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Chapter 4 frédéric le play in morocco? the paradoxes of french hygiene and colonial association in the moroccan city, 1912–1937 Walking the markets of Mogador, the physician Charles Bouveret remarked that “certain bakers whose ovens are located a distance from the place of sale have natives who are dirty and often infected with sickness transport the breads. I saw a Jew with conjunctivitis carrying breads in his arms such that pus from his eyes was spreading across the bread.”1 Haj Masgini, a Muslim member of the Municipal Hygiene Bureau (Bureau Municipal d’Hygiène; BMH) agreed: “[The vendors] put the bread right on the ground, where dust and even mud are spattered on it.”2 Together, Bouveret and native elites regulated food, founded a tuberculosis clinic and a milk dispensary for European, Jewish, and Muslim infants , and funded medical visits for children in Mogador schools.3 The Muslim carpentry guild master volunteered to vaccinate his own family in public in order to persuade the Muslim residents of Mogador to accept smallpox vaccination. “We will collaborate with you every time,” he told Bouveret. “Just call upon us.”4 The Moroccan colonial city was the site and laboratory of Lyautey’s solidarisme, his social vision of the French colonial policy of association. Lyautey drew his hygiene policies from republican Paris, where sewers conquered water to eliminate cholera, the boulevards of Baron von Haussmann cleared slums to unify the urban space into a rational civic body, and city hospitals and clinics implemented the rights of the revolutionary “citizen-patient” in state health care and welfare.5 Colonial humanism was to be an application of Third Republican welfare to the colonies , adapting theories of the engineer, social reformer, and founder of the Société internationale des études pratiques d’économie sociale PierreGuillaume -Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882) to Africa and Asia. As Le Play argued that social engineering through health, housing, and family policies would integrate the working classes into a harmonious, elite-directed frédéric le play in morocco? 111 social body,6 so Resident General Lyautey envisioned a technologically advanced colonized city to integrate the colonized to France by “recognizing natives’ rights and serving their interests,” respecting their cultures, involving them in decision-making, and improving their lives with hygiene and environmental sanitation for a mutually-beneficial mise en valeur of human and natural resources.7 When Lyautey created the bureaus of municipal hygiene on November 1, 1912, he included Muslim and Jewish native elites as members in order to create an interracial French civic culture, as Bouveret explained: “All these measures, which, in the beginning, offended old habits, obviously excite some animosity from those who believe —almost always wrongly, without doubt—that their interests are injured ; but the private interest must always disappear before the general interest. It is an absolute dogma.”8 But public hygiene did not function in protectorate Morocco as it did in France. The state-of-the-art medical, parasitic, water, and environmental technologies so beneficial in the metropole often exacerbated disease in the empire rather than curing it. The BMH often created social division , provoked resistance, and privileged colonial economic interests at the expense of native health. These outcomes arose from the paradox of French colonial welfare itself, for a state not a republic provided health care to a patient who was not a citizen. The French imperial nation-state produced self-contradictory imperatives as Gary Wilder has argued, and colonial hygiene revealed the disjunctures between social, medical, legal, urban, and state bodies, contradictions that generated disease, nationalism , and eventually tore Greater France apart as an imperial body.9 The paradoxes of colonial hygiene can be traced through four diseases: malaria, typhus, bubonic plague, and typhoid. Epidemics in Morocco reveal the contours of the French colonial city in its urban planning, social life, commerce, and politics. Malaria informed the geography of French colonial settlement and the definition of human and physical environments . Typhus lay bare the violence beneath Lyautey’s superficial rhetoric of cultural preservation for Islamic cities (mudun) and the actual limits of colonial control over native bodies. Plague challenged the technocratic modernity of the new French colonial cities and illustrated the constructedness of white European settlers as a “civilized” and “modern” population . Typhoid revealed the dysfunction of “shared colonial governance,” for municipal sewers became a fault line between European and Muslim civic bodies and ultimately gave rise to Moroccan nationalism. If French colonial hygiene did not always...

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