Arab, Berber, and Negro blood is frequent, because the Moroccan has a very pronounced taste for dark-skinned women. This affinity must have physiological causes; not simply an attraction, a caprice, it is probably a necessity. No doubt the inhabitant of Fes, the degenerate and anemic Moor, brings to his descendants a new vigor by infusing them, through marriage (official or not) with a Negress, a proportion of negro blood.232 Along with a brief discussion of the 96,377 European settlers, this completed Courtès delineation of the five races of Morocco. Courtès concludes by comparing the bright prospects of the French project in Morocco to imperial projects elsewhere in the world. In some places, like North and South America, “colonizing nations sometimes encounter races that fade and are extinguished;” whereas in other places, like the “Far Orient,” they encounter “peoples in full vitality whose ethos is incompatible 232 Ibid., 22. 75 with their own.”233 In Morocco, on the other hand, France had the exceptional good luck to meet “a people whose spirit, whose tendencies, generally resembles its own, and with whom assimilation seems possible … A marriage is possible between us and the autochthone.” The only remaining barrier to a “sincere and constant union,” therefore, was the ongoing hostility of “certain tribus, still insoumises.”234 That is what Courtès’ listeners, now thoroughly edified on the nature of Morocco’s diverse population, were there to rectify. From 1927 to 1934, the final push to pacify Morocco’s majority-Berber interior was undertaken by French troops and officers trained in the Berber myth and a vision of Morocco divided along ethnolinguistic lines. The Modernization Paradox In Morocco specifically, the French protectorate authorities’ adaptation of the Berber myth, developed decades earlier in Algeria, led to a paradoxical situation in which official attempts to preserve a mythic Berber identity were undermined by the socioeconomic policies of that same administration, which spurred processes of industrialization, urbanization, and migration that destabilized traditional lifeways. The paradox was that while attempting to create their Berber preserve, the French simultaneously enacted policies that extended the reach of the state into Berber territories and built the roads, railways, and telegraph systems that would bring more contact than ever before between the countryside and the cities. This reflects the multivocality of the French administration, as different departments within the Protectorate bureaucratic apparatus worked at cross-purposes in the service of conflicting goals. 233 Ibid., 26. 234 Ibid., 26. 76 Modernization was one of Lyautey’s primary aims and served to justify the French presence in Morocco – both in terms of the civilizing mission, which promised material benefits to the colonized, and in terms of a return on investment by the metropole. The Rabat-Casablanca railroad was completed even before the Treaty of Fes was signed, linking the two cities in 1911 and making what had been a two-day trip possible within mere hours.235 Many of the earliest infrastructure projects began in service to the military pacification campaign. New roads were required to move troops and equipment into place to fight their highly mobile adversaries, accustomed as they were to the rough terrain of the mountains and desert. Between 1907 and 1931, the French used Moroccan corvée labor to construct over 5,000 kilometers of road.236 In 1917, a new road connected Meknes to Azrou, Midelt, and Rich, creating a north-south passage through the mountains that enabled military patrols and the creation of outposts in the Middle Atlas.237 This and subsequent roads and railways were built by exploiting the corvée labor of newly subdued Berber groups. Further rail lines were not finalized until after the First World War, but then followed the path of pacification through the 1920s and into the 1930s. By 1931, they had laid 1,600 kilometers of railroad, and in 1934, the final stretch of rail connected Fes to Oujda on the Algerian border.238 Pacification ended the same year, so the completion of a rail system linking the far reaches of the country, from Tangier to Marrakech, was a symbolic victory for the French regime. The railroads also connected the new – and highly profitable – phosphate mines to the 235 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 87. 236 Ibid., 55-56. 237 Ibid., 50. 238 Ibid. 77 ultra-modern shipping port at Casablanca. Phosphates were discovered in the south during World War I and quickly became the primary export. The Cherifien Office of Phosphates was created in 1920, with a direct rail connection from their Khourigba mines to Casa Port. In 1921, they shipped 33,000 tons, and after 1930 they were shipping two million tons a year.239 Even today, Morocco is one of the leading producers of phosphates, used in agriculture and manufacturing, and sits on two-thirds of the world’s reserves. Damming projects, including the Sidi Said Maachou dam on the Oum er Rbia, completed in 1929, provided hydroelectric power and rerouted water for irrigating massive agricultural projects. As discussed above, European settlers, though small in number, controlled large quantities of the best farmable land of the plains. This led to separate zones of agricultural production: a European zone of large mechanized farms and a marginal zone of small farms run by Moroccans using traditional methods.240 The plains could no longer sustain the Moroccan population, leading to mass migration and rapid urbanization. By 1954, 150,000 Moroccans lived in the bidonvilles (shantytowns) surrounding Casablanca, which lacked clean water and sanitation.241 Similar situations arose in other cities as they ballooned. Urban modernization projects, particularly in Rabat and Casablanca, were a hallmark of Lyautey’s tenure.242 However, his projects disproportionately benefitted the cities’ European residents and neglected Moroccan quarters. For instance, 36.5 kilometers of sewers were constructed in the cities’ French quarters, 239 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 116. 240 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 90. 241 Daniel Rivet, Le Maghreb à l’épreuve de la colonisation (Paris: Hachette, 2003), 282. 242 See especially Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (University of Chicago Press, 1991). 78 compared to only 4.3 kilometers in the medinas.243 It was Moroccan labor that constructed the roads and railways, the telegraph wires and electrical grid, the apartment blocs and modern sewers of the villes nouvelles – and yet it was largely Europeans who benefitted. In addition to the cities, many Moroccans migrated to the metropole in search of work. Many first gained familiarity with mainland France through military service. During the First World War, 35,506 Moroccans served as colonial laborers in France.244 After the war ended, colonial soldiers and laborers who fought and worked for France were returned to their homelands, including another 45,000 Moroccan goumiers.245 These goumiers marocains, military units originally formed in 1908 and regularized in 1913, appear to have been almost entirely composed of Atlas Berber volunteers.246 These companies developed alongside the pacification campaign of the early Protectorate: as one tribe was ‘pacified’ and accepted state control, a number of fighting men were encouraged to join the goums, with varying levels of coercion. The new French colonial fighters would then participate in the pacification campaign against neighboring tribes. Moroccan goumiers fought against ‘Abd al-Krim in the Rif War, in both World Wars, and in Indochina. By the time of the French defeat in June 1940, there were 121 goums (companies) totaling approximately 25,000 Moroccan men. Vichy plans to utilize North Africa labor were thwarted when, in 1942, the Allied forces cut off the African empire from the metropole. In 1942 the exiled Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces (FFL) 243 Paul Rabinow, “Governing Morocco: Modernity and Difference,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13, no. 1 (1989): 44. 244 Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1, 1998): 742. 245 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 102. 246 Alain de Sédouy and Eric Deroo, L’Histoire oubliée: les goumiers marocains, television (Paris: Culture Infos, 1992). 79 incorporated over 400,000 fighters in North Africa and went on campaign in Tunisia, Italy, France, and Germany, leading to the liberation of France in 1944.247 The metropole began limiting colonial migration in the interwar era. These restrictions were compounded in Morocco by the 1925 Rif uprising, when the Protectorate regime forbade any labor migration to France.248 The response to these measures, however, was simply to travel clandestinely instead. By 1930 France was the leading immigrant-receiving country in the world.249 However, the pattern for North Africans was not permanent settlement, but temporary and circular labor migration. Through 1939, for instance, Tachelhit-speaking Berbers of Southern Morocco represented over 90 percent of Moroccan migrants in the metropole. 250 Most of these worked in France only four or five years, saving up a small “nest-egg” before returning home.251 A 1936 report on Moroccans living in France revealed that 60 percent lived in groups of four to ten men, 15 percent in groups of two or three, 10 percent in barracks or hotels. Fifteen percent were listed as “living alone, or living with or married to European women.”252 The report concluded therefore that “the normal lodging of the indigènes is the slum.”253 247 Michael F. O’Riley, “National Identity and Unrealized Union in Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes,” The French Review 81, no. 2 (December 2007), 278. 248 Agrour in Bouyaakoubi, ed., Les Amazighs de/en France: L’apport des Marocains dans une identité franco- berbère en construction, 27. 249 Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 4. 250 Agrour in Bouyaakoubi, ed., Les Amazighs de/en France, 27. 251 Rachid Agrour, "Le colonel Justinard et les Ichelhin de la banlieue de Paris", in Bouyaakoubi, 65. Nest-egg = pécule. 252 Joany Ray, “Les Marocains en France,” B.E.M. (18) October 1937, 293. 253 Ibid, 294. 80 In Morocco beginning in 1946, a massive campaign of labor recruitment brought workers to metropolitan France for the “great reconstruction effort,” assisted by American aid under the Marshall Plan.254 The number of Moroccans residing in France rose from about 20,000 in 1942 to over 53,000 in 1962.255 This postwar wave of migration drew in a broader swath of the population, so that by 1954 Tachelhit-speaking Berbers comprised only 65 percent of the total Moroccan migration to France.256 The resultant diversity of North African migrants in France, combined with the arrival of women and children, altered older patterns of labor migration marked by frequent returns home. Ultimately, the accumulation of ethnographic material that consisted the Moroccan colonial archive, that massive undertaking of rendering the country legible to its French protectors, was inadequate in the face of modernizations brought on by that same French intervention. For all their competition for dominance in expertise, Lyautey’s researchers had no sooner recorded what they could gather of Berber lifestyles and customs than these began to rapidly change. The next chapter will examine the ways that attempts to codify, calcify, and standardize these customs came into conflict with more pressing political considerations. 254 Agrour in Bouyaakoubi, ed., Les Amazighs de/en France: L’apport des Marocains dans une identité franco- berbère en construction, 29. 255 Hein de Haas, “Morocco: Setting the Stage for Becoming a Migration Transition Country?” Migration Information Source: The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute. March 19, 2014. 256 Bouyaakoubi, Les Amazighs de/en France, 67. 81 CHAPTER 2: CODIFYING TRIBAL LAW: THE PACIFICATION OF MOROCCO, BERBER CUSTOMARY TRIBUNALS, AND ÉCOLES DE FORTUNE Whereas the previous chapter explored the development of Protectorate Berber policy’s ideological underpinnings and ethnographic base, this chapter examines concrete ways in which this policy was enacted upon the Berber population. Specifically, I explore how Berberist intellectuals and officers weaponized their research in service to the French imperial apparatus. I begin with a discussion of what the French called the “pacification” of the bled al-siba. French ethnographers traveling in the wake of the military filled out questionnaires (fiches de tribu) to systematically record extensive information about each group encountered. These registers would form the basis of Berber customary law, establishing a separate judicial system outside the control of the Sultan and instead answering to the French. The Berber courts touch not only on questions of ethnicity and religion, but also the closely-linked question of language. Islam and Arabic were inextricably linked in the French imperial – as well as the Arab nationalist – worldview. The Moroccan Berber dialects were not commonly written, and literacy was not widespread among that population.257 Therefore, the policy of protecting the Berber population from infection by Arabization and Islamization required conducting court proceedings in Berber and recording them in French. Lyautey issued such an instruction in 1923, in order to demonstrate “the Protectorate’s attention to having a Berber policy that is clearly defined by avoiding the Arabization of Berbers against their will and 257 There are historical examples of Berber manuscripts written in Arabic script. Arsène Roux, the subject of Chapter 5, collected a number of these manuscripts, now housed in the Fonds Arsène Roux of MMSH in Aix-en-Provence, France. Furthermore, French Berberists developed a system of writing Berber in Latin script, which was taught at the écoles and collège berbères discussed in subsequent chapters. Today, many Amazigh activists promote the use of a modernized form of Tifinagh, an ancient script found on carvings in the Sahara dating back thousands of years. 82 in trying to embed our influence among them through our language.”258 In the same report, Lyautey declared that these French-language records would be kept by a cadre of interpreter- clerks assigned to the tribunals and the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. It was in large part to staff these positions that the Collège Berbère d’Azrou was created (see Chapter 4). Throughout the forty-year existence of the Berber customary tribunals, the French administration was bombarded by a hail of memos complaining about a chronic lack of well-trained interpreter-clerks.259 Also following in the path of pacification, some officers established ad hoc schools (écoles de fortune) in Berber villages, with the goal of teaching French and inculcating trust in local populations.260 Many of these informal schools were later folded into the official Berber school system discussed in the subsequent chapter. The 1930 “Berber Dahir” exposed the separate Berber justice system (but not the Berber schools) to public censure, and French administrators concluded that secrecy was of utmost importance in the ongoing application of Berber policy. Despite their firmly-held ideological claims, explored in the previous chapter, the mountains of data gathered by sociologists connected to the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs (Bureau d’Affaires Indigènes, hereafter BAI) would not yield the clear division between bled al- makhzen and bled al-siba, or between Arab and Berber, or between shari’a law and customary law, that the Protectorate administration expected to find and hoped to delineate. BAI officers would encounter nuance, ambiguity, bilingualism, and strategic code-shifting again and again in 258 CADN Maroc DAI 580, 8, Lyautey, “Où en est la question berbère au Maroc,” 1923. 259 Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means,” 874. 260 Unfamiliar with the term écoles de fortune, I requested assistance from an archivist at the Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes. She was not familiar with the expression either but told me that the phrasing “de fortune” indicates something haphazard, improvised, and probably temporary. The example she gave was “un abri de fortune,” which would be a makeshift shelter hastily constructed if you got caught in the rain. Upon further investigation, “école de fortune” is mostly used today in the context of refugee camps. 83 their attempts to impose order. Military conquest led to classification of the population and an administrative presence. This classification and oversight allowed for the implementation of new legal structures, which required an intermediary support staff. Training such a staff required French schooling, which provided further opportunity to undermine the authority of the Sultan and reinforce French control. The process of conquest by the military, codification by social scientists, and incorporation into the judicial and administrative apparatus of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs repeated over and over again as the tache d’huile spread across the mountains and deserts of Berber country. From 1912 until the late 1920s, the Protectorate administration honed these procedures. Then, from 1927 to 1934, the extension of Pacification into the High Atlas and Anti- Atlas regions called for ever-greater investments of manpower, material, and bureaucracy, creating an unstable system based on a myth. Military Pacification, 1912-1927 By 1914 Lyautey controlled the cities and the widening bled al-makhzen, but the bled al- siba and its associated Amazighité continued to elude him, as resistance persisted for decades in the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, and the Anti-Atlas foothills and desert. The process of conquering Morocco’s bled al-siba hinterlands, euphemistically referred to as Pacification, relied on the tache d’huile strategy that Lyautey adopted from his mentor, General Joseph Gallieni.261 This harkens back to the “makhzen policy” versus “tribes policy” debate of the previous chapter. Having successfully achieved the makhzen policy and attained the sultan’s 261 Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 84 sanction of further action, Lyautey returned to the tribes policy he had pursued during his stint in the borderlands. The strategy was to establish footing at three points of entry – Oujda in the northeast, Casablanca on the Atlantic coast, and along the Guir river into the Middle Atlas, march into the Moroccan interior from southwestern Algeria – and then spread like an oil stain to cover the western plains to the foothills. They were to establish “precarious” links between the three zones of control, and from there work to “gradually enlarge each by progressively occupying and pacifying the entire country.”262 This process continued through 1913, successfully linking the Western plains and the Eastern zone of control spreading from Algeria in May of 1914. The outbreak of the first World War halted progress when troops were pulled away to fight in Europe. During World War I, thousands of Moroccans, and hundreds of thousands of other French colonial subjects from around the world, were conscripted into military and labor service to the Empire. In addition to the 35,506 Moroccan laborers sent to metropolitan France during the war,263 another 45,000 Moroccans served as soldiers in Europe and the Levant, with approximately 9,000 killed and 17,000 wounded.264 After the war, operations resumed. At the beginning of 1920, Lyautey committed to sending as many troops as needed for the swift pacification of what he dubbed “le Maroc utile,” meaning any economically useful areas, and pledged that it would be under control by 1923.265 This distinction largely mapped on 262 1MA/285/441 Grisel, p. 4. 263 Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1, 1998): 742. 264 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 102. 265 William A. Hoisington Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 90. 85 to the bled al-makhzen – those regions of lower priority were the high mountains and the desert, or the heart of the bled al-siba. That accomplished, the next task was to gradually pacify each Berber confederation one by one. Figure 3: “The Great Steps of Pacification,” 1927 Marked are the Spanish Zone of the Rif (Zone Espagnole), Middle Atlas Mountains (Moyen Atlas), High Atlas Mountains (Grand Atlas), and Anti-Atlas region266 266 CADN 1MA/285/441 Carte des Grandes Étapes de la Pacification du Maroc, Bureau d’Affaires Indigènes, 1927. 86 In a 1927 training course at IHEM for the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, Lieutenant- Colonel Grisel declared to his trainees that France had never intended to occupy Morocco, but “only to hold it for a time” in order to help ameliorate the internal political conflict.267 By the end of 1923, Grisel announced, “the limits assigned to le Maroc utile were fully attained. We arrived at a stable military situation which seemed to permit a serious reduction of manpower and maintenance budget.” Personnel dropped to 64,500 men, a precipitous decrease from the 1921 maximum of 95,000. Then in 1924, apparently to Grisel’s personal annoyance, a “situation” arose in the North that required French attention. Berber commander ‘Abd el Krim led a rebellion in the Rif, which fell primarily in the Spanish Zone. Grisel grudgingly conceded that this constituted “an indigenous power of substantial material means and a certain level of organization,” and was frustrated that the Spanish were incapable of handling it themselves. Grisel announced to the assembled trainee officers that the “situation” in the Rif would be the topic of a separate conference. Likewise, the Rif conflict is not the topic of my dissertation.268 Finally, by the time of Grisel’s speech in 1927, “we have achieved the total occupation of the North of Morocco… contact has now been established along the entire front between the outposts of the two Powers, and the Northern zone of insoumission has completely disappeared.”269 With both le Maroc utile and the Rif under control, this would enable the military to turn its attention to the remaining 267 1MA/285/441“Les Grandes Etapes de la Pacification du Maroc,” Conférence faite par M. le Lieutenant-Colonel GRISEL, Sous-chef de l’Etat-Major Général du Général Commandant Supérieur des Troupes du Maroc, 1927, p. 5. 268 See instead C. R. Pennell, A Country with a Government and a Flag: The Rif War in Morocco, 1921- 1926 (Cambridgeshire, UK: Middle East & North African Studies Press, 1986). 269 1MA/285/441Grisel 1927, 25. 87 areas of dissidence: the Middle Atlas and High Atlas mountains, and the hills and desert of the Anti-Atlas into the Sahara. These areas – considered the essential core of the bled al-siba – were the territories of Tamazight- and Tachelhit-speaking Berber populations. This was the final showdown that the Berber Studies group had been preparing for since 1915. Over the intervening decade, ethnographers and geographers had conducted study trips along the edges of these still-dissident regions, and the various ethnographic apparatuses of the Protectorate were geared to spring into action. The IHEM, inheritor of the École d’Alger group, trained scores of officers and interpreters for the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, while the former Mission Scientifique had been incorporated into the BAI as its Service Sociologique. It was this latter group charged with compiling the fiches de tribu for the remainder of unclassified, unpacified tribes. Concluding his training lecture, Grisel addressed the purpose of French intervention in Morocco, and the nature of military action. “The great work pursued in Morocco,” he announced, “is not war but a work of peace: Pacification.” Therefore, he advised his trainees against ever using the word “war” to describe military action, arguing that This word has a precise meaning and does not apply here. War aims for the destruction of the adversary; it assumes an organized adversary, and that victory consists precisely of destroying that organization to reduce the enemy to impotence. Here, there is nothing resembling this; we do not want the destruction of the adversary due to the fact that it is for him that we work and for him that we will work tomorrow! Additionally, this adversary is not organized, and a strike to one place and one tribe has no repercussion, even 20 km away on a neighboring tribe!270 270 Ibid., 27. 88 The resistance to employing the term “war,” even to as bloody a conflict as that in the Rif during the 1920s, became a hallmark of French military action in the colonial sphere. The French administration never referred to the violent conclusions of imperial control of Algeria and Vietnam as wars, contributing to long-lasting challenges of reconciling with the imperial past.271 Berber Myth to Berber Policy Just as in conquest the French pursued both the makhzen policy and the tribes policy, in administration they similarly approached the makhzen and the bled al-siba with divergent policies. A separate, French-administered Berber policy, including oversight of courts and schools removed from makhzeni authority, developed in parallel to the process of military Pacification. Because the structure of the Protectorate necessitated the establishment of a French administrative apparatus that supplemented and surrounded, but did not replace or circumvent, the bureaucracy of the Sultan’s makhzen, French authorities could not legally alter the judicial system of the country. This was a religious institution, based on Qur’anic law, and presided over by the Sultan as Commander of the Faithful (amir al-mu’minin). Thus, while the French succeeded in establishing segregated legal pluralism, controlling the civil courts governing European colonists, and walling off separate Jewish tribunals, they could not legally control judicial matters between Muslims.272 However, Berber customary law presented a loophole. Based on ethnographic researchers’ claims that Berber traditional justice differed markedly from Islamic law, the 271 Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte & Syros, 1998). 272 Jessica M. Marglin, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 89 Bureau of Indigenous Affairs focused on the jemaa council as the seat of Berber judicial authority, rather than the shari’a courts. Typically, in practice, the highly localized jemaa consisted of four or five notables, who would hear cases and settle disputes between members of the community. The Bureau of Indigenous Affairs drafted a Dahir proclaiming the rights of Berber groups to “adjudicate matters of collective land ownership, succession, inheritance, and personal status through customary law,” which Sultan Moulay Youssef signed on September 11, 1914.273 Crucially, this Dahir also allowed the Protectorate administration to oversee this system and classify which groups constituted “Berber tribes.” As Pacification progressed, the BAI would be responsible for implementing and overseeing customary tribunals in every newly soumis Berber confederation. Sociologists and ethnographers, well-versed in the Orientalist research on Berber societies emanating from Algeria and more recently from Morocco itself, set out to codify Berber customary law with the Berber myth as their guiding principle. By the myth’s logic of superficial Islam and political anarchy, Protectorate administrators justified the removal of Berber regions and communities from the oversight of the Sultan and his makhzen, which governed according to Islamic shari’a law. From the start, Lyautey’s goal of protecting Berber cultural and linguistic purity extended to the legal realm. “The secret of my conquest,” Lyautey wrote in 1918, “was to protect the Berbers against all intrusion into their private lives, their customs, their traditions. . . In this way I have always supported the Berber element against the degenerate effects of Arab-Muslim culture.”274 Relying on the Berber myth, fears of creeping 273 Adam Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912-1930.” The Journal of North African Studies 16, no.3 (2011), 365. 274 Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, Lyautey l’Africain: textes et lettres du maréchal Lyautey, presenté par Pierre Lyautey Volume III: 1915-1918 (Paris: Plon, 1954). 90 Arabization, and the covert goal of undermining the Sultan’s authority, Protectorate officials sought to establish a justice system in Berber country that would preserve what they perceived as Berber cultural distinctiveness while attracting Berber loyalties to France. Dissenting voices pointing out the lack of clear division between Arab and Berber communities were strategically ignored. Robert Montagne, introduced in the previous chapter and one of the preeminent Berberists of the era, reported in 1930 that “between customary tribes and tribes which live under shari’a, there is no linear frontier. One finds, on the contrary, vast zones where the two judicial regimes overlap, resulting in a mixture characterized by nuance.”275 He opposed the proposed project to determine a clear distinction between customary and shari’a law that mapped neatly onto the makhzen/siba divide, which he considered similarly illusory. Furthermore, Montagne observed that “Berber society oscillates between two rival and opposed social forms, between, on the one hand, democratic or oligarchic tribal republics ruled by assemblies or hierarchies of assemblies, and, on the other hand, ephemeral tribal tyrannies, exemplified in modern times by the great Caids of the South.”276 An expert on the southern Tachelhit-speaking “Grands Caïds,” Montagne was far less familiar with the supposedly anarchic Tamazight-speaking groups of the Middle Atlas. In the South, where Lyautey visited the Grands Caïds as early as 1912, native policy developed “straight out of the playbook of the Algerian Arab Bureaux: deals were cut with the leading great qaids on how much autonomy they required, cash was distributed, and the French protectorate administration agreed to stand aside.”277 Here, indirect rule succeeded, at least from the perspective of the Protectorate administration. Lyautey, 275 Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le makhzen dans le sud du Maroc: essai sur la transformation politique des Berbères sédentaires (groupe chleuh). Paris: F. Alcan, 1930. 276 Ibid. 277 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 136. 91 nostalgic for Europe’s own monarchical era, was enchanted by the romantic feudalism of the Grands Caïds. He wrote on that visit, “I am living here for the past ten days in total fairyland: there is no orientalist painting which reaches the brilliance of my arrival in Marrakech.” He further wrote, “One must remark that in the persons of the grand qaids of the South, we are dealing with true feudal barons, masters and lords of their lands, having at their disposition warriors, citadels, and prisons.”278 Lyautey was either unaware or uninterested in the reality that the supremacy of these powerful Berber leaders was a product of political turmoil in the nineteenth century, rather than a survival of medieval splendor. It was in this context that Montagne conducted fieldwork for his well-received thesis, Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le Sud du Maroc. Furthermore, Montagne was associated with the IHEM, not the Service Sociologique. His concerns were therefore disregarded by the BAI sociologists, confident as they were in their ability to delineate the border between shari’a and Berber customary judicial systems – reflecting the multivocality, and internal competition over ethnographic expertise, of the Protectorate project. Montagne’s lack of knowledge on Middle Atlas Tamazight ethnography disqualified his warnings in the eyes of his rivals – particularly as the “Lyautey system” employed to bring the Grands Caïds under French influence was not working in the Middle Atlas. For one thing, they could not seem to locate chiefs with whom to cut deals. When they seemingly did, tribes would turn against their purported leaders. For a solution to this quandary, researchers turned to older ethnographies, particularly the three-volume La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles, published in 1893 by Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux. Influenced thus by the Kabyle myth, French officials claimed that 278 Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’ institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 1912– 1925 Volume 1 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 186. 92 Middle Atlas Tamazight-speaking Berber tribes were governed by the jema’a council, and that, “in effect, they were democratic societies.”279 This return to the founding ethnographies of the Kabyle myth reflected fears among Moroccan Berberist circles of repeating mistakes made in Algeria. These errors included “the delay in recognizing the specificity of Kabyle society, the inadvertent favoring of the spread of the Arabic language and of Islamic law, and the unreasonable haste to assimilate the Kabyles to French civilization once a Berber policy had been adopted.”280 In order to preserve the Tamazight-speaking Moroccan Berber culture, a new Berber policy must stem the tide of Arabization without imposing Frenchness in its place. Therefore, the authorities persisted. Rather than accepting Arabization as unavoidable and indeed preexisting, it came to be portrayed as contagious but preventable, and measures such as separate courts would serve to inoculate Berber populations. This is in accordance with what George Steinmetz calls “stabilization,” as well as James Scott’s discussion of “legibility.” Discussing native policy in German colonial contexts, Steinmetz observes that, Native policy was an attempt to identify a uniform cultural essence beneath the shimmering surface of indigenous practice and to restrict the colonized to this unitary identity. Native policy can thus be defined as any official intervention directed toward stabilizing a colonized group around a particular definition of its culture, character, and behavior.281 This search for clear definitions relied upon the colonial expectation, based in Orientalist ideologies, that the colonized would “present an unchanging, recognizable version of their own 279 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 139. 280 Ibid., 143. 281 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 43. 93 culture,” which needed only to be codified.282 They believed that Berber tribes existed in a primordial state, and therefore their customs had remained fundamentally unchanged for time immemorial. However, despite colonial expectations of a timeless, unchanging Berber code, pre- Protectorate Berber judicial practices were not static. Adam Guerin reveals that “systems of Moroccan customary law were far more complex and historically contingent than French scholars imagined.”283 Therefore, as in many colonial contexts, officials sought “both to clarify custom and to codify it” in order to facilitate their rule.284 Fiches de Tribu French attempts to survey and codify all of Moroccan society continued throughout the duration of the Protectorate. Continuing the work of the Berber Studies Committee of 1915, the Protectorate’s Service Sociologique traveled with the military in its pacification exercises, filling out standardized questionnaires (fiches de tribu) on each group encountered. The goal of the questionnaire on “La Société Berbère” was to determine “the degree of Arabization and Islamization of the ethnic group (tribu) from four perspectives: social, political, administrative, and religious (in relation to the geographic situation).”285 The result would be a map of tribes that adhered to either Berber customary law or the shari’a law of the makhzen, as well as an aggregate set of legal codes and practices of Berber custom. 282 Ibid., 44. 283 Adam Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912-1930.” The Journal of North African Studies 16(3) 2011: 364. 284 Sara S. Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896-1996 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001) 7. 285 CADN MA DAI 53b Fiches de tribus. 94 Reflecting fears of the supposed contagion of Arabization/Islamization, the fiches de tribu were intended to help determine “the degree of the tribe’s resistance to Arab contamination (noting above all its receptiveness to Arab political and administrative relations)” and to identify “in a word, the category into which we may classify the tribe and its classification in a chart going from the purely Arab society to the purely Berber society.”286 Anthropologist Katherine Hoffman examined some of these fiches de tribu in “Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco.” She writes that the questionnaire “reads much like an early-twentieth-century anthropological trait inventory: spoken language, family and tribal structure, habitat and environmental context, property, law, war, and religion.”287 She notes that they use “tribe” and “ethnic group” interchangeably, as well as “race” and “ethnicity,” concluding that “in characterizations of the North African population, French colonial configurations were simultaneously biological and social insofar as it was believed these were inherently linked.”288 This reflects the slippage, discussed in the previous chapter, between Arab/makhzen, Berber/siba as simultaneously ethnic and political categories. This decades-long collaborative process of classification aligns with Scott’s description of official projects of simplification in order to make a complex social reality “legible” to state actors.289 The fiches de tribu were specifically designed to provide data on individual tribes’ legal, religious, and political organizations, for the purpose of determining whether they adhered to shari’a or supposedly customary law. If the latter, the questionnaires served to standardize the 286 CADN MA DAI 53b, “Circular 213 DR2,” 15 June 1914. 287 Hoffman, “Purity and Contamination,” 731. 288 Ibid., 732. 289 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 80. 95 legal practices of customary law; for instance, the fines imposed as punishment for various crimes. This French classificatory project was possible only because most of the Berber groups in question lacked a written tradition; the French process of writing these facts created them. Of course, the fiches de tribu, though used to determine whether a particular group would be subject to shari’a law or French-run Berber customary tribunals, never revealed the clear-cut divide that Lyautey and his BAI social scientists hoped to find. In fact, let us recall Edmund Burke’s observation that “despite the earnest belief of many of its proponents, a scientifically driven native policy was more of a marketing device than a reality.”290 Gary Wilder asserts that the figure of the “informed, methodical, caring, and independent public servant…became a metonym for France in Africa,” a representative of colonial rationality and colonial humanism. 291 Despite Lyautey’s promotion of an image of quietly efficient, highly modern, and ethnographically informed officials peacefully easing native Moroccans into the French imperial fold, “in the end, native policy was carried out by soldiers, not social scientists.”292 As William Hoisington concluded, “in Morocco, the ultimate testing ground of the Lyautey method, pacification came everywhere through armed and bitter contests with resistant townsmen and tribesmen. Pacification was war, not peace.”293 290 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 194. 291 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 55. 292 Ibid. 293 William A. Hoisington Jr., Lyautey and the Conquest of Morocco (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 205. 96 Figure 4: Fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou and Aït Yazza, in the Middle Atlas, 1935294 One fiche de tribu, recorded by Captain Denat of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs in 1935, is a particularly thorough example of the form. Incorporating a number of maps and photographs, Denat’s fiche de tribu is remarkable in its detail. Denat arrived in 1932 during what 294 CADN_1MA/285/454 Capt. Denat, “Étude du droit coutumier berbère des Aït Haddidou – Aït Yazza de l’Assif Melloul,” BAI, 1 January 1935. 97 he delicately referred to as “military operations for a reduction of dissidence in the High Atlas.”295 The Aït Yazza, among whom Denat was stationed, were a subsidiary group of the Aït Haddidou confederation. They spoke Tamazight, the central Berber dialect, but closely bordered the Tachelhit-speaking Souss region. Denat recorded that they referred to themselves as Imaziren. Denat observes that “the Aït Haddidou tribe, locked within the high mountains of the Great Atlas, was completely sheltered from the Arab penetration of past centuries and from the domination of the Sultans, who would not have failed to transform the local Berber mores and customs of the Aït Haddidou.”296 With clear relish, Denat records that not a single man or woman of the Aït Yazza speaks Arabic, that their tribal customs are entirely oral, and that he acquired these records by interviewing the elders of the customary tribunal. He depicts his record of tribal custom as a snapshot of the situation in 1933; already by the end of 1934 certain “barbaric” and “immoral” customs had been abolished under French tutelage (for instance, the BAI sought to eradicate practices of familial vengeance that led to years-long feuds).297 However, he also laments the impending disappearance of some of their finest customs, those of hospitality and fraternity. “One must remark, in effect, that if we brought by our arrival Peace and Order to the Moroccan Atlas, we have also reduced the authority of the jema’a to the profit of functionaries named by the Administration,” who would not, Denat believed, be able to uphold the aforementioned hospitable customs – particularly as any surplus must now go to the central government in the form of taxes. 295 Ibid. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid. 98 Figure 5: Table of contents, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou298 Denat depicts the Aït Yazza as poor, semi-nomadic herders, inhabiting an inhospitable landscape of sharp cliffs and icy winters. He reports recording temperatures as low as -25 C. Based on the length and detail of his report, the reader imagines Denat passing long winter nights writing down his observations and collected legends. The oral history he records dates back 250 years, and although most of this is a recounting of names of rival tribes pushed off their mountain, it also includes stories of cleverly won battles. The collected photographs depict the landscape and buildings, including the newly constructed Bureau of Indigenous Affairs office 298 CADN_1MA/285/454 Capt. Denat, “Étude du droit coutumier berbère des Aït Haddidou – Aït Yazza de l’Assif Melloul,” BAI, 1 January 1935. 99 (See Fig#); men and women playing games, sports, and dancing; and, jarringly, the burnt corpses of French legionnaires killed by “dissidents” during the 1933 summer military campaign. Figure 6: Hand-drawn map of neighboring tribes, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou299 299 CADN_1MA/285/454 Capt. Denat, “Étude du droit coutumier berbère des Aït Haddidou – Aït Yazza de l’Assif Melloul,” BAI, 1 January 1935. 100 Denat records the most common first names for men and women, with their diminutive childhood nicknames. He notes that men’s surnames are a patronymic, occasionally accompanied by a descriptive nickname (“the Lame, the One-Eyed, the Traitor”). Oddly, though he lists women’s surnames, he claims that they “don’t usually mean anything.” Perhaps; or perhaps the women just did not want to tell him what their names meant. He dedicated a great deal of space and attention to describing the marriage customs of the tribe, which he appeared to find extraordinary. Marriage, he wrote, was a casual affair, and both men and women could repudiate their spouses and remarry at will. There was no prostitution; instead, a man may marry a woman and divorce her a day or so later, though he must give her an alimony payment. Both boys and girls may marry upon arriving at puberty, and Denat remarked that some girls were still children after their first or even second divorce. Girls who reached the age of 18 or so without marrying were mocked by their peers; much better to be a divorcée than a virgin. As a result, Denat wrote, the great freedom of marriage allowed the Berber woman – her right to marry with whom she pleases, her right to divorce when she wishes, without being obliged to give even a single reason, the freedom she has in the house of her husband – renders her a being similar to a man. Her life, her gait, her look, her frankness, give her a particular mentality and make her a very different woman from Arab women.300 On the other hand, in later sections Denat describes the beatings a husband is permitted to give his disobedient wife, though he assures the reader that these are light, and that if a woman feels she is mistreated, she is always free to divorce. 300 Ibid. 101 Figure 7: Photo of Tamazight Berber women playing a leap-frog game, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou301 In summary, Denat informs his supervisors at the Bureau of Indigenous affairs that the fiche de tribu is an important record of the good and the bad of these rapidly changing customs. His documentation may serve either as an ethnographic relic, or perhaps, he hints, “as a basis for the development of a more just, less barbarous law, taking into account simultaneously the habits 301 CADN_1MA/285/454 Capt. Denat, “Étude du droit coutumier berbère des Aït Haddidou – Aït Yazza de l’Assif Melloul,” BAI, 1 January 1935. 102 of the Ait Haddidou, the authority of the Makhzen Central, and the benefits brought to this country by our European civilization.”302 No new and more just law, however, was forthcoming. Customary Law and the Berber Dahir of 1930 The best new research on the long-understudied and misunderstood system of Berber customary law comes from Adam Guerin and Katherine Hoffman. In “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912-1930,” Guerin argues that the Berber judicial system represents an example of colonially invented tradition and custom. His work corrects earlier scholarship that took the French colonial narrative at face value, accepting that the Protectorate administration “left the social and political structures that organised indigenous life relatively untouched and worked with local leaders to ensure the tranquility of rural societies otherwise hostile to outside influence.”303 Drawing on the work of T.O. Ranger and Eric Hobsbawn, Guerin claims instead that “the so-called reform of Berber customary law was rather an invention of a system that French administrators used to remove the Berber population from the influence of the Arab makhzan, to marginalise religious law in favour of secular European values, and ultimately to fracture the network of social, cultural, and political relationships between the sultan and his people.”304 However, Guerin does not connect the Berber myth to fears of Arabization, but considers these as separate, and even competing, French colonial conceptions. 302 Ibid. 303 Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912-1930,” 362. 304 Ibid. 103 The French attempt to impose a Berber customary legal system on Morocco’s Berber country would appear to lack what Scott calls a high-modernist ideology, committed as it was to the preservation of ancient tribal traditions. However, Scott defines this ideology as a “muscle- bound” version of confident belief in scientific progress and, “above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”305 French Orientalists, emerging from the intellectual tradition of scientific racism, believed that the racial hierarchical placement of European, Berber, and Arab adhered to natural laws. Their attempt to maintain strict social and legal separation between these groups, based on a supposedly scientific determination of ancient legal custom, reflects an overconfidence in the possibility of rationally ordering human society. Burke identifies the French Protectorate as a “high modernist project,” and its colonial ethnography as “explicitly and self-consciously counterinsurgent, a tool of colonial social engineering.”306 Lyautey himself was confident in his administration’s ability to rationally examine, codify, and thus control Moroccan society. When the conflict broke out in the Rif in 1924, the French military appointed Marshal Philippe Pétain, rather than Lyautey himself, to fight Abd el Krim’s insurrection alongside the Spanish. Insulted, Lyautey resigned as Resident General in 1925 and returned to Paris, where he continued his vigorous defense of French colonial practices. However, his departure “irrevocably altered the structure, personnel, and general philosophy of the Protectorate government.”307 Lyautey’s successor, Theodore Steeg, was not as committed to the idea of preserving Berber society intact. As Sara Berry explains, colonial officials “placed themselves in the 305 Scott, Seeing Like A State, 4. 