The Conquest of Morocco Book

At the turn of the century, Morocco was a nation yet to emerge from the Middle Ages, violent and primitive, a place ruled by local warlords out of mud castles, and swept by religious fanaticism. Yet in the mad scramble for African colonies, Morocco had one great attraction: it was available. In 1903, with the posting to Africa of one of the oddest of all French military figures, General Hubert Lyautey (royalist, strategist, homosexual), France undertook to change this state of affairs, and by the time World War I broke out the conquest was virtually complete. In this book Douglas Porch tells the story of France's last great colonial adventure with the appropriate mixture of wit, energy, and richness of detail. Here is the country itself, exotic and vulnerable, barren yet surprisingly beautiful...the fantastic old cities like Marrakech and Fez...the extreme political corruption...the habits and customs that so shocked Europeans. Here are the rulers and the pretenders..Sultan Abd el-Aziz, so obsessed with mechanical bric-a-brac that he installed an elevator in his one-story palace. El Glaoui, whose possession of a single Krupp 77 cannon made every fortress in the High Atlas obsolete...the magician and mimic Bou Hamara, who by clever forgeries and great gall nearly gained the throne...the bandit called El Raisuni, whose kidnapping of an improbable Greek business led to the dispatch of an American naval squadron...and more. And here are the conquering generals and their motley troops, ranging from legionnaires to Senegalese tirailleurs to the African Light Infantry, the 'Bats d'Af,' a sweeping of French delinquents and petty criminals generally referred to as les joyeux because they were always complaining. We see the campaign gradually expand from small clashes at Saharan outposts to wild battles involving thousands of man; the bombardment of Casablanca; the sieges of Fez; the final, tenuous pacification of the desert tribes.Read More