Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://journals.cambridge.org/AFH
Gervase Clarence-Smith
The Journal of African History / Volume 27 / Issue 03 / November 1986, pp 581 - 582
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700023483, Published online: 22 January 2009
SPANISH COLONIALISM
NOGUES IN MOROCCO
The Casablanca Connection. French Colonial Policy igj6—ig43. By WILLIAM
A. HOISINGTON. JR. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 320. £30.40.
The central figure of this fascinating study of French colonial policy in Morocco
from 1936 until the end of the Vichy regime in North Africa is General Charles
Nogues, resident-general of Morocco during the period in question. Indeed, in
many respects, Professor Hoisington has interwoven a biography of the general
into the detailed background of different attitudes of the Popular Front and the
Vichy regime towards France's North American empire. General Nogues's firm
convictions about colonial policy, which derived directly from his professional
mentor, Marshal Lyautey, provided the link that ensured administrative con-
tinuity despite the political, diplomatic and military vicissitudes of the later 1930s
and the Second World War.
Hoisington approaches his subject by identifying the major issues that faced
France's North African protectorate in Morocco and then examining the way in
which General Nogues resolved them in the face of the conflicting interests of
metropolitan government, colon populations, and indigeneous society. The book
opens with a discussion of the principles on which Lyautey based the ' pacification'
of Morocco and of Charles Nogues's development as a member of Lyautey's staff,
indeed, as a trusted confidant of the marshal. He then turns to the first crucial
problem that faced Nogues on his return to Morocco in 1929, now without
Lyautey's guiding presence - the development of nationalism. General Nogues's
appointment as Resident-General Lucien Saint's expert for native affairs virtually
coincided with the first outburst of nationalist agitation in Morocco, over the Dahir
Berbere - the formalization of customary law within the Moroccan legal system
that nationalists correctly saw as an attempt to separate and isolate rural com-
munities from the increasingly aware urban world. It was Nogues who organized
the French response and he, in turn, came to realize that nationalism would
henceforth play a crucial role in the future of French policy in Morocco. The
experience was to be a forerunner for his later repression of nationalism after he
became resident-general in 1936. His policy here was based on the need to pacify
Popular Front anxieties in Paris, while at the same time ensuring that the
Moroccan sultan should continue to support a French presence in Morocco and
that the nationalists should not acquire a firm hold on public opinion in the
protectorate. In this he was only partially successful, for he was unable to accept
that the paternalist Lyautey vision had outlived its time.