306 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 193. 307 Guerin, 371. 104 position of adjudicating competing interpretations of traditional rules and precedents. Committed to resolving questions … in accordance with ‘custom,’ colonial officials found themselves obliged to learn what custom was.”308 This gave individuals and groups “eager to advance their own interests within the colonial order” the opportunity to present “multiple, often conflicting interpretations” of how the law operated.309 “In practice,” Berry argues, “officials’ attempts to govern through tradition were as likely to prolong disputes as to end them, and their search for knowledge of customary rules and historical precedents produced debate rather than consensus about the past.”310 This echoes Guerin’s finding that, in the customary tribunals the French hoped would be self-governing, “day-to-day arbitration was ultimately hamstrung by the complexity of the hybrid regime that was otherwise unrecognisable to local Moroccans.”311 As the customary tribunals struggled with practical issues of standard precedent and enforcement, as well as more philosophical and religious issues of legitimacy, the BAI and Steeg began seeking a solution. Increasingly, their proposals advocated gradually converting Berber customary law into French Napoleonic law and placed directly under French jurisdiction. This was not a new concept. As early as 1914, skeptics of the customary law project had proposed introducing the French legal system to Berber country. Augustin Bernard, who believed that Arabization left unchecked would dominate Morocco’s Berber soul, wrote that “Neither the Berber language nor law can subsist in the presence of a superior organism. It will thus be 308 Sara S. Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries, 7. 309 Ibid. 310 Ibid. 311 Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco,” 369. 105 necessary to give them our language and our law.”312 A decade later, Steeg’s BAI associates seemed to agree with Bernard’s assessment and considered Berber legal policy a failure. In June of 1927, however, the French advisor to Moulay Youssef reported the Sultan’s opposition to such a change. The advisor wrote that His majesty has remarked that the organization of shari‘a is a strictly religious matter and absolutely impossible to modify. I have commented a number of times on the sultan’s position on the Berber question. He recognizes that the Berber tribes have been organized according to the French authority; in fact, he supports this reform. He also recognizes that these tribes are administered outside shari‘a by their traditional customs, but he does not in any way wish to be involved in this process and cannot make any decision or sign any official document that will disrupt shari‘a or renounce his position as Imam – guardian of religious law.313 Guerin observes that this is “perhaps the clearest French articulation of the severely compromised position in which the sultan found himself with regards to Berber justice.”314 To agree to let the French take completely control of the Berber justice system would be to abdicate his religious duty; however, it was only through French intervention that the inhabitants of the bled al-siba had been brought under the control of the centralized state in the first place. Because the nature of a Protectorate required the cooperation of the Sultan, even Steeg could not legally circumvent him. 312 Augustin Bernard, “La question berbère dans le Maroc central,” (unpublished paper, 1914), in Fonds Terrier No. 5957. In Burke, The Ethnographic State, 144. 313 In Guerin, 372. From CADN/MA/DAI 732, Lettre Résidentielle No. 3888, 15 Juin 1927. 314 Guerin, 372. 106 Figure 8: Sultan Moulay Youssef and Maréchal Lyautey, Paris, July 1926 Then, in November of 1927, Sultan Moulay Youssef died. His son and heir, Mohammed ben Youssef, ascended to the throne at age eighteen. Though he would eventually align himself with the nationalist cause, in the early years of his reign the French found the young Sultan easier to manage than his father had been. In May of 1930 the French administration issued, and the Sultan signed, the so-called Berber Dahir, which, in addition to reiterating the 1914 Dahir granting authority to the French to classify Berber tribes, formally granted oversight of the customary tribunals to the French. However, it was Article 6, which transferred all criminal cases from shari’a principles to the French Napoleonic code, that captured public outrage.315 315 Ibid., 376. 107 Guerin depicts the Berber Dahir of 1930 as the apex of French administrative overreach, rather than the first instance of it, as earlier scholars had accepted. He demonstrates how the Berber tribunals and legal codes were haphazardly constructed from 1914 through the 1920s, growing increasingly unwieldy. According to Guerin, French officials’ commitment to the project was so strong that they were blind to the system’s flaws, and instead came to blame its shortcomings on a “narrative of Muslim perfidy and anti-modern fanaticism,” seeking to further restrict involvement by the Makhzen or Islamic jurists.316 For Guerin, the Berber Dahir was therefore an attempt to permanently block the Sultan’s administration from authority over the Berber courts, and to model Berber law after Napoleonic legal codes. The 1930 Berber Dahir sparked an uproar and became a rallying point for the burgeoning Moroccan nationalist movement, led by French- and Arabic-bilingual alumni and students of the urban collèges musulmans. Their agitation attracted the attention of pan-Arab nationalists and Islamists beyond Morocco’s borders. Urban nationalist leaders stoked fears that the French were trying to separate the Berbers, in part as an attempt to Christianize them.317 They mobilized thousands in marches, and repurposed the Latif prayer, a traditional call for divine relief in times of crisis, to lament French attempts to “separate us from our brothers, the Berbers!”318 Contrary to popular belief, and the mistaken claims of some scholars, the Dahir itself was not repealed; only Article 6 was stricken, and not until 1934.319 Past scholars have also claimed that the backlash to the 1930 Dahir ended the separate Berber Policy of the Protectorate. However, as 316 Ibid., 371. 317 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 139. 318 Ibid., 141. 319 Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means,” 855. 108 Hoffman demonstrates in “Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930-1956,” the dahir was not repealed, and these tribunals were not abolished, but continued to operate until independence. The emergence of Moroccan nationalism in response to the Berber Dahir has been thoroughly examined by other scholars. Viewed through the lens of French administrators enacting Berber Policy in Berber country, however, the importance of the 1930 Berber Dahir was that its nationalist backlash reinforced fears of Arabization and the resultant need for secrecy in their project. According to the logic of the Berber myth upon which Berber Policy was formed, Berbers were superior to Arabs and must be protected from encroachment and absorption. Administrators reported with relief that the protests of 1930 did not extend into Berber regions themselves. Berber policy in general, and the work of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs in particular, was meant to be kept free of oversight by the Sultan’s makhzen. The customary tribunals, écoles de fortune, and écoles berbères were all institutions invented to circumvent the authority of the makhzen. The Bureau of Indigenous Affairs In the wake of pacification, the Protectorate authorities charged the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs with taking over the administration of the newly soumis elements of the bled al-siba from the military. This chronically-understaffed Bureau sent its agents to establish an outpost in each new cercle, where the BAI officer was responsible for establishing cooperation with the local caïd and other notables, implementing French development plans through corvée labor, and gathering intelligence for the Information Service. Ultimately, officers were to establish and oversee a customary tribunal, as well as work toward the establishment of local schools – 109 although this latter goal was a notoriously low priority for the BAI, to the frustration of education administrators. The BAI generally gained a negative reputation among the French administrative cadres, and in further chapters we will examine how the Bureau came to be seen as an antagonist to the Public Education Service. The BAI attitude toward the Moroccan population does indeed differ markedly from the prevailing ideologies of other administrative offices, reflecting disunity of both purpose and message within the French administration. Frustrated by the failure of official Berber Policy ideology to explain their experience with the heterogeneity of the Moroccan population and hindered by constant staffing shortages, the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs began to shift from acceptance of the Berber myth to a more cynical belief in ubiquitous corruption and obstructionism.320 Beginning in the early 1920s, Indigenous Affairs officers received nine months of training at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines (IHEM) in Rabat before mobilizing into the pacification campaigns in the interior. Their coursework covered the history and demography of Morocco, Islamic and/or Berber law, and Berber or Arabic dialects.321 The goals, priorities, ideologies, and methods of policy implementation employed by the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs emerge clearly in a 1928 training course by Louis Mercier to the new class of officer trainees. Born in Algeria in 1879, Mercier began his long military and diplomatic career as an officer- interpreter in the Army of Africa.322 By 1928, Mercier was the Inspector General of the Bureau 320 See Guerin, “Racial Myth, Colonial Reform, and the Invention of Customary Law in Morocco, 1912-1930,” 373. 321 For the most thorough overview of the formation of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, see Marc Méraud, Histoire des A.I: Le service des affaires indigènes du Maroc (Paris: Public-Realisations, 1990). 322 “Louis MERCIER, Correspondant,” Académie des sciences d’outre-mer, http://www.academieoutremer.fr/academiciens/fiche.php?aId=703. 110 of Indigenous Affairs, charged with overseeing not only the training of new officers but the effective functioning of all outposts. Entitled “Advice to an officer creating a new outpost,” Mercier’s 1928 speech reveals the attitudes inculcated in BAI agents that would influence their work throughout Morocco’s interior. The overarching theme is of intense distrust toward the Moroccan population, with none of the romantic idealism of the mission civilisatrice or the Berber myth. To the officers of the BAI, the Moroccan population was a hostile adversary that must be subdued and controlled by any means necessary. To his trainees, Mercier portrayed the role of an officer establishing an outpost as a heroic challenge, “the highest mission one could entrust to a man,” akin to a naval captain in command of an unruly ship.323 He must lead by example, bearing always in mind a slogan (in English) borrowed from the British during the First World War: “Keep smiling!” Which is not to say, Mercier clarified, “simply knowing how to grimace a smile when you really don’t want to, but is in reality a true discipline to impose upon oneself, a discipline consisting of welcoming, all circumstances with a calm smile, and deciding to always hold oneself to one’s honor.” It was upon these officers’ honor that the French flag, and the swift soumission of the backcountry, would depend. Mercier’s first order of business was to spell out the various personnel over whom the officer would command. The most important distinction was between French personnel and indigenous personnel; the former was to be trusted and respected, the latter watched carefully and never relied upon. French personnel would vary by outpost, but could include a deputy officer, a doctor, an officer-interpreter, secretaries, and laborers from the military, such as drivers and electricians. Even though all of them would have a different background, education, political 323 1MA/285/441 Louis Mercier “Conseils à un Officier qui créé un poste nouveau,” 1928. 111 opinions, personal troubles, and thoughts about their post, “it is thus by your equality of humor, your reserve, and your firmness that you, the leader of the post, must maintain good harmony among your collaborators.”324 These men would live in close proximity and would likely be the sole Europeans for miles around, so the commanding officer would need to maintain discipline and camaraderie. Figure 9: Photo of French officers in front of the BAI office in Imilchil, constructed in a Berber architectural style, from the fiche de tribu for the Aït Haddidou325 324 1MA/285/441 Mercier, 1928. 325 CADN_1MA/285/454 Capt. Denat, “Étude du droit coutumier berbère des Aït Haddidou – Aït Yazza de l’Assif Melloul,” BAI, 1 January 1935. 112 Of particular importance was the officer-interpreter. In the late 1920s, the corps of the officer-interpreters largely consisted Algerian-born Europeans, like Mercier himself, who spoke Berber dialects. Many had served as intermediary officers for colonial troops during the war.326 Over the next decades, they would be replaced or supplemented by graduates of the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines (established in 1920) and the Collège Berbère d’Azrou. Mercier urged the commander to never disrespect, or appear to disrespect, the member of his team most capable of helping him avoid faux pas and pitfalls of communication. Of the interpreter, Mercier reminded his officers that “he has received profoundly different training from your own, but you must give him credit for the considerable effort he has expended to penetrate the language, to a certain point the literature, and most of all the mentality of the people who concern you.”327 The commanding officer was further recommended to attend to the morale of his petit personnel, who “are generally very young people, not always volunteers, who find themselves suddenly deprived of all the distractions they are used to.” He should encourage them to participate in hobbies like sport or gardening, and “ameliorate their material conditions as much as possible,” in order to “make their sojourn to the isolated bled less arduous.” Before moving on to his discussion of the indigenous personnel, Mercier offered one warning about the behavior of the European staff. The commanding officer must insist upon “proper dress, tidiness, good hygiene, and under no circumstances tolerate any of them becoming, by intemperance or manners, the laughingstock of the indigènes: in these isolated posts all Frenchmen must stand together, for it is by them that the dissidents form an opinion of us all.”328 326 See Roger Gruner, Du Maroc traditionnel au Maroc moderne: le contrôle civil au Maroc, 1912–1956 (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1984) and Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means.” 327 1MA/285/441 Mercier, 1928. 328 Ibid. 113 Regarding the non-European personnel attached to the outpost, Mercier held no expectation of such solidarity or solicitude. Instead, his advice for supervising Moroccan staff was to hold them in constant distrust. Declaring that the personnel musulman had more in common with the local population and “even the dissidents” than with the French, Mercier exhorted his charges to “Never lose sight of the fact that each of your indigène personnel has but one undeclared goal, which is to exploit your name, your authority, your influence, in favor of his own interests, while pulling the wool over your eyes.”329 A conviction of Moroccan greed, corruption, and selfishness pervades Mercier’s seminar. Any Moroccan working with the French, he claimed, must be considered to be a spy who will report on all French activities to the local caïd, or, worse, the nearby tribus insoumis. It would therefore be useful for the French officer to learn the local Berber dialect, so that he would no longer have to rely on these intermediaries. That theme reemerges again and again in Mercier’s advice – never depend on anyone, or owe anyone anything, because the Moroccans cannot be trusted. This belief in Moroccan greed and untrustworthiness is particularly evident in the section devoted to dealing with local notables, particularly the caïd: “Here again, I cannot warn you too strongly against our all-too-natural tendency to befriend the indigenous chiefs. Know well that this sentiment is never reciprocated … your native chiefs have only one aim: gain the maximum profit from the functions assigned to them.”330 Mercier lamented that French rule could benefit corrupt caïds, claiming that, in the past, if a caïd got too greedy, his subordinates would rebel. This practice, whereby “the greed of the Caïds is fortunately tempered by the anarchy of the tribes,” was curtailed by French conquest, and it fell to BAI to prevent graft. 329 Ibid. 330 Ibid. 114 One of the officer’s first duties upon the establishment of his outpost in newly soumis territory would be to appoint an official caïd. Mercier cautioned against “any idea that a tribe can be managed like a company or a battalion,” and advised the officer that these anarchic groups had their own internal traditions and hierarchies that he would not immediately be able to grasp or control. If he attempted to install a caïd against the wishes of the group, he could not expect them “to bow their heads before chiefs they have not chosen.”331 He particularly warned against appointing as caïd the first member of the group to declare loyalty to the French. In Mercier’s logic, this individual did so not out of loyalty and gratitude, but out of self-interest, probably to seize a level of power he did not previously possess. Therefore, the officer should select as caïd a true notable of the group, one approved by the local jemaa, and preferably the wealthiest man – he might be less likely to “misbehave,” and if he did, would not have poverty as a rationale. Even with a handpicked caïd, though, the BAI officer should never trust the man. According to Mercier, the best way to ensure against graft would be to make a thorough and careful catalogue of the caïd’s wealth and how he acquired it, and then pay careful attention to any sudden increases in his fortunes. When giving the caïd responsibilities to carry out, such as collecting taxes, raising corvée labor, or distributing materials, the officer would have to supervise personally, given the “infinite variety of illicit sources of profit for native chiefs.” When visiting or communicating with the caïd or other notables, the officer should employ great courtesy, and never attempt to give commands. “In brief,” Mercier advised, “the Chef de poste must depict his role more in the form of a tutelage of educable minors who follow by example, rather than that of an authoritative leader who always imposes his will by force.”332 Additionally, 331 Ibid. 332 Ibid. 115 the officer must always avoid intimacy with or personal obligation to the caïd, because expectations of reciprocity would require the officer to make concessions. Once one concession is made, the caïd would unceasingly demand ever-greater ones. Then, a bit delicately, Mercier warned his pupils that the caïd would attempt “seduction in all its forms,” from fine food and beautiful gifts, to “services of a more intimate order, about which I will say no more here.” 333 To accept any of it would be to fall into the caïd’s debt, and into his hands. The chef de poste must depend upon absolutely no one but himself. Mercier’s advice for keeping the caïd in line was to keep a door open for anyone with a grievance against him, so that he knew he was being watched. The ensemble of Mercier’s recommendations for “handling” Moroccan subordinates was steeped in the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs’ collective general suspicion of Moroccan motives and character. Rather than the romantic “noble savages” and Berber myth of earlier intellectuals, Mercier prepared his men to confront a self-interested, sullen, and potentially hostile adversary – while always maintaining a smile. A key duty was the role played by the Officer of Indigenous Affairs in the customary tribunal. Writing in 1914, Augustin Bernard had remarked that, by their authority in the customary tribunals, “the Native Affairs agent will be the veritable chief of the tribe.”334 Clearly, claims that empowering local jemaa as legal authorities would allow the French to rule indirectly were disingenuous. As powerful as he may therefore have been, Mercier’s hypothetical chef de poste would not relish the task of overseeing the customary court. Mercier recommended again maintaining a positive and patient attitude, because as onerous as the task may be, the tribunal represented the best opportunity for gathering information about the internal machinations and 333 Ibid. 334 Augustin Bernard, “La politique berbère dans le Maroc Central,” Rabat: Résidence Générale (1914), 21. 116 changing opinions of the group. Patience was particularly crucial, and it would be unreasonable to expect order and discipline, because “these are not soldiers but primitives, who have difficulty thinking of two things at the same time.”335 Never strike a complainant, he admonished, even if caught in a flagrant lie. Katherine Hoffman provides the sole analysis of the operation of the Berber customary tribunals after 1930, and she gathers the limited archival sources available to paint a picture of how Berber communities experienced and utilized the justice system. Hoffman argues that, “the courts themselves—and not just the political polemics around their creation—were crucial sites for the negotiation of relations between Moroccan subjects and French administrators, and for attempts to implement French ideas about ethnicity, human progress, and civilization.”336 They were to be overseen by the local Indigenous Affairs officer, assisted by his clerk-interpreters, who would have some say in decisions. However, few of the French Indigenous Affairs officers spoke Berber dialects, although they would be offered incentives of pay and promises of advances to study them. Hoffman found that these officers were often inadvertent “agents of Arabization given their widespread and often unreflective use of Arabic in the Berberophone countryside.”337 Hoffman provides an example from Marcel Turnier, a long-time officer of Indigenous Affairs who penned one of the few accounts of how the customary tribunals operated. As a chef de poste in the south in 1939, Turnier oversaw the jemaa tribunals. His assistant translated from Tachelhit to Arabic, and he reported: 335 1MA/285/441 Mercier, 1928. 336 Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means,” 857. 337 Ibid. 117 The Chleuh of the region were hardcore quibblers [chicaneurs en diables] and we would often see an old woman who had walked 40 kilometers to complain of a stolen egg. Under my supervision, justice was rendered by a council composed of the country’s notables…. Long and exhausting work. Sometimes I got irritated and threw my files at the heads of parties acting in bad faith—the assembly members then smiled seemingly indulgently and with understanding—but if my reactions were violent and rare, our law was, I think, fair.338 Evidently Turnier had forgotten his early training against striking people in the courtroom. In any case, the customary tribunals were plagued by endless and confusing appeals processes, constant questions of their legitimacy by Moroccan subjects, and chronic understaffing. The complaints of BAI officers would lead to the drafting of the Berber Dahir of 1930, as well as contribute to the educational goals of Berber schooling, discussed further in upcoming chapters. One of the most important practices of French imperial exploitation, in Morocco and elsewhere, was the use of corvée labor.339 In the case of the pacification of the Berber interior, the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs was able to appropriate a pre-conquest practice. Traditionally, Berber groups engaged annually in a form of agricultural mutual aid called twiza, which the French arrogated for their own ends. The caïd was charged with providing sufficient manpower for French corvée/twiza projects, such as constructing the outpost itself, building roads, laying tracks, digging wells, and so forth. However, in BAI his training course, Mercier warned against using the twiza too often, or for projects of personal comfort – not out of concerns of abuse, but 338 In Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means,” 864. From Marc Méraud, Histoire des A. I., le service des Affaires Indigènes au Maroc (Paris: La Koumia—Public-Réalisations, 1990), 339. 339 Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 118 because “the more you resort to the twiza for the good of your own station, your personal lodgings, etc., the more the caids will demand that you let them use it themselves for their own construction and agriculture.”340 Likewise for any requisitions of food, for men or livestock. In fulfilling his duties, the officer must ensure that the caïd was never his sole point of contact with the “tribe.” Particularly in cases of “benevolence or propaganda,” like when the central authorities allotted new agricultural technologies or stud livestock, it was crucial that the French outpost be seen as the source of these goods.341 To allow the caïd to distribute them would be to allow him to take credit and to reap the greatest benefits himself. For instance, when it was stud season in the markets, a French officer ought to be present when villagers brought their goats or sheep to be inseminated by the (presumably genetically superior) French studs, so that they would know who was to thank for this good fortune. Another instrument of benevolent propaganda for the French was the doctor. Mercier’s hypothetical officer, if he was lucky enough to have a doctor assigned to him, was advised to take this doctor with him on any visits to the villages, and to send him around to various markets to give consultations. “Even if he doesn’t have the temperament of an apostle,” Mercier suggested, “the success of this will surpass your imagination.” After all, “we have always said and frequently repeat that real penetration and conquest are achieved by the doctor and the teacher.” Later school records indicate French doctors vaccinating children. 342 In regard to schools, the officer’s goal would be to “spread at least an elementary knowledge of the French language as much as possible.”343 However, he was not to do so by encouraging the creation of 340 1MA/285/441 Mercier, 1928. 341 Ibid. 342 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35.” 343 1MA/285/441 Mercier, 1928. 119 new Qur’anic schools or supporting existing ones, as “it would not do for us to seem more Muslim than the Muslims themselves.” Mercier provided no guidance for how to promote French language education, hence the creation of ad hoc French schools, discussed below. The final objective of the chef de poste was to aid in the pacification of surrounding groups. Throughout the late 1920s and into the 1930s, outposts were established near the edges of the pacified zone, and even in areas where local leaders had signed treaties with the French, others who refused to accept French control would retreat higher into the mountains, either in hopes of continuing the fight or to escape. Mercier instructed the future officers that they should seek to establish contact with dissident groups, possibly through intermediaries like traveling merchants who would visit both soumis and insoumis communities. He reminded his officers, though, that any local spy he attempted to send into dissident territory would likely be a spy for the other side as well. He recommended cultivating relationships with better informants, for instance “old women, who, especially in Berber country, are a remarkable source of information.”344 They would be his best chance at sorting out fact from rumor. The purpose of this communication was to pursue a “native policy” based on attraction rather than force. Mercier explained that, in the pursuit of total pacification, there were two opposing paths: “the policy of merciless reprisals, or on the contrary the policy of attraction… We must choose, once and for all, between these two extremes. As far as I am concerned, the choice is clear, no discussion possible.” He insinuated that the outcome of a policy of reprisal had already been witnessed in Morocco itself, with Spain’s bloody conflict in the Rif. Mercier claims that the French, on the other hand, had pursued a policy of attraction for years – their 344 Ibid. 120 “special formula,” which had enabled them “to conquer the country at minimal cost, and to extend pacification into regions never before soumises to the Makhzen.”345 It was the duty of the chefs de poste, on the frontlines of the shrinking zone of dissidence, to pursue this policy of attraction in their efforts to bring the country to heel. Mercier concluded by renouncing the idea that France utilized “divide and rule” tactics. He acknowledged that this “old maxim” was regularly employed, “and which all the people of our colonies wield as a bloody reproach.”346 In his estimation, however, direct attempts to divide the population were not used because they were not necessary, and he advised the BAI officers against “contriving” such schisms. This was because “the jealousies between chiefs will suffice” to achieve division, no special effort by the French necessary. On the contrary, he explained, it would often fall to the chef de poste to resolve these disputes and “preach solidarity” to squabbling Moroccans. However, the officer should avoid getting too involved or picking sides: “Position yourself as the natural arbiter,” and demonstrate that only by French guidance could peace be achieved. Mercier acknowledged the complexity and importance of the BAI officer’s role, and offhandedly mentioned that he would need to accomplish it all on a shoestring budget, because the central authorities would not be allocating great sums to the project. Écoles de Fortune Many of the officers of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs had another task, essential to the promotion of Protectorate Berber Policy, that has thus far gone unremarked in historical analyses. Each officer was charged with creating at his outposts an école de fortune, an ad-hoc 345 Ibid. 346 Ibid. 121 school for the purpose of teaching French to the local population. These schools were run by the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs but later received budgetary support from the Directorate of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities. While some form of écoles de fortune therefore existed from around 1915, it was not until the 1920s that the structure was studied and formalized. The final great push of Pacification began in 1927, the year the Collège d’Azrou was founded. The massive influx of newly-soumis populations led to increased interest in collaboration between the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs and the Direction of Public Education (discussed further in the next chapter). In 1926, the new Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Activities, Jean Gotteland, commissioned a report on the écoles de fortune. He announced his findings and instructions to the head of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs in Rabat on January 2, 1927. At the time, 38 écoles de fortune existed in regions controlled by the BAI, though only 20 of them met regularly and reported strong progress.347 The Chefs de poste were under orders to provide regular trimestrial reports. Those who reported their schools struggling cited precarious economic conditions, lack of permanent personnel, and the transhumance of local inhabitants.348 Gotteland praised the officers who, “despite the circumstances, succeed in ‘straightening out’ some indigenous children and in creating school-going habits that will be precious for the future.”349 He announced that his division had “rather laboriously” obtained a budget line of 50,000 francs for the administration of the schools.350 The future direction of the schools, Gotteland instructed, would be 347 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35.” Memo from Gotteland to Affaires indigènes, 2 January 1927. 348 Ibid. 349 Ibid. Gotteland’s term is débrouiller, to untangle. 350 Ibid. 122 regularization under the control of the Muslim Education Service. One by one, the écoles de fortune would become écoles berbères. The benefit of first establishing an école de fortune was that it was an inexpensive method of determining “by its success or failure, places where the administration can count on a normal and regular school clientele.”351 The following week, the central Bureau of Indigenous Affairs in Rabat sent a memo concerning the écoles de fortune to the regional commandants of Marrakech, Fes, Meknes, and Taza.352 In addition to passing along Gotteland’s report, Director Duclos instructed the commandants that personnel for each école should be recruited on location, either from the troops or the cadre of secretary-interpreters. After announcing the increased budget for these schools, Duclos warns the commandants against blending these funds with those for the regular schools, which had their own budget from the Directorate of Public Education. The goal, he announced was for the “flourishing” écoles de fortune to be normalized. Significantly, while Gotteland referred to the normalized schools as écoles berbères multiple times, Duclos consistently called them “écoles de fonctionnement normale,” despite lifting much of Gotteland’s text verbatim for his own memo. This is evidence both of hostility within the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs to the separate Berber education project, as well as awareness of the more complex linguistic situation of the supposed bled al-siba. Only sporadic records of the écoles de fortune survive in the records of the Directorate of Public Education, housed in the Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes. However, a cache of 71 trimestrial reports on the écoles de fortune, filed by BAI officers between 1930 and 1934, 351 Ibid. 352 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35.” Memo from Duclos to Commandants Régionales, 11 January 1927. 123 provides a glimpse into the schools’ clientele, staff, and day-to-day functioning.353 Thanks to the Protectorate administration’s love of standardized questionnaires, the information listed in each report follows the same format. First, the chef du poste marked the location of the école de fortune – town or outpost, then cercle, then administrative region – and the trimester and year of the report. First, the questionnaire asked for the number of students in attendance during that trimester. Next, the officer was to make a list of “tribes represented,” with a note that he should indicate which were “arabisant” or “berberisant.” It is highly significant that this asks specifically about language spoken, rather than ethnicity. It is further significant that many officers ignored this, responding instead with “arabe” or “berbère,” and in one case with “musulmans” and “israëlites.” This elision of ethnicity, language, and religion creates an ever- present tangle in Protectorate records. Third, the officer was asked to list the personnel of the school. The vast majority of schools listed only one teacher, usually Moroccan, and typically a “mokhzani” (employee of the Makhzen) or a secretary-interpreter employed by the BAI. The fourth space is for a summary of lessons given; some officers filled this section out in great detail, while others left it blank or gave minimal details, perhaps revealing the varying levels of interest for local education among the BAI cadres. Finally, the questionnaire asks about agricultural work undertaken by students and its outcomes. Apparently, it was self-evident from the beginning that the écoles de fortune should incorporate training in “modern” agricultural methods, although many officers marked that their schools did not, either because of inclement weather, insufficient time, or disinterested personnel. Finally, a blank was left for “observations by the chef du poste,” with varying levels of engagement.354 353 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35. 354 Ibid. 124 There is a marked rupture in the trimester reports in 1933. Apparently, while gearing up for the last years of the Pacification campaign, the highest levels of the Protectorate Administration tightened the budget considerably. This rippled through the various administrations, and the écoles de fortune fell on the chopping block. In December 1932, Gotteland, the Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, informed the new Director of Indigenous Affairs, Benazet, that “the credits allotted to the écoles de fortune, in terms of both staff and materials, have been eliminated. It will no longer be possible for this Office to participate in any way in their function. I can do nothing but leave to you the decision on whether it is possible to maintain them.”355 Benazet passed this information along to the six affected regional commandants, and on December 12th he sent a telegram requesting they inform him of their decision. He also let them know that the central Bureau in Rabat “can dispense no credits permitting the allocation of subsidies for operating the écoles de fortune.”356 Brigadier General Catroux, commandant of the Marrakech region, responded that he wants the schools to continue to function, and has ordered all affected outposts to keep them running under “volunteer teachers.”357 General Giraud, commandant of the Algero-Moroccan borderlands, reported that the écoles de fortune in Gourrama, Ksar Es-Souk, and Rich would be shuttered effective January 1.358 The commandant of the Tadla region, General de Loustal, also 355 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Gotteland to Benazet, 7 December 1932. 356 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Benazet telegram to Commandants régionales, 12 December 1932. 357 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Catroux to Benazet, 21 December 1932. 358 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Giraud to Benazet, 30 December 1932. 125 announced the closure of the schools. He noted that all of the larger villages in his region already had either an école franco-arabe or an école franco-berbère, and all remaining écoles de fortune had been fairly ineffective because of their isolation, climate, and the transhumance of the locals.359 It was therefore no trouble to close them. The remaining three commandants not only refused to close the schools, but vociferously protested the decision to de-fund them. General Marquis, commandant of the Fes region, announced that he would pay for the 1933 school year out of his own budget, but strongly recommended that the Bureau reestablish that budget item of 38,000 francs for the 1934 year. 360 After consulting with the affected chefs du poste of his region, Marquis reported their “unanimity of opinion” that the “abrupt suppression” of the écoles de fortune might have “disagreeable” consequences for French political efforts. Arguing that the indigènes appreciated the schools and would react negatively to their closure, Marquis warned that “it would be a great disadvantage to deprive the supervisory authorities of this excellent means of penetration.”361 Declaring the money required to fund the schools a “modest sum,” Marquis stated that the écoles de fortune represented, “in my opinion the best example that we can record of positive returns on such reduced budgetary means.”362 The commandant of the Meknes region (which included Azrou), General Goudot, informed the central office that “regarding the écoles de fortune, I have the honor of informing you that the suppression of credits necessary to the functioning of these schools has rendered 359 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” de Loustal to Benazet, undated. 360 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Marquis to Benazet, 12 January 1933. 361 Ibid. 362 Ibid. 126 them impossible to maintain.”363 However, he was pleased to be able to report that a BAI officer named Aubert had volunteered to continue running the école de fortune in the mountain town of Ifrane, despite the loss of his usual stipend. Marquis announced, “It is all the more pleasant for me to report to you this mark of the sub-officer’s devotion, because three of his young students gained admission to the Collège Berbère d’Azrou over the course of the last school years.”364 The commandant of the Taza region, General Gendre, reported that his officers had unanimously voted to continue operating the schools, even if that required making the instructors teach without pay.365 They had previously received 50 francs per month, supplementing their usual income, and had not received the news of its elimination favorably. “It is nevertheless regrettable to see these schools disappear,” Gendre stated: As long as they were intelligently directed and carefully dosed with agricultural education and manual labor among the reading and writing, they could have rendered real service. I thus have the honor of asking if it would not be possible to maintain the allocation of 50 francs per month for the teachers by taking it as needed from other articles in the budget. This would constitute a relatively minor expenditure for the whole Region. In the case that no remuneration can be allocated to the teachers of the écoles de fortune of this region, I must warn you that a large number of these will cease to function. 366 363 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Goudot to Benazet, 17 January 1933. 364 Ibid. 365 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Gendre to Benazet, 7 February 1933. 366 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Gendre to Benazet, 7 February 1933. 127 A week later, a brief response from the central Bureau in Rabat informed him that there would be no allocation of credits to continue paying teachers of the écoles de fortune.367 Significantly, after funding was cut, many the schools remained in operation and continued to submit their trimester reports. Evidently the BAI found such schools beneficial, and many of the reports indicate resentment of the budgetary decision made by the Direction of Public Education. Several chefs de poste pointedly noted teachers working on a voluntary, unpaid basis (bénévole). In March of 1934, one Captain Miquel reported that the volunteer teacher at the Kef el Rhar école de fortune (40 students), was an alumni of the Collège Moulay Youssef, having completed the Certificate of Muslim Primary Studies, and “demonstrates good teaching skils.”368 That same term, the officer of the town of Missour reported that the teaching position had been accepted, without pay, by his Moroccan secretary-interpreter. He requested that the man be granted some sort of recognition (“une gratification”) as encouragement.369 The teacher was responsible for 42 students, a combination of “village Muslims” and “israëlites of the mellah” (Jewish quarter).370 Both schools were in the Taza region, where the commandant Gendre had advocated for continued funding. A third officer in the Taza region noted that the school in Oulad Ali had been shuttered; the schoolteacher had assumed the functions of secretary-interpreter of the Customary Tribunal following the “non-replacement” of his 367 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Coutard to commandant of Taza, 15 February 1933. 368 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Miquel, Trimester Report on Kef el Rhar, March 1934. 369 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Trimester Report on Missour, March 1934. 370 Ibid. 128 predecessor.371 This was a sly way for Lieutenant Pantalucci to complain about the constant understaffing of the customary tribunal secretaries while commenting on the school closure. Other officers praised the efforts of the students and teachers despite the budgetary constraints. According to Captain Naudin of El Aderj, where 10 Berber-speaking students attended lessons taught by a volunteer teacher: Unfavorable atmospheric conditions have not dampened the diligence of these young students, who regularly attend their class, despite the numerous snow- and rainfalls that made their commutes very difficult throughout the entire trimester. Their happy dispositions, and the good will of the teacher are, unfortunately, thwarted by the absence of credits for the replacement of school supplies and materials.372 Later that year, Captain Humbert of Boulemane, north of Fes, included an annex of the materials at his local école de fortune, where 31 students attended. The school possessed one blackboard, one wooden table, five desks with 4-meter benches, 45 slates, 20 beginner-level readers, 40 student notebooks, 2 boxes of chalk, and a series of wall maps: Africa, Morocco, France, and a planisphere (star chart).373 Perhaps Captain Humbert included this information in an effort to demonstrate to his superiors the small scale of financial output required to run these schools, disproportionate to their effects on local communities and their benefit to the French imperial undertaking. 371 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Pantalucci, Trimester Report on Oulad Ali, March 1934. 372 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Naudin, Trimester Report on El Aderj, March 1934. 373 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Humbert, Trimester Report on Boulemane, December 1934. 129 These trimester reports also hold clues to the attitudes of the Indigenous Affairs officers and their influence on local population. For instance, at the school of Kef el Rhar, mentioned above, the volunteer teacher instructed 40 students in March of 1934. Within a year, Captain Miquel was replaced by a Lieutenant Dubois. The school closed in April of 1935. In his report, Dubois claimed: Despite the calls of the Chef de Bureau and the Caïds, the parents balk at sending their children to school… beyond doubt, the masses are not yet évolués enough to understand the superiority that their children will gain later on by the ability to understand and to speak French, and the horizons that would be opened to them.374 This echoes Adam Guerin’s observation that Indigenous Affairs officers were often quick to blame local populations when their policies and efforts failed. Referring to the Customary Tribunals, he remarked that “the narrative of Muslim perfidy and anti-modern fanaticism was so strong that French reformers were seemingly unable to question the viability of the invented system itself.”375 This recalls also the attitude of Louis Mercier in his advice to trainee officers. He repeatedly warned them not to trust their Moroccan staff or the local notables and advised constant vigilance on suspicion of corruption and graft. Rather than question why a system intended to be one of indirect rule instead required the constant presence and attention of French state agents, Mercier preferred to blame the untrustworthiness of their Moroccan subjects. It is unclear how many schools there were after 1935, how many were converted to écoles berbères or écoles musulmans, and how long the écoles de fortune persisted in the remotest regions. What is clear, however, is that the écoles de fortune represent an important and 374 CADN 1MA/100/330B Folder “Enseignement: Écoles de Fortune 1927/35,” Dubois, Trimester Report on Kef el Rhar, June 1935. 375 Guerin, “Racial myth, colonial reform, and the invention of customary law in Morocco,” 371. 130 previously overlooked phase of Protectorate Berber Policy, bridging the gaps between the customary tribunals and the écoles berbères, and between the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs and the Directorate of Public Education. Indeed, the decision from Public Education to cut funding to the BAI’s écoles de fortune, in spite of their apparent success, can only have contributed to the antipathy between the two administrative offices. In the next two chapters, I will examine the ways this ongoing hostility affected how Berber education policy was enacted in the mountains. 