FRENCH MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE MOROCCAN COURT

In contrast to Ottoman Egypt, which imported European experts to reorganize the military and create institutions of higher learning,

¹⁰

19th-century Morocco has been seen by historians as closed to European penetration. The Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Sulayman (r. 1793–1822) disbanded the Moroccan fleet and stopped maritime trade on Moroccan ships in 1817. His successor, Mawlay

Abd al-Rahman (r. 1822–59) sent an ambassador to Paris in 1846 but did not invite the French to Morocco.

¹¹

The Sultan Mawlay Hasan (r. 1873–94) accepted European training missions for his military under pressure, but these missions have not been considered significant.¹²

Edmund Burke argues that the tardy modernization efforts of Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz in 1900 failed because the ulema opposed the introduction of Europeans and their technology.

¹³

European statesmen described Morocco as a closed society in which “doctors of law” frowned on all but commercial interactions with Christians.¹⁴

However, I argue that the Moroccan sultans, the ulama, and the rural populations were keenly interested in Western technology from the beginning of the 19th century and sought to acquire it. Western science did not provoke a “clash of civilizations” or conquer Morocco for the Europeans. Rather, science acquired Moroccan social meanings as the sultans and Europeans used it to their own ends.

The Moroccan sultans had invited French and English physicians to court since the 16th century, when the Saadian Sultan Mawlay

Abd al-Malik engaged the Frenchman Guillaume Bérard as his personal physician.

¹⁵

However, “maritime jihad,” or piracy against European ships, provided the largest source of European doctors, engineers, and military experts in Morocco. Piracy has been recognized as labor exchange—Sultan Mawlay Isma

il (r. 1672–1727) used Christian slaves to build his Meknes palaces, and Louis XIV powered his galleys with Moroccan slaves.

¹⁶

However, piracy was also a form of technological exchange. European doctors served the Moroccan court as slaves,¹⁷

were sent to minister to the European slaves, or converted to Islam and joined the sultan's army. France, Spain, and England sent doctor-clerics (Franciscans, Trinitarians, Mercedarians, Dominicans, and Protestant missionaries) to care for their enslaved countrymen. In 1691, the Spanish crown founded a royal hospital and friary for the Spanish captives of Meknes, which the sultan placed under his protection.¹⁸

The sultans also had access to European technical knowledge through “renegades”—that is, European officers captured at sea; escapees from European penal colonies; or deserters from the French army in Algeria who converted to Islam, took Moroccan wives, and assumed a rank in the sultan's army.¹⁹

In 1825, the Piedmontais renegade Ahmad ibn Sulayman was chief of artillery, as he alone knew how to operate and repair the gun carriages purchased in Europe. In 1810, a renegade Portugese surgeon accompanied the sultan on campaign to treat the wounded and compose drugs for the officers and rich soldiers.²⁰ The French engineer Cornut designed the Moroccan port city of Mogador (modern-day Essaouira) in 1764, with straight streets, European-style windows, a sewer system, and a covered aqueduct with clean drinking water.²¹ The English renegade Ismail Ingliz (“English Ismael”) was tutor to the adolescent Mawlay Hasan. Under his direction, Hasan organized a battalion of Soussi tribesmen and developed the infantry as a new branch of the Moroccan army.²² With the end of piracy came an end to this supply of European technical personnel. However, as late as 1877, the French found a French polytechnicien canalizing the river Fez; the Baron de Saint-Julien was personal physician to the grand vizier; and a renegade Spaniard was directing a royal brass band that could play “God Save the Queen” and various military airs.²³

European travelers were another source of information about the new science. In 1803, Sultan Mawlay Sulayman received “Ali bey al-Abassi,” the assumed name of the disguised Catalan adventurer Domingo Badia y Leblich, who presented himself as a Turkish savant.²⁴

As Badia claimed to have studied in London and Paris, the sultan questioned him about European education. Whether the Moroccans were fooled by his disguise is debatable, for the sultan delighted in having Badia read Arabic and gently correcting his mistakes.²⁵ The first Friday sermon included pointed remarks from the imam that “it was a great sin to cultivate any commerce with the Christians, or to sell or give them any sort of food or nourishment.” The sultan posed many questions about the measurement of temperature, astronomical observation, and electricity:

After the stunning Moroccan defeats in the 1844 Battle of Isly with France and the 1860 Tetouan War against Spain, Sultan Mawlay Hasan recognized the need for state-directed military reform and the systematic acquisition of European technology. He sent tolba to study artillery in the arsenals of Belgium, England, France, and Spain, where some attained the rank of maître-ouvrier and returned to assume direction of the arsenal in Fez.

²⁷

The sultan also sent the Moroccan physician

Abd al-Salam al-

Alami to study European medicine at the modern Qasr al-

Aini medical school in Egypt.

²⁸

In Tangier, Mawlay Hasan cooperated with the Spanish government to create a school of European medicine for the training of Moroccan military physicians.²⁹

His successor, Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz, used Arab graduates of the French medical school in Algiers as military doctors.

