If historians are detectives following clues of eras past, then Jonathan Katz is the sleuth par excellence of the advent of French colonialism in Morocco. In Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure, Katz narrates the events surrounding the 1907 murder of Émile Mauchamp, a French medical doctor sent to Morocco in 1905 by the French government as part of its plan for the “peaceful penetration” of the country prior to its establishment of the protectorate in 1912. Mauchamp's murder outside his Marrakesh clinic by an angry crowd of Moroccans created a diplomatic crisis between Morocco and France. The conflict eventually resulted in the French occupation of the Moroccan city, Oujda, and in the French bombardment of Casablanca—events that mark the beginning of the end of Moroccan sovereignty.

Yet, beyond simply narrating the “whodunnit” of Mauchamp's murder, Katz uses the incident as a prism through which to examine and interpret the broader encounter between Morocco and France in the era leading up to the establishment of the French protectorate. Katz masterfully combines a positivist analysis of diplomatic correspondence relating to the murder with a deconstructionist reading of its significance and meaning (both at the time of the murder and after). In so doing, he makes an important and refreshing contribution to scholarship about colonialism in North Africa.

Murder in Marrakesh locates the impetus for Mauchamp's brutal murder in several paradoxes associated with French colonial ideology. First, while the mission civilisatrice optimistically posited that French colonialism could elevate colonized populations through the introduction of Enlightenment ideas, it simultaneously viewed the colonized with contempt, as barbarous and in need of civilization. Second, advocates of French conquest of Morocco viewed doctors and modern medicine as weapons in the conquest of Moroccan hearts and minds. The logic of “medical diplomacy” argued that by providing modern medical services to Moroccans, Mauchamp would introduce them to the benefits of French civilization and science, thereby winning them over to impending French rule.

Katz tells us that Mauchamp embodied the paradoxes of the civilizing mission in a number of ways. Although in theory Mauchamp had the best interests of his patients in mind, his actions, choices, attitudes, and interactions with Moroccans during his time in Marrakesh suggested otherwise. Katz provides many examples, the most important of which was Mauchamp's decision to play a provocative joke on his Moroccan neighbors on the day of his death. Despite warnings by his superiors and within an atmosphere of heightened tension due to fears of French encroachment, the doctor hoisted a pole on the roof of his clinic, which locals variously interpreted as communication equipment meant for espionage or a flagpole upon which Mauchamp planned to raise the French flag. He was accosted outside his clinic and attacked. As Katz explains, “one cannot avoid the sneaking suspicion, first ventured by historians sympathetic to Morocco's struggle for independence, that maybe Mauchamp got what he deserved.” He reminds us, however, that “our twenty-first-century point of view was certainly not held by his French contemporaries. They preferred to represent the doctor as a poster child for the French civilizing mission” (p. 5).

Murder in Marrakesh reflects several significant trends in postcolonial studies, which challenge both French colonial and Moroccan nationalist representations of the colonial encounter. Rather than view this encounter in terms of a hegemonic Western “colonizer/metropole” acting in concert against a passive and undifferentiated “colonized/periphery,” Katz emphasizes how differences among specific European national cultures had important consequences for the ways in which policies such as the French concept of “medical diplomacy” were implemented. Moreover, he shows how inter-European rivalries contributed to and influenced attitudes about Mauchamp's murder and internal French politics also produced recriminations and accusations. For example, Eugène Regnault, France's minister to Morocco, organized the incipient French labor movement in Morocco in support of the occupation of Oujda in an effort to combat French socialist opposition to the government's policy of conquest following Mauchamp's death (p. 182).

Murder in Marrakesh is excellent reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students focusing on the history of French colonialism in North Africa and for those interested in the relationship between history and memory in postcolonial societies. The book is extremely accessible in its style, narration, and overall format. It succeeds in doing what scholarly works often struggle to achieve—namely, integrating discussion of complex social, historical, and cultural phenomena while narrating a gripping and fascinating story. For instructors interested in colonialism and postcolonial studies generally, the introduction and first two chapters (“Civilization's Martyr” and “The Road to Marrakesh”) are particularly useful. Chapters 7 and 8 relate the fascinating diplomatic negotiations that occurred in the aftermath of the doctor's death and that eventually led to the calamitous occupation of Oujda and the bombing of Casablanca. These chapters of the book offer a fascinating display of political accusation and reprimand suggestive of today's debates in the U.S. Congress about the occupation of Iraq—who is at fault for the current situation?

Murder in Marrakesh is an important contribution to scholarship on the Moroccan preprotectorate period. Drawing on diplomatic sources, epistolary exchange between Mauchamp and his family, newspaper commentaries, Mauchamp's posthumous writing, and a biography of the doctor written shortly after his death, Katz manages to breathe life into and impart new meaning to a story that, at the time of its occurrence, “stirred great passions” but is now simply an “arid footnote” in the history of the preprotectorate period of Moroccan history (p. 14).