131 CHAPTER 3: SEGREGATION AND SECRECY: PUBLIC EDUCATION UNDER THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE The development of the so-called indigenous education system is key to understanding the ideology, implementation, and shortcomings of the Berber policy of the French Protectorate of Morocco. More than the separate Berber judicial system discussed in Chapter 2, the establishment of separate Berber schools reveals the extent to which the French sought to undermine the Sultan’s political power while fortifying his symbolic authority. At first glance, the pluralistic school system seems similar to the pluralistic legal régime: separate schools for Muslims, Jews, and Europeans. However, while the Sultan’s makhzen did maintain authority over the Islamic religious schools, up to the Qarawiyyin University in Fes, this system was relatively small, decentralized, and informal. The precolonial religious schools, called madrasas or msids, usually consisted of local religious leaders (fqihs) directing a group of local boys in memorization of the Qur’an. Only those with strong aptitude (and families paying tuition) would advance to higher study of Islamic jurisprudence. The French, therefore, left that system in place, and set themselves the task of developing European-style modern schools for Morocco’s youth. As global changes of the early twentieth century rendered this type of education more desirable, opening as it did access to far more (and more lucrative) opportunities than religious training, the French schools came to dominate the makhzen-aligned religious schools in the eyes of the Moroccan elite. Therefore, to a greater extent than in the judicial realm, it was through education that the French administration gained access to Moroccan hearts and minds. Additionally, while the separate Berber customary tribunals granted the French administration jurisdiction in “Berber country” without makhzeni oversight, the nature of the 132 school system meant that all of the modern schools for Moroccan youth – Arabic- and Berber- speaking – fell under the supervision of the Superior Council of Indigenous Education, which included Moroccan appointees from the makhzen. As originally intended, the system of écoles and collèges musulmans would remain segregated from the écoles and collège berbères. Not at all coincidentally, the geographic division of the two systems aligned with the imagined boundaries of the bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba. The two systems were to serve separate populations, in service of separate goals. In an internal memo dated June 25, 1924, Lyautey explicitly stated his intentions for Berber education. For these separate schools, he wrote, the goal was “to tame the indigène, and to maintain - discreetly, but as firmly as possible - the linguistic, religious, and social differences that exist between the Arabized bled makhzen and the Berber mountains, which, while religious, are pagan and ignorant of Arabic.”376 This nod to discretion is particularly telling – the first clue in the archival record that the existence of a separate Berber education system was to be kept hidden from the Sultan and his Moroccan administrators. Due to the continuation of makhzeni oversight of the education service, the establishment of separate schools for Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking Moroccan youth would require prudent secrecy if Protectorate officials wished to avoid makhzeni protestations of this divide-and-rule strategy. In this chapter, I discuss the development of an education system for indigenous Moroccans, and how that system was then further subdivided along a number of lines: social class, ethnicity (and/or) language, region, gender, and religion. Despite the proliferation of these different types of indigenous schools, only a small proportion of the native population received an education during the Protectorate. By 1950, for instance, whereas 94% of European children 376 Lyautey, memo 113 D.R2 adressée aux chefs des Régions de FES, MARRAKECH, et MEKNES, 25 June, 1924. 133 residing in Morocco attended public schools (enseignement européen), only 6% of school-age Moroccan children did so (9.4% of boys and 2.5% of girls).377 Even this represented a marked increase, particularly following World War II; in 1930, only 9,756 Moroccan students attended French-operated schools, compared to 117,523 in 1950.378 French officials claimed that the discrepancy between European and Moroccan schooling was because most Europeans lived in the cities, with more schools available, and that they were a relatively small population (66,700 school-age Europeans, compared to approximately 1,940,000 school-age Moroccans in 1947).379 However, this explanation does not account for why the budget provided 32,000 francs annually per European student, and only 16,000 francs per Moroccan student.380 In this chapter I specifically examine the ideologies at play behind the creation of separate Arab and Berber schools, harkening back to the Berber myth and fears of creeping Arabization. Berber schools were intended to serve as a bulwark against Arabization of Berber country, and to train a francophone Berber elite to staff Protectorate administrative offices and customary tribunals in the bled. During the interwar years, the conflict between the Protectorate Berber policy and the rise of a politically active Moroccan Arab nationalism coalesced around three schools: the Arab collèges musulmans in Rabat and Fes, and the Collège Berbère in Azrou. The nationalist backlash to the Berber Dahir of 1930 confirmed the importance of secrecy to the administrators implementing Berber policy in the education system. Finally, I discuss increasing 377 Istiqlal Party of Morocco, Morocco Under the Protectorate: Forty Years of French Administration (New York: Moroccan Office of Information and Documentation, 1953), 52. 378 Jean Gotteland, “Historique (1912-1930),” Direction générale de l’instruction publique, des beaux arts et des antiquités du Maroc. Protectorat de la République française au Maroc, 1931, http://www.babordnum.fr/items/show/186. 379 Ibid. 380 Istiqlal, Morocco Under the Protectorate, 53. 134 efforts over the 1930s, 40s, and 50s by Moroccan reformists to demand not only more widespread access to education for all Moroccan youth, but specifically to education that gave greater attention to Arabic language and Islamic religious teaching while maintaining a modern, scientific character to grant access to occupational opportunities and political participation. In this chapter, I argue that the French construction of modern education for indigenous Moroccans reveals the priorities and shortcomings of the Protectorate administrative goals. By creating French-aligned schools for the sons of Moroccan elites, both Arab and Berber, the Protectorate sought to undermine the Sultan’s political authority and develop an intermediary elite loyal to France. While the following chapter will examine this goal in the context of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou and the development of a specifically Berber elite, this chapter explores how the urban collèges musulmans pursued a more subtle attempt to garner the loyalties of the urban Arab elite. When students and graduates of these schools instead demanded ever- increasing rights and access to opportunity, French administrators responded by attempting to placate and obfuscate with as few substantive reforms as possible. By establishing separate Berber schools with a different curriculum than the “Muslim” schools, Protectorate officials sought to develop parallel and non-overlapping administrative zones mapping on to a bled al-makhzen/bled al-siba dichotomy that, while largely fictive from the start, grew ever more unstable over the course of French control of North Africa. Protectorate education policy thus illuminates the flaws of the imperial project and the false promises of la mission civilisatrice. The bargain of a “protectorate” (and, more broadly, of imperialism in general) was that France would take the reins of Morocco’s modernization, benefitting by access to resources and manpower, and in return preparing the Moroccans themselves to eventually take back the reins – a promise eternally deferred. Disparities in educational access and opportunities 135 between Moroccan and European youth in the Protectorate revealed French reluctance to relinquish control. Lyautey, Educational Segregation, and Secrecy While Resident General Lyautey’s performative deference to the Sultan infuriated officials of the Republic, his approach to Moroccan governance simultaneously preserved precolonial power structures and contributed to the French imperial state’s economy and military.381 Over time and little by little, the Sultan’s role and spheres of power were curtailed. Education is a key example of a realm in which the French expanded their own influence and simultaneously limited that of the Sultan, while maintaining the illusion of protecting traditional Moroccan hierarchies. By leaving the Sultan as the highest authority over Muslim religious education and assigning to themselves only secular “modern” and “scientific” education, Protectorate administrators ensured their control over the future of Morocco’s elite. In the fewer than 45 years of the Protectorate, religious education was increasingly sidelined as “modern” education became the key means to socioeconomic mobility and access to opportunity. And not only in Morocco – the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented a massive sea change worldwide in the importance of schooling.382 381 Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 3. 382 See Detlef Müller, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon, eds., The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990); David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (New York : Teachers College Press, 1995); John Boli, Francisco O. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, “Explaining the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education.” Comparative Education Review 29, no. 2 (1985): 145– 70; Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History (SUNY Press, 1985). For France in particular, see Raymond Grew and Patrick Harrigan, School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France: A Quantitative Analysis (University of Michigan Press, 1991); Donald N. Baker and Patrick J. Harrigan, eds. The Making of Frenchmen: Current Directions in the History of Education in France, 1679-1979 (Waterloo, Ontario: Historical Reflections Press, 1980). 136 In Lyautey’s view, separate education for European and Moroccan children would protect against both assimilationism and miscegenation. As discussed above, Lyautey favored a paternalistic policy of associationism, which assumed inherent differences between Moroccans and Frenchmen and insisted that such differences be respected and maintained – while never doubting the superiority of the latter over the former. Under Lyautey’s authority, indigenous education would be further subdivided: religious vs. secular, elite collèges vs. lower-class vocational schools, handicraft schools for girls, and a separate system for Berber speakers in the Atlas Mountains (see Figure 10). The 1912 Treaty of Fes listed education as one of the responsibilities the French accepted in their protective alliance with Morocco. For the first few years, the efforts undertaken were fairly haphazard, lacking “doctrine and technique.”383 The Collège Moulay Ismail in Fes was founded in 1915, followed by the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat the following year. However, analyzing the earliest years, one education official remarked in 1946 that “neither the collèges nor the écoles musulmans had a fixed curriculum, the staff were neither specialized nor trained for a task whose size and nature had not yet been determined.”384 This was rectified in 1920, when a July 26 Dahir created the Direction of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities (DIP), headed by Gaston Loth.385 That service was responsible for overseeing various 383 MMSH Fonds Roux, Folder 2.1, Marquet, “Direction de l’Instruction Publique au Maroc: l’Enseignement Musulman,” March 20, 1946, 2. 384 Ibid. 385 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.1, Arretés Viziriels, Dahir du 26 juillet 1920. For the most thorough analysis of the early years of French education in Morocco, and an elaboration on the pedagogical theories of Gaston Loth, Louis Brunot, and Georges Hardy, see Spencer Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956. Despite the title, the major focus of Segalla’s work is pre-1930. 137 subsidiary educational services, including European education, vocational and agricultural training for Moroccans, Moroccan girls’ schools, and the écoles and collèges musulmans and berbères. The DIP also provided financial support for schools for Moroccan Jewish youth, although the administration of those schools was coordinated by the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.386 When a 1921 dahir organized a Superior Council of Indigenous Education, both French administrators and Moroccan makhzeni officials gained oversight of the entire franco-Muslim education system. The Superior Council’s president was the Sultan’s Grand Vizier, who also appointed a delegate to the General Direction of Public Instruction (DIP). This native Moroccan delegate would prove a thorn in the side of many a director of public education, as French officials sought to dissemble the separate, non-Arabic, non-Islamic curriculum of the écoles franco-berbères.387 Discussed further in the next chapter, records from the 1940s reveal French administrators admitting to outright lying to this Moroccan official when he asked about the curriculum of the Collège d’Azrou. The ideology of the Protectorate presented it as a paternalistic partnership with the existing Moroccan state; therefore, French attempts to undermine that state (such as a separate Berber policy) had to be kept secret in order to maintain this image. That is to say, because the public stated goal of the French Protectorate was to defend Moroccan sovereignty and help the traditional leadership modernize the country, French administrators had to hide all of their efforts that instead destabilized Moroccan unity. While the 386 For a discussion of the AIU, see Elias Harrus, L'Alliance en action: les écoles de l'Alliance israélite universelle dans l'Empire du Maroc (1862-1912) (Paris: Editions du Nadir, 2001); Michel Abitbol, Histoire de l'Alliance israélite universelle de 1860 à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). For more on Jewish life in North African history, see Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schrouter, eds. Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 387 Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 149. 138 French state apparatus in outright colonies, such as Algeria, could be explicit in its supremacist ideology, in Morocco such attitudes had to be more carefully – and often cynically – concealed. In his 1924 memo, Lyautey also made clear the linguistic and religious practices of the Berber schools: the Qur'an is not taught, nor is the Arabic language. In religious terms, the rule is the strictest possible neutrality; in linguistic terms, teachers are required to speak only Berber or French; Arabic is rigorously prohibited. We will teach the students to write their language in Latin characters.388 His conclusion and hope was to create a Berber intermediary class and thereby reduce the Protectorate’s reliance on the privileged intermediaries of the makhzen: “Perhaps we will thus train Berber secretary-interpreters who will eliminate the Arab fqihs.” These fqihs – the Arabic plural is actually fuqaha – were teachers of Qur’anic law and classical Arabic language. They came to be the bugbears of both the legal and educational administrations, frequently cited as vectors of both nationalist propaganda and linguistic Arabization in Berber country. Continued reliance on the fqihs was considered a failing of the ethnographic research and educational initiative. Thus Lyautey himself established the hallmarks of the Protectorate administration's Berber education policy: enforced separation between Arab and Berber regions and people, suppression of linguistic Arabization, belief in a lesser degree of Islamic devotion by Berbers, commitment to the development of a Berber administrative elite, and the maintenance of secrecy around these practices. 388 Hubert Lyautey, memo 113 D.R2 adressée aux chefs des Régions de FES, MARRAKECH, et MEKNES, 25 June, 1924. 139 Muslim Education The Muslim Education Service (Service de l’Enseignement Musulman, hereafter SEM), organized under the DIP, was charged with the “double mission of bringing to life and developing the trust of the Muslims in regard to schooling and of organizing an education adapted to the needs of the indigènes.”389 Between 1920 and 1929, the number of Moroccans enrolled in French schools rose from 2,900 to 9,800. In the cities, there were two different types of primary schools available to Muslim boys: the écoles de fils de notables for the sons of wealthy or influential families, which fed into the Collèges musulmans, and the écoles urbaines, which served as the “antechamber” of the vocational schools (écoles musulmanes d’apprentissage).390 In both types of primary schools students attended for 30 class hours per week, with 20 in French and 10 of Arabic language and Qur’anic studies. Their studies concluded with an examination for the Certificate of Muslim Primary Studies (CEPM), a degree analogous to the French Certificate of Primary Studies but which included a brevet in Arabic. Boys who continued their education in vocational schools attended a preparatory year of general coursework and safety training, before choosing a specialization. After three years of specialized training, their schooling ended with the Certificat d’Apprentissage. These schools trained carpenters, smiths, lathe operators, boilermakers, and electricians, among others. Students could also train as traditional artisans, whose work was overseen for “authenticity” by the “Arts Indigènes” subsidiary of the Direction of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities. That service was born of alarm at what Protectorate officials considered the deteriorating quality of traditional handicrafts as well as hopes of drawing tourism to Moroccan markets. 389 MMSH Fonds Roux, Folder 2.1, Marquet, “Direction de l’Instruction Publique au Maroc: l’Enseignement Musulman,” March 20, 1946, 3. 390 Ibid. 140 As originally designed, the highest level of secondary schooling available to young urban Moroccan men was the collège musulman – a euphemistic term, because it was Arabic language education (and presumably ethnicity) that differentiated these schools from the Collège Berbère. By referring to these Arabophone schools as “Muslim schools,” French administrators obfuscated the reality that they were not intended for the entirety of Morocco’s Muslim population. Additionally, the use of “Muslim” when they meant “Arab” underscores the tenet of the Berber myth that claimed Berbers were only superficially Islamized. “Muslim” was thus used as a stand-in for “Arab,” emphasizing that religion, rather than ethnicity, was the criterion for dividing students into separate schools. While this appeared to successfully explain separate schools for Moroccan Jewish and Muslim youth, it is telling that the schools for the children of European colonists were called écoles européennes or françaises, rather than Christian – because they were run by a state that adhered to the secular educational principles of Jules Ferry and laïcité.391 Furthermore, the “Muslim” appellation obscured the reality that Moroccan Muslims were indeed segregated by ethnicity. Housed under the same Muslim Education Service, the écoles/collèges musulmanes and écoles/collège berbères nevertheless served separate populations and had distinct functions. 391 Jérome Krop, La méritocratie républicaine: élitisme et scolarisation de masse sous la IIIe République (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). 141 Figure 10: Chart showing the organizational leadership of schools operating in Morocco during the Protectorate Period The collèges musulmans principally served the sons of Arab notables, as well as offering scholarships to the most promising graduates of the primary écoles musulmans. The collèges were attended by local students (externes) who lived at home, but also housed boarders (internes) recruited from surrounding areas. The Collèges Moulay Youssef in Rabat and Collège Moulay Ismail in Fes were large compounds, with a local primary school on the campus alongside the secondary boarding school, as well as certain higher-level certification programs, such as a post-secondary teacher training program (Section Normale). The secondary level started with the 6ème year, followed by the 5ème and 4ème. At the conclusion of the 3ème school year, students would sit examinations for the Certificate of Muslim Secondary Studies, a 142 French Protectorate Authority (Résidence Générale) Makhzen European Education Service Muslim Education Service (SEM) Qur’anic Schools University al-Qarawiyyin (Fes) Mosque al-Yusufiyya (Marrakech) Lycées français (Baccalauréat) Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines Vocational Schools Girls’ Schools Écoles de Fils de Notables Independent Schools Alliance Israélite Universelle Écoles libres (esp. 1930s) Écoles de Fortune (ad hoc) Dar Beïda Military Academy (Meknes) Écoles Berbères Collèges Musulmans (Fes, Rabat, Marrakech, Meknes) Collège Berbère d’Azrou Direction of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities (DIP) Bureau of Indigenous Affairs (BAI) Écoles musulmans Key: European Education Muslim Education Makhzen Bureau of Indigenous Affairs Military Independent Financial support degree that would grant access to some lower-level bureaucratic jobs. Prior to the 1930s, students who chose to continue their studies for the 2ème and 1er years would conclude their degrees with an exam for the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, which would make them eligible for more prestigious careers in various administrations. However, this degree was still considered inferior to the French Baccalaureate, which was not open to Moroccans until the 1930s. After that, students could decide to sit for either the Bac or the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies. At first located only in the major cities of Rabat and Fes, by the 1950s collèges musulmans were also opened in Marrakech and Meknès.392 These collèges musulmans became contentious sites of nationalist politics, as graduates of these schools increasingly chafed against French restrictions on their access to higher education, desirable careers, and political and civic freedoms. Discussed further below, the Alumni Associations of the collèges musulmans in Rabat and Fes drove much of the nationalist discourse of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The collège curriculum included “modern” subjects like sciences, mathematics, literature, history, and geography, taught in French, as well as formal Arabic training and courses in Islamic law, history, and the Qur’an. Although Moroccan critics often claimed that these latter subjects were allotted less time or rigor than they merited, their very existence marks the key difference between the collèges musulmans and the collège berbère. The primary écoles berbères included no Arabic or Qur’anic training at all. At the secondary level, the Collège Berbère instructed less than three hours of Arabic language per week, with no Qur’anic study at all. The 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris, billed as “The Tour of the World in One Day,” was an attempt to show the world that “colonial action, so long misunderstood, 392 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 40. 143 deformed, sometimes shackled, is a constructive and beneficial action.”393 While all of France’s colonial possessions were displayed at the Exposition, the Palace of Morocco was particularly grand. The young Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef was in attendance, escorted through the exhibition by Lyautey himself – though retired as Resident General, Lyautey maintained an active interest in Moroccan affairs.394 Figure 11: Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef visiting the 1931 Colonial Exposition, accompanied by Lyautey395 393 Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 3. See also Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition Coloniale de 1931 (Brussels: André Versailles, 2011); Steven Ungar, “The Colonial Exposition (1931)” in Pascal Blanchard et al., eds., Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Alexander Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Jonathan Wyrtzen also discusses the Palace of Morocco in Making Morocco, chapter 2. 394 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 64. 395 CADN 20MA/201/156, “À l’exposition coloniale de Vincennes, le Sultan du Maroc retrouve les souks de Rabat,” 1931. 144 The Palace – designed by two experts of the “neo-Mauresque” style that Lyautey had promoted in urban planning projects in Rabat and Casablanca – showcased a before-and-after view of Morocco to underscore French contributions. After an overview of the “pacification” process and a showcase of Moroccan traditional handicrafts, the visitor to the Exposition entered rooms celebrating the modernizing progress of the French administration. Here, beside rooms dedicated to the ministries of health, industry, agriculture, and public works, was a room devoted to public education.396 In contribution to the Colonial Exposition, Jean Gotteland, Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities published a pamphlet celebrating the successes of their project from 1912 to 1930. In one table Gotteland announced that, as of 1930, the DIP had established two secondary collèges musulmans (Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat and Collège Moulay Ismail in Fes), six primary schools for fils de notables, 14 vocational schools, 25 urban primary schools, 15 girls’ schools, and 18 rural schools en pays arabe. In addition, he counted 18 rural schools en pays berbère, as well as one école régionale berbère, which would come to be known as the Collège Berbère d’Azrou.397 Altogether, these 99 schools instructed 9,756 Moroccan pupils under 332 teachers. In his narrative recounting of the first 18 years of education under the French Protectorate, Gotteland announced - to his presumably European, pro-imperialist readers - the stated purpose and goals of l’école franco-musulmane: 396 Ibid., 72. 397 Gotteland, “Historique (1912-1930).” 145 to tame the Muslims, to allay fears they may have about the impact of modern education, to convince them that their children, called to live tomorrow in a Morocco very different from that of yesterday, must be prepared for a whole new existence. The Moroccans hesitate... As their education has always been exclusively religious, they fear that our schools will distance their children from Islamic belief and make them morally very different from their parents and ancestors. To this obstacle is added the noxious propaganda of the Qur'anic teachers [fqihs], who see official schooling as a terrible competitor, and attacks by fanatics who preach non-cooperation with the Christians.398 Recalling that “école musulmane” is a euphemism for the Arab (non-Berber) schools, this passage referred specifically to early efforts to establish French-run Muslim schools in Arabized cities like Fes and Rabat. The description of ignorant, suspicious, devoutly Muslim parents under the thrall of religious leaders and “fanatics” is heavily colored by contemporary French stereotypes about Arabs.399 Gotteland expressed frustration at this apparent intransigence, depicting the first decades of the French Protectorate as a moral crusade. Berber Education Drawing on the dichotomous logic of the Berber myth, Gotteland’s tone changes dramatically when he begins discussing the establishment of “rural schools en pays berbère.” The DIP established the first five Berber primary schools in 1923 and expanded to 18 throughout the Middle Atlas region by 1930. Here, Gotteland announces that while “Berber schools do not differ significantly from [rural Arab schools] by their organization,” politically speaking, “they 398 Ibid. 399 Ibid. 146 play a much more important role. Their mission is to tame and bring closer to us without delay the children of those warlike peoples who most valiantly fought us.” Again, French stereotypes shape the narrative, but in this case the Berber myth leads to more positive conclusions. In addition to praising their martial qualities, Gotteland claims that “due to the good will of this population, especially the notables, to educate their children,” the DIP could confidently expect that the rural Berber school system would grow rapidly.400 However, this was not to the liking of all French administrators operating en pays berbère. The Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, discussed in the previous chapter, was notorious for distrust of the indigènes, and swiftly developed an adversarial relationship with the Berber education service as it emerged in the 1920s. This was perhaps in part because they did not want to cede control of their écoles de fortune but was also largely driven by the conviction that too much Western-style education would make local populations too hard to control. Writing to a high-level minister of the Résidence in 1929, the Indigenous Affairs officer for the Oued Zem area advocated for the creation of an agricultural training school, rather than an école franco- berbère. An agricultural school, he wrote, is, in my opinion, the type of institution that it would be appropriate to develop in this area, at the exclusion of certain other schools where insufficiently-évolué young indigènes absorb poorly the elements of Occidental science that are proposed to them, and which promote aspirations that would hinder, rather than help, the normal evolution of this protectorate.401 400 Ibid. 401 CADN 1MA/100/330B, R. Lemaire, controleur civile, chef de la circumscription de Oued Zem à M. le Ministre Plenipotentaire délégué à la Résidence Générale, “Création d’une école Indigène d’Agriculture à l’usage des fils de propriétaires fonciers,” 5 February 1929. 147 According to this mid-level Indigenous Affairs officer, agricultural training, rather than Western education, was the key to success in the bled. An agricultural school would constitute “effective propaganda in favor of modern methods,” helping to overcome the obstacle of “Muslim inertia or indifference.”402 This slippage again reveals the tendency in the BAI to disregard the Berber myth’s insistence on inherent differences between Arabs and Berbers: Lemaire unifies both populations under the religious category of “Muslim” and employs the narrative of Arab anti- modern recalcitrance. Lemaire believed he could convince the large land-holding farmers of his region to send their sons “to a school of this type,” with the implied threat that he would be less inclined to recruit for a school of a less desirable type. Such opposition from the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs would plague the écoles and collège Berbère for decades. In October 1927, the DIP opened a Berber “regional school, a veritable collège, in Azrou.”403 Gotteland, the Director of Public Education, “did not think it necessary to wait until primary education was widespread among the Berbers” to create the future Collège. This is cited as evidence of renewed commitment to Lyautey’s vision for this most recently soumis segment of the Moroccan population. In a pamphlet entitled “The French School and the Berber Question,” edited by the DIP in the late 1920s, Maurice le Glay, who fought in the pacification campaign and contributed to the ideological development of Berber policy and the customary tribunals discussed in the previous chapters, wrote that the goal in Berber country must be French, not Arabic, education: The profound and legitimate worry of our cause requires that the evolution of the mountain people is done in the French language, the vehicle of our thought. The Berber 402 Ibid. 403 Gotteland, “Historique (1912-1930).” 148 population will learn French, will be administrated in French…. This drives us to the prodigious effort to cover as quickly as possible the Berber world in French schools. No longer will we speak of “Arab-French” schools; we will intentionally write French schools, full stop.404 General Freyderberg, Commandant of the Meknes region, had written to the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs the year before to demand “the construction of an establishment which would permit the sons of Berber notables to improve themselves by the study of French and which would educate intelligent indigenous secretaries and clerks to replace the fqihs and interpreters of Arab origin in the Bureaux of Indigenous Affairs.”405 Azrou was his preferred location because it was close enough to Meknes (the “Berber Capital”) for rapid communication, but far enough way that students would not be exposed to the “political propaganda of the city milieu.”406 Figure 12: Welcoming new students to the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, 1929 404 Le Glay, in CADN 3MA/900/30 Paye 1943, 12. 405 CADN 3MA/900/30 Paye 1943, 5. 406 Ibid. 149 This Berber regional school, which would become known as the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, was directed from its foundation by Arsène Roux.407 The goals for students were clear, and limited: they could return to their tribes, presumably to inherit their fathers’ leadership roles; they could enroll in the officer training school of Dar Beïda in Meknes; or they could become functionaries in the various administrations, particularly the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, which needed translators and intermediaries in the various tribal confederations of the Mid-Atlas. The Collège recruited students from écoles berbères throughout the Middle Atlas region, as well as select students from the écoles de fortune discussed in the last chapter. In addition to the sons of notables, the school also accepted poor students from the town of Azrou itself but funneled them into the agricultural and artisanal sections. The Meknes commandant in 1934 obtained a 15- hectare farm for this section’s training. There was no instruction in Arabic or the Qur’an at the primary level, of the Collège d’Azrou or any of the écoles berbères. At the secondary level, Arabic language courses were added in 1931 in response to the nationalist backlash to the Berber Dahir. However, these courses were minimal: 1 hour per week for the first years, 1:30 for the second years, and 3 hours in the third year. This was increased to 2 hours per week for the first and second years after 1939, as well as the terminal students, in response to demand from the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, which was perpetually in need of trained secretary-interpreters.408 In 1943, Director of Muslim Education Lucien Paye wrote that “the particular orientation of education in Berber Country was determined, as we know, by the idea that it was possible to maintain and enclose a Berber bloc opposite the Arab populations and to reduce, notably by the 407 The Collège Berbère d’Azrou is the subject of Chapter 4, and Arsène Roux himself is the subject of Chapter 5. 408 CADN 3MA/900/30 letter no 5276 D.A.P./2 du 19 mai 1939. 150 activity of the school, the Islamisation that threatened it.”409 For twenty years, Lyautey’s vision of the Berber preserve had shaped education policy in the mountains. Moroccan Demands for Educational Reform The Berber Dahir, discussed in the previous chapter, galvanized nationalist organizing which coalesced into an active movement demanding reforms to many aspects of French control, including the French-run Muslim education system. Many of these activists were graduates of the urban collèges musulmans, who promoted a unitary Moroccan identity based on Arabic and Islam. As an attempt to soothe the Dahir backlash, the first concession made in the educational realm was the announcement, in May 1930, that students at the collèges musulmans would be allowed to take the Baccalaureate exam. Passing the Bac would give Moroccan students access to higher-level positions within various Protectorate administrative offices, as well as the possibility to seek higher education in French universities. However, although collègiens were now allowed to take the French Baccalaureate, the curriculum of the collèges did not change to accommodate this. They continued to study the “double culture,” and Arabic and Qur’anic curriculum alongside the French curriculum.410 Therefore, very few Moroccan students passed the Bac in the first few years (only four in 1933, for instance); the rest continued to conclude their studies with the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies. In 1934, nationalist activists in Fes issued a formal Plan of Reforms, listing their grievances and proposing solutions for the colonial order.411 They carefully avoided any 409 CADN 3MA/900/30 Paye 1943. 410 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 200-201. 411 Comité d’action marocaine and Robert Jean Longuet, Plan de réformes marocaines (Paris: impr. Labor, 1934). 151 insinuation of independence, arguing instead for change from within the French Protectorate. However, they did not hold back or conceal their anger, and the Plan called out the discriminatory practices and mentality of the colonial order.412 In their section on education, which they argued should be universal and compulsory, the authors also demonstrated the dismissive attitude toward the Berber language that would come to dominate the nationalist and post-independence discourse.413 The Plan de Reformes specified that the ideal education system would include instruction in “Qur’an, Islam, the Arabic language, and the history and geography of Morocco, which will have the same importance in examinations as the other material of the curriculum.” Additionally, nationalists demanded the creation of a “Moroccan Baccalaureate,” equivalent as a degree to the French version but adapted in content to Moroccan culture, as well as the admission of Moroccan youth into the French lycées currently reserved for Morocco’s European-origin inhabitants. In the entire “Education” section, the Plan of Reforms specifies the importance of Arabic language training twelve times; at no point does it mention Tamazight. This was clearly no oversight, however, based on a veiled reference in the demand for “unification of modern education programs for the totality of Moroccan Muslims, with neither regional considerations nor distinctions of social condition.”414 The Moroccan populace, according to these urban nationalists, was to be entirely Arabic-speaking. The Plan of Reforms was rejected wholesale by the small but powerful settler lobby.415 However, through the 1930s, several administrations built accommodations into their programs, increasingly favoring the Arabic language for political as 412 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 135. 413 Plan de Reformes, 1934. 414 Ibid. 415 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 135. 152 well as pragmatic reasons. Furthermore, the DIP began quietly accepting elite Moroccan students into the French lycées, although each would-be transfer required approval from the Direction des Affaires Politiques. After the hubbub over the Berber Dahir and the Plan of Reforms, the collèges musulmans in Fes and Rabat (through the agitation of their Associations des Anciens Élèves) promoted an essential Moroccan identity based on Arabic language and ethnicity and Islamic religion. During this time the separate curriculum of the Collège Berbère – specifically the deliberate dearth of courses on Arabic language and Islamic religion – was kept as quiet as possible, hoping to continue its goals of creating a Berber “collaborationist elite” without interference from the increasingly influential nationalists. In the cities, demands for better Arabic instruction in particular, and greater access to education in general, mounted unrelentingly. Entering the 1940s, the young Moroccan elite trained in French schools continued to push for educational reform, arguing that the French administration had demonstrated clear preference for European-origin students over Moroccans. In a 1941 letter to Lucien Paye, then Director of Muslim Education, the Alumni Association of Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat asserted that “the effort given to Muslim education is very weak compared to that reserved for European education.”416 At the time, there were sufficient schools to accommodate all European residents of Morocco, but of the approximately 900,000 school-age young Moroccans, the French-run schools could accommodate only 27,000, or 3% of that population.417 Worse, under the Vichy regime, no new funds were budgeted for the 416 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1 letter from Alumni Association CMY to Paye 1941. 417 Ibid. 153 construction of new écoles musulmans, so pre-war progress stalled for several years.418 In order to mitigate this “crisis of primary education,” the Alumni argued that the administration ought to give greater support to the Qur’anic schools (long seen by the Muslim Education Service as adversaries).419 These religious schools, the Alumni argued, should be granted considerable funding to hire auxiliary teachers trained and authorized to teach “modern education” subjects, such as history, geography, and French. Beyond expansion of the school system to fully serve Moroccan youth, the Alumni Association advocated “general and profound reform.” Acknowledging that such efforts would take a long time to achieve, they limited themselves to listing a few considerations “that could be swiftly realized.”420 The first was a creation of a Viziriat within the Makhzen charged with modern and traditional education, staffed by a corps of competent functionaries to inspect all schools. The next was the creation of an École Normale, a teacher-training school for Arabic- language professors and educators in Islamic law. They specified that such a school should be accessible not only to holders of the Baccalaureate and graduates of the Collèges musulmans with the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, but also to graduates of the Qarawiyyin University. Arguing that Morocco currently lacked sufficient personnel to form a faculty for their proposed school, they suggested recruiting capable “Oriental professors, preferably Egyptians or Syrians.”421 The subtext would have been clear to Lucien Paye: the Alumni Association was suggesting that Moroccan teachers of Arabic should be instructed by an intellectual class known 418 Lucien Paye, “Introduction et évolution de l’enseignement moderne au Maroc” (Thesis, Université de Paris Sorbonne, 1957) 495. 419 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1 letter from Alumni Association CMY to Paye 1941. 420 Ibid. 421 Ibid. 154 for pan-Arab nationalism. This appeared to confirm one of the administration’s anxieties about creeping Arabization – the infection originated outside of Morocco, particularly in Egypt and the Levant, and spread in Morocco through aggressive pan-Arabist propaganda. The Alumni further demanded relaxing the conditions by which Moroccan students could gain admission to French lycées – which remained the clearest route to universities in France – as well as an increase in the number of scholarships available to Moroccan students. Finally, they argued again for the creation of a “Moroccan Baccalaureate.” The Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, despite administrative claims to be the equivalent of the Bac, was widely known to be substandard, with far fewer opportunities for further study or access to desirable careers. Rather than force students to choose between the inferior Diploma or the French- oriented Bac, the creation of a Moroccan Bac would require the same intellectual rigor as the French Bac while reserving pride of place for Arabic language and literature. They reiterated this demand in another formal letter, this one directed to the Resident General in 1941. Here, their requests were even loftier, suggesting that the Protectorate administration should provide scholarships not only for secondary school, but for Moroccan students who wished to attend universities in the Metropole. They also petitioned for improved Arabic language education, claiming that the current instruction in the collèges was hindered by the “professional ineptitude” of the current personnel.422 They closed with a salutation that is difficult to read without detecting a measure of sarcasm: “Knowing that M. le Résident Général is completely willing to make improvements to the situation of the Moroccan population, we are convinced that our wishes will find a warm welcome from him.” The Alumni Associations were growing bolder, and their efforts would only escalate over the ensuing decade. However, the 422 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1 Alumni Association CMY to Conseil du Gouvernement, 1941. 155 Vichy regime was little inclined to grant greater funds to the Protectorate of Morocco, and the administration there had less incentive to dedicate more of their budget to Muslim education. Lucien Paye made some strides toward the development of a Moroccan Baccalaureate, but the resumption of the war in North Africa in 1942 temporarily swept aside such plans for reform. Istiqlal, Independence Manifesto, and Public Protest However, many Moroccans, increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo and French reluctance to reform the inequalities in their system, and galvanized by Allied talk of post-war decolonization, would not be deterred. While earlier demands, such as the Plan de Reformes of 1934, had called for change within the French Protectorate system, in December of 1943 nationalists formed their political party, Istiqlal, and on January 11, 1944 published a manifesto demanding full decolonization – total independence and autonomy for Morocco from European dominance.423 They assert that Moroccan troops had fought on the side of the Allies in both World Wars, and that they had recently fought with distinction in France, Tunisia, Corsica, Sicily, and Italy and were currently called upon for ever-greater participation in upcoming battles. Citing the Atlantic Charter, the Tehran Conference, and the dissolution of the French Protectorate of Lebanon, the nationalists of Istiqlal (many of them graduates of the collèges musulmans) demanded full independence under Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef, whom they charged with establishing a democratic government. Istiqlal further claimed that the French Protectorate of Morocco had overstepped its intended role. Referring to the 1912 Treaty of Fes, they reminded French authorities that the 423 Lise Garon, Dangerous Alliances: Civil Society, the Media and Democratic Transition in North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 89. 156 originally-stated purpose of installing a Protectorate was to “endow Morocco with a set of administrative, financial, and military reforms, without touching the traditional sovereignty of the Moroccan people under the aegis of their King.”424 Instead, they charged, the Protectorate administration had egregiously overstepped its boundaries, with the result that “la colonie française was able to monopolize all of the power and become mistress of the vibrant resources of the country, to the detriment of the autochthones.”425 This, they claimed, was a deliberate abuse of power, aimed at “attempting to break, by diverse means, the unity of the Moroccan people, preventing them from participating effectively in the government of their country, and depriving them of all individual civil liberties.” Echoing this reference to French attempts at divide-and-rule, they asserted that “Morocco constitutes a homogeneous unit… under the High direction of its Sovereign.”426 Assertions of Morocco’s fundamental – and Arab – homogeneity were common to Moroccan nationalists of the era, and remained central to Istiqlal’s platform even after independence a decade later. Delivered to the sultan, Resident General Puaux, and Allied officials, the Manifesto was signed by 58 members of the party, most of them notables and members of the makhzen. Copies in Arabic were printed at the Guessouss Free Arabic School, a private nationalist institution, and distributed widely throughout the country.427 Despite its private ownership, that school was 424 Istiqlal, “Manifeste Pour l’Indépendance Du Maroc,” 1944, Digithèque MJP. http://mjp.univ- perp.fr/constit/ma1944.htm. 425 Istiqlal, “Manifeste Pour l’Indépendance Du Maroc,” 1944. 426 Ibid. 427 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 171. 