³⁰

In 1861, the Moroccan state spent 62,747 francs on imported pharmaceutical drugs from France; this was more than the value of all Moroccan exports to France combined.³¹

Under enormous pressure from the European powers, Mawlay Hasan accepted European military-training missions after 1870. The sultan knew that these European military experts were spies, topographers, and commercial agents, but he desperately needed trained personnel—he had resorted to using religious students to manufacture cartridges, maneuver artillery, and keep records. To minimize the Europeans' access to information, the sultan divided the missions among different branches of his army—the French trained the artillery; the English trained the infantry on Gibraltar;³²

and the Italians were admitted to Fez to set up foundries for the arsenal, at a portal today known as “Bab al-Makina,” or Portal of the Machine.³³ These military missions were financially and politically costly for Mawlay Hasan—the French artillery mission alone cost him 60,000 francs per year and 100,000 francs more when tribesmen killed a French officer in 1887.³⁴

In an attempt to extract scientific knowledge without paying the political price, Mawlay Hasan incorporated individual “men of science” into his entourage and kept the rest of the 1877 French mission at a distance. He took the physician Fernand Linarès with him to the palace and had the artillery expert Jules Erckmann lead a group of Moroccan students to the Ecole de Génie in Montpellier for engineering training.³⁵

Erckmann also served as palace astronomer, directing the muwaqqitin (functionaries of the mosques who determined exact prayer time) in the use of the sultan's astronomical instruments, which included the English Quarter, sextants, theodolites, and a glass mounted on the equatorial.³⁶ However, unlike the renegades, the technological help of these experts extended the reach of the French military into Moroccan society and laid the groundwork for French invasion in 1912. The artillery expert Larras was an adept cartographer, and the maps he drew while at court were later used for the French invasions of Casablanca in 1907 and Fez in 1912.³⁷

Through the person of Linarès, French medicine became the tool of European espionage par excellence. Linarès acquired great influence at court through his medicine and became the sultan's personal physician, accompanying him on the famous mahalla of 1893.

³⁸

Having gained the sultan's confidence, Linarès deftly promoted French interests, acting on constant instructions from the French Legation in Tangier. Linarès was able to block efforts by the British and the Germans to introduce the telegraph, a state bank, and the post office, reserving these strategic interests for France.³⁹

On the diplomatic front, he singlehandedly mediated among Paris, Madrid, and the makhzan in the Melilla crisis of 1893 and averted war between Morocco and Spain. His detailed accounts of everyday court intrigue, many of them in numeric code, helped the French monitor contacts between Morocco and the political movements in Turkey. After Sultan Mawlay Hasan's death in 1894, Linarès was the first European representative received by the new Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz.

So successful was Linarès that after his departure from Morocco in 1902, the French organized a corps of doctor agents (médecins missionaries) attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who were to gather local intelligence and win the natives' confidence.⁴⁰

Beginning in 1904, the French created dispensaries for these doctors along the Moroccan coast (Casablanca, Mazagan, Mogador, Larache, Rabat, Safi), and in Marrakech and Fez. Mauchamp was the doctor agent of the French dispensary in Marrakech. Other European powers soon besieged the sultan with their own doctor agents, offering medical and military advice. French doctors did not see themselves as spies; they fulfilled intelligence duties to pursue medical goals. Indeed, the Foreign Affairs Office forced Linarès into retirement for his sympathy to Moroccans.

After 1900, the French made of medicine, science, and technology Headrick's “tentacles of progress,” ensnaring Morocco in debt and technological dependence. The French Algerian deputy Eugène Etienne and his Comité du Maroc organized the Mission Scientifique du Maroc in 1905, a scientific exploration to interest metropolitan investors in the natural resources of Morocco and persuade the Chamber of Deputies to invade and colonize.⁴¹

The French entrepreneur Henri Popp raised 600,000 francs for his Moroccan Telegraph Company in September 1907 and installed stations in Casablanca and Tangier without the sultan's permission. The French occupied the Chaouia in 1907 and offered to withdraw on condition that the sultan buy the telegraph, railroads, and other technology installed by the army of occupation and hire Frenchmen to supervise.⁴² The makhzen bought Popp's four telegraph stations for 560,000 francs and named Popp director of the new Moroccan Telegraph in 1908.⁴³ These personnel facilitated the transition to French protectorate in 1912.

THE FOREIGN BOX OF FIRE: MOROCCAN POPULAR RESPONSES TO FRENCH TECHNOLOGY

The Moroccan ulema condemned the sultans' interest in Western technology and recognized its role in the Moroccan economic crisis. A member of the influential Kattaniya brotherhood, Ja

far ibn Idriss al-Kattani, denounced foreign inventions in his lithograph “The Blessed Composition in Judgment of Soap of the East and Candle “the Bougie” and the Foreign Imported Box of Fire, These Things from the Countries of the Unbelievers, God Curse Them.”

