This Morocco That France Made

Sarah Carter — New York, États-Unis — 2026-10-02

A 317-page book, published in Paris in 1955, carries a title that needs no commentary: "Ce Maroc que nous avons fait" — This Morocco That We Made.

Its author, Jean d'Esme — real name Jean d'Esmenard, a viscount, 1894-1966 — was a journalist, a film-maker and a colonial writer. His publisher: Hachette. His preface is signed and dated: "Jean d'ESME. September 1955." In other words, at the precise moment when France was leaving Morocco.

This is not an anti-colonial pamphlet. The general catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (ark:/12148/cb32082794w) files it under the history of Morocco. The summary line for the copy digitised by the Hoover Institution reads: "An apologia for French action in Morocco."

That is exactly what makes this book useful. It is not we who are speaking: it is a supporter of the Protectorate recounting, while events were still hot, what France did.

30 March 1912, at noon

The book gives the exact hour. Page 18:

"on 30 March 1912, at noon, His Majesty Mouley-Hafid and M. Eugène Regnault affix their signatures at the bottom of the document thanks to which the Alaouite dynasty will keep the Moroccan throne and the old Cherifian empire, in full decrepitude, [find] the road to greatness and prosperity!"

M. Eugène Regnault is France's representative. The book specifies how the text was delivered, page 12: Regnault left Tangier on 16 March in order to "submit it to Mouley-Hafid and have him sign it after having definitively settled its terms".

And on the sultan's state of mind, the author hides nothing. On page 34, he writes that Mouley-Hafid "had yielded only to constraint". On page 17, he notes that at certain moments the sultan "speaks of abdicating rather than submitting to the yoke of the infidels".

Signed under duress. It is the author of the book who writes it, not an Algerian historian.

What France found on arrival

Page 257:

"Until the signing of the protectorate treaty, the Cherifian empire had never known any financial organisation. It would be even more accurate to say that it had never imagined that one could exist."

And in the short glossary the author places at the end of his book, page 311, we find this:

SIBA, dissidence.

The "bled-es-siba" was the territory the central power did not control. A French author of 1955 therefore records, in his own vocabulary, that the Moroccan state did not hold its own country.

The main admission, page 213

This is the sentence to remember. Jean d'Esme describes the result of the conquest:

"…will make, from the Atlantic to the Algerian frontier and from the Mediterranean to Mauritania, the great unified Cherifian empire that we know and that no sultan had ever yet been able to constitute durably…"

Two admissions in a single sentence.

First admission: before France, no sultan had managed to unify Morocco durably. Not "none had tried" — none had succeeded.

Second admission: that unification stops "at the Algerian frontier". The author himself places the frontier, and he does not contest it at any point in his 317 pages.

"The victors and the vanquished"

Page 255, the author recounts what happened after the fighting:

"…the victors and the vanquished of the day before were no longer, from the day after the baroud, anything but the sincere artisans of one and the same work: the construction of a modern Morocco."

Victors. Vanquished. The balance of power is owned, in writing, by an author favourable to the Protectorate. There is no possible misunderstanding about the way modern Morocco was built.

And the heaviest admission of all

Page ii, in the preface:

"…the nationalism it had always ignored or pushed back and that we instilled into it — and that it turns back against us today."

France taught Moroccan nationalism. It says so itself, through the pen of one of its colonial writers, four days before leaving the country.

It is a sentence no Algerian editorialist could have written without being accused of exaggerating. And it was written by a French author, published by Hachette.

What he thinks of his own work

His view of himself is no gentler. Page 16:

"For having become the saviours of this Makhzen and having never ceased to be betrayed and reviled by it, we pass, in fact, in the eyes of the Moroccan masses, for the self-interested accomplices of its abuses…"

And page 279, on the new towns built by France:

"Enormous cities of perfect modernism sprang from the ground and mushroomed, harmonising their structure foreign to the Moroccan setting and architectural traditions."

Foreign structure. He is the one saying it.

The gaze on Moroccans

The book hides nothing either about the way a colonial author spoke of the resistance fighters. It must be read as it stands, without commentary — the text speaks for itself.

Page 215, on Moha-ou-Hammou, chief of the Zaïan bloc, who was more than seventy years old:

"The Zaïan bloc is still defended by its old chief, Moha-ou-Hammou, our irreducible adversary. Although he is more than seventy years old and life on the bare flanks of the mountain where we drove him back is harsh for him, he remains the tenacious and heroic defender of his…"

Our irreducible adversary. Where we drove him back. Heroic. Three words, and everything is said.

Page 186, on the Moroccan fighters:

"Under the fire of our rifles, of our machine guns, literally crushed by our shells, they persist and get themselves killed with an extraordinary heroism…"

Page 206, on the French soldiers:

"A wind of heroism is blowing over France and our people are many, who rage behind the posterns of the Zaïan citadel, at not being able to "get some air"…"

A "wind of heroism" in France, while others are being crushed by shellfire. It is not we who are being ironic: the book is.

And page 217, on the Moroccan auxiliaries enlisted in the service of France:

"Some enlist in our service; mokhazni or goumiers, these mercenaries…"

One last sentence, page 22

On the act torn from the sultan:

"Take back from the bachadour the deed of sale he imposed on the sultan. — Imposed? But yes, that everyone…"

"The deed of sale." "Imposed on the sultan." "Everyone knows that." It is a dialogue from the book. The author reports it without correcting it.

What this book proves

Not that Morocco did not exist. The Cherifian empire existed — with its sultans, its dynasties, its cities, its history. Saying the opposite would be false, and it does not interest us.

What the book establishes is something else, and it is more serious:

What France made is the unified, administered, centralised Morocco — the state as it exists today. A country that, before France, had never known any financial organisation, whose power did not hold half of its territory, and which no sultan had managed to bring together durably.

And that country, France built it on a signature torn under duress, in Fès, on 30 March 1912, at noon.

It wrote it. It published it. It sold it. All that remains is to quote it.