157 shuttered by the Protectorate authorities in the aftermath of the protests, as part of a general clampdown on the independent nationalist schools.428 The sultan broadcast a response reaffirming that Morocco’s continued evolution would develop “in a framework of French friendship and respect of the treaties.” However, concerned about escalation, Protectorate officials arrested high-level nationalist leaders in Rabat and in Fes on the night of January 28th.429 The following day, mass protest erupted in Rabat. Along with thousands of other protestors, the entire student body of the collèges musulmans of Rabat and Fes walked out of school and joined the demonstrations (see Chapter 4). The students of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou held their own strike in solidarity a few weeks later (see Chapter 3). All three schools were closed for the duration of the school year and did not reopen until the rentrée of October 1944. The demonstrations, some of which turned violent on the Moroccan side and were met by an overwhelming military response by the French, continued in the cities through February. After they calmed down in March, Resident General Puaux was preoccupied with rebuilding French prestige: “France is imposed on Morocco by force and by prestige. We cannot maintain our place in this country by force without prestige when now we are making our protégés into a defeated adversary. It is important, then to dedicate ourselves to the work of restoring French prestige.”430 To that end, he established a series of mixed Franco-Moroccan Commissions on 428 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Compte-Rendu de l’audience accordée à une delegation de professeurs du Collège Moulay Youssef, le 18 Février 1944 par Monsieur PUAUX, Ambassadeur de France, Commissaire Résident Général de la République Française au Maroc.” 429 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 171. Wyrtzen’s work provides an in-depth examination of the rise of the Moroccan nationalist movement and should be consulted for a broader discussion of the events of January and February 1944, beyond their effects on education and schools. 430 Service Historique de la Defense, Archives de l’Armée de Terre, Carton 3H 251, Gabriel Puaux, “Agitation nationaliste,” 19 February 1944. In Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 173. 158 various administrative functions to address the nationalists’ concerns. One of these commissions was dedicated to Muslim education. The Commission on Educational Reform was composed of Moroccan notables, Frenchmen residing in Morocco, and metropolitan Frenchmen. One of the primary targets of the Commission’s report was the “double culture” that had served as the touchstone of franco- Muslim education since the days of Lyautey. 431 Rather than seeing this as associationism – maintaining local culture while adding a thin veneer of French modernization – they depicted the double culture as an attempt to force young Moroccans to master both. They condemned it outright, declaring that it is impossible for “young brains” to assimilate to “Occidental culture,” while perfecting themselves in “Arab culture” simultaneously, without “succumbing to overexertion.”432 Under their reformed regime, collègiens would have to choose: at the secondary level, some would enter the “Modern Section” leading to the Baccalaureate, and some would enter the “Traditional Section” leading to the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies. The Modern Section would introduce more French, science, and “living languages” (particularly English) to the curriculum, while cutting back the time spent on Arabic language and Islamic law. The Traditional Section would increase those courses, plus geography of Morocco and the Muslim World, while eliminating math and science. The 1944 nationalist upheaval dramatically shook the core of the French Protectorate administration. The return of North Africa to Free French control, and the subsequent resumption of the war overseas, meant that resources and manpower were limited. The education system was particularly affected and spent the remainder of the year seeking to correct course. 431 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.1, Arsène Roux, untitled speech, 1946. 432 Ibid. 159 École Certificate of Muslim Primary Studies musulmane 6ème Préparatoire 6ème 5ème 4ème 3ème 2ème Terminale Begin tracking into Modern or Traditional Section Certificate of Muslim Secondary Studies Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies OR Baccalaureate Figure 13: Diagram showing program for urban Muslim Education Post-War Reforms General Charles de Gaulle declared victory on May 8, 1945. Roosevelt, with his tacit support of decolonization and Moroccan independence, was dead. No Moroccan delegation was involved in the peace accords, dashing the hopes of Istiqlal. Worse, France responded to protests in Syria and Algeria with overwhelming force, culminating in the bombings of Damascus and Sétif.433 Demands for Moroccan independence receded for the remainder of the decade. A month later, the new Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities took to the radio to address the teaching cadres of Morocco. Roger Thabault was a sociologist by training and had served as Director of European and Israëlite Primary Education in Morocco from 1929 to 1941. He was removed from his post and sent back to France for his opposition to Vichy-imposed anti-Semitic policies.434 After the war, Resident-General Puaux called on him to assume the oversight of all public education in Morocco. In his broadcast, he addressed each 433 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006). 434 Roger Thabault, “Le Maroc à l’heure du vichysme,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers (43): 1975-76: 16-20. 160 component of the education service one by one. First, he greeted the teachers of European education, followed by European teachers of Muslim schools, then Muslim teachers, and finally “les israëlites.”435 Addressing the personnel of the Muslim Education Service, he announced that he had carefully examined the plans of reform, personally handed to him by Puaux in Paris when he asked Thabault to accept the position. He vowed to see the reforms accomplished, promising to “do my best to render the inhabitants of this country, villagers as well as city-dwellers, capable of adapting morally and intellectually to modern economic life… without detaching them from their traditions or their beliefs.”436 However, he warned, “this will not be possible unless the entire Moroccan people becomes aware of the inestimable gift that is given them in the form of schools, the infinite possibilities of economic progress and social progress that are offered to them.” They must, therefore, “give us their trust and their help” in accomplishing together the reform of the public education system.437 Thabault concluded his speech by paying homage to the members of the Public Education Service who died during the course of the war, whose names it was too painful and too numerous for him to list. Finally, he referred to the French humanist tradition, “striving to discover and promote in each man all the human dignity of which he is capable,” which he claimed “justifies our presence and our action in this country and eminently deserves that we educators devote our lives to it. Vive le Maroc, mes amis, et vive la France!”438 435 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Roger Thabault, “Allocution radiodiffusée: Au personnel enseignant du Protectorat,” June 13, 1945. This transcript, conserved in Arsène Roux’s personal archive, was autographed by Thabault “avec mes amitiés.” 436 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Roger Thabault, “Allocution radiodiffusée: Au personnel enseignant du Protectorat.” 437 Ibid. 438 Ibid. 161 Thabault’s speech marked the beginning of a new phase of public education in Morocco. One of the components of the plan put forth by the Commission on Educational Reform was a student population increase of 10,000 per year. During the 1944-45 school year, there were 32,900 Moroccan students enrolled in French schools. During the 1945-46 year, there were over 42,000.439 To maintain such a pace, the Muslim Education Service, under Lucien Paye’s successor, Pierre Counillon, would need to rapidly construct new schools and recruit teachers. The goals set by the Commission on Educational Reform also included expanding education for Muslim girls, specifically. To that end, the Muslim Education Service began recruiting young European women to teach in such schools. The Inspectrice de Travaux Féminins was Madame Counillon, wife of the new Director of Muslim Education. She organized training courses for newly-recruited women teachers, preparing them for deployment to expanded or newly-constructed schools for girls. One of the presenters to these trainees in March of 1946, M. Marquet, who gave a lecture on the history of the Muslim Education Service. He first gave an overview of the pre-Protectorate educational system, painting an unflattering portrait of the “cacophonous” Qur’anic schools. Such schools remained in existence, he added, and had been subject to inspections by the Education Delegate to the Grand Vizir since only 1937. There were now some such schools, referred to as “renovated,” that offered “the study, in Arabic, of profane subjects: math, sciences, Moroccan history, etc.” Such schools were illegal, Marquet continued, and were only allowed to continue operating “by the grace of the Administration’s tolerance.”440 He neglected to mention that such schools were a deliberate 439 MMSH Fonds Roux, Folder 2.1, Marquet, “Direction de l’Instruction Publique au Maroc: l’Enseignement Musulman,” March 20, 1946. 440 Ibid. 162 nationalist strategy to achieve their educational goals while circumventing French authority, and that such schools were indeed regularly closed by the administration. Marquet continued to report that the highest level of non-French education in the country was the Qarawiyyin University in Fes, and at the Yussufiya Mosque in Marrakech, where elite students trained in Islamic jurisprudence and gained access to the highest levels of the Makhzen administrative services. However, according to Marquet, “one might say that the ‘Moroccan universities’ grant only a formal culture without great practical value. Their teaching, confined within the narrow framework of tyrannical traditions…is not adapted to the new conditions of the political and social life of the country.”441 Modern, practical education was a gift from France to the Moroccan people. In addition to the Collèges Musulmans of Fes, Rabat, and Marrakech, as well as the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, Marquet announced that some Muslim students also had access to modern secondary education in the lycées françaises. Finally, he declared, “access to higher education is open to Muslims without restriction, and a certain number of them currently attend the Facultés de France thanks to scholarships that have been generously granted to them.”442 Throughout the entirety of the Protectorate, the number of Moroccan students in French universities was very low, especially compared to Tunisians and Algerians; Marquet neglected to mention this. Of the rural schools, Marquet remarked that the greatest challenge to expansion was the “Difficult problem of recruiting teaching personnel to the Bled.”443 The ability of the SEM to build schools in rural areas was conditional on their ability to send teachers there. However, most 441 Ibid. 442 Ibid. 443 Ibid. 163 of the “Muslim educators” trained in the urban Sections Normales originated in the cities. According to Marquet, “they know nothing about the land, and, lost in the bled, they dream of nothing but returning to Rabat, to Salé, or to Fes. It is thus necessary that we recruit in the countryside teachers capable of a rural career.”444 This new recruitment push had generated some success in the majority-Berber towns of Khemisset and Sefrou, with plans to expand further. One of the best aspects of rural schools, Marquet continued, was the practical application of modern techniques for agriculture and light manufacturing. Each school was to be equipped with a small farm or garden as well as an atelier, complete with opportunities for students to sell their goods and thus learn how to operate a small enterprise. In conclusion, Marquet praised the efforts of the European cadres of the Muslim Education Service. “We can never say enough,” he stated, “about the zeal and faith of teachers, modest artisans of the most beautiful and the most peaceful of conquests: that of hearts.” 445 The past directors of the SEM had inculcated such a strong “spirit of teamwork” that the entire Service had “formed a bit like a caste, with faith in its mission, proud of the results obtained, and jealous of the role it knows it plays.” He turned to his audience, informing them that You too, Mesdemoiselles, will have an important role to play ...The beginnings may seem difficult; misery is not beautiful to see, and you will also meet the mistrust, even the hostility of those to whom you bring the benefits of your brand new science. You too will learn that it is not always easy to do good and you may experience hours of 444 Ibid. 445 Ibid. 164 discouragement and abandonment. But you will find, I am sure, in the beauty of your action, in the generosity of your hearts, the courage to pursue and carry out your task!446 Under this new reform regime, the Muslim Education Service did increase access to education for Moroccan youth. Between 1946 and 1950, the number of Moroccan students in French schools increased from 42,000 to over 117,000. The nationalists, however, saw the continued disparity between European and Moroccan rates of schooling and the disparity in budgetary allocation to European and Moroccan schools. The fact remained that the vast majority of Moroccan children received no formal education and high rates of illiteracy persisted. Conclusion Although temporarily sidelined by the imprisonment of their leaders in 1944, by the 1950s Istiqlal was resurgent and gaining power. They enjoyed the increasingly overt support of Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef and began a campaign in pursuit of international support for Moroccan independence. They published a booklet in New York in early 1953, presenting telling statistics about French exploitation and injustice. Sections on political status, agriculture, industry, health, and human rights paint a bleak picture of impoverished Moroccans whose standard of living had dropped precipitously yet had no recourse. They deny the “extravagant claims” of the French about the benefits of colonialism, arguing instead that “these advantages have accrued only to the French colonists, while Moroccans have in many respects suffered a marked deterioration in their living conditions.”447 European settlers represented less than 5% of the country’s population, alongside 8.5 million Moroccans. 446 Ibid. 447 Istiqlal Party of Morocco, Morocco Under the Protectorate: Forty Years of French Administration (New York: Moroccan Office of Information and Documentation, 1953), 7. 165 In the section dedicated to education, Istiqlal presented the grim statistics on Moroccan access to schooling. Pointing out the continued insufficiency of available schools, they claimed that “This policy of the Protectorate is deliberate and has as its purpose the maintenance of mass illiteracy so as to insure a population without intellectual leadership and with a lowered capacity to press for economic and political independence.”448 In addition to the inequalities faced by Moroccan students, they also pointed to the dearth of trained Moroccan teachers. Of all teachers in the country, only one quarter were Moroccan; even in the Muslim Education Service, Moroccans represented only two fifths of the teaching corps. About 1,500 Moroccan men were teachers. There were only 63 Moroccan women teaching in the entire system, only one of whom taught in a European school.449 They argued that this was because, despite decades of demand, there was no teacher training academy. The only program was the Section Normale in Rabat, but because admission required the Baccalaureate, the vast majority of attendees were Europeans; in 1950, only one Moroccan received training at the school. They also condemned the challenges for Moroccans to gain access to higher education (in France, as there remained no non-religious university in Morocco). For instance, “out of an indigenous population of over 8,500,000 there are less than a dozen Moroccan physicians.”450 The Istiqlal authors praised instead the efforts of the écoles libres – the nationalist-led independent schools that had long faced opposition by the Protectorate. They claimed that attendance in free schools had reached 250,000, despite attempts by the French administration to stymie their efforts. In 1951, for instance, 13 schools were “arbitrarily shut down,” and “twenty- 448 Istiqlal, Morocco Under the Protectorate, 53. 449 Ibid., 55. 450 Ibid., 8. 166 five school principals were dismissed or jailed while teachers, students and parents were intimidated and harassed.”451 In conclusion, the Istiqlal writer condemns outright the French project: The heritage of forty years of French domination in Morocco offers nothing to justify French claims of assistance to the Moroccan people. The reforms referred to in the Treaty of Fez, which was imposed upon the Moroccan Government by force of arms, have turned out to be measures to convert the Moroccan economy into an appendage and extension of France’s predatory economy.452 Tellingly, at no point does the pamphlet make reference to the Berber language or population. Instead, they repeatedly assert Morocco as a unitary nation-state, a sovereign power under a centuries-old royal dynasty headed by a capable and beloved leader. This nationalist dismissal of Berber difference became a hallmark of the independence movement and carried into the postcolonial era, with disastrous consequences for Berber language and culture. 451 Ibid., 55. 452 Ibid., 8. 167 CHAPTER 4: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE COLLÈGE BERBÈRE D’AZROU While the previous chapter explored the development of separate school systems for Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking Moroccan youth, this chapter provides an examination of life at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, the flagship of Berber education policy. I focus on the 1940s, the most contentious time for the school’s project and the era that reveals the stresses and ultimate impracticality of Protectorate Berber policy. At the beginning of that decade, the Collège d’Azrou housed 100 student boarders, in addition to several dozen local students.453 By the end of the decade, that number had risen to approximately 180 boarders, while the local contingent declined somewhat – for reasons discussed below. Drawing from archival collections at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) and the Maison Méditerrannéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (MMSH) in Aix-en-Provence, in this chapter I examine three critical moments of Moroccan action, followed by the subsequent French administrative (over)reactions. In each of the three incidents I explore in this chapter, Moroccan attempts to secure greater rights and opportunities were met with disproportionate and, eventually, violent response by the agents of the French colonial state. These moments of conflict reveal the limitations of Protectorate Berber policy, which failed to wall off the bled al-siba as its ideological adherents intended. I also argue that Berber rejection of Protectorate Berber policy was driven not only by nationalist pressure, but also by its failure to provide its intended beneficiaries with the promised material advancements. Accommodation of nationalist demands regarding the curricula of the Arabic collèges musulmans in Rabat and Fes, as described in Chapter 3, meant that Arabic was increasingly 453 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1, newspaper clipping “Le reportage du samedi,” 1953. 168 required for employment in the administration and thus choice bureaucratic jobs were accessible only to those trained in both French and formal Arabic. This left the carefully non-Arabized students of the Collège Berbère out in the cold, and unable to attain the prestigious administrative careers they (and their parents) had been promised as the supposedly preferred auxiliaries of the French, harkening back to the Berber myth. By attempting to defend a firm border between the largely fictive bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba, the French Protectorate administration elaborated a divide-and-rule strategy that was simultaneously undermined by the French-initiated processes of modernization, urbanization, and migration that changed the nature of the montagne berbère. Modernization and Arabization had become inextricably intertwined in the minds of both French officials and Moroccan nationalists. First, I examine a pair of student letters confiscated in 1941 that reveal Berber students’ concerns about their future prospects, and which sparked French administrative anxieties about both the secrecy of their separate Berber schools and creeping Arabization. Then, an incident in 1942 sent these anxieties into high alert, when the Sultan himself appeared at the doors of the school, asking questions that he was never meant to ask. Finally, the opposing forces of Moroccan nationalism and French Berber policy came to a head at the school in 1944, as a student protest strike met with harsh reprisals from the Protectorate administration. All of these events took place during the heightened tensions of the Second World War, as French education administrators struggled to maintain their original policies with tightened budgets, rationed resources, and limited manpower. By the end of the war, the Protectorate’s Berber policy, initially established as an attempt to “divide and rule” Morocco’s geographically and ethnolinguistically diverse population, was failing. Key to this policy was the education system, particularly a subset of schools within the 169 Muslim Education Service branch of the Directorate of Public Education, which operated in Berber regions under a very different curriculum than the standard écoles franco-musulmans. As originally intended, Arabic would not be taught in these écoles berbères, although by the early 1940s minimal Arabic language courses (a few hours per week) had been grudgingly introduced at the secondary level. The goal of the secondary boarding school, the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, was even more ambitious: drawing on long held mythologies about inherent differences between Arabs and Berbers, this school’s separate mission was to prevent the development of a single, cohesive Moroccan nationalism based on Arabic and Islam.454 The students of this school thus bore the weight both of colonial demands of service (as interpreters, clerks, teachers, and military officers), as well as growing nationalist pressure to conform to a unitary Moroccan identity in opposition to French hegemony. The unique position of this collège, and this policy of separate schools based on ethnolinguistic difference, coalesced around debates about language, in particular the teaching of classical Arabic in French-run schools.455 French administrative anxieties about the rise of nationalism went hand-in-hand with anxieties over Arabic linguistic ‘corruption’ of Berber-speaking regions. The Collège Berbère d’Azrou serves thus as a microcosm of the Protectorate’s overarching Berber Policy, and the students within its halls were both the intended beneficiaries and the victims of the French colonial mission in Morocco. 454 C.R. Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (London, 1990); Lorcin Imperial Identities; E. Burke ‘The Image of the Moroccan State in French Ethnological Literature: A New Look at the Origins of Lyautey’s Berber Policy.’ In Arabs and Berber , E. Gellner and C. Micaud, eds. (Lexington, 1972) 175-199. 455 A. Messaoudi, ‘The Teaching of Arabic in French Algeria and Contemporary France,’ in French History, Vol. 20 Issue 3 (2006): 297-317. 170 Figure 14: Students and faculty of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, undated, but likely 1929, with Arsène Roux in the front row An Epistolary Crisis In 1941, Zidi Allal ben Mohammed was a student at the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat. The teenager was a member of the Zemmour Berber confederation, hailing from the region surrounding Khemisset. Most likely, he was the eldest son of an influential Zemmouri family, who sought for their heir the most prestigious – and potentially lucrative – education available. As such, he was a boarder at the secondary school in Rabat, living in the dormitories with dozens of other young men. Since 1930, students at the collèges musulmans in Rabat and in Fes were allowed to sit the Baccalaureate exam, which Zidi Allal intended to do, and which he hoped would grant him access to high-level career opportunities.456 While his native tongue was 456 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 100. 171 Tamazight – the Berber dialect of the Middle Atlas – at school he studied French and formal Arabic. It is likely that he also picked up darija, Moroccan dialectical Arabic, the lingua franca of Rabat’s markets and the native tongue of the majority of his urban-born classmates. And so it was that, when Zidi Allal ben Mohammed sat down to write letters to his hometown friends, M’hamed ben Caïd Haddou and Driss ben Taïbi, he wrote in French, even though all three boys were native Tamazight speakers. This is because, while Allal studied at Collège Moulay Youssef, M’hamed and Driss were students at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, where their access to Arabic language instruction was strictly limited. Due to this bifurcated language instruction, Zidi Allal and his friends shared no written language but French, facilitating administrators’ censorship of their correspondence. While Tamazight Berber was taught at the Collège d’Azrou, written in Latin script, it was not traditionally taught as a written language and was not taught at all at the collèges musulmans. This friendly missive from a student to his friends is remarkable as one of the few examples in the archives of the French Protectorate of Morocco’s education system of a young colonial subject speaking for himself. It is unclear whether or not M’hammed ben Caïd Haddou or Driss ben Taibi ever saw the letters sent to them by their friend. The letters were confiscated by Collège Berbère d’Azrou director Paul Bisson, who sent them to his superior, Lucien Paye, head of the Muslim Education Section (SEM). Paye then forwarded them to Arsène Roux, founder of the Collège Berbère and then-director of the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat. Roux sent the letters back to Paye with his own memo in response, and the promise that Zidi Allal would be reprimanded. All three Frenchmen were gravely concerned with the contents of these schoolboy missives; perhaps disproportionately, considering the upheaval of life in Morocco following France’s 1940 military defeat, the extension of Vichy control over French North Africa, and ongoing famine and plague. 172 After all, as Arsène Roux assured his superiors, Zidi Allal ben Mohammed had been soundly punished for his decidedly pornographic illustrations. Why involve the director of Muslim Education in what seemed to be a simple matter of student discipline? As their memos reveal, the naughty drawings were the least of their concerns, and merely provided a pretext for confiscation and reprimand. The true cause of these educators’ anxiety was in the content of Zidi Allal’s letters, which reflect a number of the themes introduced in the previous chapter: secrecy, nationalism, demand for Arabic language instruction, access to opportunities, and creeping Arabization in Berber country. Figure 15: Dormitory of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, circa 1940 Director Paul Bisson stands on the left 173 “I must not refer to the proverb ‘out of sight, out of mind,’” Zidi Allal wrote to his friend, M’hamed ben Caïd Haddou, “because even if this expresses a general truth, we are the exceptions, you and I.”457 Following his salutations, Zidi Allal wrote something that his French superiors found deeply alarming: in order to truly succeed within the colonial administration, he advises his friends to study Arabic and perhaps transfer to a different collège – a collège musulman. Only by learning classical Arabic could young men such as themselves become “Berbères d’élite.”458 This may have been particularly disquieting to M’hamed, whose patronymic indicates that his father was the caïd – local leader, appointed by and beholden to the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs – of their segment of the Zemmouri Confederation. As such positions were often (but not always) hereditary, M’hamed could expect to grow up to be an “elite Berber” himself, and his education at the Collège Berbère was intended to help him succeed as local political leader and intermediary with the Protectorate administration. Unbeknownst to them, Zidi Allal and his friends sat at the heart of French administrative anxieties about maintaining authority in the face of rising anticolonial and nationalist agitation. Thus, it was this reference to Arabic lessons that stirred up the growing paranoia of French officials. After his affirmations of amity, Allal mentions a mutual friend who recently passed his Arabic language brevet, joking that he is now a “Berbère d’élite.”459 Another friend recently came to Rabat to sit the examination for the fin d’études normales (the post-secondary teacher training year), but Allal doubts that he passed, given his past struggles with Arabic. To take the exam without further Arabic study, he warns, would be to “take the bull by the horns,” 457 CADN 3MA/900/61. 458 Ibid. 459 Ibid. 174 scrambling the typical sense of the idiom. He then recounts the cautionary tale of four more of their comrades from Khemisset, who failed their own exams. “I saw them return,” Allal writes, “each wearing a vest not of fabric but of confusion… that is to say, they returned empty- handed.” This tableau – of the Arabic-speaking Berber now among the elite, juxtaposed with those who failed – reveals the deep anxiety these youths held about their career prospects. Without their brevet in Arabic, they could not access the most promising careers in the administrative corps. Following this warning, Allal announces his plans for the day (including a swim at the beach in the afternoon), asks M’hammed to pass along his salutations to mutual friends, and signs off. At the bottom of the page he illustrates a graphic image of a nude woman, legs spread, awaiting a man who lifts his djellaba to reveal a sizable erection. Figure 16: Illustration to the letter by Zidi Allal ben Mohammed, 1941460 460 Ibid. 175 Allal captioned this tableau “Malika’s hole waits for the corkscrew of Driss ben Taibi – here he comes, all prepared.” Malika herself is depicted as a Berber woman, complete with traditional facial tattoos. The evidently well-endowed Driss ben Taibi was another Zemmouri at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou and the recipient of Allal’s second letter. Significantly, Driss was a boursier – he attended the Collège Berbère on a scholarship from the SEM. Perhaps this was a recruiting strategy to entice the family to send him to the Collège Berbère rather than a collège musulman; perhaps it instead indicates that his family was less wealthy and high-status than that of Zidi Allal ben Mohammed or M’hamed ben Caïd Haddou. This second letter seems to pick up the threads of an earlier conversation, with Allal cautiously encouraging Driss to transfer to Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat. He assures his friend that although “it would be a providential benefit for me and a pleasure to have my old friend here with me, one must calculate the consequences.” These consequences, apparently, have to do with Driss’ insufficient Arabic language preparation. Allal warns that “entering the Collège, you’ll have to lose at least one year to permit you to catch up in Arabic, and even that year could be insufficient.” He then spells out the components of the Arabic examinations: “1. Spelling and grammar, 2. Writing, 3. Reading comprehension, 4. Religious teachings, 5. Translation. You see that this is already too much. You would have done better to do what I did [i.e. attend the collège musulman in Rabat from the start]. But, they say it’s never too late to do well.”461 The letters from Zidi Allal ben Mohammed to his friends at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou are a unique archival source, revealing the anxieties of school-age Berber youth under the Protectorate. Success was linked to passing exams, which would determine the types of jobs 461 Ibid. 176 available to graduates. Allal’s disapproval of the Collège Berbère’s Arabic language restrictions is evident in his assertion that the only “elite Berber” is one who passed the Arabic brevet. The highest-level administrative jobs increasingly required the Baccalaureate – which was not offered to students at the Collège Berbère. Their highest possible degree was the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, with the Arabic brevet requirement quietly waived by the top levels of the SEM. Ever since the Baccalaureate was introduced to the collèges musulmans in 1930, and access further eased in 1934, the Diploma increasingly came to be seen as a consolation prize for those who failed the Bac. Additionally, it was only the Baccalaureate that could provide – for an elite few – the opportunity to pursue university education in Europe. There were no modernized universities in Morocco at the time – only the religious Qarawiyyin University in Fes – and the only in-country opportunity for higher education was the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, the training ground for Protectorate functionaries. As “indigènes,” adolescents, and students, Zidi Allal ben Mohammed, Driss ben Taibi, and M’hammed ben Caïd Haddou were at a disadvantage in the power differential between themselves and the French colonial officials and school administrators who were so shaken by their correspondence. These letters were confiscated, and both Zidi Allal and his letters’ addressees received (unfortunately for this researcher) unspecified punishments – for the dirty pictures, they were told, but in reality for the dangerous political sentiments expressed within. However, as three of the few Moroccan collégiens during the Protectorate period, Allal and his friends were members of a small elite indeed. These young men would graduate to join a social category that in other French colonial contexts would be called évolués, although the term appears rarely in the archives of the Protectorate of Morocco.462 Many graduates of the Collège 462 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize; Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa; Kelly, French Colonial Education. 177 Berbère d’Azrou went on to attend the Military Academy at Dar Beïda in Meknes, joining the French colonial military’s officer corps.463 After independence, this letter writer’s cohort would become Morocco’s dominant administrative class. On the other hand, both the letter’s author and intended recipients were Tamazight-speaking Berbers. In the post-independence era, the Berber language and culture would be subjugated by the pan-Arabist rhetoric that came to dominate Moroccan politics. Figure 17: Refectory of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, early 1940s Zidi Allal ben Mohammed’s experience illustrates the plight of students caught between colonial administrators’ differing agendas, as well as Moroccan efforts to maneuver within a foreign system imposed from above. However, his experience is not at all representative of most 463 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou (Paris, 2005). 178 Moroccan youth of his era. Prior to World War II, fewer than 30,000 Moroccan children attended French-run schools, a tiny fraction of the youth population.464 The goal of the Arabic collèges musulmans, secondary schools intended for the sons of notables, was to craft an urban indigenous elite class that French administrators hoped would serve as intermediaries and allies in their colonial project. Selected for their family wealth and status and destined for an elite role within the French system, many instead became the most vocal opponents of continued French control, and the outcome for these students was higher status after independence. Their experience is demonstrative of the ambiguous role of indigenous elites in colonial contexts. 465 What is interesting, in the case of these three young men, is that they represent the Moroccan Protectorate’s bifurcated indigenous elites, with different intended outcomes for their respective futures. One was meant to join the urban, Arabophone elite, with access to the professions or the makhzen; the other two were intended for local Berber leadership, the military, or the administrative services of the French Berber policy. Each was hardly supposed to even be aware of the existence of the other, so such friendship between the members of the two elites posed an alarming threat to the authors of this divisive policy. Administrative Anxieties Once again, the specter of creeping Arabization reared its fearsome head. Far more than crude illustrations, the most worrying element of the letters was the letter-writer’s insistence to his friends that they ought to demand Arabic language instruction at their school, and, failing that, they should seek transfer to his school in Rabat. For the administrators of the public 464 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 55. 465 G.C. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in Nelson and Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, 1988), 97. 179 education system of the French Protectorate of Morocco, such suggestions were alarming. These memos – by Bisson and Roux – while sparked by Zidi Allal’s letters, delve deeply into the pressing questions of creeping Arabization, official secrecy, school recruitment, Arabic language training, job prospects for graduates, and French Berber policy in general. This sense of alarm arose from a number of sources. The letters were written in French because that was the only written language all three boys shared, despite their mutual origins in the Zemmour Berber confederation of the Khemisset region. Located southeast of Meknes in the foothills of the Middle Atlas mountains, this group aroused French fears of the “Arabization” of Berber peoples. Because the Zemmour inhabited a region on what the French saw as the border between bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba, any sign that this group was increasingly oriented toward Arabic-speaking urban centers became evidence of the virulent spread of Arabization. If Zidi Allal ben Mohammed, scion of a powerful Zemmouri family, not only attended a collège musulman but was encouraging other young Berbers to do so as well, this was strong indication that the Zemmour were a growing risk to the “purity” of the Berber schools and Berber policy. Furthermore, whereas Allal received an education in classical Arabic in Rabat at Collège Moulay Youssef, his comrades in Azrou received strictly limited instruction in that language, studying Berber (Tamazight) instead. Furthermore, and unbeknownst to Allal, Driss, and M'hammed, this scholastic linguistic division was meant to be a secret, deliberately kept from the Sultan and his makhzen by French administrators. Their memos, regarding both this incident and the next one discussed in this chapter, reveal that one of the reasons for the Collège Berbère’s geographic isolation in the Middle Atlas town of Azrou was to enable the secrecy of the Protectorate administration’s separate Berber education program. 180 With the nationalist agitation gathering steam over the previous decade, particularly among the young French-educated elites of major cities like Rabat and Fes following the 1930 Berber Dahir and the 1934 Plan de Reformes Marocains, sentiments like those expressed in the letters seemed increasingly dangerous. Demand for formal Arabic and increased Qur’anic teaching was a hallmark of urban nationalist ideology, influenced by pan-Arab and anticolonial thought from Egypt and the Middle East. These 1941 letters suggested to educational leadership that such anticolonial sentiments had begun infecting students at the Collège Berbère, in direct conflict with that school’s intended purpose. Student discontent with the status quo in their schools represented a serious crisis for the Protectorate’s Berber Policy. In his memo to Paye reporting on Zidi Allal’s letters, Collège Berbère director Paul Bisson expressed concerns that, at first glance, appear contradictory: that demand for Arabic language instruction or access to the Collèges in Rabat and Fes was a growing danger, and that Berber collégiens should be able to sit for the Baccalaureate.466 This right had been extended to their urban arabophone counterparts in 1930, a concession released in response to the Berber Dahir that did not placate nationalist collégiens and activists as hoped.467 That it had not been extended to students of the Collège Berbère was increasingly seen as an injustice that unfairly favored attendees of the collèges musulmans for various employment concours. Bisson reported to Paye that the most advanced students had “already spoken to several of their professors about preparation of the Baccalaureate.”468 Bisson believed this would grant Collège Berbère graduates access not only to more desirable careers, but also to higher 466 CADN 3MA/900/61 Bisson to Paye, 21 June 1941. 467 Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 100. 468 CADN 3MA/900/61 Bisson to Paye, 21 June 1941. 181 education, perhaps even in France itself. In this way, these Berber elite sons could be inoculated against nationalism and Islamism. Figure 18: The soccer team of the Collège Berbère, early 1940s, Paul Bisson at center Bisson cautioned Paye that “we will have cause to fear attempts to evade” their Arabic language limitations by students seeking admittance to Collège Moulay Youssef or Collège Moulay Idriss. Such letters as those exchanged between Allal, Driss, and M’hammed were a particular “danger” because they represented what Bisson called “the young fanatics of Rabat and Fez,” who would put pressure on Collège Berbère students, “especially the Zemmour,” to demand Arabic at Azrou or go elsewhere for it.469 The presence of Zemmouri students at both schools highlights the liminal position of this tribal confederation in the borderlands between the bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba – categories that the French sought to keep strictly separate. 469 Ibid. 182 However, Bisson recognized that demands for Arabic and transfer to the collèges musulmans were not motivated solely by nationalist ideology. He informed Paye of “students who hope to pursue their studies further than possible in Azrou.”470 Bisson held this up as a point of pride, crediting the school with having “bourré le crâne” – literally stuffed the skulls, a locution for cramming – of such students. He also notes that “just about all of them have an urgent need to earn a living (gagner leur vie), and their families will not understand a prolongation of their studies.”471 He realized that for his highest-achieving pupils, the push for Arabic and the Baccalaureate was about attaining the sort of high-ranking bureaucratic positions that had drawn them to the Collège Berbère in the first place, positions which increasingly required or prioritized those qualifications. Bisson did not seem aware that his superiors’ wariness of such changes reflects the long-time vision of the Berber preserve, walled off in the bled al-siba away from the corrupting influences of the makhzen and the lure of migration. Arsène Roux, founder of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, was by 1941 director of Collège Moulay Youssef. He was thus responsible for Zidi Allal ben Mohammed, illustrator of dirty pictures and purveyor of dangerous ideas. He had been promoted to this position in 1935, departing tiny (but growing) Azrou for the cosmopolitan capital city. However, the promotion meant stepping out of the separate Franco-Berber school system and into mainstream Franco- Muslim (read: Arab) education. His priority now, in Rabat, was to educate the sons of Morocco’s urban Arabophone elite while tamping down the sort of nationalist and anticolonial fervor that had rocked the city and the school in the wake of the 1930 Berber dahir (for more in-depth analysis, see Chapter Four). As such, Roux was alert to any hint of insurrectionist ideology, and 470 Ibid. 471 Ibid. 183 Zidi Allal’s letters fit the bill. For the past 14 years of his career, one of Roux’s top priorities had been to maintain a strict division between the Berber and “Muslim” school systems. A student at Collège Moulay Youssef was not meant to know that the Collège Berbère even existed, much less be in correspondence with students thereof! In his own memo to Paye, in addition to noting that “Zidi has been severely reprimanded and punished” for his “dessins orduriers,” Roux advocated allowing a few of the finest collégiens from Azrou to matriculate at urban collèges like his own Moulay Youssef in Rabat.472 He acknowledged that while “most of the students of our Berber primary schools are best directed to the Collège d'Azrou,” he had “always thought it would be equitable, and no doubt politically sensible, to allow some of the elite students of Azrou to pursue their secondary studies” in an urban collège musulman.473 The goal, however, was the same as Bisson’s: to grant top Berber students access to the Baccalaureate and better careers in the bureaucratic administration, particularly that of Berber country. Reiterating the stated purpose of separate Berber schooling, Roux argued that such an opportunity would “furnish to the indigenous cadres a rural element not lacking in personal interest.” He further suggested that, during his own eight- year tenure as director of the Collège Berbère, “I knew about three or four students who, by their intelligence and their moral qualities, were at least at the level of the best students of our Collèges musulmans.”474 472 CADN 3MA/900/61 Arsène Roux to Lucien Paye, 25 June 1941. 473 CADN 3MA/900/61 Roux to Paye, 25 June 1941. 474 Ibid. 184 Figure 19: Page and signature of Arsène Roux’s memo to Lucien Paye regarding the student letters, 25 June, 1941 The archives give some indication of what happened to these students. A January 1943 memo by a later director of the Collège lists Driss ben Taibi, of the Zemmour, son of an advisor to the caïd, as having gained admission to the Dar Beïda officer training academy in Meknes. 475 By independence, he rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and served as a commandant in the post-Independence military.476 The case of M’Hammed ben Caïd Haddou will be addressed again below. However, neither Bisson’s nor Roux’s suggestions came to fruition. Evidently, however, the administrator’s anxieties were not assuaged – a subsequent letter, confiscated from a different student, announced that “the Director opens all the letters and reads them. M. Bisson does this 475 CADN 3MA/900/60 Gabriel Germain, “Compte-rendu au sujet des élèves du Collège admis à l’École Militaire,” 4 January 1943. 476 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 323. 185 because other students were writing ‘nonsense’ to their friends. One day the censor intercepted I think two letters that made him blush, so he sent them to the director. So if you want to tell me anything ‘shocking,’ tell me in a veiled manner.”477 Bisson was reprimanded for censoring student mail himself, rather than sending it through the proper Vichy channels. 478 He was sacked that September, apparently because he had been too vocal in his opposition to the Vichy regime. On the road to Beni Mellal, Bisson died in a car wreck–which many of his supporters claimed was no accident, but an assassination.479 The saga of Zidi Allal ben Mohammed’s correspondence, and the French administrative response to it, reveals growing anxiety about the increasing volume of nationalist demands, and in particular the fear that it would spread and infect Berber country. In the previous chapter, I examined the demands for educational reform of the Alumni Association of the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat to Lucien Paye that same year, 1941. Bisson referred to these in his own memo to Paye, remarking that “the wishes of the Alumni Association of Rabat must be known to our oldest young people” at the Collège d’Azrou.480 Furthermore, fears that similar sentiments would proliferate at the Collège Berbère were not unfounded. Decades later, nationalist and signer of the Istiqlal Manifesto Abderrahim Bouabid claimed that the first nationalist cells at the Collège d’Azrou were indeed created in 1940-1941.481 477 CADN 3MA/900/61 Moulay Abderrahman to Lahbib ben Mohammed, 1941. 