Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure

Introduction

Introduction People are not, generally speaking, conscious hypocrites. Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871–1914: Myths and Realities This book is about a murder and its consequences. It seemed like a senseless murder at the time when it took place in Marrakesh on March 19, 1907. It is thus a book about yesterday’s news, now long beyond the reach of living memory. Some of the most important details are obscure. They were obscure even when they were first recounted. Today, the Mauchamp affair remains the kind of forgotten historical event often relegated to footnotes. It is, however, an event worthy of our renewed consideration, for Émile Mauchamp’s life and death is a story about good and bad intentions and the inability of differing peoples to accept one another for what they are. A century after the fact—especially now, at a time when relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are still plagued by mistrust—the story retains its significance. In its broadest outline, it is the story of a Western power ostensibly justifying the occupation of a Muslim country in the name of a lofty, universal ideal. The analogy to events of our own day scarcely needs comment. The outward facts of the case were fairly simple, if tinged with tragicomic irony. Émile Mauchamp was a physician sent by the French government to open a public clinic in Marrakesh. Arguably , medical clinics like the one operated by Mauchamp were desperately needed in Morocco. Mauchamp often saw upward of a hundred patients a day. But—as with much foreign aid in our own time—ulterior motives accompanied France’s humanitarian gesture. In addition to being a doctor, Mauchamp was a fervent French patriot and, it emerges, an inveterate political intriguer. In Marrakesh, he worked tirelessly to further the colonial interests of France. And so, when rumors about him were spread through the markets of 2 Murder in Marrakesh Marrakesh in the middle of March 1907, they were quickly believed. It was said that Mauchamp had brought wireless telegraph equipment with him on his return from a vacation in Europe. It was said that the pole on the roof of his home in the midst of the “native” quarter was an antenna. It was said that Mauchamp was a spy who sent messages back to his superiors in Casablanca and Tangier. Called from his clinic into the narrow street outside his house, Mauchamp argued with the crowd that the pole was nothing. His protestations did not cool tempers. Knives were drawn. The first blows fell upon Mauchamp as he was pressed against a door. Finally, as his lifeless body was stripped and dragged to a vacant lot, looters plundered his house. Other Europeans in Marrakesh first learned of the murder later that day when a Moroccan offered to them for sale a tennis racquet that they recognized as belonging to Mauchamp. News of the murder reached Paris, where outraged deputies, crying for justice, demanded satisfaction from the Moroccan government . Elevated to a point of national honor, the incident became a major diplomatic affair. French troops stationed in neighboring French-held Algeria and led by General Lyautey moved across the border to occupy the Moroccan city of Oujda. In theory, they were to leave when the Moroccan government met a long list of demands set forth by the French. But as chance would have it, Mauchamp’s death was followed in succeeding months by other horrendous attacks on Europeans in Morocco. France retaliated with an escalating series of military campaigns that would cost Moroccan lives by the thousands. In 1912, France finally succeeded in establishing a protectorate over Morocco and installed Lyautey as its first resident general. Although France never officially annexed the country, it deposed sultans at will and governed Morocco much like a colony until 1956, when Morocco gained independence. In brief, the French troops that entered Oujda in reprisal for Mauchamp’s death would not leave Morocco for another fifty years. The complex narrative of Mauchamp’s murder, a cause célèbre at the time, and the subsequent French occupation have been distilled over the past century by historians to a single sentence: “After the murder of a French medical missionary at Marrakesh in March 1907, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau ordered the occupation of Oujda, the most important Moroccan city in the east and just kilometers from the Algerian border.”1 So much for the barest outline of the story as it appears in a recent...