478 CADN 3MA/900/61 Inspecteur Greffet, Chef du BCTA, June 1941. 479 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 228. 480 CADN 3MA/900/61 Bisson to Paye, 21 June 1941. 481 Guy Delanoë, Lyautey, Juin, Mohammed V: fin d’un protectorat – mémoires historiques (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988), 188. 186 The Sultan, Incognito On December 24, 1942, the Collège Berbère d’Azrou was on holiday. The European faculty was dismissed for Christmas, and the students who remained in the dormitory were left under the watch of the few Moroccan employees of the school. That day, in the absence of the instructors, the Sultan himself visited the school, in disguise. Sidi Mohamed ben Youssef, crowned in 1927, was already provoking the fears of the French administration with his sympathetic reception of the nationalist cause (as discussed in Chapter 2). During a sanctioned holiday trip to his palace in the mountain town of Ifrane, the Sultan slipped away from his attendants with just a chauffeur and guard. Under cover, he spoke with Collège Berbère students playing outside their dormitories, asking them questions about their lessons: how much time they spent studying Arabic or reading the Qur’an, who instructed those classes, whether their teachers were European or Moroccan. On January 6, 1943, the Moroccan employee who oversaw the boys’ dormitory went to new Collège Berbère director Gabriel Germain’s home to inform him of the Sultan’s clandestine visit. Apparently, the sovereign had spoken to this overseer, who did not at the time recognize his ruler. When the overseer asked if the unknown visitor wanted to meet with the director, the disguised Sultan responded “not to worry about it, and then got back into his car with the three Moroccans who accompanied him, without entering the establishment himself.”482 It was not until the rumor of the visit spread locally that the overseer realized who this mysterious visitor must have been. 482 CADN 3MA/900/30 Germain to Paye, January 6, 1943. 187 Germain, successor to Paul Bisson, was alarmed by this report, and the next morning sent a top-secret memo to his supervisor, Lucien Paye.483 Apparently local authorities had believed the Sultan to be in the nearby resort town of Ifrane at the time, but word had spread through the village about his secret side-trip to Azrou. Germain’s report to his supervisors in Rabat set off a fstorm of concern. This visit heightened existing fears and confirmed growing suspicions about the monarch’s political priorities – Mohamed ben Youssef assumed the throne in 1927 at age 18, and over the intervening 15 years had grown increasingly independent. A decade later, he would be stripped of his crown by the French and exiled for his support of the nationalist movement. A week later, on January 14, Robert Ricard, the Vichy-appointed Director of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, distributed a memo on the incident to the highest-ranking officials in the Protectorate administration, including the Director of the Cabinet, the Director of Cherifien (Royal) Affairs, and the Secretary General.484 In this memo, Ricard acknowledged that 483 Gabriel Germain taught literature at the European Lycée Gouraud in Rabat from 1927 to 1941, before his promotion to the directorship at Azrou. He returned to the Lycée Gouraud from 1948-1954, before joining the faculty of the Université de Rennes. In addition to several books of poetry (including Chants pour l’âme de l’Afrique, 1934), Germain wrote a semi-autobiographical novel (La lampe de Sala, 1958) in which his hero, commenting on European society, remarks: “Et si je n'en veux pas de votre civilisation? Si c'est elle que je trouve barbare?” See Michel Lafon, “Gabriel Germain: Paris 1903-Chantilly 1978,” L’Association Mémoire de l’Afrique du Nord. 484 CADN 3MA/900/30 Ricard to Cabinet, January 14, 1943. Robert Ricard had taught in Morocco previously, at the European Lycée Gouraud in Rabat from 1925-1928, although he hated teaching at the secondary level. During that period, he began work at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, where from 1928-1930 he was appointed to specialize in research on medieval Spanish and Portuguese sources on Moroccan and Moorish history. He then spent a year on a research exchange to Mexico, before returning to his IHEM post in Rabat from 1931-1937. He regularly criticized the Protectorate administration in letters to his friend, renowned French ethnologist Paul Rivet: “The Moroccan situation remains serious, and it seems to me that we take pleasure in aggravating it by measures where injustice joins with clumsiness to exasperate the discontent of the indigènes…These measures have, as supplementary inconvenience, swollen the proletariat of the cities, where a misery as lamentable as it is dangerous accumulates. One needn’t be strong in history to know how empires are lost. And yet, our policy is one of blind folly. Honest and clairvoyant people try to scream, but they have about as much success as Cassandra” (March 1934). His son, writing Ricard’s biography in 2017, speculates that Ricard may have accepted the DIP position in 1941 out of both loyalty to the Vichy regime (which he connects to Ricard’s support of Franco in Spain) as well as the hope of affecting Protectorate policy from such a high position. See François-Xavier Ricard, “Robert Ricard, Récit-portrait” Iberic@l, Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro- américaines 11 (2017): 263-311. 188 the appointed makhzeni liaison to the Directorate of Muslim Education, Si Ahmad Bargach, had been asking questions similar to his sovereign’s for some time, and that the French administrators had been intentionally dodging him. Bargach, Ricard wrote, seems to have taken a keen interest in the current state of [Berber education] and inquires notably on the manner by which is given, in the schools of this region, instruction in Arabic and the Qur'an. It was possible up until now to evade these questions, but it is becoming more and more difficult to do. The recent visit of His Majesty to AZROU suffices to demonstrate this.485 The potential exposure of the entire separate Berber schooling system was officially an emergency. Ricard promised a forthcoming report from Lucien Paye, SEM director, and requested feedback from the higher-ranking Protectorate officials. “It seems to me useful,” Ricard suggested, “for the Service of Muslim Education to receive precise directives on the education policy they must practice in Berber country and, eventually, on the nature of concessions that may be necessary in these circumstances.”486 This last reference to potential concessions is the first time any French administrator expressed willingness to reconsider the Berber education policy that had been in place for over two decades. Lucien Paye’s report was distributed to the same officials nine days later. The Sultan’s visit, Paye claimed, “provides new proof of the Sovereign's concern, like those of the nationalists, to see the particular character of education in Berber country disappear and to 485 CADN 3MA/900/30 Ricard to Cabinet, January 14, 1943. 486 Ibid. 189 realize the political and spiritual unity of the country.” 487 Like Ricard, Paye admitted to previously obfuscating Makhzeni attempts to gather information about the differences between schooling in Arab and Berber areas. Until the Sultan’s visit, Paye wrote, “we carefully avoided, while addressing the programs of study followed in the rural schools, evoking the particular status of those situated in Berber country and nothing was changed in their orientation. The Qur'an is not taught there, they do not study Arabic, and it is the young [Berber] teachers trained at the Collège d'Azrou who instruct there.”488 Despite the official Protectorate policy of Makhzeni oversight and collaboration, the French officials had intentionally pursued and masked an education policy they knew would be objectionable to the Sultan’s administration. Again like Ricard, Paye saw that the Sultan’s appearance in Azrou would have consequences for this praxis of secrecy. “We must not hope,” Paye continued, “that it is any longer possible to maintain silence on this education policy that has been the focus, on the part of imprudent publicists, of a propaganda that profoundly upset the Moroccan literate class and the nationalist circles.”489 He cited ongoing “anxiety” on the part of Protectorate officials, “despite the care we have taken to no longer discuss the ‘Berber question,’” referring here to “the irritating memory of the dahir on Berber justice.” Paye admits outright that the 1930 Berber Dahir reinforced the French policy of secrecy and dissimulation around the question of separate Berber schools. This comparison to the Berber Dahir further illustrates the heightened anxieties of Protectorate officials; the Sultan’s incognito visit to the Collège Berbère d’Azrou could well be the harbinger of another public scandal and nationalist outcry. 487 CADN 3MA/900/30 Paye to Cabinet, January 23, 1943. 488 Ibid. 489 Ibid. 190 Paye recognized that changes wrought by the Protectorate’s push for modernization brought Arabic- and Berber-speakers into greater contact than ever before, directly at cross- purposes to the aims of their Berber policy. He also acknowledged that this contact was bi- directional. Middle Atlas Berber elites “more and more turn their eyes toward Rabat… they seek the protection and friendship of the Makhzen.”490 Simultaneously, new roads and means of communication had quite literally paved the way for Arab-origin merchants and Muslim confraternal activity in Berber areas, “tying new links between the tribes and the cities.” That creeping Arabization the Berber policy sought to combat was a direct outcome of French efforts. The demolition of the boundary between bled al-siba and bled al-makhzen was the fault of the French themselves. Not without irony, Paye observed that “ultimately, we can say that our presence alone was a factor for unity in this country.”491 Even as French administrators pursued divide-and-rule policies intended to privilege Berbers, their large-scale projects of modernization, state control, and legibility instead allowed for greater social cohesion that was dominated by Arab nationalists. Paye lay the blame for increasing demands for Arabic at a few doors: urban nationalists, Makhzeni traditionalists, and the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs (BAI). This last he accused of demanding more and more berberophone functionaries (interpreters and secretaries for the customary tribunals) while simultaneously requiring they speak ever-higher levels of Arabic – essentially, insisting that the SEM train its students to be fully trilingual in French, Berber, and Arabic. However, this same Bureau of Indigenous Affairs frequently attempted to undermine the effectiveness and reach of the Berber schools. According to Paye, the BAI was regularly 490 Ibid. 491 Ibid. 191 antagonistic to the Berber school system, particularly the Collège d’Azrou. In order to fulfill the goals of the Collège, Paye wrote, “it was necessary… to maintain a close relationship between the authorities of contrôle and the direction of the Collège. It has not always been thus.”492 In particular, he continued, while the directors of the Collège always sought to recruit the sons of notables, “certain officers” were less interested, and would instead send for enrollment the sons of their favorite protégés (even their cooks). One officer, Paye claimed, had even discouraged an influential notable from sending his son to Azrou, telling the father that it was nothing but an “école de meskines,” meaning a school for rabble.493 Worse, Paye continued, other BAI officers, “concerned only with easily exercising their command and afraid of one day having better-educated caïds,” thought that the students of the Collège were given far too much education.494 Highly-educated caïds and chefs de cercle evidently made their jobs harder, not easier, so a school whose mission was to educate such a class was undesirable. Paye was convinced that this fear, which BAI officers had expressed after a training course visit to Azrou in 1935, contributed to their reluctance to assist with recruitment. He believed that they were deliberately stoking fears of Western education among the Berber population in order to curb the recruitment of fils de notables. This recalls the BAI officer from Chapter 2, who opposed the opening of an école berbère in favor of an agricultural training school, which he felt was more appropriate for the locals. Furthermore, in 1941, Paul Bisson had written to Paye to warn him of on Commandant Soulard, formerly chef du cercle of Azrou, who 492 Ibid. 493 Ibid. 494 Ibid. 192 was “absolutely opposed to the education of indigènes and expressed his deep desire, in the presence of an Inspector of Public Education, that the Collège Berbère be eliminated.”495 Already, the Muslim Education Service was conceding what had been Berber territory – bled al-siba – as lost to creeping Arabization. Paye stated that the Service had already modified the école berbère curricula in the majority-Berber towns of Khemisset, Demnat, and El Hajeb to acquiesce to parental demands for Qur’anic and Arabic lessons. Additionally, he pointed a finger at the Direction of Political Affairs for pressuring Muslim Education, the year prior, into accepting the Berber son of the Zemmouri caïd of Khemisset to Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat instead of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou.496 The Direction of Political Affairs was thus deliberately circumventing the role of the Collège Berbère. The boy was to attend a collège musulman where he could study Arabic and, more importantly, sit the Baccalaureate exam. While I cannot be certain, it is highly likely that Paye refers here to M’hammed ben Caïd Haddou, who was from Khemisset, the son of a caïd, and had received advice to transfer to Collège Moulay Youssef the year prior. Perhaps this was an ongoing consequence of the confiscated letters from Zidi Allal ben Mohammad. Apparently, M’hammed had followed through on Zidi Allal’s recommendation, circumventing the leadership of the Muslim Education Service in the process. Access to the Baccalaureate remained a sticking point, because at Azrou the highest attainable qualification was the Certificate of Secondary Studies. Collège Berbère students, Paye argued, had become the object of “pressure, solicitation, and taunts” from their counterparts at the collèges musulmans. Referring obliquely to the confiscated letters of 1941, Paye noted that 495 CADN 3MA/900/61 Bisson to Pay, May 3, 1941. 496 CADN 3MA/900/30 Paye to Cabinet, January 23, 1943. 193 “the correspondence and drawings of students are curiously revelatory of this sense of inferiority,” especially those from arabized tribes and “marginal zones” of the Berber bloc. 497 Worse, he reported that Collège Berbère alumni reported themselves as “disadvantaged” in comparison to graduates of the collèges musulmans, even when their job performance was satisfactory. Finally, the sultan’s incognito visit was evidence of a “disquieting solicitude” on the part of the Makhzen to questions about Berber schooling. All it would take, Paye warned, is a few complaints sent to the Makhzen by dissatisfied parents to open the French administration to attack. “It is essential,” he wrote, “to prepare ourselves, starting now.” Instead of making suggestions outright, Paye directs a series of pointed questions to his superiors. Should they accede to parental demands for Qur’anic lessons, especially in schools with “more sons of merchants and artisans than sons of Berber farmers?”498 Should they incorporate more Arabic in Azrou? Could they allow “certain elite subjects” to pursue secondary education culminating in the Baccalaureate, either in Rabat or by implementing a new section at the Collège d’Azrou? Or, instead, should they resist change, stubbornly adhering to the Berber policy of the Lyautey era? In that case, Paye warns, “we must prepare ourselves to face a brusque offensive from the Makhzen and the nationalist milieu, as well as present a firm resistance” to elite parents who sought admission for their children to the colleges musulmans. “In effect, I ask myself,” Paye concludes rhetorically, if we must, in face of these difficulties, firmly maintain the principles of our scholastic action in Berber country, in the sense that this remains subordinate to the ‘Berber policy’ 497 Ibid. 498 Ibid. 194 followed up until now; or if instead we ought to soften our approach, to stave off the claims that already make themselves known. This is why I would like to obtain very precise directives on this subject which, despite its scholastic and pedagogical character, is of great political importance.499 While Paye may have been correct about the political urgency of the Berber Question in the school system, these problems could not have come at a worse time for the Protectorate administration. As American General Dwight Eisenhower’s 1942 Operation Torch got underway with surprise attacks on Port Lyautey, Casablanca, and Safi in Morocco, plus Algiers and Oran, and then marched American troops into Tunisia, Protectorate authorities under Vichy control were in no position to concern themselves with school politics. With events of such magnitude occurring, the higher Protectorate administration cannot have seen Paye’s and the Sultan’s preoccupation with Arabic lessons for schoolboys in Azrou as anything but frivolous distractions. No response was forthcoming, and Paye’s request for serious discussion and precise directives went unheeded. Lucien Paye himself lost his position, as did his direct superior, Robert Ricard.500 For another year, the question was pushed aside, and when it finally boiled over, it did so in spectacular fashion. 499 Ibid. 500 Lucien Paye was mobilized for the remainder of the war. He served as Director of Public Education in Tunisia from 1948-1955, then in Dakar, Senegal from 1957-1960, before his appointment as Minister of National Education in Paris, where he served from 1961-1962. He was France’s first ambassador to China, from 1964 to 1969. Robert Ricard joined the faculty of the University of Algiers, then the Sorbonne in 1946, where he worked until retirement in 1969. Chantal de Tourtier-Bonazzi and François Pourcelet, Guide des papiers des ministres et secrétaires d'État de 1871 à 1974, 2nd edition (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1984): 190; François-Xavier Ricard, “Robert Ricard, Récit-portrait” Iberic@l, Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines 11 (2017): 263-311. 195 Nationalism and the Student Strike The foundation of Istiqlal in December 1943 and distribution of their Manifesto and subsequent mass protests of January 1944, which received thorough coverage in Chapter 3, directly touched the Collège Berbère. Several of the officers of the alumni association of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou had signed the Manifesto, and their alumni association president was among the young urban nationalists arrested and fined for their protest. Their student counterparts in Azrou were similarly enflamed with nationalist fervor – as well as anxious about their future career prospects, limited as they were by their lack of Arabic and the Baccalaureate. In solidarity with the urban movement, at the beginning of February 1944 a group of students from the third-year class held a secret meeting on a supervised outing in the woods, aided by the teacher Si Hammou ben Mohammed.501 Cognizant of their importance as the educated avant-garde of the nationalist movement in Berber country, these students concluded that it was their responsibility to carry forward the “fight of the people.” On 5 February, they delivered their manifesto to director Gabriel Germain: Like their comrades in the other scholarly establishments of the cities, the students of the Collège d’Azrou, in a special meeting, have unanimously decided to go on strike, to contribute to the struggle of the Moroccan people to obtain their political, economic, and social rights. We love France, because it is the country which has taught us to know and to appreciate the traditions of 1789 that are our own; but we also love Morocco, because it is the country of our birth and which we would be proud to see featured in the rank of free powers, which owe to it a part in this freedom. 501 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 371. 196 Long live Free France, long live Free Morocco Long live His Majesty the Sultan, may God protect and glorify him!502 Familiar with the events of the Second World War (the Army of Africa had united with the Free French Forces in August of 1943), their reference to Free France and the debt it owes to Morocco seems calculated to appeal to this alliance. It is likely that they were well aware of the significance of the movement to liberate France from Germany and the Vichy collaborators, the role of colonial troops in the attempt, and the irony of denying these colonies their own liberation in the aftermath. They also appeal explicitly to the republican values of the French Revolution and give credit to the Protectorate for instilling these values within them. By drawing a parallel between the French Revolution of 1789 and the burgeoning nationalist struggle, the authors bolster their claims of legitimacy and shame the French for their continued imperial exploitation. However, they temper this by expressing gratitude to the French for both originating these ideals and for imparting them to their Moroccan students. This recalls the paradox of educated nationalists in many colonial contexts, whose desire for political, social, and economic autonomy is complicated by their recognition of the colonizer’s role in their own education. Trained by the colonial powers as intermediaries, these thinkers then used their advanced educations and global knowledge to advocate for independence, using the very republican values to justify this claim.503 502 Ibid. 503 James Eskridge Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French- Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 (Peter Lang, 2004); Harry Gamble, Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950 (U of Nebraska Press, 2017); Gail P. Kelly, “Conflict in the Classroom: A Case Study from Vietnam, 1918-38,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 8, no. 2 (1987): 191–212. 197 The authors of this letter also eschew the word “Berber,” using it neither in the director’s title nor the name of the school. This, with their statement of solidarity with other “scholarly establishments,” establishes their association of the Collège d’Azrou with the collèges musulmans of Rabat and Fes, and their elision of the difference between them. They reject the Protectorate’s Berber Policy as enacted through their own educations, identifying instead with the broader nationalist movement for Moroccan self-determination. Discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation, Mohamed Benhlal’s book Le collège d’Azrou: La formation d’une élite berbère civile et militaire au Maroc provides eyewitness accounts of life at the Collège. During the 1990s, Benhlal conducted oral interviews with alumni of the Collège d’Azrou for his dissertation in sociology at the Université de Provence. According to Benhlal’s interlocutors, reminiscing decades later, Gabriel Germain read the letter calmly. Nodding and murmuring the occasional “mmhmm…,” Germain gave “not the slightest sign of nerves or of humor, neither of approbation or hostility.”504 Other teachers, they said, seemed rather excited by the whole affair, if not openly supportive. They speculate that it was this latest demonstration of Germain’s broad-mindedness that led to his subsequent demotion to the lycée in Meknès; the Direction of Political Affairs and the Department of the Interior had long considered him much too generous and indulgent with the indigènes. As in Rabat that January, the administrative response to the strike was swift and harsh. After reporting the strike to his superiors, Germain was shunted aside. Leadership in Rabat sent the military to occupy the Collège, and the secondary level was shut down. Forty-five students at the upper levels were expelled. Eight ringleaders, from the third year, were arrested, tried by 504 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 375. 198 military tribunals, and sentenced to prison terms from eight months to a year.505 They were between fourteen and sixteen years old. Some recounted being marched eighty kilometers from one prison to another, and some of those imprisoned recalled that they did not see sunlight for as much as four months.506 Younger students who avoided the purge recalled total confusion as the upperclassmen were arrested and taken away. One of Benhlal’s interviewees remembered chasing the slow- moving wheat truck carting them away; petroleum rationing meant they could not attain high speeds, especially on the mountainous roads, so the younger boys were able to keep up for quite a while before their comrades in the truck told them to go back to the school.507 The secondary level was closed and would not reopen until the following October term. The Aftermath of the Strike Germain spent the remainder of his tenure as director in shame and uncertainty, reviewing the policies of the Collège. He also received a number of letters from expelled students, which he passed along to Counillon at the Muslim Education Service. Most apologized for their actions; some requested readmission to the Collège or transfer to other collège musulmans. One student, Lahssen ou Bouchta, whose letter Germain referred to as “a monument of style, worthy of a read” in his handwritten note to Counillon, waxed poetic about his regrets: 505 CADN 3MA/900/30. 506 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 374. 507 Ibid. 199 Monsieur le Directeur, I wanted to write to you as soon as I arrived home to apologize to you and tell you that this strike – or rather, this great foolishness, whose cause I have never known – this foolishness has shamed us, has thrown into perpetual despair. I have been so unhappy that from time to time I say to myself, "little children, we are to be pitied!" But I have been ill for a long time and it is only now that I'm starting to recover a little. I admit it was a stupid and simple thing, what we did there. Alas! Monsieur le Directeur, it is too regrettable! Where is that life in the Collège, those pearly laughs, those joys, those noisy games, those enthusiastic projects; where is all this sweetness and this escaltation [sic] of soul? Ah! How can so many beautiful days leave us, to never return? To tell the truth, when I start thinking about all that, I become so sad I could die. To let me pass over all these things that make me so eager to cry, I beg you, Mr. Director, to forgive me…508 Alas, I do not know whether Lahssen ou Bouchta was readmitted to the Collège Berbère. According to Benhlal, he did, however, go on to attend the Dar Beïda military academy in Meknes, where he graduated as a sub-lieutenant in 1949, eventually rising to the rank of colonel.509 Evidently, his nationalist commitments had not been deep enough to overcome his fondness for his school, or his willingness to make a living within the French system. 508 3MA/900/30 Lahssen ou Bouchta to Gabriel Germain, 4 June 1944. 509 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 147, 323. Benhlal cites Lahssen ou Bouchta as an example of a Collège d’Azrou alumnus who was able to rise in social class thanks to his time at the school; his rank gave him the opportunity to “marry a daughter of the great Lyoussi family, former caïd and Minister of the Interior in the first post-independence government.” 200 Another student, however, expressed far less culpability in his letters. Hassan ben Si Mohammed had been imprisoned for eight months following the strike, and first wrote to the school in June 1945 asking for readmission. After many notes between French officials, Commandant Coudino, BAI contrôleur for the customary tribunals of the Meknes region, advised that, while Hassan appeared to “sincerely regret” his participation in the strike, he continued to “criticize the absence of Arabic language instruction at Azrou.”510 This was too great a risk to take, so Hassan received notice that he would not be readmitted to Azrou – though he was told that it was because he would have to recommence the 4ème level, and that, as a result of the strike, there was no 4ème level that year. Hassan wrote back in August, to “solicit from your high benevolence the transfer of my scholarship to the Collège Moulay Youssef,” and asked to be sent his Certificate of Secondary Studies.511 This again sparked numerous memos between various Protectorate offices, until finally, Director Counillon himself responded to Hassan in September that “I regret to inform you that it will not be possible to admit you to the Collège Moulay Youssef de Rabat. Moreover, the scholarship from which you benefitted can neither be maintained nor transferred.”512 The Certificate of Secondary Studies was attached. Significantly, part of their rationale for the rejection was that Hassan was a member of the Zemmour confederation, which they cite as “a hotbed of the propaganda that gave birth to the events of 1944 – it appears that the young Hassan has not abandoned his pretensions and his critiques.”513 The Zemmour, with their long-suspected 510 3MA/900/30 Directeur des Affaires Politiques à Monsieur le Directeur d’Instruction Publique, 19 June 1945. 511 3MA/900/30 Hassan ben Si Mohammed à Monsieur le Directeur du Collège d’Azrou, 3 August 1945. 512 3MA/900/30 Counillon to Hassan ben Si Mohammed Zemmouri, 6 September 1945. 513 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Direction d’Instruction Publique, 23 June 1945. 201 trend toward Arabization and its associated nationalist agitation, was now excluded from the Collège Berbère recruitment zone. In March 1944, a month after the strike and in the midst of numerous investigations, Louis Brunot, formerly the Director of Muslim Education and contemporarily director of the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, suggested “putting the college to sleep for a while,” and described the Berber policy as a serious failure. “It would be out of place,” he suggests, “to speak here of the prejudices that we shared with regard to this population and our ignorance of the inevitable effects of the general pacification of the country. We were cruelly mistaken ... no secondary education for Berbers.”514 Apparently, Berber policy was increasingly seen as a failure. Not only Germain’s position as director, but the continued existence of the school and its mission were at stake. In June, Germain received a letter from DIP director Jean Pasquier, on behalf of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, requesting the creation of a special training section at the Collège d’Azrou for Berber secretary-interpreters for the customary tribunals. Germain’s last act as director of the Collège Berbère was thus to deny the BAI. In an icy response, he laid out – in a numbered list – all of the reasons why such a program was not feasible. First, he reminded Pasquier that “all of the students of the 3eme have been condemned to a year in prison,” and thus there would not be students eligible to join a post-Certificate training course.515 Furthermore, even if such a course were started (in October 1945 at the earliest, though he was doubtful even that would be possible), the students of the Collège d’Azrou were not typically eager to extend 514 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 185. 515 3MA/900/30 Germain to Pasquier, 10 June 1944. Emphasis in the original. 202 their studies by another year, particularly as they were already able to find work as auxiliaries to the customary tribunal without extra training.516 If, however, such a course were opened, and accepted French trainees for the program, Germain proposed the addition of “a course on the human milieu (the Berber past, their customs, the modes of life in diverse regions, their present-day transformations).”517 This echoed the longstanding belief of the Muslim Education Service that BAI officers were generally ignorant of, or failed to appreciate, Berber culture. Germain closed with a complaint about the Dar Beïda military school recruiting indiscriminately from all years of the student body, even those “who did not have their Certificate of Study.”518 If additional training programs were to be added, such as the one Pasquier proposed or a Section Normale for teacher training, the military school would also need to follow the same recruitment protocol. Germain’s decidedly unhelpful response may have contributed to Pasquier’s decision to remove him from the Collège. Germain received notice of his impending reassignment in July and transferred to a European lycée in Meknes that November. Yet again, the questions of recruitment and the school’s purpose were reopened. On May 15, 1944, Director of Political Affairs Philippe Boniface sent a memo to the Director of Public Instruction, Pasquier, about restructuring recruitment practices at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou.519 His memo called for doubling down on the original, Berber myth-inspired goals of 516 Ibid. 517 Ibid. 518 Ibid. 519 Boniface, who rose through the ranks of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs beginning in 1913, was notorious for promoting the violent suppression of protest, first in Rabat in 1944, and later in a 1947 massacre in Casablanca. In 1944, he sent a top-secret memo to the officers of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, calling for them to carefully surveil and, if necessary, “sanitize” all caïds, whom he suspected of sympathies with the nationalists. See Robin 203 the school, in opposition to competing administrative claims that the separate Berber policy had failed. He referred to a 1942 circular from the Resident General on the goals of the Collège Berbère, which specified that the Collège “is essentially intended to accommodate the sons of Berber notables,” and that there were specific desired outcomes for graduates: to “return to their tribe, with their parents, indigenous chiefs or influential notables;” to attend the military school at Dar Beïda, to enter “a career in the Berber justice system,” or to become a teacher in an école berbère.520 Boniface wrote that “These goals determine recruitment, and the events that transpired at the Collège d'Azrou on February 5th impose henceforth the strictest adherence to these principles.” The student strike, according to the Director of Political Affairs, necessitated clamping down on the types of students who could safely be admitted to the Collège Berbère. The changes that Boniface mandated were explicitly designed to combat creeping Arabization, by “excluding from recruitment children from suspicious families.”521 In addition to known troublemakers, this included the “Arabs of Azrou, or Arabized areas such as Sefrou;” as well as the “semi-Arabized Berber tribes of the plain (Zemour, Guerrouane, Aït Ayache du Saïd, Beni Sadden).” The Zemmour had been noted as potentially dangerous three years earlier, when former director Bisson confiscated the letters between Zemmouri students at different collèges, as well as in 1942 when the Sultan came calling. Boniface notes that even the close relatives of alumni “should be avoided, if they belong to one of these categories.”522 All of these measures were intended to return the Collège Berbère d’Azrou to a state of “pure Berber” enrollment, as Bidwell, Morocco Under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas 1912-1956 (London: Routledge, 1973), 83. 520 CADN 3MA/900/30 Boniface to Pasquier, 15 May 1944. 521 Ibid. 522 Ibid. 204 envisioned from the start. Corrupting “Arab” influences were to be culled, to avoid further incidents like the strike. In October, Pasquier wrote a letter to the Plenipotentary Minister of the Secretary General to justify sacking Germain.523 According to Pasquier, the strike demonstrated that Germain, for whom I have the highest esteem, and whose intellectual and moral worth are not at all in question – has neither the practical qualities nor the necessary fortitude for this post. In particular, he has committed the error of treating these young Berber highlanders in his charge as if they were French students. Insufficiently hemmed in, left to their own devices on outings, these youths were easy prey for nationalist agitators who enticed them into obnoxious demonstrations.524 According to this administrator, himself a long-time functionary of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, treating Moroccan youth as the intellectual equals of French students was a grievous mistake. The poor students themselves were not, of course, responsible for the nationalist sentiments they espoused; it was inevitably external agitation that had infected them with such subversive views. Arabization was infectious. The next task was thus to select Germain’s replacement, who would be competent to restrict students’ exposure to dangerous outside elements. The new director must, according to Pasquier, be “an energetic man, competent in Berber and having already sufficient experience in Berber affairs to enforce the compliance of his students.”525 After bemoaning how all of the 523 Pasquier oversaw the post-protest reopening of the collèges musulmans as well, requiring students returning to Collège Moulay Idriss in Fes to provide their parents’ signatures on a commitment that their children would not partake in nationalist activity. See Daniel Zisenwine, Emergence of Nationalist Politics in Morocco: The Rise of the Independence Party and the Struggle Against Colonialism After World War II (I.B.Tauris, 2010), 72. 524 CADN 3MA/900/30 Pasquier to Ministre plénipotentaire, October 1944. 525 Ibid. 205 officials who fulfilled these requirements had been mobilized in the war, Pasquier conceded that Colonel Mondet more or less fit the bill. Mondet was a former officer of Indigenous Affairs and had participated in the pacification campaign in the region of Azrou. However, Mondet was to be strictly limited in his responsibilities. Charged with the “moral and political administration of the College d’Azrou,” Mondet was the first Collège Berbère director who had no authority over the curriculum or oversight of the faculty.526 The effects of the strike were acutely felt. In expelling and imprisoning an entire class and altering the school’s recruitment practices to exclude many regions with better-developed primary schools, the Muslim Education Service had pitted two of its core values against one another: maintaining a “pure Berber” nature on the one hand and training enough intermediaries to fulfill the Protectorate’s needs on the other. It also could not have come at a worse time for the school. With many regular teachers mobilized for the final push of the war effort, the faculty was sorely diminished. When Colonel Mondet took the reins of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou as it reopened in November of 1944, he was beset by problems on all sides. The first of his problems was enrollment. After the strike, 49 students were expelled. Some of them would be readmitted upon review, but many others did not return. Six boarders of the third year had been condemned to prison; a seventh successfully pled innocence, but his request for readmission was denied. Of the 49 expelled, only 26 were readmitted. Another three enrolled at the military school at Dar Beïda, two took jobs in Meknès, and one was denied readmission on the grounds that he was already a troublemaker and poor student, even if innocent of orchestrating the strike. Another five students were not heard from, and when Germain wrote to their local BAI chefs de poste in September of 1944 requesting their return, the 526 Ibid. 206 officers ignored him. This further confirmed his long-held suspicions that the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs leadership was hostile to the school’s mission. The sole remaining member of the fifth form was advised to apply to Collège Moulay Youssef instead, on the grounds that the Collège Berbère d’Azrou no longer recruited from his “Arabized” region. During the aborted school year, there had been 68 students across four cohorts at the secondary level; the following year, there were 39 for only two classes.527 This drop in enrollment was exacerbated by Mondet’s second problem (which had plagued previous directors for years): recruitment. The October 1944 enrollment records show only one fils de caïd and one fils de proprietaire. There were sons of mokhzanis, shopkeepers, farmers, a nurse, a clerk, and a mason; however, the largest number (19) had fathers listed as “unemployed” or “poor without profession.” To Mondet, the school was clearly not fulfilling its intended role as training ground for future Berber elites. Furthermore, efforts to recruit a sufficient number of students were stymied by increasingly strict admission requirements. No longer could lax recruitment policies be allowed to let Arabs or Arabized Berbers slip into the ranks of the school. Occasionally, even the hard-line Mondet seemed frustrated by these new restrictions. In May of 1945, he received a letter from an employee of the Post, Telegraph, and Telephone (PTT) service in Fes – a “Français musulman d’Algérie,” as Mondet reported to his superior – requesting his son’s admission to the Collège Berbère.528 Miloud Mellak expressed a desire that his son receive “preparation for employment as a jemaa secretary, like his two older brothers, who work for the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs.”529 He informed Mondet that the 527 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 189. 528 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Counillon, 23 November 1945. 529 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mellak to Mondet, 28 Mai 1945. 207 family was “of Kabyle Berber origin,” and provided the name of their home caïd for verification. Mondet responded, “to my great regret, I cannot but inform you that this Collège accepts only Moroccan Berber subjects, whose candidature is certified by the Direction of Political Affairs.”530 Mellak then appealed to the Direction of Political Affairs, who similarly responded in the negative. Even as the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs agitated for more secretaries for the customary tribunals, Mondet had to turn away promising candidates because of the school’s strict standards. One solution, undertaken for the 1945-1946 school year, was to recruit younger students as internes at the primary school level, who would then grow to populate the secondary level in upcoming years. Mondet’s top-priority recruitment was “children who do not have the possibility to attend an école du bled at home. This is perhaps an interim measure but ought to be maintained as long as the montagne berbère is not covered by schools with French teachers.”531 As a result, he recruited more than 20 children “with no schooling” between the ages of 8 and 11. Of the 43 total new recruits, 31 were marked as from a notable family – sons, grandsons, and nephews of caïds, ex-caïds, customary tribunals judges, or religious leaders (cheikhs).532 Recruitment efforts were also hindered by other factors. The first was practical; petroleum rationing meant Mondet could not conduct a full recruitment tour across the entire (mountainous) zone of enrollment. The second was that the Chefs de Bureaux and Indigenous Affairs officers, long hostile to the school, were able to use the strike as justification to not exert themselves in recruitment efforts. Additionally, Benhlal’s alumni interlocutors claim that drops 530 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Mellak, 5 June 1945. 531 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet, “Très confidentiel: Rapport relatif à la reorganization du Collège d’Azrou,” 24 July 1945. Emphasis in the original. 532 Ibid. 208 in enrollment were also due to a sense of solidarity with the students expelled and imprisoned.533 Rather than scaring would-be nationalists straight, these repressive efforts had scared them (and their parents) away altogether. Most alarmingly, it soon became apparent that not all of the would-be revolutionaries had been purged from the Collège; in January 1945, Mondet ventured, perhaps for the first time, into the student WCs, where he was enraged to discover a great deal of graffiti “still bearing witness to the mentality of that epoch.”534 Unfortunately, Mondet did not see fit to record the words of the student resistors and nationalists. He immediately ordered the walls and doors whitewashed, notwithstanding the difficulty of requisitioning the necessary materials in wartime. To his dismay, new inscriptions appeared almost immediately. Additionally, Mondet resumed the practice of censoring student mail, reporting on suspicious activities to others in the administration. For example, in November of 1945, he sent a top-secret note to the contrôleur civile of the region of Berkane, informing them that he had intercepted a letter from an employee in their service to a student of the Collège, Bounouar, himself from Berkane. Mondet notes that Bounouar had “exercised a certain activity at the time of the troubles at the Collège, in February 1944.”535 The employee, Mohammed Sebbani, had included a cryptic comment that “A…N…develops more and more, and we are real ones.”536 Mondet speculated that “A…N…” could be secret code for “activités nationalistes,” and asked the contrôleur to inform him of “any 533 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 189. 534 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Pasquier, January 1945. 535 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Monsieur le contrôleur civile, chef de la circonscription civile BERKANE, 8 November 1945. 536 Ibid. 209 intelligence you can collect on the actions of these two indigènes.”537 Nothing came of this suspicion; the contrôleur civile did not respond, and a month later Mondet reported to Counillon that Bounouar seemed to recognize the seriousness of his role in the “incidents at the start of 1944” and did not appear to be presently fomenting rebellion among his comrades.538 Although no second strike occurred, Mondet remained acutely aware that he was surrounded by potential anticolonial agitators. In addition to these internal shortcomings, Mondet also faced external hostility. Instead of breaking the will of the nationalists, the repression of the student strike had become a unifying moment for the countryside. Berber groups that had ignored unrest in the distant cities were far less apathetic when their own youth were caught up in the French crackdown. The nationalist movement in Berber country was referred to as Aït Watan – mirroring Berber tribal naming convention to evoke a larger “Tribe of the Nation” or “Sons of the Nation.” They saw themselves as “taking up the torch” of earlier “sibistes,” the forces of dissidence that had resisted colonial incursion just a few decades before. Every November 11, amidst Armistice commemorations, students from the Collège d’Azrou were taken to the military memorial at Tabadoult. There, a stele read: “Frenchmen who come to this land: know that each head of wheat you harvest here was irrigated by the blood of our brothers.”539 Erected to evoke recognition and gratitude of the sacrifice of Moroccan troops for France in World War I, this ominous inscription came to condemn the colonial project itself to the students of the Collège, as alumni recalled years later to Benhlal.540 537 Ibid. 538 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet to Counillon, 5 December 1945. 539 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 372. 540 Ibid. 210 Mondet himself was an ardent proponent of the Protectorate’s original vision for its Berber policy, and of the initial purpose of the Collège. He disagreed strongly with Brunot’s March 1944 declaration that secondary Berber education had been a mistake. According to Mondet, writing in March 1945, “the Berbers are surprised that we seem to have less concern for their future than that of the Arab element, and urban in particular.”541 This was because the lack of Arabic language training, and lack of access to the Baccalaureate, was limiting their employment opportunities. The students of the school were merely jealous of their counterparts at the collèges musulmans. They felt that the reforms the French had accorded to urban nationalist demands were designed to “keep the Berbers in an inferior rank.” He also suggested that the strike was merely “an explosion of anarchy,” recalling the long association of Berber country with anarchy and dissidence, or siba.542 In that March 1945 memo, he lambasted the local leadership for ignoring the “multitude of rodents, Arab and otherwise, encrusted in this county and absorbing it.”543 He demanded that the Protectorate follow through on its stated policy of hiring Berber-origin translators, clerks, officers, and secretaries instead. His diagnosis of the ills of the Collège contended that necessary reforms had long been proposed but never put into practice. “Pure” Berbers had been mixed haphazardly with Arab students from the village’s commercial class and even Algerians; the primary and secondary levels were too intertwined; and boarders had been exposed to (presumably Arab) locals, infected with dangerous political ideas which were then allowed to fester. He insisted upon isolating the internat of the Collège and creating a separate primary 541 CADN 3MA/900/30 Colonel Mondet, “Note au sujet du Collège Berbère d’Azrou,” 23 March 1945. 542 Ibid. 543 Ibid. 211 school for the children of newly-installed Arab villagers; failure to do so earlier, he argued, “put the worm in the fruit,” echoing the rhetoric of contamination and spoliation long associated with the Arabization of Berber regions.544 To Mondet, ever the military man, the solution was discipline. The school needed to be militarized and given “habits of order, a corrective to the discipline they lack.”545 They should be incorporated with the Berber goum regiments and encouraged to continue their studies at Dar Beïda. He expressed disapproval of students’ wishes to carry on with their educations, especially in the cities, and especially when the Baccalaureate came up. He also responded severely when students were caught with books or newspapers in Arabic, and chastised students who used the Arabic “ben/ibn” instead of the Berber “ou” in their names.546 Unsupervised trips to the town and unstructured free-time were curtailed; rigid schedules with plenty of physical education became the order of the day. By 1945, the only recourse that students at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou had against the administration was the anonymous graffiti of resistance, scribbled on bathroom walls. This poignant image evokes the fragility of these young men’s position within the hierarchy of the French Protectorate of Morocco. Despite ostensibly belonging to a privileged class of the educated elite, they were nevertheless defenseless against the full force of the regime when it cracked down on their collective anticolonial action. 544 Ibid. 545 Ibid. 546 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 188. 212 The Collège d’Azrou on the Eve of Independence In 1953, founder and former Collège Berbère director Arsène Roux, now the director of the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, carefully clipped an article from his Saturday paper, entitled, “Perched on the Slopes of the Atlas, the Collège d’Azrou Ensures the Future of Young Berbers.”547 Mondet’s successor as director of the Collège, M. Serrès, had made many changes to the school in just five years. The article is a glowing report of his successes. Most remarkable about this report, however, is what remains unsaid. For instance, the authors make no mention of the languages of instruction – neither French, nor Arabic, nor Berber language courses receive comment from the article’s reporters, L. Claden and J. Martin.548 Perhaps unsurprisingly, former unrest at the school is also ignored. The article presents an optimistic portrait of a school undergoing a renaissance, swiftly adapting to meet the needs of its student population and grant them limited entry into the modern – that is to say, French – world. However, the article’s conspicuous silences belie the anxiety of the Protectorate Administration in the final years of its control over Morocco. The page is illustrated by a large photo of the school, taken from higher up an adjacent slope to give an aerial view. The caption invites the reader to observe the new wing under construction, which promised to provide space for a total of 300 boarders by the beginning of the next school year, in October 1953. The article begins by calling on the familiar trope of the divide between bled al-makhzen and bled al-siba, situating the reader thus: “at the very border of dissidence stands erect a building of relatively modern architecture: this is the Collège 547 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1, newspaper clipping “Le reportage du samedi.” Atypically, Roux did not mark down the name of the newspaper or date of publication on this clipping. 548 https://www.corsematin.com/deces/57819.627342.html 213 d’Azrou.”549 Dissidence in this context refers to the traditional imagery of the bled al-siba, or land of dissidence. Figure 20: Photo of the Collège d’Azrou from “Le reportage du samedi” Drawing on this romantic imagery of the Collège as the boundary-marker between anarchy and modernity, the authors delve into the history of the school. Founded in 1927 “even before the pacification of Berber Country,” the school served as a means of bringing French “influence and culture to the most isolated highlanders of the Middle Atlas.”550 The goal of the school, they report, was threefold: first, to educate young Berbers under the same curriculum as 549 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1, newspaper clipping “Le reportage du samedi.” 550 Ibid. 214 the Muslims – drawing a clear distinction between these two groups, even in 1953, despite the fact that the Berbers of the Middle Atlas were predominantly Muslim to begin with. More to the point, this first goal as stated is a falsehood: the Berber schools were deliberately distinct from the écoles and collèges musulmans, and did not follow the same curriculum at all, particularly in the subjects of Arabic language and Islamic religion. Even in 1953, the curriculum was limited to only a few hours per week of Arabic, and even less of religion. The second listed purpose of the school was to train a local cadre of functionaries for the French administration, preparing students for service to France in Berber Country. Finally, the collège served to shape a rural elite capable of pursuing higher education. Lavishing the first director – Roux himself – with praise, the authors describe him as a “veteran Arabist and Berberist,” who succeeded in attracting the sons of local notables to the school by tirelessly traversing the mountains to recruit from the various tribes.551 In his very first years, thanks to pressure from local authorities as well as generous scholarships (including tuition, room, board, and clothing), he had amassed 15 boarders and 40 local schoolchildren who attended classes during the day. Only a few years later, the number of boarders had risen to 43, although the authors observed that most of these were the sons of “partisans” of the French administration, because most Berber caïds remained reluctant to entrust their sons to the French. Thus, when in 1930 the number of boarders reached 60, only three were the sons of Moroccan chiefs. Furthermore, the authors observed that the students were of a relatively advanced age. Whereas the average French collège served students aged approximately 11-15, the secondary- level students of the Collège d’Azrou, especially in the early days, tended to be in their late teens and as old as their early twenties. By 1941, the school housed approximately 100 boarders. 551 Ibid. 215 Skipping over the war and the unrest at the school, the authors jump to Mondet’s 1945 construction of new dormitories, bringing the boarding capacity to 180, although it would take a few years of recruitment to reach that enrollment. Thanks to the efforts of the Collège, according to the journalists, “education has little by little entered into the values (moeurs)” of the Berber population, and they predicted that soon, recruitment would pose no problem at all, and Director Serrès would be able to “select his pupils from the better elements” of that society.552 Under his leadership, during the 1952 school year there were 213 boarders and 118 local students. This reversal – more interns than externs – goes unremarked, but is certainly due to changes instituted by Mondet, who feared that the local population of Azrou was too Arabized to be allowed to safely mix with the Berber students. A local primary école musulman was opened in town in October of 1945, drawing this undesirable element away from the Collège.553 This is another example of the journalists’ exclusion of any mention of ethnic or linguistic divides at the school – a holdover of that habit of secrecy that had long characterized French discussion of the Collège d’Azrou. The purpose of the school these days, they wrote, was to provide a thorough secondary education for young Berbers, in order to prepare them for modern life while “respecting their tribal particularisms.”554 Lyautey’s double culture lived on. Picking up the theme of modernization, the authors praise recent refurbishments to the kitchen and cafeteria. For the sake of hygiene, the past two years had seen a major development: no longer were students allowed to share meals communally, eating with their hand from a 552 Ibid. 553 CADN 3MA/900/30 Mondet, “Très confidentiel: Rapport relatif à la reorganization du Collège d’Azrou,” 24 July 1945. 554 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1, newspaper clipping “Le reportage du samedi.” 216 common tajine. In Figure 16, taken in the early 1940s, students can be seen eating in the refectory seated on the ground, sharing a communal tajine. Instead, students now dined from individual plates, with silverware, “in the modern way.”555 Clearly, this was to be considered a coup for modernity. They list the other modern amenities of the school: teacher’s lounge, administrative offices, laundry, five dormitories with beds “à l’européenne,” shower room, lavatory, and an infirmary, featuring a common room with ten beds, two “isolation chambers,” and housing for the nurse, who assisted the medical inspector with his weekly rounds. The newly modernized dining room could also be converted into a cinema, they note with evident pride. Additionally, the school in the early 1950s counted five primary classrooms, seven secondary classrooms, a recreation room, a sciences laboratory, a study hall, a well-equipped gymnasium, and a vast artisanal atelier. The new wing under construction would provide five new classrooms and two new dormitories of 70 beds each. Only a kilometer away, the 13-hectare school farm provided “practical and theoretical training adapted to the pastoral and agricultural life of the mountains.”556 Recruitment of new students adhered to two principles. First was respect for the prestige of Berber chiefs, and the fine treatment of their sons (who were, increasingly, paying boarders from wealthy families). The second principle was to seek out the “deserving elite,” bright pupils who were showered with generous scholarships. Berbers, the authors announce, tend to prioritize farm work over education for their children. It is difficult to convince them to sacrifice money and labor for something they do not view as immediately profitable. It is for this reason that scholarship students remain the majority at the Collège. Finally, they note the presence of twenty 555 Ibid. 556 Ibid. 217 young Frenchmen among the student body, the sons of the French faculty and staff. These lads followed the same curriculum as their Berber classmates, “which is indisputable proof of the quality of the education given.”557 The Collège d’Azrou had thus grown into one of the largest boarding schools in the country, “specially destined for and adapted to that mountain population for whom Berber remains the mother tongue.” Significantly, this is the only mention of language in the article, and deftly dodges the question of language of instruction. The students spoke Berber at home – but the reader receives no information about the languages they learned or used at school. French could be presumed, of course, but the issues of Arabic vs. Berber language were sidestepped. The journalists go on to discuss the outcomes and careers of graduates of the school. Because only a minority return home to work the land, a constant concern of the school administration was finding other opportunities for their students. The new teacher training section, created after Mondet’s departure but proposed before the war, served to provide cadres for the Muslim Education Service. Juridical training courses prepared students to become legal clerks for local courts (they do not specify that these are the Berber Customary Tribunals), artisanal courses furnished good workers of wood and iron for local industry, and, finally, a typing course “picks up those students with little talent for studying.”558 The director, Serrès, also helped steer his graduates to further education opportunities: to the French lycée in Meknès, to the Dar Beïda military academy there, to advanced training schools in agriculture, horticulture, nursing, and so on. 557 Ibid. 558 Ibid. 218 The results, according to the authors, were very satisfying. A full dozen students were studying with the goal of sitting for the Bac (six graduates having already done so, although they do not mention if all of them passed), one worked as an agronomist in Meknes, and one alumnus attended medical school in Paris. The school had trained around 50 law clerks and 100 teachers currently working in the Muslim education service. The sole reference to the war is a brief mention of the 30 military officers among the alumni, “of whom three died on the field of honor.”559 The remaining alumni maintained close contact with the school, whether by “friendly letters” or regular visits. Finally, the authors commend the European faculty and staff for inculcating trust of the French in their Berber charges, for bringing them into contact with modern culture, while simultaneously maintaining respect for their religion and their customs. “Strict obedience, firm and benevolent authority, sports practice,” instill in the students “a taste for order, good habits, and activity.”560 In conclusion, Mssrs. Claden and Martin declare the school a rousing success for French educational efforts: By the quality of the teaching and the results obtained, by the constant concern for the future of the pupils, by the close contacts maintained with the families, by the sincere and often moving attachments of the alumni, by the prospects of its near future, the Collège d’Azrou can claim the legitimate pride of clinging victoriously to the slopes of the Atlas, following behind the soldiers of the Pacification, the avant-garde and the very heart of la Berbérie marocaine. This is the conclusive outcome of 25 years of effort.561 559 Ibid. 560 Ibid. 561 Ibid. 219 Beyond showing how the school grew and changed in the years following the war, the strike, and the concurrent upheavals of life at the school, this article demonstrates French priorities in the final years of the Protectorate of Morocco. Only a few years before independence, they were confident (or sought to project the appearance of confidence) in their control over the country, and optimistic about the future growth of the education system. However, this confidence and optimism required the obfuscation of any contradictory evidence, such as the unrest at the school and the nationalist political activism of the Alumni Associations, including that of the Collège Berbère. Likewise, the 1930 Berber Dahir is never mentioned in the article and is conspicuous in its absence. The continued public silence about the separate nature of the Berber curriculum – completely different from that at the collèges musulmans – reveals that French anxieties remained high and guarded about the potential reemergence of nationalist mass protest. Ultimately, the goal of Berber education policy, and the purpose of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, was – somewhat ironically – achieved. The stated purpose was to train a Berber administrative elite and to educate future caïds and functionaries. As Mohamed Benhlal discovered, they succeeded in this: by 1950, of the 350 official caïds in charge of administrative regions, 250 were alumni of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou.562 However, the larger aim of Protectorate Berber policy, to inoculate the former bled al-siba against the incursion of Arabic and Moroccan nationalism, was less successful. In the countryside as in the cities, the failure of French developmental promises, combined with a global anticolonial movement, contributed to discontent with the status quo and an impatience for Moroccan political autonomy. 562 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 11. 220 CHAPTER 5: ARSÈNE ROUX AND THE COLLÈGE D’AZROU: A CASE STUDY OF A COLONIAL EDUCATOR AND ADMINISTRATOR Arsène Roux has appeared earlier in this dissertation: in Chapter 3 as the founder and first director of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou in 1927, and again in Chapter 4 as the director of the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat, where he was responsible for punishing Zidi Allal ben Mohammed for his crude artwork in 1941. In this chapter, I examine Roux’s life, work, and correspondence, seeking to understand his role as an agent of the French imperial apparatus. Devoted to the associationist ideology of the Protectorate Berber policy, Roux dedicated his career to facilitating interaction between French officials and Berber subjects.563 As a soldier, interpreter, linguist, and educator, Roux’s work served to further incorporate the putative bled al- siba into the fabric of the Franco-Makhzen field of authority. Simultaneously, Roux held a passion for Berber language and culture, and made a hobby of collecting Berber poetry, songs, and folklore. His personal archives, housed in the library of the Maison Mediterranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence, contain countless examples of Berber cultural production. The existing scholarship concerning the Fonds Roux examines Roux’s collection of Arabic and Berber manuscripts, his linguistic treatises on various Berber dialects, and his extensive compendium of Berber folklore.564 Jonathan Wyrtzen, in his remarkable study Making 563 Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 564 For example, see Nico Van Den Boogert, Catalogue des Manuscrits Arabes et Berbères du Fonds Roux (Aix-en- Provence: IREMAM, 1995); Harry Stroomer, “Three Tashelhiyt Berber Texts from the Arsène Roux Archives,” in Evidence and Counter-Evidence: Essays in Honour of Frederik Kortlandt Vol 2: General Linguistics, eds. Alexander Lubotsky, Jos Schaeken, and Jeroen Wiedenhof (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008) 389-399. Like Wyrtzen, Stroomer also attributes Roux’s collection to help from assistants, though he does not mention that many were students. 221 Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity, dedicates a chapter to analysis of Middle Atlas poetry found in Roux’s collections.565 Wyrtzen presents these poems and songs as the only existing primary source from the perspective of Middle Atlas Berbers themselves, and examines the ways that these poets express defiance toward and occasionally approval of French intervention in North Africa. While Wyrtzen acknowledges that Roux “relied extensively on Moroccan assistants” to collect these works, he does not delve into who these assistants were, or what their relation was to Roux.566 Although many were indeed paid associates and professional colleagues, Roux also relied upon sources of assistance of more questionable ethical consideration – his students. While the director of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou from 1927 to 1935, Roux was also the main instructor of Berber language and culture. In addition to asking students to divulge various political, social, and agricultural practices of their natal villages, Roux set assignments for students to complete over holiday vacations back home. These assignments were not optional or mutually beneficial, as in a relationship between paid informants and the researcher. Roux quite literally controlled students’ everyday lives at the boarding school, as well as influencing their potential future livelihoods. In this way, Roux enlisted his students in his hobby of collecting Berber folklore. These holiday assignments – stories, poems, songs that boys collected at home - often note their source: “My father.” “My uncle.” “My grandmother.” In this way, Roux bypassed the reticence of many Middle Atlas Berbers to entrust their stories to a Christian Frenchman. Grandmothers who would have been unlikely to recount their 565 Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also Wyrtzen “Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identities in Protectorate Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (2011), 227-249. 566 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 96. 222 stories to Arsène Roux gladly did so for their beloved grandsons – only for their stories to be filed away in Roux’s collection. This points to the manipulation at the heart of the colonial project in general and Protectorate Berber Policy in particular: French administrators claimed to be acting benevolently, for the cause of preserving Berber language and society, and yet it is the French themselves who reaped the material benefits. Roux was an active contributor to the continuation of the imperial project of legibility and simplification, introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. He was himself a participant in the creation of the Moroccan ethnographic archive, having published articles and books on Berber linguistics and folklore and presented his research at conferences.567 He was a member of the Fédération des Sociétés savantes d’Afrique du Nord. Arsène Roux, therefore, sits uncomfortably at the intersection of exploitation and the narrative touting the benefits of colonialism. In February of 2005, a French law with a clause calling schools to teach the “positive role” of the French presence overseas provoked wide controversy. Apologetics of empire regularly invoke the construction of roads, hospitals, and schools as evidence of this “positive role.”568 Roux, educator and school-builder that he was, clung to this narrative of the civilizing mission to justify his own participation in the imperial endeavor. When Morocco gained independence in 1956, Roux’s personal papers reveal his disbelief and sense of betrayal by the population he sought to enlighten. Returning to France, Roux started teaching Berber and Moroccan darija language courses, and corresponded with both French and Moroccan friends and former students. 567 Selected publications of Arsène Roux: Récits, Contes et Légendes berbères en tachelhit (Rabat: IHEM 1942); La vie berbère par les textes: Parlers du Sud-Ouest marocain (tachelhit) (Paris: 1955); "Quelques argots arabes et berbères du Maroc" /Arsène Roux, In : IIe Congrès de la Fédération des Sociétés savantes d'Afrique du Nord, Tlemcen 14-17 avril 1936, 2/2, Revue Africaine , LXXIX, n° 368-369, Alger, pp. 1067-1088. 568 Pierre Boilley, “Loi du 23 fevrier 2005, colonization, indigènes, victimisations: Évocations binaires, représentations primaires” in Politique Africaine 98 no.2 (2005): 131-140. https://www.cairn.info/revue-politique-africaine-2005-2-page-131.htm 223 Roux’s career also highlights another theme that emerged in earlier chapters. His was a decidedly paternalist approach to colonialism, in contrast to the antagonistic variety adopted by others who saw Morocco as little more than an abundance of resources to be extracted, with or without Moroccan consent. He frequently found himself in conflict with other administrative offices within the Protectorate system, particularly the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, recalling Steinmetz’s discussion of the multivocality and competition of the colonial project. Does it matter that Roux’s intentions were more benign? To the victims of colonial exploitation, does it make a difference whether it was done with malice? Was Roux naïve, and other administrators simply more honest about their shared undertaking? Clues about Roux’s attitudes toward Moroccan critiques of the colonial order are on display in his handling of the Associations des Anciens Élèves of the Collèges Moulay Youssef in Rabat and Moulay Ismail in Fes. Rather than undying gratitude and allegiance, these young men increasingly expressed frustration with their subordinate position to the French in their own country. Trained to fill the auxiliary roles of administration, they began to push back against the limitations imposed from above. As the appointed go-between for the Protectorate and the Associations, Roux’s assigned role was to distract them from their political activism with charity work. These associations reveal the tension between the ideology of the mission civilisatrice and the reality of the new young Moroccan elite the French had educated, and Roux was complicit in frustrating their goals. And what of Roux’s legacy? Ethical concerns aside, his collection does provide the only record of Middle Atlas Berber oral tradition of the early twentieth century. He was a dedicated researcher of Berber language and society, and his family bequeathed his personal papers to the Berber Encyclopedia following his death in 1974. Today, linguists at the Moroccan Royal 224 Institute for Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) utilize his treatises on Berber linguistics in their own project of modernizing the Tamazight language.569 As a professional linguist, most of Roux’s publications during his lifetime dealt with Berber and Arabic language. However, he presented at conferences and published a number of articles on Berber songs, folklore, and manuscripts. In this chapter, I argue that Arsène Roux was the ideal agent of the Berber Policy of the French Protectorate of Morocco, as Lyautey had intended it. Intelligent, personable, committed to his life’s work and convinced of the righteousness of his mission, Roux epitomized the French imperial project the way that apologists of empire would have it remembered. Simultaneously, Roux represents the hubris of that project. No matter how well-intentioned, agents of imperial domination are inevitably complicit in the violence of that exploitative system. As an educator, Roux also serves as a reminder that the colonial project, like all oppressive systems, planted the seeds of its own undoing. Figure 21: Arsène Roux570 569 Meftaha Ameur, Abdallah Boumalk, and Salem Chaker, eds, Un berbérisant de terrain: Arsène Roux (1893- 1971) Écrits et inédits (Rabat: IRCAM, 2016). 570 MMSH Fonds Roux. Undated photo. http://e-mediatheque.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/collection/manuscrit/roux/Pages/Roux-bio.aspx 225 Roux in Azrou, 1927-1935 Born February 5, 1893 in Rochegude, in the southeastern Drôme region, Arsène Roux showed an early aptitude for languages.571 He enlisted in the military as a teenager and learned Arabic and Kabyle-dialect Berber while stationed in Algeria. In 1913, at the age of 20, he deployed to the newly-formed Protectorate of Morocco as an interpreter. He was assigned to the region of El Hajeb, a majority Berber area in the Middle Atlas Mountains south of Meknes, where he worked until 1918. Matriculating at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines the year it was founded, he earned his diplomas in both Arabic and Berber languages in 1921. From then on, Roux worked as an educator, teaching Berber and Arabic to junior officers at Dar Beïda, the military academy, as well as at the French lycée in Meknes. It was there that he caught the attention of General Freydenberg, commandant of the region, who sought to establish a Berber regional school that would feed into Dar Beïda, providing French-speaking, Berber-origin officers for the goum regiments. When Freydenberg received approval from the Protectorate education service to open the school in Azrou, he appointed Arsène Roux its first director.572 Roux developed the school in its earliest years, first as a primary school, and later adding the secondary level in 1929. He worked to recruit ever-greater numbers of students, requesting increased petroleum rations to undertake arduous journeys on new roads to visit Berber villages throughout the Middle Atlas. He sought to convince parents and local elites that the school represented their boys’ best chance at upward mobility. Promising lucrative careers in the French administration and military, training in modern agriculture, and the language skills to succeed as future leaders and intermediaries between the French and the Berber population, Roux worked to 571 Ameur, Un berbérisant de terrain, 1. 572 Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou. 226 break through local skepticism to build the school’s cohort of boarders.573 Unfortunately for this researcher, the archives provide little insight into the earliest years of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou. Neither the Public Education files of the Protectorate of Morocco in the Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes nor Roux’s personal archives in Aix-en- Provence contain his official records or correspondence from the years 1927-1935. This appears to have been a contemporary problem, because Roux’s successors as director of the Collège complained about the dearth of records for the school’s early years. In 1942, for instance, Gabriel Germain reported that he was unable to provide concrete numbers of past enrollments, as no register existed prior to 1938.574 Enrollment registers, employment records, and course schedules are all missing. The only archival materials available from the Collège Berbère during Roux’s term as headmaster are several dozen student notebooks he kept in his private collection. These notebooks, dating from 1930 to1935, contain handwritten material from students, including lecture notes and homework assignments. They are the notebooks designated for secondary-level Berber language and culture courses, instructed by Roux himself and, on occasion, his wife Emma. By comparing notebooks from the same years to one another, I was able to determine which pages were copied lecture or reading materials and which were original compositions. Furthermore, the notebooks contained notes from Roux himself – grades and comments on student work, but also later notations indicating “tales to recopy.”575 Roux is known to have collected Berber folklore throughout his long career in Morocco. His collection of 573 Ameur, Un berbérisant de terrain. 574 CADN 3MA/900/30 Germain to Paye, 1942. 575 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1. “Cahiers d’écoliers 1930-1935.” 227 songs, legends, and poetry is housed in the Fonds Roux at MMSH with his personal papers and has only recently been recognized as a vital source of Amazigh oral history.576 Figure 22: First page of the notebook of student Moulay Ahmi, 1931 The front page is marked in Roux’s handwriting “examined December 1952”577 However, scholars who have worked with these sources have done little work on how Roux accessed these pieces of Berber oral tradition. Wyrtzen, for instance, says only that “While Roux gathered much himself, he also relied extensively on Moroccan assistants, who fanned out in various locations in the Atlas to collect songs, transcribing oral performances in a Latin script form of Tamazight.”578 He later comments that “it seems that the individuals who related their 576 See especially Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, chapter 3. Stroomer and Peyron (2003) compiled a catalogue of these holdings, and both have published poetry from the collection. Harry Stroomer and Michael Peyron, “Catalogue des archives Berbères du Fond Arsène Roux,” Berber Studies, Vol. 6, 2003; Stroomer, “Tashelhiyt Berber Texts from the Ayt Brayyim, Lakhsas and Guedmioua Region (South Morocco): A Linguistic Reanalysis of ‘Récits, contes et légendes berbères en Tachelhiyt’ by Arsène Roux with an English translation,” Berber Studies, 5, 2003; Stroomer, “Textes berbères du Maroc central (Textes originaux en transcription). Tome I. Récits, contes et légendes berbères dans le parler des Beni-Mtir et Choix de versions berbères (Parler du Maroc central),” Berber Studies, 18, 2007. 577 MMSH Fonds Roux. 578 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 97. 228 poems to Roux and other interlocutors felt free to relate a wide range of perspectives.” 579 Wyrtzen’s goal in Making Morocco is to analyze these poems as rare primary sources on the period of Pacification and resistance from the Berber perspective. His objective was not to examine how these came into Roux’s possession, but instead to treat them as “the only extant primary source record from these communities and one of the only means of gaining insight into personal and public negotiations of collective identity in the Tamazight-speaking Atlas during this eventful period.”580 In this chapter, however, I am interested in Roux himself as a key actor mediating between this Atlas Berber population and the French Protectorate administration, providing a window into the ongoing project of the colonial ethnographic archive. To that end, it is significant that much of his collection came, not from paid professional research assistants, but from student homework assignments. The notebooks marked “tales to recopy” are stored separately from his folklore collection. When recopied from the former to the latter, Roux carefully wrote down the origin and source of each story or poem – however, he did not note that they were collected by schoolboys from their families. Here, I turn from the concrete (Roux assigned his students to collect folklore for his personal collection) to speculation: in addition to poems and stories, much of the information that Roux had his students report would have been of immediate political and military interest to the Protectorate authorities. Without his correspondence from his tenure at the Collège d’Azrou, it is impossible to conclusively say whether he reported to his superiors in Rabat on the material he collected. However, based on what we know about the Protectorate administration’s 579 Ibid. 580 Ibid., 98. 229 preoccupation with codifying “authentic” Berber tradition and the overlap between Roux’s time in Azrou and the end of Pacification, it seems likely. If so, Roux’s practice of using students to collect ethnographic field notes becomes less a matter of personal eccentricity and moves into the territory of imperial exploitation of a subjugated population. But what do the student notebooks contain? A majority of the pages in each notebook is filled with Berber language lessons. Berber language notes include translated vocabulary, verb conjugations, and grammar mapping. Berber words and phrases were written in Latin characters. Grammar lessons included “adverbs of place,” pronouns, and irregular verbs, for example. Vocabulary lessons focused largely on practical, rural terminology: parts of the human body, animal names, agricultural implements. Students included detailed drawings of jars, tents, and other typical objects found in a Berber home. One assignment on “Jobs” (métiers) called for students to list common professions, including tanner, butcher, mason, cobbler, baker, weaver, musician, and so forth. Then they were asked to write on the topic “Who in your tribe practices these professions? Men, women, strangers?”581 Other assignments required students to describe the pastoral practices, migration or sedentary patterns, and eating habits of their tribes of origin. Questions for short essays included “In Berber, what are the customs of your tribe in the matter of transhumance?” and “What are the principal rules of politeness for your tribe?”582 Lectures on Berber culture also occupied space in students’ notebooks. In one lesson, appearing verbatim in several students’ accounts, Roux appears to have lectured students on traditional Berber gender roles: “it would be indecent for a man of the tribe to grind the wheat, to prepare the food, to weave the fabric, to fetch wood or water for housework, to sweep – these 581 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1. Cahier of Mohammed ben Bouâzza, 30 October 1932. 582 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Moulay Ahmed, November 1931. 230 tasks are done by the women.”583 In another case, Roux provided a paragraph in French on Berber burial practices, which students then translated into Berber. While the source of these lessons is unclear, it is highly likely that Roux relied on works produced by the Protectorate’s sociological service, discussed in Chapter 1. However, the reason Roux kept these notebooks for forty years was the homework he assigned over school holidays. When students went home for Easter vacation, Roux gave them copious writing assignments to complete. The assignments differed slightly from year to year, but the goal was to have students provide detailed descriptions of village customs and folklore. In 1932, for instance, the first question asked students to write, in Berber, on a variety of different tasks, ranging from herding and agriculture to food storage and water-gathering: “In sum, you must provide a complete, detailed, exact, and precise tableau of the agricultural and pastoral life of your tribe.”584 The second question that year dealt with the reverence of saints. Students were asked to provide a list of all of the saints of their “tribe,” and to “Indicate on a map the placement of their tombs and describe each tomb and its environs.” Roux required an in- depth explanation of each individual saint: Report on their legends (the stories people tell of their lives), their powers (protects the tribe, fights certain maladies), and their miracles. Give them a ranking in order of importance. Indicate who supplicates to them (men, women, children, entire tribe, travelers, pilgrims, strangers), under what circumstances and to what ends. Describe the precise manner in which one appeals to them (spoken words, processions around the 583 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1. Cahier of Moha ou Lhoussayn, May 1933. 584 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Hammadi ben Dou Haddou, 1932. 231 tomb, beasts sacrificed and in what manner, etc). Describe the holidays consecrated to them….”585 Figure 23: Page from the notebook of Ba-Ahssin, 1932 Drawing of his village (“Isqir”) with two saints’ tombs labeled, as well as a physical landmark (“Stones of Bu-uzzal”)586 The final task of the 1932 holidays was particularly open-ended but gives a clear hint to Roux’s personal preoccupations: “Finally, report as many interesting texts as possible (proverbs, riddles, fairytales, historical and religious legends and stories, songs, etc.).”587 Hammadi ben 585 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Hammadi ben Dou Haddou, 1932. 586 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Ba-Ahssin, 1932. 587 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Hammadi ben Dou Haddou, 1932. 232 Dou Haddou provided several proverbs and riddles which Roux marked for transcription to his collection. In the margins, the student noted that these were provided by “my father, my uncle, and my brother.”588 The following year, Roux again asked for any interesting tales the students could provide, as well as information on the subject of Berber customary law. One student, Bougrin ou Ali of the Beni Sadden, received a 9/20 on his assignment, and was instructed to redo it by correcting his transcripts. Roux marked his initial submission as “not useful” because of sloppy transcription and some texts left unfinished.589 The second question required students to ask “competent people” to describe “everything dealing with the customary law of your tribe.” Suggested topics included practices surrounding alliances, war, grazing, fines, tents, the mosque, communal goods, and voluntary labor (the twiza discussed in Chapter 1). Another pupil, Haddou ou Mimoun, received full marks and an “excellent work” notation on this assignment. His “competent” informant was Mohand ou Bassou, of the Aït ben Amar, age 63. The vacation assignment of 1935 (Roux’s last) provides strong evidence that Roux was collecting sensitive information for the Protectorate administration. “Pacification” was declared accomplished in 1934, as all formerly “dissident” groups and lands were brought under the control of the makhzen for the first time. This brought with it the specter of Arabization. Officials believed that Arabization spread in a few different ways: when Berbers left the mountains for the Arabic-speaking cities, and through (specifically salafi) Islamic proselytization in Berber communities. According to the Berber myth, Berber religious practices, particularly the reverence of saints and Sufi mysticism, became evidence of “syncretic” Islam, a thin veneer over 588 Ibid. 589 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Bougrin ou Ali, 1933. 233 an older and stronger pagan – or even perhaps Christian – base. This is why Roux’s assignment asking students to mark the location of saints’ tombs on maps is telling. In 1935, the assignment went even more in-depth to suss out Berber religious practices. What French ethnographers referred to with fascination as “maraboutisme” included saint- reverence as well as Sufi confraternities, widespread throughout North Africa. 590 They considered the Moroccan, and particularly Berber, brand of maraboutisme spread across the bled al-siba of the deserts and mountains as a “degenerate form” of the Sufi tradition, “corrupted” by pre-Islamic ancient religious traditions as well as “pagan influences” from sub-Saharan Africa.591 Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, who served as the head of the sociological service of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs (discussed in Chapter 1), published his “Essay on the History of Moroccan Confraternities” in 1921. The more mystical of these brotherhoods, with their spectacular performances of devotion and gnawa trance music, were associated with the imagined superficial Islam of the Berber myth. Further complicating this picture, the Arab nationalist and salafiyyist- inspired nationalist movement that emerged in the 1930s agreed with this French depiction of the confraternities.592 They sought to crack down on Sufi mysticism and “ecstatic displays of religious devotion including self-mutilation, sword-swallowing, snake handling, and trance dancing.”593 French sociologists’ fascination with these practices, and nationalist attempts to 590 For a more in-depth examination of Moroccan religious tradition, see Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (1969); Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 591 Vincent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnophsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1-2. 592 Emilio Spadola, "The Scandal of Ecstasy: Communication, Sufi Rites, and Social Reform in 1930s Morocco." Contemporary Islam 2, no. 2 (07, 2008): 119-138. 593 Wyrtzen, Making Morocco, 165. 234 circumscribe them, meant that by the mid-1930s the state of Berber religious tradition was an urgent question. Before Easter vacation in 1935, a student named Ba Rahho carefully copied down Roux’s instructions into his notebook.594 Students were asked to list all of the religious confraternities active in their tribe in order of importance, “which is to say, by the approximate number of adherents.”595 For each one, they were given twenty questions to address. How many adherents, and were the numbers increasing or decreasing? “Who are these adherents (men, women, rich, poor, strangers, negroes, masons, butchers, etc.) at the present time?” What must one do to join; what are the requirements and rites of initiation? Who is the leader, how is the confraternity organized, how is authority exercised? Where is the “supreme head” of the confraternity headquartered? Does he visit adherents elsewhere, and if so, how is he received? What are the practices of each confraternity “(Individual or collective, public or private, daily or seasonally or annually). Describe with precision.” Do they have a special uniform or symbol, and if so, what is it? How do adherents recognize one another? What are their particular songs and prayers? Do they host pilgrims or travelers, and if so, with what resources? Describe their ceremonies in detail, including if possible the text of their performances. Finally, draw their headquarters on a map. The pedagogical value of this assignment is unclear. Aside from all the practice to their penmanship, grammar, and vocabulary, what did the students stand to learn from compiling such a detailed report on the religious practices in their own villages? Who stood to benefit from the collection of such information, if not the French administration? If the Sufi confraternities were 594 Upon his completion of the Certificat des études secondaires in 1935, Ba Rahho became the secretary/interpreter for the customary tribunal in Itzer. Benhlal, Le Collège d’Azrou, 105. 595 MMSH Fonds Roux Box 84 Folder 84.1 Cahier of Ba Rahho de Ichgirn, Easter 1935. 235 losing adherents and resources, or if salafi groups were gaining in prestige in Berber regions, these would be apparent evidence of the spread of Arabization and nationalism into the newly pacified bled al-siba. Again, there is no direct evidence that Roux passed this information along. However, prior to 1934, the sociological wing of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs had not been able to map a complete picture of the religious landscape of the bled al-siba. Then, in 1937, a Captain Schoen submitted a 121-page report on religious confraternities in southern Morocco to the Centre des Hautes Études d’Administration Musulmane (CHEAM) in Paris.596 The next year, Georges Spillmann, one of the BIA sociological service’s most prolific ethnographers, produced a report on Moroccan religious confraternities.597 The director of CHEAM at the time was Robert Montagne, discussed in Chapter 1. Roux and Montagne overlapped in their time at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines in Rabat in the early 1920s, and all were active members of a small cohort of French Berberists in Morocco. Furthermore, the strongest evidence is Roux’s own admission, discussed below, that he used Collège d’Azrou student assignments to gather information for the Protectorate administration. Director of Berber Studies, Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines In October of 1935, Roux received a promotion that moved his family (he and Emma had one child, their daughter Francette) from remote Azrou to the administrative capital of Morocco, Rabat.598 In addition to becoming the headmaster of the Collège Moulay Youssef, one of the 596 Capitaine Schoen, Les confréries musulmanes dans le sud marocain, Report 89 (Paris: Centre des Hautes Études d’administration Musulmane, 1937). Archives Nationales de France, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. 597 Georges Spillmann, Zaouias et confréries marocaines, Report 8 (Paris: Centre des Hautes Études d’administration Musulmane, 1938). Archives Nationales de France, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. 598 Harry Stroomer and Michael Peyron with Claude Brenier-Estrine, Catalogue des archives berbères du (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2004). 236 collèges musulmans intended for the best and brightest of Morocco’s Arabic-speaking urban population, Roux was named Director of Berber Studies at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines (IHEM). This combination research center, training school, and degree-granting institution was, as discussed in Chapter 1, a cornerstone of the ethnographic production of the French Protectorate. Figure 24: Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, Rabat, 1920s As Director, Roux was responsible for analyzing the contemporary state of Berber language education and linguistic research, then setting forth plans to improve and extend both fields. He issued a report on his findings and proposals to his superiors in March 1937. Addressed to the Jean Gotteland, General Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, Roux’s 24-page report demonstrates the limited scope of Berber Studies at the time. 237 According to Roux, Berber Studies, “like most disciplines represented at the Institut des Hautes Études,” served dual purposes: first, to organize, coordinate, guide, and control Berber linguistic research while putting the amassed material to work; and also to distribute the data provided by these researchers to the public and in particular to those who have to use Berber dialects.” 599 Of these two goals, it becomes clear that Roux means “putting the amassed material to work” in service to the goals of the Protectorate administration of Morocco. He first addresses the question of the teaching of the Berber language in Morocco. When he took the position in October of 1935, Berber language courses existed only in Rabat, Fes, Meknes, Marrakech, and Azrou.600 There were two professors teaching Berber language courses in Rabat: Roux himself, and his colleague Émile Laoust, who had also written the principal extant textbooks of Tachelhit and Tamazight, the Berber dialects of Morocco’s southern and Middle Atlas regions, respectively.601 Most of their students were trainee interpreters, French students training to become teachers in the Muslim Education Service, and trainee officers of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. Finally, there were 92 students enrolled in Berber language correspondence courses which ran from November 1935 to May 1936. Over the course of his first year, problems he observed included the scheduling of the courses (too early in the afternoon, preventing enrollment by those currently employed in 599 MMSH FR 3.1, Arsène Roux, “Rapport à Monsieur le Directeur Général de l’Instruction Publique des Beaux Arts et des Antiquités au Maroc, sur les études Berbères à l’Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines durant les années scolaires 1935-36 et 1936-37,” March 23, 1937, 1. 600 Ibid. 601 Émile Laoust, Cours de berbère marocain, grammaire, vocabulaire, textes. Dialectes du Sous, du Haut et de l'Anti-Atlas, (Paris: A. Challamel) 1921; Laoust, Cours de berbère marocain. Dialecte du Maroc central. Zemmour. Beni Mtir. Beni Mguild. Zayan. Ait Sgougou. Ichqern. (Paris: Libr. orientaliste, Paul Geuthner) 1929. Laoust began his career as an Indigenous Affairs officer in Algeria, before writing his thesis on Berber linguistics at the Université d’Alger in 1912. He was subsequently invited to teach in Morocco by Lyautey. 238 government offices), insufficient written feedback to correspondence students, and inadequate standards for the examinations for the Certificate and Brevet. For instance, in 1935, 147 students sat for these exams and had a passage rate of 56%. The following year, they made these exams more difficult, with the result that of the 175 students who sat the exams in 1936, only 37% passed.602 In 1936, in addition to the satellite courses located in Fes, Meknes, Marrakech, and Azrou, the IHEM added courses in Casablanca, Midelt, El-Hajeb, and Aïn-Leuh. Roux notes that the latter two courses were instructed by graduates of the Collège d’Azrou – it is almost certain that he recruited them himself. Each of these new classes had a dozen enrollees in their first year. Therefore, during the 1936-1937 school year, between the students at IHEM in Rabat, the satellite courses, the correspondence course, and the trainees in Indigenous Affairs and the military, Roux estimated that 234 (mostly French) students were studying Berber dialects in Morocco. His goals to continue improving and expanding these programs included visiting the regional satellites of the IHEM to create more direct ties with teachers and students elsewhere. Additionally, Roux planned to organize even more satellite centers, including one in Taza to teach the Rifian dialect, which he observed had long been neglected (as the majority of Tarrifit- speakers resided in the Spanish Zone). Beyond physical and numerical expansion, he also planned to improve the quality of Berber language instruction by promoting modern “scientific” and “practical” teaching methods. The principal goal, he wrote, “for our beginners, whether they are trainee interpreters, teachers, officers, or independent auditors of all kinds, is to give them the taste for Berber studies by enabling them as quickly as possible to enter into relations with 602 MMSH Fonds Roux 3.1, Roux, “Rapport sur les études berbères,” 2. 239 Berbers, in Berber.”603 Changes to the existing curriculum would include adding ethnographic homework to the correspondence courses. He also proposed adding a third level at the IHEM in Rabat that would enable “elite” students to attain a Diploma in Berber Studies, requiring speaking ability, competence in a second dialect, and an advanced knowledge of “ethnography, sociology, and comparative grammar and lexicography of Berber dialects.”604 Long-term goals included producing more and better textbooks, dictionaries, conversation guides, and a clear and unified system of transcription. He observed that the current guides were too old, the dictionaries too limited, and the textbooks too expensive.605 Besides, he mused, “why not envision for the future the creation of recorded lessons that would support courses by radio?”606 The second section of Roux’s report examined the state of the field of Berber linguistic research. He had personally, “despite the little leisure time at our disposal,” undertaken to learn the southern Tachelhit dialect, which he had not previously encountered (Tamazight was spoken in Azrou).607 He had also been building an “inventory” of Berber manuscripts written in Arabic characters and hoped to “harvest” more on a future research trip. However, aside from his own work and that of his colleague Laoust, Roux was ignorant of other researchers’ topics of study. He presents this as a serious obstacle to the development of a strong Berber Studies cohort, and most of his suggestions for improvement involve increasing levels of collaboration and cooperation. 603 MMSH Fonds Roux 3.1, Roux, “Rapport sur les études berbères,” 8. 604 Ibid. 9. 605 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 606 MMSH Fonds Roux 3.1, Roux, “Rapport sur les études berbères,” 9. 607 Ibid., 10. 240 The first major task would be the complete codification of all regional and tribal dialects and sub-dialects. The contemporary moment, he observed, presented a new opportunity for this achievement: “The research field before now was limited to the regions soumises, but now spreads over all of Morocco. Numerous dialects remain unknown or insufficiently studied. Certain ones, agonizingly, must be gathered before their complete disappearance.”608 He proposed to begin by commissioning a series of monographs on the linguistics of individual tribes, which would expand over time to include comparative studies across all of North Africa. Ultimately, he foresaw Berber linguists collaborating with historians, sociologists, geographers to create a comprehensive, interdisciplinary field of Berber Studies. The most important of the predicted benefits of this research agenda would be improved legibility of Morocco’s bled al-siba for administrative purposes. Roux deplores the “certain admitted errors of the linguistic maps of the Indigenous Affairs Service,” and proposes a widespread questionnaire to “precisely delimit the arabophone areas, berberphone areas, and bilingual areas.”609 Notably, he adds that “an assay in this direction, attempted with the students of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou dealing with the dialects of Central Morocco has given us some satisfaction. We also expect to obtain analogous results with our students at the Collège Moulay- Youssef.”610 This is Roux’s first clear admission of using students as ethnographic informants. But, he asks, “for this task of mining, inventory, and implementation, which appears so vast and so diverse, who will be our laborers?” He names several categories of potential researchers who might be called upon. First, the “professional Berberists,” consisting of himself 608 Ibid., 12. 609 MMSH Fonds Roux 3.1, Roux, “Rapport sur les études berbères,” 15. 610 Ibid. 241 and Laoust, and “to a lesser degree,” the approximately ten professors teaching Berber language courses elsewhere in Morocco. He laments that those in Rabat are limited in their ability to conduct fieldwork, and suggests that they should take annual research trips during holidays to fully immerse themselves – otherwise, they might begin to think of Berber as a “dead language” and their teaching would suffer accordingly.611 Regional Berberists could conduct fieldwork year-round, and he proposes established an annual conference in Rabat that would allow each of them to share their findings with the Director of Berber Studies (Roux himself). Next, he praises the “bonne volonté,” the willingness or good will, of “amateur Berberists” who have been known to publish in the fields. He cites by name Mssrs. Justinard and Jordan, as well as a forthcoming example from Louis Mercier of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, who appeared in Chapter 1 to instruct trainee officers in their duties.612 To attract more such amateurs, Roux recommends including linguistic methodologies in classes to tempt their students toward research, particularly when their students are trainee officers of Indigenous Affairs who will work “en plein bled” and in direct and constant contact with indigenous populations.613 It would be impossible, he claims, to overstate the potential benefits of “researchers so well placed and generally desirous of participating in the scientific inventory of Morocco.”614 However, in order to accomplish this, the BIA and the military would need to maintain closer ties to the IHEM. 611 Ibid., 18. 612 Ibid., 19. 613 Ibid., 20. 614 Ibid. 242 “Finally,” Roux concluded, “there is a one last category of researchers that we seem to have thus far neglected: the Berbers themselves.”615 He observed that, while the vast majority remained illiterate, it was possible to find those who can read and write classical Arabic, particularly in the southern Souss region, and “additionally there are young Berbers who have learned French in our schools and collèges.”616 Again, he refers to his own tenure at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, where he acknowledges that “for eight years, our students brought to us materials – of unequal value but generally very usable – on all the dialects and tribes of Central Morocco. Some of these students, once graduated from the Collège, continue to send us interesting documents from the new regions where they are now employed.”617 This repeated reference to the “usability” of these materials is significant: Why would we not, after having awakened their curiosity and guided their first efforts, use their perfect knowledge of the language and mores, and their abilities to transcribe this language into either Arabic or French characters, to obtain from them those texts which are simultaneously the most precious linguistic and ethnographic documents?618 The goal of teaching Berber language courses was to better equip the various bureaucratic and administrative services of the Protectorate to govern the country. The goal of researching Berber linguistics and ethnography was to create a clearer map of the country now under French control. The creation of this “inventory” of Moroccan Berber studies would be possible if the work of the various researchers – academics, officers, administrators, Berber subjects – could be “organized, guided, encouraged, and controlled by the professional Berberists,” led by Roux himself. 615 Ibid., 21. 616 Ibid. 617 Ibid. 618 Ibid. 243 Collège Moulay Youssef de Rabat Arsène Roux was a busy man. In addition to his duties as Director of Berber Studies at IHEM, he became in October 1935 the new headmaster of the Collège Moulay-Youssef in Rabat, the flagship institution of franco-Muslim education (introduced in Chapter 2). The Collège was a large compound, comprising a primary school for local sons of elites, a secondary school that instructed both “internes” (boarders) and “externs” (day students), and several professional post- secondary training programs, including a Section Normale for trainee schoolteachers. While Roux oversaw all of these, it seems clear that his greatest priority, pedagogically speaking, was the secondary-level boarding school. Figure 25: Entrance to Collège Moulay-Youssef de Rabat 244 Over Easter vacation in 1937, the Direction of Public Instruction organized a “pedagogy week” in Rabat. Teachers and administrators from all components of the public education system assembled for a week of seminars, dinners, and outings, including optional camping and hiking trips. The published program includes not only the schedule of events, but the text of many of the presentations. Among these is a report entitled “Life in the Boarding School of the Collège Moulay-Youssef in Rabat,” by Arsène Roux, director of the collège, and M. Page, head teacher.619 This report paints a picture of Roux’s pedagogical philosophy and leadership at the Collège Moulay Youssef, as well as providing strong hints about his administration of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou. The purpose of the report is to explain the measures taken under a “progressive plan” of action taken since 1935, when Roux took up the reins of the school. Roux’s report begins by explaining the diversity of the student body.620 The Collège housed 150 boarders, from a wide range of ages, social backgrounds, and territorial origins. In addition to students from across French Morocco, boarders originated from the Spanish Zone, the international zone of Tangiers, and even from western Algeria. In addition to the sons of Morocco’s urban elite, the Collège hosted a number of students from poor families on scholarship. Finally, boarders ranged in age from 10 to 24. In the face of such diversity, the goal of school reform was therefore “to unite the students; to incite them to grant us their trust and sympathy; and to transform the boarding school into a home, such that these young people in our charge can feel that they are free while remaining under control.”621 The first steps were to change the surveillance practices of the 619 MMSH Fonds Roux, file 710 Bulletin de l’Enseignement Publique au Maroc. Programme de la Semaine Pédagogique, Foyer Scolaire, Rabat (Mars 1937). Roux and Page, “La vie à l’internat du Collège Moulay-Youssef, à Rabat” 446-456. 620 Roux, “La vie à l’internat,” 446. 621 Ibid. 245 school, including leaving the front gates open during the day and assigning students, rather than hired overseers, to distribute food and maintain order at each dining table in the cafeteria. The most important component of the new school regime was the implementation of “a system of self-government” beginning in February 1936. Roux cites as the inspiration for this a number of European examples, including English institutions and certain Écoles Normales in France. Additionally, the system is based on the “very liberal functioning of the boarding school at the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, where the current Director of the Collège Moulay-Youssef was the founder and head for eight years.”622 Evidently, Roux successfully implemented a student council in Azrou, which he decided to recreate at Collège Moulay-Youssef upon his transfer to Rabat. Recalling the Berber myth and the Protectorate’s preoccupation with Berber customs, it is likely that this student council was envisioned as a hybrid between similar structures in European schools and the traditional Berber jemaa leadership council (see Chapter 1). Apparently, it had worked well enough to replicate elsewhere. All students voted, in secret ballots, for a council of eight student delegates (one per dormitory). This elected council would meet weekly with the Superintendent (Surveillant Général), Head Teacher (Censeur) and an elected representative of the faculty. Teachers no longer doled out punishments themselves but submitted all student offenses in writing to the Superintendent for discussion in this weekly meeting. Then, with some input from the adults, the student council would decide upon appropriate punishments for each offense, and the elected delegate of the guilty party would inform him of his sentence. Possible sanctions included verbal warnings with “friendly but firm advice to the delinquent,” loss of Sunday outing privileges, and, in the most serious cases, loss of vacation days. Roux declared this system a great success, and 622 Ibid., 447. 246 that the student delegates had surpassed their teachers’ hopes in terms of moral leadership. He includes a number of anecdotes demonstrating this. One delegate, caught smoking, received a fairly light sanction from his peers. However, he “energetically refused and demanded a more severe punishment, stating that, as a student delegate, he had more serious duties” and should be held to a higher standard of conduct.623 Another, known for his temper, got into a shouting match with a teacher in front of his classmates. Called before the Head Teacher, he was chastised and instructed to apologize to the teacher. He wrote a letter resigning from the student council, which Roux quotes: “I admit that you are correct, despite the injury to my vanity… I do not provide a good example to follow, by my conduct, and thus I am not fit to serve with my seven comrades.”624 The success of the student council was such that, after the next year’s elections, they were granted greater privileges. For instance, when the school needed a new chef for the dining hall, the student delegates were responsible for voting for the trial replacements. When the food was unsatisfactory, the delegates reported it to the headmaster, preventing the sort of revolt that had apparently shaken other schools. In fact, they were able to maintain such discipline in the dining hall that food waste decreased over time, leftovers were distributed to the poor of the neighborhood, and the school office was able to gradually afford higher-quality food. The evidence for the success of this program was the weight gain of the entire student body during their trimestral weigh-ins (the nine students found to have lost weight were put on a supplementary diet).625 623 Ibid., 449. 624 Ibid., 449. 625 Ibid., 451. 247 The next step following the success of the student council was to introduce Scouting at the Collège.626 A small trial troop was created in April of 1936 with 15 older students and led by a “devoted” student teacher. The following October, the effort was expanded, with a troop of 28 scouts, a troop of 24 scouts, and a younger troop of 12 “cubs.” Together, the scouts represented more than a third of all boarders, and Roux declared that “most of them seem to understand the moral character of this education, and for the rest it at least fulfills their taste for freedom and fresh air.”627 The final step in the school reforms was the development of a student Home (Foyer) that would be entirely for student use during relaxation periods. A space was renovated and equipped “for the Muslim lifestyle” with seating, colorful cushions, low gaming tables, and mats on the floor and walls.628 The equipment included a wireless radio and record player with a selection of records (“modern Arab music for which our students have a marked predilection”), cards, dominos, checkers, and other games.629 The walls were decorated with students’ drawings, and they came up with their own set of rules for the space’s use. Certain responsible students were in charge of the radio, maintenance of the games, and discipline. The space was reserved for the scout troops on certain days of the week, but free for general use on others. No food allowed, no feet on the tables. Students who broke the rules could be excluded from the Foyer for a week or 626 Scouting has a long history in France and the colonies. For more, see Christian Guérin, L’Utopie scouts de France: histoire d’une identité collective, catholique, et sociale (Paris: Fayard, 2007); Jennifer M. Dueck, “A Muslim Jamboree: Scouting and Youth Culture in Lebanon Under the French Mandate,” French Historical Studies 30 no. 3 (July 2007): 485-516. Additionally, Wyrtzen briefly discusses Moroccan scouting’s nationalist ties, Making Morocco, 152. As a result, according to the Istiqlal booklet discussed at the end of Chapter 2, Moroccan scouting was banned in 1941. Istiqlal Party of Morocco, Morocco Under the Protectorate. 627 Roux, “La vie à l’internat,” 452. 628 Ibid., 453. 629 Ibid., 454, 455. 248 two at a time, according to the gravity of their misbehavior, and those kicked out would have their names listed on the front door. Roux observed that the combined effect of these reforms – the democracy of the student council, the discipline of the Scouts, the independence of the Foyer – led to a greater degree of student initiative and sense of belonging within the school. He cites as an example the student prayer room, which no staff or faculty entered. One day, he received a formal note from a group of students informing him that, because some students had been discovered loitering in the prayer room for naps and chitchat, they had assembled a council of five older students now responsible for the discipline of the room. They requested a key, several buckets and towels, and a housekeeper assigned to sweep the room regularly. However, Roux acknowledged that the reforms had not eliminated all problems of discipline. He illustrated this point with several anecdotes. One student, quarantined in the infirmary with a contagious eye infection, ran away from the school to escape a treatment he dreaded. Another profited from a teacher’s inattentiveness to slip away from the group and escape during a trip to the cinema in town. A third, convinced he had appendicitis, caught a bus back to his town during the Sunday outing and then sent a letter to the school informing them that he would rather die at home (“a certificate sent by his doctor in Safi informed us, a few days later, that his fears were in vain and he did not have appendicitis”).630 Finally, an “unbalanced” student that school authorities already wanted to expel attempted to stab a classmate. However, Roux affirmed, such episodes were rare and would not likely have been avoided by more stringent disciplinary practices. In any case, he concluded, the number of offenses and punishments had markedly diminished and continued to decline. At the beginning of his term, 30 630 Ibid., 451. 249 to 40 (of the 150) boarders were forbidden to attend their Sunday outing each week. Since then, the number had dropped precipitously each trimester. The decline was such that, in the most recent term, three of the weekly student council meetings had not had a single offense to discuss. The overall result of the ongoing process of reform was that “a general atmosphere of cordiality reigns” at the Collège Moulay-Youssef.631 War and Instability However, this atmosphere of cordiality could not survive the upheavals of the Second World War. The administrative services were shaken up – for instance, Jean Gotteland was mobilized to France in 1939, then returned to Morocco in 1940, then removed as head of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities in January of 1941 for his anti-Vichy stance. Roux himself served as interim Director of Muslim Education when Lucien Paye was mobilized from 1939 to 1940. Additionally, the early 1940s were marked by a resurgence of Moroccan nationalist activity.632 Again, as in the early 1930s discussed in Chapter 2, the question of education, and Arabic language education in particular, was at the forefront of the nationalists’ concerns. One of the most outspoken groups was the Association des Anciens Éleves, the Alumni Association, of the Collège Moulay Youssef. Roux, who served as liaison between the Alumni Association and the Protectorate administration, bore the brunt of their grievances. In February of 1941, Robert Ricard, newly-appointed Vichy Director of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, issued a confidential report to the Director of Political Affairs expressing concerns about the Alumni Associations of the collèges musulmans. The 631 Ibid., 456. 632 Guy Caplat, “58. GOTTELAND (Jean),” Bibliothèque Historique de l’Éducation 13, no. 1 (1997): 304–8. 250 Associations, “charged with transmitting to the authorities the wishes or the complaints of Moroccan youth,” were growing more and more vocal.633 After praising the Alumni Association of Fes and its president, Ricard states that “that of Rabat, whose president is assuredly less intelligent and probably less loyalist,” does not always demonstrate “the collaboration and devotion that one might hope for.”634 He reports that the president, Si Abdeljalil Kabbaj, had begun circumventing Roux, the technical advisor to the Association, to send letters of complaint directly to various cabinet ministers. In “marking their independence,” and to Ricard’s horror, the Alumni letters “are inspired by certain paragraphs of the Plan de Reformes Marocaines de 1934.” However, he cautions that the administration “must not exaggerate the importance and the danger” of such actions, concluding optimistically that “the attitude of the Alumni Association of Rabat, which might seem to attest to mistrust or a rejection of collaboration, can just as well be interpreted as an ignorance of the rules.”635 Nine months later, however, his optimism had faded. In a November 1941 memo, Ricard reported that “this group has furthermore demonstrated its determination to not take advice from M. Roux.”636 His proposed solution to this growing problem was to grant Roux more authority in the Association than his “technical advisor” position had previously afforded. However, the governing board of the Alumni Association continued to fail to solicit Roux’s input, and also continued to weigh in on questions of education policy. At the beginning of January 1943, representatives of the Alumni Association presented Roux with a 28-page 633 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Robert Ricard, “Note confidentielle sur l’attitude de la jeunesse marocaine,” 28 February 1941. 634 Ibid. 635 Ibid. 636 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Robert Ricard, “Note à Monsieur le Directeur des Affaires Politiques a/s Association des Anciens Élèves,” 4 November 1941. 251 report on their dissatisfaction with franco-Muslim education in Morocco. Their demands echoed those of the Plan de Reformes Marocains of 1934 and a similar report from the Alumni Association sent to Lucien Paye in 1941, discussed in Chapter 2. Like their predecessors, the Anciens Élèves in 1943 focused on the perceived insufficiencies in Arabic language instruction and called for the creation of a Moroccan Baccalaureate. Also like the 1934 Plan de Reformes, the Alumni Association report makes no mention of Berber schooling, language, or culture. They do, however, repeat multiple times throughout the text that “Arabic is the national language of Moroccans” and “Arabic is, in general, the maternal language of Moroccans.”637 Roux, ever the teacher, marked his copy of their report with grammatical and spelling corrections, and indicated with question marks the sections with which he took issue. He then wrote a 5-page response, tackling their concerns one by one in a numbered list. He addressed his response to the officers of the Alumni Association: Adbeljlil Kabbaj, president; Si Messaoud Chiquer, secretary; and Si Ould Amar, assistant secretary.638 His first bullet point refutes a claim by the Alumni that “among those who received a franco-muslim education,” few possessed sufficient Arabic language competency.639 Roux remarks that this is an exaggeration, and that, on the contrary, “it suffices to consult those Arabic-language journals and reviews published in Morocco to discover the signatures of a certain number of graduates of the collèges musulmans.”640 Furthermore, the cadre of secretaries hired by the Makhzen, as well as the 637 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 1, 12. 638 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 1. 639 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 1, 2. 640 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 1. 252 secretaries and interpreters working for the various Protectorate administrations, required Arabic competency, and recruited heavily from the collèges musulmans. For several of their other points, Roux deflects any blame from the Muslim Education Service. For instance, to the Alumni’s concern that a social barrier existed between the graduates of the franco-Muslim collèges and those of the Qarawiyyine University and other Qur’anic schools, Roux directs them instead to the Superior Council on Islamic Education, which had remained under the purview of the Sultan’s Makhzen. Likewise, to their complaints about disparities in pay between Moroccan schoolteachers and French schoolteachers, Roux directs them to other offices within the Protectorate administration that set such pay scales. He dismisses some of their other concerns by insisting that the Protectorate administration had fully intended to implement the suggested reforms, but had been unable to do so, not due to lack of will but to lack of funds and manpower as a result of the war. For instance, they request school inspectors to travel the country and investigate the Arabic language instructors in all primary and secondary schools to assure the quality of the education given. Roux responds that two such positions had been created and hired, but that the two men hired had been needed instead to fill positions left by teachers mobilized in the military. He hoped that they would be able to realize this inspection in the coming years, once the end of petroleum rationing would allow such travel. Similarly, he responds to a complaint that the textbooks used for Arabic language instruction are outdated and need to be replaced by saying that a new textbook was currently being edited, but that lack of sufficient paper was slowing its publication for the foreseeable future. Their most grievous complaint is that the Arabic language instruction given in the écoles musulmanes is “insufficient, incoherent, and defective, and this is because of the personnel 253 charged with it, the method they follow, the time consecrated to it, and the booklist dedicated to it.”641 Roux addresses these systematically. He acknowledges that there used to be a problem of recruiting personnel but insists that this has been rectified in recent years by the addition of a concours, a new Section Normale at the Collège Moulay Youssef specifically intended for Arabic language instructors, and a summer teacher training program to introduce new pedagogical methods. He agrees that the teaching methods employed by the Arabic teachers have tended to be “traditional,” and not always to the liking of the students. In recent years, however, the new training programs have focused on modern, scientific pedagogy such as active participation in discussion, rather than “monologuing in front of passive students.”642 He promises that, as these recent reforms bear fruit in the coming years, the Alumni Association would see changes. As for the number of hours dedicated to Arabic language lessons, Roux insists that these have increased by between 30% and 100% over the past few years, depending on the school and grade level. Finally, regarding the texts used in classes, Roux agrees that the 1938 list is outdated and should be revisited. The Alumni also claim that, while they believe the current Arabic language teachers to be poor at their jobs, this is understandable because they are overworked, underpaid, and disrespected. Roux flatly denies these claims. The Alumni Association report included a claim that “their directors, when they aren’t bullying or disrespecting them, treat them with a condescension that is hurtful to their dignity as men and Muslims.”643 Roux responds that 641 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 3. 642 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 3. 643 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 5. 254 “Never, to my knowledge, has a fqih who performed his work conscientiously been the object of hurtful remarks by his school director. If such a case should arise, I demand that it be reported to me immediately.”644 This is one of many archival examples of Arsène Roux dismissing the idea that Moroccans might experience disrespect from Frenchmen or refusing to accept that any of his French colleagues would disrespect their Moroccan subordinates. He neatly sidesteps one point raised by the Alumni. In their discussion of the insufficient time allotted to Arabic language in the weekly schedule of many schools, they remark that “in certain rural schools, Arabic language instruction does not exist at all.”645 They seem to think that this is the case because the French administration decided to focus on agricultural sciences rather than written formal Arabic in such schools, believing that rural students would not need it. This may be evidence that awareness of the separate Berber schools was still not widespread in 1943; the intentional secrecy of the project was still effective. Roux responds obliquely that “this situation has been considerably modified in the last few years.”646 Neither the report nor the response mention Berber schools at all. Finally, the Alumni devote considerable print to the discussion, originally raised in the 1934 Plan de Reformes, of a proposed Moroccan Baccalaureate. At the time, the options for terminal degrees from the Collèges musulmans were the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies or the French Baccalaureate. The Diploma, they claim, is essentially worthless, and those who hold it struggle to succeed in employment concours. The Alumni propose eliminating both 644 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 4. 645 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 6. 646 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 4. 255 options and replacing them with a Moroccan Bac and adjusting collège curriculum accordingly. Their suggestion is to cut back on the time devoted to French literature and geography in favor of more Arabic language instruction, and to teach history and geography in formal Arabic rather than in French. The new Moroccan Bac would be equivalent in value to the French Bac, and grant bacheliers access to higher education, including law and medicine. “Thus,” they conclude, “this new Baccalaureate would have the advantage of being the expression of Muslim culture combined with modern Occidental formation.”647 Roux responded, “I am not personally hostile to the creation of a Moroccan baccalaureate. I am even, in principle, in favor.” 648 As long as it would indeed be considered equivalent to the French Baccalaureate, Roux qualified, otherwise it would be a “trompe-l’oeil” that would leave its graduates at a disadvantage in university entry, certain exams, and employment concours. However, such a guarantee was beyond the scope of the Muslim Education Service and would need to be decided at the highest levels of the Ministry of Public Education in Paris. Neither Roux’s assurances nor the reforms proved sufficient to satisfy the Anciens Élèves. A month later, in February 1943, the Alumni Association of the Collège Moulay Youssef elected a new governing board. Their new president was Mehdi Ben Barka, elected by 134 votes to 6.649 Unbeknownst to Roux at the time, Ben Barka had been an active adherent of the nationalist movement since the 1930 protests against the Berber Dahir. He would go on to be one 647 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Note sur l’enseignement, présentée par l’Association des Anciens Eleves du College Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” January 1943, 23. 648 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, Arsène Roux, “Note au sujet du rapport sur l’enseignement musulman présenté par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège musulman de RABAT,” January 15, 1943, 4. 649 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Arsène Roux, “Note à Monsieur le Chef du Service de l’Enseignement Musulman sur l’Association des Anciens Elèves du Collège Moulay-Youssef,” 20 February 1943. 256 of the foundational members of Istiqlal, and head of the party after independence. 650 The Alumni Association would be his staging ground for the rise of the independence movement. Over just a few years, the number of dues-paying members of the Alumni Association had risen from about 50 to over 250. Ben Barka asked Roux for a list of all alumni of the school, to assist with his recruitment campaign.651 In March, Ricard issued a memo signaling “this recent rapprochement of the Makhzen and the alumni of the Collèges Musulmans” that he had been warning of.652 The Sultan himself wanted to include representatives of the Alumni Associations in a meeting about schooling for Muslim girls. Lucien Paye advised that one way to distract the Alumni from such political activity might be “to encourage the Alumni Associations to consecrate an ever-greater portion of their activity and their funds to tasks of a philanthropic character,” and offered to grant the Collège Moulay Youssef Association 30,000 francs with which to distribute clothes and shoes to poor students.653 However, they could not be swayed from their increasingly political bent. In May of 1943, Arsène Roux resigned as technical advisor. In his resignation letter, he wrote, “it appears clear that, more and more, the Alumni Association of the Collège Moulay Youssef is losing its precise character as a solidarity organization and is transforming into a sort of consulting committee on Muslim education, and a political organism called upon to furnish its 650 Abderrahim Ouardighi, L’itinéraire d’un nationaliste: Mehdi Ben Barka, 1920-1965: une biographie (Editions Moncho, 1982). 651 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Arsène Roux, “Note à Monsieur le Chef du Service de l’Enseignement Musulman sur l’Assemblée Générale tenue par l’Association des Anciens Élèves du Collège Moulay-Youssef, le dimanche 28 février 1943,” 18 March 1943. 652 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Robert Ricard, “Note confidentielle sur le programme des écoles de fillettes musulmanes,” 11 March 1943. 653 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Lucien Paye, “Note confidentielle sur l’Association des Anciens Elèves du Collège Moulay Youssef de RABAT,” 30 March 1943. 257 opinions on questions beyond the scope of its statutory attributions.”654 Since 1939, they had not ceased, he wrote, to attempt to minimize the role of the technical advisor. Roux asked that his resignation be accepted, noting that “my authority and my prestige as head of the school can only improve” as a result.655 Unfettered by Roux’s supervision, the Alumni Association of the Collège Moulay Youssef could freely participate in growing nationalist movement, culminating in the creation of the Istiqlal Party in December of 1943 and the publication of its Manifesto. The Istiqlal general strike of January 1944, which led to the closure of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou (discussed in Chapter 3), had similar outcomes for the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat. The day of the strike, January 29, 1944, all but three of the students of the collège (at least 200) walked out and joined the protests. Arsène Roux was injured while trying to prevent students from leaving the school grounds.656 On February 16, 1944, a delegation of five professors from the Collège Moulay-Youssef was accorded an audience with Gabriel Puaux, the newly-appointed Resident General of the Protectorate.657 Their spokesman informed Puaux that they believed that the students of the Collège participated in the demonstrations because of “external influences;” notably, it was the Muslim students of the French Lycée Gouraud who gave the decisive marching orders, and 654 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.3, Arsène Roux, “Réponse à la note circulaire no. 3409 I.P. 3-t du 1er mai sur le rôle du conseiller technique des Associations d’Anciens Élèves,” 28 May 1943. 655 Ibid. 656 CADN 3MA Box 347, “Rapport relative aux incidents du 29 janvier 1944 à Rabat et à Salé.” 657 Puaux replaced Noguès, who was later tried for crimes of collaboration with the Vichy regime. 258 therefore the students of the Collège were not equally responsible.658 The leader then expressed “the great disappointment” that the faculty felt after the demonstrations, “which seemed to have annihilated in just a few minutes the work of thirty years.”659 Their disappointment was such that a majority of the faculty of the Collège wished to request reassignment from the Muslim Education Service to the European Education Service. They presented a motion to that effect to Puaux, along with copies of “inscriptions discovered on the blackboards of various classrooms of the Collège Moulay-Youssef” on the afternoon of the strike. They requested that the school, which had been closed since that fateful day, not be reopened until the following October, “demonstrating to the students the gravity of their error.” They also remarked that their response was fairly measured, considering; the professors of the Collège Moulay Idriss in Fes, which was also affected by the general strike, wanted to ban Muslim students from access to the Baccalaureate, restricting it to the European Lycées in the future. Puaux then asked how many “indigenous professors or teachers deserted their posts the day of the demonstration.”660 The number given was five – one at the secondary level, and four at the primary. They were fired and would not be readmitted, along with staff who walked out. Likewise, the three trainee teachers from the Section Normale who refused to join the protest were given special permission to sit their exit exams, allowing them to enter the teaching service. Those who walked out would not be readmitted, as “their conduct has profoundly disappointed the educators of the Centre de Formation Pédagogique, who can never again consider them as the 658 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Compte-Rendu de l’audience accordée à une delegation de professeurs du Collège Moulay Youssef, le 18 Février 1944 par Monsieur PUAUX, Ambassadeur de France, Commissaire Résident Général de la République Française au Maroc.” 659 Ibid. 660 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Compte-Rendu de l’audience accordée à une delegation de professeurs du Collège Moulay Youssef, le 18 Février 1944.” 259 educators of tomorrow.” Puaux, who had served as High Commissioner of the French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon from 1938 until his removal by the Vichy regime in 1940, observed that similar demonstrations had taken place in Syria during his tenure there.661 The professors swiftly informed him that “the situation in Syria could not be compared to that of Morocco, because their independence had been officially promised by France since 1937.” Puaux agreed that “a mandate, by definition, is of a limited duration.”662 A Protectorate, by definition, is apparently rather more open-ended. The Collège was shuttered in February of 1944 and did not reopen until the following October term. The closing of the school, followed by the end of the war, served as something of a reset to the frayed nerves of both the nationalist movement and the Protectorate authorities. Roux Responds to Reforms After the war, Roux left the Collège Moulay Youssef when he was promoted yet again to the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, as both head of the Berber language section and chief inspector of Arabic language instruction in urban collèges and lycées. In 1946, Roux gave a speech to a group of his peers on the topic of “Franco-Muslim Secondary Education.” His successor to the directorship, Pierre Counillon,663 asked Roux to speak in his place before the congress of an unnamed “Society” to which both men belonged – though it is quite possible this was the Moroccan branch of the Fédération des Sociétés savants d’Afrique du Nord, which was 661 “Anciens Sénateurs IVème République : PUAUX Gabriel,” accessed April 7, 2018, http://www.senat.fr/senateur- 4eme-republique/puaux_gabriel0281r4.html. 662 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 2.4, “Compte-Rendu de l’audience accordée à une delegation de professeurs du Collège Moulay Youssef, le 18 Février 1944.” 663 A novelist, Counillon was known for his mystery-solving character Pacha el Baghdadi, referred to as the “Sherlock Holmes of Morocco.” 260 based in Algiers. Roux’s copy of his speech, which he marked with corrections and marginal notes to himself, is a revelatory statement of his his beliefs regarding the French imperial endeavor and the role of education in its success or failure. The speech is also a direct response to the Commission on Educational Reform established in the wake of the 1944 Istiqlal protests (discussed in Chapter 2). Opening with a disclaimer that his opinions are solely his own and do not reflect official Protectorate policy, Roux immediately pays homage to Lyautey, stating that his political goals were to “respect the personality of Morocco and its traditions; that is to say, to guard it against all attempts at assimilation, and to help it evolve prudently, without clashes, toward that modernization which is the very objective of the Protectorate.”664 Therefore, the purpose of the education system that the French established for their Moroccan beneficiaries was to shape a young generation “capable of collaboration with us and initiation into our methods of government and administration.” Only by conquering the “old and tenacious prejudices” of the Moroccan population was the education system able to expand, gradually introducing the people to the benefits of modern education. Roux frames the early years of this process with stunning optimism: according to him, they were so successful in their mission to “acclimatize the Moroccan elite to modern culture” that by the early 1930s, “it was the students themselves and the Alumni Associations that demanded, with swelling insistence, that the collèges musulmans present their students for the Baccalaureate.” Rather than presenting the protests surrounding the Berber Dahir and the formation of Istiqlal as an example of Moroccan resistance to French hegemony, Roux instead claims that these demands for reform instead represent the successes of French educational 664 MMSH Fonds Roux 2.1, Roux speech 1946. 261 efforts. This seems a remarkable stance for a man injured by his own students during the strike. He then presents the administration’s capitulation in the face of mass protest as “granting satisfaction” to the masses clamoring eagerly for greater educational opportunities.665 Roux expresses pride in the way the collèges developed through the 1930s and into the early 1940s – perhaps unsurprising, given his own formidable role as director of the Collège Moulay Youssef at the time. Rather than becoming segregated clones of the French lycées, he praises their continuation of their originally intended “double character,” with attention to Arabic and the “religious sciences.” The Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, he argues, was an acceptable “consolation prize” to those who failed the Baccalaureate, and ideal for those who had no hope of pursuing the prestigious exam.666 That system ended in 1944. Roux refers delicately to the mass protests as “those events with which you are all familiar,” following which the Directorate of Public Education was upended.667 At the time of his speech in 1946, mixed franco-Moroccan commissions were assembled to consider reform proposals to a wide variety of administrative and social concerns. One such commission was dedicated to educational reform and had recently issued a report on its conclusions. Roux was not pleased. The remainder of his speech systematically deconstructs each of their proposals. The commission’s failings, he hints, were the result of the inclusion of Metropolitan Frenchmen in its composition – men who could not possibly understand the greatness of Lyautey’s “double culture” (discussed in Chapter 2). 665 Ibid. 666 Ibid. 667 Ibid. 262 In addition to the insult to the principle of “double culture,” Roux was perturbed that this proposed reform would not address a core problem: the Diploma of Muslim Secondary Studies, he claimed, was “a key that opens no door, a diploma that leads nowhere.” Promises that bearers of this certification could gain entry to careers in the Makhzen had gone unfulfilled, and students knew it. Therefore, the new Traditional Sections were all but deserted. At Collège Moulay Youssef, there was only one boy graduating from that section. The rest preferred to give the Baccalaureate a go, knowing it was their best chance to progress in their desired career paths. The result was that, by segregating “Occidental culture” from “Arab culture” and then prioritizing the students of “Occidental culture” over those who chose “Arab culture,” the new reforms thoroughly undermined Lyautey’s dedication to preserving Moroccan particularity. “I must truthfully say that I am not in agreement with all of their conclusions,” Roux declared. “I cannot associate myself with their condemnation of the ‘double culture.’”668 The double culture, he argued, was the only way forward for the “young Moroccan elite”: There are two things which are equally impossible for them to renounce: French culture, which opens for them the doors of the modern world and grants them the secrets of efficiency; and Arab culture, founded on the language of the Qur’an, which, while not actually their maternal language, is considered by the youth as a national language and the vehicle of a civilization which, from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic, formerly knew several centuries of splendor.669 This dichotomy – French culture as gateway to modernity, Arab culture as inalienable heritage – walks the fine line of compromise between the civilizing mission and Lyautey’s commitment to 668 Ibid. 669 Ibid. 263 preserving a distinct Moroccan culture. Roux, whose entire career and personal mission had been built on that line, could not accept educational reforms that attempted to tear the two asunder. “Is it possible for a young Moroccan to synthesize harmoniously these two cultures?” he asked. “For my part, I believe it is.” If the very attempt were aborted, he continued, “it would mark the failure of our entire spiritual work in this country.”670 Figure 26: Faculty and staff of Collège Moulay-Youssef de Rabat, 1947 Arsène Roux is seated front row center671 Moving from the ideological to the practical, Roux goes on to observe that the young Moroccan, like the young Frenchman, does not simply seek education to acquire education, whether singular or double. The goal for these students is access to careers that would have 670 Ibid. 671 MMSH Fonds Roux. 264 otherwise been out of reach. Therefore, commitment the double culture must be supported by a diploma equivalent to the Bac, not inferior. Lucien Paye had, before the war, commenced work on the creation of a “Moroccan Bac,” which would have granted equal status to Arabic as French. The commission had rejected that proposal. Roux again suggests that the inadequacies of the commission’s proposed solutions to Morocco’s education problems were due to the involvement of Frenchmen from the Metropole. Perhaps he was unable to envision a scenario in which any Moroccan would question the value of a double-culture education. On Independence Independence came much more quietly to Morocco than to Algeria. The Istiqlal (Independence) Party was formed in 1944, and although the signatories of its charter were imprisoned following the January strike (including Mehdi Ben Barka), the nationalist movement continued gaining ground in urban areas. In a 1947 speech in Tangiers, the sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef expressed solidarity with their demands for independence.672 Previously nationalist sentiment had been largely confined to Arabophone middle class city- dwellers, but the sultan’s support granted the movement legitimacy and facilitated its spread in Amazigh regions.673 The liberal and accommodating Resident-General Erik Labonne was forced out by hardline colons, and his replacement, Alphonse-Pierre Juin, tried to bully the sultan into a shared sovereignty agreement with France.674 Increasingly confident and unwilling to bend to 672 Joffé, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement,” 290. 673 Jean-Louis Duclos, “The Berbers and the Rise of Moroccan Nationalism,” in Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud, Arabs and Berbers, 1st edition (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1973), 225. 674 Egya N. Sangmuah, “Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef’s American Strategy and the Diplomacy of North African Liberation, 1943-61,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (January 1, 1992), 134. 265 French demands, the sultan refused, and during a 1950 visit to Paris openly “insisted on the abrogation of the protectorate treaty and the negotiation of a treaty of friendship between France and Morocco.”675 Hoping to generate opposition to the sultan, Juin adopted a familiar strategy of divisiveness and the assumption of Berber loyalty to France: he traveled into the countryside “to preside over Berber rallies where medals were showered on Berber collaborators, preparing the ground for using them against the Sultan.”676 A show of force by Juin and his Berber troops in February 1951 resulted in small concessions by the sultan, but Juin had become an embarrassing liability and was dispatched to command NATO forces in Eastern Europe. Juin’s self-appointed successor, General Augustin Guillaume, was committed to maintaining order rather than attempts at reform, so he was unable to either suppress nationalist calls or prevent a pro-French coalition from demanding the sultan’s abdication. This coalition was led by the powerful Berber pasha of Marrakech, Thami el Glaoui, and Abdelahi Kittani of an influential religious brotherhood in Fes. They collected the signatures of 307 political and religious leaders on a document accusing the sultan of “unorthodox religious practices” and support for “illegal extremist parties” (presumably Istiqlal, which he had refused to repudiate). 677 In August of 1953, the French Cabinet empowered Guillaume to forcibly dethrone him and replace him with his more pliable uncle, Mohammed ibn Arafa.678 Mohammed ben Youssef and his family were sent into exile, first in Corsica, and later Madagascar. 675 Ibid., 135. 676 Ibid., 136. 677 Ibid., 138. 678 Ibid., 139. 266 This was a severe miscalculation by the French. The Moroccan populace did not accept ibn Arafa as a legitimate ruler, and the sultan in exile became a focal point for growing protests in city and countryside.679 The creation of a guerilla “Army of Liberation” and the outbreak of violence in large cities and the Amazigh Rif was the last straw for the French: coping with the simultaneous outbreak of revolutionary violence in Tunisia and in Algeria, as well as the debacle in Indochina, embattled new prime minister Pierre Mendès France decided to jettison all but Algeria. The sultan returned from exile in triumph in 1955, and independence was declared for both Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. Cautious of allowing the more radical elements of Istiqlal to dominate the new constitutional monarchy, the sultan adopted the title King Mohammed V and actively participated in the construction of the new state.680 Relations with France remained strained, as the king of independent Morocco openly supported the independence claims of Algeria as well. In the early months of 1955, Arsène Roux scrawled his scattered thoughts across numerous scraps of paper. He jotted down notes regularly, but usually his handwriting was tidy and cramped. On these, it is haphazard and takes up much more space than usual. On one: “Does the Moroccan Nationalist Party truly express the will of the Moroccan people?” On another: “The snowball is becoming an avalanche!” A third: “They reject paternalism.” Another: “The first barrier is overturned – the breach is open.” “If we resign our mandate, what will be the situation tomorrow?” “But don't they see how much they’re fooling themselves?”681 679 Joffé, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement,” 306. 680 Ibid. 681 MMSH Fonds Roux, Folder 39.3. Untitled handwritten notes, 1955. 267 The French-Moroccan agreement was signed in March of 1956, and the Protectorate was formally relinquished on April 7. On April of 1956, Roux, director of Berber Studies at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, received a memo from General Meric, outgoing Director of the Interior. Meric instructed all personnel on the procedures for turning over buildings formerly operated by the Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. The term “Affaires Indigènes” would no longer be employed and all placards bearing the designation would be removed. Roux circled one paragraph: “The French flag flying over buildings ceded to the Moroccan Authorities will be brought down in a simple ceremony and replaced by the Cherifien flag.”682 Meric signed off with the curt declaration, “the solution is imminent.” Roux removed the French flag, along with portraits of Maréchal Juin and General Guillaume, from the central classroom for Indigenous Affairs officers at IHEM. On April 22, he received a vitriolic note from one Colonel Niox, who continued to designate himself “Chef du territoire du Tafilalet,” despite having certainly been removed from the position. 683 Niox chastised Roux for stripping the building of its flag, and the classroom of its “relics” – a room at once “Museum and Monument to the Memory of our comrade.” He accused Roux of insulting the “national feeling” of the Indigenous Affairs officers, especially those who fell in battle for France. Worse, Roux had continued to hold classes the day of a Mass read in the memory of fallen officers. “It is very dangerous, in our materialist epoch, to teach a young officer that the flag of his country can be treated like the sign on a business and that his uniform can be considered a sort of livery. That is what you have done!” Niox wrote. “I hope that you will look 682 MMSH Fonds Roux, Folder 39.5. Meric to personnel, 17 April 1956. 683 MMSH Fonds Roux 39.5 Colonel Y. Niox à Monsieur le Directeur, 22 April 1956. 268 back on your decision, and I am persuaded that those Moroccans who still have a sense of honor will consider you a knave for this unspeakable gesture!”684 Roux copyedited the note before filing it away among his papers. Return to France and Berber Correspondence Courses, late 1950s At age 63, Arsène Roux returned reluctantly to France with his family, taking up residence in Bayonne. In July of 1957, he received a letter from his old colleague Lucien Paye, who had several interesting propositions for him.685 First was an idea to open a Center for Berber Studies in Algiers. Another was to create correspondence courses for Berber and dialectical Arabic. A third was for Roux to become an inspector of Arabic education in France. “There would, of course, be an administrative obstacle to overcome: you are currently retired, and you never belonged to the metropolitan cadres,” Paye remarked, “I will inquire by what means we might surmount this obstacle. The thing must be attempted.”686 After a preliminary inspection tour with his predecessor, Roux accepted the position of Inspector General for public Arabic courses, reporting to the Service Universitaire des Relations avec l’Etranger et l’Outre-Mer. The Arabic classes he inspected were primarily attended by functionaries in cities with large North African migrant populations. In his first statement to his supervisor, he reported that classes in Algerian-dialect Arabic existed in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. Most students were adults rather than youths, and the majority worked for social assistance, social security, or medical administrations. However, while the current students demonstrate willingness and zeal 684 Ibid. 685 MMSH Fonds Roux Folder 114.1 Lucien Paye to Arsène Roux, 26 July 1957. 686 Ibid. 269 to learn, the classes were often poorly attended. Roux had a number of enthusiastic suggestions for improvements, envisioning a system whereby all functionaries who worked with North African populations would receive incentives and administrative support to take such classes. He proposed opening such classes in other cities, like Bordeaux, Toulouse, Perpignan, and Aix-en- Provence. To fill these posts, he cited all the French teachers of Arabic currently exiting North Africa for France. He also tempered his enthusiasm: “I know too well the administrative obstacles this proposition may encounter,” including budgetary constraints and the challenges of working with existing scholarly institutions. However, such a task could be accomplished with “patient and sustained efforts.”687 Two years later, he was disappointed by the apparent lack of interest or support by his superiors. He received notification that, rather than accept many of his proposed advancements (including, once again, the idea to broadcast lessons by radio), the director had instead decided to reduce his responsibilities and cut his remuneration.688 Roux tendered his resignation and returned to his retirement in October of 1959. At the end of his tenure, he wrote a report on the progress made under his watch. During his first inspection, only six public classes for dialectical Arabic existed, and only three of them lasted the year. 689 The next school year, 1957-1958, there were 13 classes in 8 cities, with 393 students at the start. In 1958-1959, there were 19 classes in 11 cities, with 442 students to start. In addition to these measurable improvements, he noted that “the professors were more stable and better prepared for their task; the methods followed were, 687 MMSH Fonds Roux 114.5 Arsène Roux to M. Santelli, 17 June 1957. 688 MMSH Fonds Roux 114.1 Roux to Santelli, 24 March 1959. 689 MMSH Fonds Roux 114.1 Arsène Roux, “Rapport à M. le Directeur du Service de la Cooperation avec la Communauté et l’Etranger sur le fonctionnement des cours publics d’arabe maghrebin,” 8 September 1959. 270 in general, more appropriate to the goal at hand.”690 He asked the Service to continue expanding the courses offered and reiterated many of his proposed innovations. In conclusion, he envisioned that “knowledge of dialectical Arabic will spread further, relations between the metropolitan French and arabophone North Africans will became easier, and their mutual understanding will improve.”691 Arsène Roux died in Pau at the age of 78 on July 19, 1971. Conclusion In this chapter I sought to examine Roux’s self-perception while avoiding the trap Wilder describes, whereby “scholarship on historical perpetrators also risks reaffirming their self- understanding.”692 Roux, as an agent of the French empire, understood himself as a civilizing missionary. As an educator, he claimed to impart to Moroccans that which French intervention had promised: enlightenment, modernization, and opportunities for advancement. However, like colonialism itself, this pedagogical mission had no predetermined endpoint, no measure by which it could be judged successful and therefore completed. The goalposts could be continually moved. Roux’s incredulity at Moroccan independence, despite having been intimately connected with the independence movement’s leaders for two decades, reveals that he considered Morocco unfit for self-administration. This biographical sketch of Arsène Roux has sought to examine him as a representative of the type of “autonomous field agent” described by Gary Wilder: “As an informed, methodical, 690 MMSH Fonds Roux 114.1 Arsène Roux, “Rapport à M. le Directeur du Service de la Cooperation avec la Communauté et l’Etranger sur le fonctionnement des cours publics d’arabe maghrebin,” 8 September 1959. 691 Ibid. 692 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 8. 271 caring, and independent public servant, this figure became a metonym for France in Africa.”693 As such, Roux was both a proponent and a product of the colonial humanism that simultaneously justified French imperialism and undermined French Republican ideals. From his founding of the Collège d’Azrou as the centerpiece of the separate Berber education system, to his use of student informers for ethnographic research in service to Berber policy, to his attempts to curtail the nationalism of the Alumni Associations, Roux’s life reveals how he worked to facilitate the exploitative colonial endeavor while believing himself an altruistic benefactor of Moroccan society. As an ethnographer, educator, and expert in Protectorate Berber policy, Roux exemplifies the brand of colonization unique to the Moroccan case. 693 Ibid., 55. 272 CONCLUSION: “OUR COMPANIONS IN STRUGGLE” In 1948, Protectorate authorities sought increasingly drastic solutions to the problems posed by the growth of Istiqlal and the Sultan’s increasingly overt support of their aims. Captain J. Mourot, an Indigenous Affairs officer of the Cercle d’Azrou, wrote a confidential report, circulated at the highest levels of the French administration, proposing a cunning plan to undercut the power of the nationalist movement. Istiqlal, he claimed, was “jealous of the solicitude with which we mark the Berbers, of the attachment which we demonstrate to these born warriors, who have been our companions in struggle on all battlefields.”694 However, Mourot warned, it would take very little – “our weakness, our uncertainties, and the incomprehension of the métropole” – to drive the Berber world into the arms of the ascendant nationalists.695 As French control over Morocco began to crumble, Mourot turned to an old vision, one harkening back to the earliest days of French involvement in North Africa: the Berber myth, with its promise of a fruitful alliance between France and la Berbérie against the forces of Pan-Arabist nationalism. The solution he proposed was for the French leadership to organize and support a federation of Berber states, which would oppose Istiqlal. Ultimately, he proposed, the new Morocco would boast a federal constitution, comprising a majority of Berber states (some democratic, some led by ancestral elites, but all with detailed treaties of collaboration with France) and one Cherifien State, “pushed back to its 1912 limits” – the old bled al-makhzen.696 694 CADN 1MA/285/455 Capitaine J. Mourot, BAI Cercle d’Azrou, “CONFIDENTIEL: Contribution à la recherche d’une solution au problème marocain,” February 1948, 5. 695 Ibid. 696 Ibid., 7. 273 The Berbers, he argued, represented three-fifths of the population, and an additional fifth was merely superficially Arabized Berbers. Istiqlal and the Sultan, therefore, could claim authority over no more than a fifth of the population, and thus had no right to dominate the whole. Of course, Mourot conceded, it would be challenging to unite the Berbers under common cause. It had never been accomplished before, for one thing, and for another, Berbers were “individualistic and anarchic by temperament.”697 Any attempt to rouse and rally them ran the risk of reawakening old rivalries. “Happily,” Mourot wrote, “in Berber country we have enough influential – even ambitious – friends, trained in our schools, and eager to play a role in the political life of this country.”698 This Berber elite, educated by the French, would be the key to the success of the proposed endeavor. Otherwise, the urban Arab nationalists would dominate the country, with the unjust outcome of a minority ruling the majority. Invoking the role of France as protector, Mourot stated that “it is with and for the Berber world that we must try to avoid the consequences of the grave crisis threatening Morocco.”699 Only by aligning with the Berber majority could France maintain its influence in Morocco into the future. Mourot was confident in the ultimate success of this plan, predicting that, “Just as the Viet Minh has failed to impose its rule on a too-diverse country, so too the independence movement will fail in imposing its own upon the Berber elements that are too different from its Arabized substance.”700 This proposition, which never came to fruition, nevertheless reveals the multiple ideologies at play in the French administration of the Moroccan Protectorate. This dissertation has explored these ideologies as they changed over time, arguing that French priorities are 697 Ibid., 6. 698 Ibid. 699 Ibid., 5. 700 Ibid., 8. 274 clearest through the lens of Berber education. Mourot’s plan lays these ideologies and priorities bare: divide-and-rule entailed preferential treatment of the Berbers, as the rightful, natural, and deserving beneficiaries of the civilizing mission, owing to their inherent characterological superiority to Arabs. That mission would be accomplished through the training of a francophone and Francophile Berber elite, in schools that would inoculate them against the poisonous effects of creeping Arabization. Any failure of this plan was inevitably the fault of outside elements, and perhaps budgetary constraints, but certainly not flaws in the ideology itself. As the first chapter demonstrated, the seeds of this Berber policy were transplanted from the Algerian colonial context. Early ethnographers sought clues to a supposed Berber superiority in their history, their religion, their language, their customs, and even their bodies and blood. In many cases, researchers’ suggestions for how best to govern the indigènes reflected their own backgrounds and priorities – leading to multivocality in the colonial ethnographic archive. Competition between and among various factions for control of Moroccan ethnographic expertise in the years immediately prior to the formation of the Protectorate reveal more about French political and cultural hierarchies than about the peoples they purported to study. Once the Treaty of Fes was signed in 1912, ethnographic research took on a more urgently pragmatic tone. Lyautey assembled a cohort of researchers from a variety of competing factions to establish a coherent administrative policy for Berber country. The first step in this process was to study, describe, and catalogue Moroccan Berber cultures and societies. This would allow for a standardization and simplification that would render the mythic bled al-siba legible to the French Protectorate authority. The next step was to use this standardized template to impose an artificial system of Berber justice, with a patina of primordial authenticity, in order to avoid the extension of the Sultan’s political authority into the bled al-siba. In Berber country, 275 he was to be a symbolic figurehead only. Following military conquest of the Moroccan interior, researchers and functionaries of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs would establish outposts for surveillance and control of Berber populations. Despite claims of indirect rule, these French contrôleurs were highly hands-on in the daily implementation of Berber policy. Furthermore, because the new system of customary tribunals never worked as smoothly as intended, French officials found themselves constantly embroiled in the resolution of minor disputes. The 1930 Berber Dahir was an attempt to rectify this situation, though administrators severely misjudged the Moroccan response to such a public announcement of separate legal systems for Berbers and Arabs. After establishing outposts throughout Berber country, the French aim became twofold: first, the laborious construction of a modern infrastructure of roads, telegraph wires, and railroads; second, the conquest of hearts and minds, achieved primarily through the gift of education. In particular, these schools would teach French, allowing for ever greater communication and collaboration between the new allies. This was of special importance while the French conscripted massive numbers of Moroccan Berbers into the ranks of their military, fighting in both World Wars as well as other colonial conflicts. However, the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs did not maintain control over schooling in Berber country. A civilian branch of the administration, the Direction of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, established a Muslim Education Service to oversee the implementation of modern education for Moroccan youth. Never universal, this education was intended first and foremost for the sons of the political and economic elite classes. Vocational and agricultural training schools served a few members of lower socioeconomic strata, and some écoles de fillettes musulmanes trained girls in handicrafts and hygiene for their futures as wives and 276 mothers. In the Arabic-speaking cities, the elite collèges musulmans were overwhelmed by Moroccan demand for ever-increasing lessons in Arabic language and Islamic tradition. Rather than preparing a loyal elite, these schools became training grounds for the nascent nationalist movement. Cognizant of the inequalities and injustices of the colonial order, graduates of these schools sought guidance in the Pan-Arabist intellectual currents of the Middle East, as well as Allied promises of national self-determination. The 1930 Berber Dahir was the spark around which the Moroccan nationalist movement coalesced, despite having relatively little impact on Berber policy itself. That movement waxed and waned over the next decades, battered by French suppression and bolstered by the (at first tentative) support of Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef. The urban collèges musulmans were not the only project of the Muslim Education Service, however. Despite nominal oversight by the Sultan’s Makhzen, the French quietly implemented a parallel shadow system of schools in Berber areas. In these écoles berbères, Arabic language courses were deliberately absent, in the hopes of slowing the tide of linguistic Arabization that had been spurred on by changing patterns of industrialization, urbanization, and migration. The pinnacle of the separate Berber schooling system was the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, founded in 1927 for the sons of Berber notables. The school’s goals included a limited and deliberate set of potential outcomes for its students. They were to either join the French military as multilingual junior officers, facilitating communication between French leadership and Berberophone troops; return to their home villages and take up hereditary leadership roles; or join the Protectorate administrative services as clerks, interpreters, and functionaries of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs and Berber customary tribunals. In this way, within a generation the leadership of Berber country would be French-trained and, ideally, ignorant of Arabic, 277 indifferent to the nationalist agitation of the cities, and minimally invested in the Sultan’s traditional authority. Alas, the school was not immune to the rising forces of nationalism and modernization. All of the school’s French headmasters found themselves combatting student and familial demands for Arabic language training. Especially after students of the urban collèges musulmans gained the opportunity to take the Baccalaureate exam, students of the Collège Berbère were at a disadvantage in the competitive hiring concours for the most sought-after administrative positions. Moreover, more and more services of the Protectorate apparatus required a brevet in Arabic, rather than Berber, further disadvantaging students trained in Berber schools. This precarity, in addition to rising anticolonial sentiments, culminated in student dissatisfaction and protest. The Istiqlal demonstrations in January of 1944, and the student strike of the Collège d’Azrou that February, marked a crisis point for the Protectorate as a whole, and for the Muslim Education Service in particular. The dream of the Collège Berbère was shaken, raising serious questions about the continued viability of a separate Berber education project, particularly because the Sultan himself had begun to express open sympathy with the Arabist cause. Brought to heel by new military leadership, the Collège d’Azrou entered an uneasy truce. An exemplary agent of the imperial education project, Arsène Roux worked, at different points in time, as a military interpreter, ethnographic researcher for the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, founder and headmaster of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou, director of the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat, and director of Berber Studies at the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines. His long career touches on every theme of this dissertation, from military pacification to the attempted suppression of the nationalist movement. Talented and well-meaning, Roux never seems to have questioned the validity and righteousness of the colonial endeavor. His 278 paternalism to his students extended to all Moroccans, reaffirming the widespread ideological underpinnings of the Protectorate that Morocco required French protection and aid. Moroccan independence brought an end to the separate French Berber policy. The customary tribunals that had continued quietly operating after the 1930 Dahir were shut down and replaced by a modernized, centralized, shari’a-based judicial system. The nationalist rhetoric of the independence era relied on a different set of myths, emphasizing national unity based in Islam and Arabic language and ethnicity. By claiming that the Berber myth was based on nothing but French divide-and-rule tactics, Arabists could deny the existence of Berber difference and claim that Berber refusals to conform constituted colonialist betrayal of the cause. Their claims that the Arab-Berber distinction was fictional or exaggerated for French colonial purposes were then used to discount Berber claims as invalid or destructively divisive. Ironically, the failure of the French education system in Morocco to train sufficient numbers of Moroccan schoolteachers (among other professionals) meant that, post- independence, Morocco would remain reliant on French teachers. Furthermore, French-style modern schools remained at odds and in competition with Islamic schooling. The religious schools up to the Qarawiyyin University continued to exist in parallel to the modern schools, and the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines became Université Mohammed V in 1959. In addition, the DIP schools for European students were removed from the new public system and instead run by the Mission Universitaire Culturelle Française, in a non-state system that “allowed elite Moroccan families to escape the consequences of Moroccan educational policy.” 701 Educational pluralism lived on. 701 Segalla, The Moroccan Soul, 252. 279 Figure 27: Aerial photograph of the Lycée Tarik bin Ziyad, as the Collège d’Azrou was renamed after Independence Undated, probably 1970s The most daunting task would be the expansion of the system to finally achieve universal education. In 1956, only 13% of school-age children attended school.702 The following year, under the guidance of Minister of Education Mohammed al-Fasi (himself educated at the collège musulman in Fes), 200,000 new first-year students started school.703 However, this coincided with al-Fasi’s commitment to a new policy of official Arabization, with French taught as a second language, rather than the language of instruction. There were not nearly enough teachers 702 Ibid., 248. 703 Ibid., 251. 280 (or anyone) trained in classical Arabic to take on this task. The attempt to simultaneously universalize and Arabize the schools was a disaster, and full Arabization was not accomplished until the 1990s.704 Additionally, the Modern Standard Arabic promoted by every Moroccan government since 1956 is enormously different from the dialectical darija that is the maternal language of approximately 60 percent of Morocco’s population. This spoken form of Arabic has historically been “denied any legitimacy” and remains stigmatized.705 For instance, Marnia Lazreg claims that colloquial Arabic “has been adulterated with French words and, as it stands, does not allow the expression of complex and abstract thoughts.”706 The linguistic situation of the Maghreb is thus far more complicated than the Arab/Berber dichotomy would suggest: linguistic warfare is waged between standard and dialectical Arabic, between both forms of Arabic and Berber, and between French (still a lingua franca) and any of the ‘native’ languages. Morocco’s Berber population was the victim of these new policies. According to Mustapha el Qadéry, “the dominant thought issuing from Arabo-Islamist ideology” holds that “the Berbers must assimilate and Arabize,” relying on discursive logics eerily similar to those of the French civilizing mission.707 According to the nationalist discourse, the Berbers were “les enfants chéris” of the Protectorate, which had sought to “evangelize, assimilate, and Frenchify” them.708 The solution, according to the new ruling class, would be to reverse the formula, and instead assimilate the Berbers to a unified Arabo-Islamist national identity. As a result, scholastic 704 Ibid., 255. 705 Berger, Algeria in Others’ Languages, 2. 706 Lazreg, “The Reproduction of Colonial Ideology,” 393. 707 Mustapha El Qadéry, “Les Berbères Entre Le Mythe Colonial et La Négation Nationale. Le Cas Du Maroc,” Revue d’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 45, no. 2 (1998), 429. 708 Ibid. 281 Arabization meant that Berber schoolchildren would have to learn two foreign languages, rather than one, and would never experience their maternal language as a language of instruction. The écoles berbères, as well as the Collège d’Azrou, were incorporated into the national education system, which was hampered in its earliest years by insufficient teachers and resources as well as a push for rapid Arabization. While the number of schools grew rapidly in urban areas over the first decades of independence, educational progress stalled in the rural hinterlands formerly referred to as the bled al-siba. Today, the villages of the Atlas Mountains and Sahara Desert remain underserved in comparison with Morocco’s cities. Patterns that emerged under the Protectorate continue – people migrate away from their homes in search of educational opportunities and jobs, to Morocco’s cities or to the large international diaspora. The French attempted to elevate the Berbers at the expense of their Arab compatriots. The post-independence administration sought, not to rectify this injustice, but to reverse it. This dissertation has explored how French attempts to govern Morocco – and justify themselves in doing so – contributed to the calcification of social inequalities that persist today. In its earliest forms, the Berber myth described a racial hierarchy, topped by the French, followed by the Berbers, with their positive innate qualities and aptitude for civilization, in contrast to the negatively stereotyped Arabs. This division was mapped onto the Moroccan land itself: the romantically anarchic bled al-siba, ripe for bold exploration and a blank slate for the extractive practices of imperial modernization, versus the backwards, superstitious, Orientalized bled al-makhzen. Edmund Burke III writes that “while the binaries of the Moroccan colonial gospel were poor ethnography, they were skillful discursive politics.”709 Promising to assist the 709 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 186. 282 sultan in bringing the Berbers under state control, the French used this mythology to justify their involvement in resolving a supposedly innate and primordial opposition. Over time, however, the French came to discover that the border between these two segments was not, and could not be made, rigid and impenetrable. As Scott explains, there is an essential symbiotic relationship between such “state spaces and extrastate spaces.”710 However, Scott echoes Gellner, stating that, “it becomes difficult to discern, under those circumstances, what ‘Berberdom’ means except as an Arab designation for those who elude control by the state and incorporation into its hierarchy.”711 Gellner himself speculated in his introduction to the 1972 edited collection Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa that, as modernization and centralization continued unabated in the postcolonial era, Berber identity would inevitably give way to the Arabization the French had so feared. After all, he wrote, “in his heart, the Berber knows that God speaks Arabic and modernity speaks French.”712 As the transnational Amazigh ethnolinguistic revival movement has shown, however, this category has remained more resilient than anticipated.713 The Berbers of Morocco evade Scott’s categorization in another way. He writes that tribal “hill peoples” like the Berbers “are constituted as if they were intended to be a state- maker’s or colonial official’s worst nightmare.”714 This may have been the case during the period 710 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 31. 711 Ibid., 123. 712 Ernest Gellner, “Introduction,” Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1972) 13. 713 See, for instance, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States, (University of Texas Press, 2011). 714 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 327. 283 of Pacification, as colonial officials struggled to bring these populations under centralized state control through military conquest and projects of legibility. However, the greatest thorn in the side of the French colonial apparatus, and which ultimately led to its downfall, was not the Berbers, but the Arab nationalists of the cities – Scott’s quintessential “valley people.” That the revelation of the separate Berber policy itself sparked this backlash is poetic. Lyautey’s technocolony, based on “socioeconomic strategies of pacification, cultural preservationist approaches to modernization, and ethnographically informed paternalism,” failed.715 The colonial archive compiled by the ethnographers of Morocco was multivocal, a product of competition between French actors. In their rivalry for cultural capital, “ethnographic perceptions and representations were wielded as markers of distinction regardless of their fictiveness, offensiveness, or even absurdity.”716 Furthermore, attempts at preservation of the culture behind the bled al-siba divide were hindered by contradictory policies of rival administrators. Wilder contends that such “unintended consequences… should be ascribed neither to incompetent implementation nor to irrepressible subaltern agency. Nor were they a function of the inevitable gap between clear rhetoric and messy reality.”717 Instead, such seeming paradoxes were the result of the “intrinsic messiness” of the imperial order, with its simultaneous claims to universalist humanism and rigid hierarchies of power. The French justified their Protectorate as a modernizing pedagogical project, with the implicit promise that they would hand over the reins of power once this goal was achieved. The separate judicial and education systems under Protectorate Berber policy reveal how French 715 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 54. 716 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 49. 717 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 22. 284 attempts to classify and crystallize Berber society and culture, based on extensive ethnographic research, resulted in neither ease of rule nor Berber loyalties to France. Administering these systems required massive outlays of time, resources, and manpower. By imperialist logic, the extraction of Moroccan natural resources for French profit, and the exploitation of their human resources for bloody European wars, was a fair price to pay for the myriad benefits of French tutelage. This dissertation has sought to excavate the flaws in this logic. 285 APPENDICES 286 APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY Alawite – The surname of the Moroccan royal family is Alaoui/Alawi; Alawite thus indicates their dynastic rule of Morocco (adj.) Amazigh – Preferred present-day terminology for the autochthonous people of North Africa, replacing Berber as archaic. Translated as “Free People” or “Free Men.” amir al-mu’minin – title of the Sultan, meaning Commander of the Faithful. Indicates his role as spiritual and religious leader, in addition to his political leadership. Arabisant – Adj., meaning Arabic-speaking. Refers to language use, rather than ethnic identity. Baccalauréat (Bac) – Examination taken at the conclusion of French secondary studies, which serves as either a terminal degree or university entrance exam. Introduced under Napoleon in 1808. Graded on a 20-point scale. Berberisant – Adj., meaning Berber-speaking. Refers to language use, rather than ethnic identity. Bled – From Arabic beled, meaning land or country. Refers colloquially to rural Morocco. Bled al-makhzen – Lit. Land of the Makhzen, referring to all territory controlled by the central government. More specifically, areas where the sultan’s administration could levy taxes. Bled al-siba – Lit. Land of Dissidence or Anarchy, referring to all territory outside the control of the central government. In French colonial ideology, associated with Berber groups. Brevet – an examination whose passage results in a certificate of competency or license to practice. In the context of this dissertation, typically refers to a language competency certification that would grant access to positions requiring it. Caïd – leader of an administrative area. Often used interchangeably with “chief” for native groups. After Pacification, referred to administratively sanctioned local leaders. Cercle – Refers to a territory under administrative control. At the height of the Protectorate, Morocco was divided into seven administrative regions, which each comprised a varying number of subordinate cercles. Chef de poste – Officer of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, assigned to leadership of an administrative outpost within a cercle. Answered to the chef de cercle, who in turn answered to the chef de région. Chérif/chérifien – In Arabic, a chérif (sometimes transliterated as sharif in English) is a person 287 who traces ancestry to the Prophet Muhammed. This applies to the royal family of Morocco; thus, the Alawite dynasty can be referred to interchangeably as the Chérifien dynasty. Collège berbère – A collège is a secondary school. In France today, students attend first collège (age 11-15) and then lycée (age 15-18, culminating in the Bac). In the Protectorate of Morocco, however, lycées were intended only for European secondary students, and collèges were the secondary schooling opportunity available to some Moroccan students. This did not correspond to the age of the students, nor adhere to the same academic levels as collèges in the metropole. The Collège Berbère was a secondary school intended specifically for the sons of Berber elites, where the languages of instruction were French and Berber to the intentional exclusion of Arabic. Collège musulman – A secondary school intended for the sons of Arab notables, located by the end of the Protectorate in Morocco’s major cities. Languages of instruction were French and Arabic. Collège musulman students were granted the opportunity to take the Baccalaureate beginning in 1930. Colons – European settlers. While never as numerous or influential as their counterparts in Algeria, Morocco’s colons gained greater political sway after Lyautey’s 1925 departure. Concours – A competition, often based on testing, in application for employment. For instance, if the education service sought to hire new teachers, they would hold a concours to select the most qualified applicants. Eligibility for certain concours could include certain brevets, diplomas, or other certifications. Collège Berbère students frequently protested that they were at a disadvantage compared to collège musulman students in some concours, and collège musulman students often made similar claims about European lycée graduates. Dahir – A royal decree. Often written by French administrators to receive the Sultan’s signature. école berbère (also école franco-berbère) – Primary school, intended for Berber students, where the languages of instruction were French and Berber. école musulman (sometimes école arabe or franco-arabe or franco-musulman) - Primary school, intended for Arab students, where the languages of instruction were French and Arabic. école de fortune – an ad hoc school, established by the military and/or Bureau of Indigenous Affairs during the Pacification campaign. Operated on a shoestring budget, with the goal of teaching rudimentary French to local children in rural areas. Some were later regularized as écoles berbères. Fiche de tribu – A questionnaire developed by the Protectorate sociological service to catalog and standardize Berber traditions, customs, and legal precedents, in service to the project of administrative legibility, 288 Fils de notable – Son of an important Moroccan man or family. Targeted for French educational efforts, both to ingratiate themselves to local elites and to train an intermediary administrative class. Fqih (pl. fuqaha) – A scholar and teacher of Arabic language, and often Islamic law as well. Considered adversarial to the modern French education system. Indigènes – Nominal form of indigenous. Outdated term for local populations, equivalent to the English “natives.” Officially removed from Moroccan administrative terminology upon independence and now considered pejorative. Interne/externe – Internes are boarders, students who lived at the collèges. Externes were local students who attended classes during the day and returned home in the evenings. Istiqlal – Independence Party of Morocco, established 1943. Responsible for nationalist agitation leading to decolonization in 1956. Jemaa (sometimes djemaa) – Pre-protectorate leadership council for Berber groups. In the Protectorate context, became the customary tribunal, a court system for a separate Berber legal regime. Laïcité – State-mandated secularism and strict separation of Church and State. A core principle of the Third Republic. In practice, placed education under the purview of the state rather than religious orders, and removed religious instruction from public schools. Lycée – Under the Moroccan Protectorate, a secondary school for the children of European settlers, culminating in the Baccalaureate. Moroccan students were able to petition for admission to the lycées beginning in 1934. Madrasa/msid – Islamic schools which taught Arabic language, the Qur’an, and Islamic law. Remained under the purview of the Sultan during the Protectorate era. Mouderres – A Muslim teacher of Arabic language. Often employed in public écoles and collèges musulmans, these teachers were carefully distinguished from fqihs, who also taught religion and religious law. Makhzen – The pre-Protectorate state administrative apparatus under the Sultan. Preserved by the Protectorate authority in a symbolic capacity, the Makhzen continued to perform some administrative duties, largely religious. The word makhzen means a tax collection box. Mokhzani – Functionary of the Makhzen. Sometimes used to refer to Moroccan employees of the French administrative services. Shari’a – Islamic law, spelled out in the Qur’an and legal tradition. 289 Soumis/insoumis – lit. submitted, submissive, or subject. Groups referred to as insoumis were those that had not pledged loyalty to the Makhzen or the French administration. The goal of Pacification was the soumission of all remaining insoumis populations, achieved by military conquest and treaties. Tache d’huile – lit. oil stain. Referred to a military pacification strategy developed in the West African conquest. Tachelhit – Berber dialect of Southern Morocco and the High Atlas range. Sometimes referred to as Chleuh. Tamazight – Berber language. Both a general term for the collection of Berber dialects, as well as the specific name of the dialect of Central Morocco Tarrifit – Berber dialect of Northern Morocco (Rif Mountains). Transhumance – Pastoral nomadism, practiced by some Moroccan Berber and Arab groups. Became a serious concern of the Protectorate administration as land ownership policies were Westernized. Twiza/corvée – Mandatory labor service as a form of taxation. Twiza existed in pre-Protectorate Berber groups as communal labor during peak agricultural events, and was appropriated by the French for construction of roads, railways, and administrative outposts in rural areas. Ulama – In general, a body of Islamic scholars of varying disciplines; in the Moroccan context, a body of religious and legal authorities located primarily in Fes and issuing from the Qarawiyyin University. Viziriat – The office and functions of a Vizir, or counsellor to the Sultan. 290 APPENDIX B: LEADERSHIP ‘Abd al-Aziz ‘Abd al-Hafid Sultan: 1894-1908 1909-1912 1912-1927 Moulay Youssef 1927-1957 Mohammed ben Youssef, then 1957-1961 King Mohammed V *August 1953-October 1955, Mohammed ben Arafa (Alaoui cousin, installed by Protectorate during exile of Mohammed V) 1961-1999 Hassan II 1999-Present Mohammed VI Resident-General: 1912-1925 1925-1929 1929-1933 1933-1936 March 1936- Sept 1936 1936-1943 1943-1946 1946-1947 1947-1951 1951-1954 June 1954-June 1955 June-August 1955 August-November 1955 November 1955-March 1956 André Dubois Director of Public Education: 1912-1919 Gaston Loth 1919-1926 Georges Hardy 1926-1 Jan 1941 Jean Gotteland 1941-1943 Robert Ricard 1943-1945 Jean Pasquier 1945-1955 Roger Thabault 1956 Laurence Capdecomme Director of Muslim Education: 1920-1939 Louis Brunot (director of Moulay Idriss 1915-1920) 1939- interim Arsène Roux 1940-1943(?) Lucien Paye Hubert Lyautey Théodore Steeg Lucien Saint Auguste Henri Ponsot Marcel Peyronton Charles Hippolyte Noguès Gabriel Puaux Erik Labonne Alphonse Juin Augustin Guillaume Francis Lacoste Gilbert Grandval Pierre Boyer de Latour 291 *His wife was the Inspectrice for écoles de fillettes 1944(?)-1956 Pierre Counillon Director of the Collège Berbère d’Azrou: 1927-1935 Arsène Roux 1935-1941 Paul Bisson 1941-1944 Gabriel Germain Colonel Mondet 1944-? ?-? Serrès –definitely director in 1952 292 BIBLIOGRAPHY 293 BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives Consulted: Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer – Aix-en-Provence, France Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes – France Maison Mediterranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme – Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans, Fonds Arsène Roux – Aix-en-Provence, France Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc – Rabat, Morocco Institut Royale de la Culture Amazighe du Maroc – Rabat, Morocco Published Primary Sources: Alaoui, Abdelhadi. 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