⁴⁴

The Moroccan ulema saw the country enter economic freefall between 1900 and 1904, losing its treasury surplus and going 100 million francs into debt. The young Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz, with his taste for extravagant European inventions (a bicycle, a solid gold camera, fireworks), did not inspire confidence. The ambitious program of government reform proposed in 1900, including roads, bridges, the telegraph, and modernization of the ports, was undermined by inept application. The tax reforms alienated traditional elites, and corrupt Moroccan ministers cooperated with European commercial interests to pocket public funds. In December 1904, the sultan requested a legal opinion (fatwa) from the ulema of Fez on “the cause of our present decadence.” The response was a resounding rejection of the European experts: “the foreigners are the original cause of our misfortunes. It is to them that our decadence, our anarchy, our internal strife, the disappearance of our independence and our downfall must be imputed.”

⁴⁵

However, the ulema did not object to European technology itself or declare it against Islam. A member of the same al-Kattani family secretly visited the French in Tangier for a demonstration of the telegraph.⁴⁶

European technology was incorporated into everyday life; European clocks kept prayer time in the Fez mosques from 1803.⁴⁷ Many of these ulema were also members of the manufacturing and commercial bourgeoisie of Fez. Operating at the crossroads of the trans-Saharan caravans and the European trade in manufactured goods, the cosmopolitan Fassi merchants sent ivory, gold, ostrich plumes, and indigo to the Europeans and glassware, iron, salt, and cottons to West Africa. Fassi merchants traveled to Manchester and Lyon for commerce and began to import European machinery for weaving and soap making after 1900. The anti-European Kattaniya embraced the new technology but suggested using Egyptian or Turkish personnel in place of the Europeans.⁴⁸

Rural tribesmen also appropriated French medicine and technology, despite traditional hostility to the makhzan. Rural folk did not have access to the manuscripts of elite travelers such as al-Saffar and al-Tahtawi,⁴⁹

but pilgrims to Mecca saw the military and technological changes in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt on the journey. In 1843, the French sent the military physician Dr. Candé to the Middle Atlas to treat a Beni Snassen tribal leader who had aided the French in Algeria. Candé found European technology the subject of lively popular discussion, particularly among those who had made the pilgrimage:

However, the tribesmen were well aware of the military potential of French science. When Candé took a notebook from his pocket, the nephew of the chief remarked, “That's how the French are: when they go to a country, they take the description of the localities and map the cities so they can take them later.”⁵¹

Thus, Moroccans were accustomed to French medicine long before Dr. Mauchamp in 1907. Moroccan pilgrims endured quarantine on the hajj, which the International Tangier Hygiene Council imposed after 1840. In principle, the council protected the safety and health of Moroccans, but its real raison d'être was to facilitate the export of goods to Marseille and hide Moroccan epidemics from French metropolitan health authorities.⁵²

The council argued that pilgrims imported plague and cholera to Morocco; thus, their quarantine would suffice to protect shipping.⁵³ The city of Tangier provided a more benevolent example of French medicine: Tangier enjoyed modern public hygiene and one French, one Spanish, and two English hospitals by 1902.⁵⁴ The native Jewish community in Tangier was so impressed by European medicine that a Jew named Bensimon founded a French hospital for Moroccan Jews with his private fortune.⁵⁵

Even the Chaouia and Marrakech tribes, who waged jihad against the French invaders in 1907, asked the French for medical assistance. Shortly after the French occupied the Chaouia in 1907, the M'Zab and Achach tribal councils approached the French military post to request native infirmaries for their populations, supported at their own expense.⁵⁶

In 1905, when the dissident Zenaga tribesmen captured the French Marquis de Segonzac, they seized his pharmaceutical supplies and required him to treat the sick. As they released him into the custody of the Glawa, the Zenaga asked their former prisoner to send them Frenchmen for civil engineering.⁵⁷

Mauchamp saw French medicine as civilization and Moroccan practice as barbarism, but traditional Arab healers saw no such conflict and borrowed freely from European techniques, equipment, and medical authority. In 1865, an Algerian “syphilis specialist” approached the French physician Dr. Cenac to request an ijaza (certificate of competence). Nancy Gallagher has argued that European signatures on ijaza illustrate European hegemony, but I suggest instead an exchange of knowledge between French and “Islamic” medical traditions.⁵⁸

This tabib already “enjoyed a great reputation among the Ouled Sellem tribe” and possessed considerable lands. He sought to improve his knowledge: “all Arab doctors are specialists and seek to perfect their art by all means in their power.”⁵⁹ In their interview, Cenac was astonished by the similarity between the “traditional” description of syphilis and clinical medicine at the Paris Hospital:

The enthusiasm of Moroccan healers for French medicine caused embarrassment once the French protectorate was established in 1912. The Moroccan Mohammad ibn Salim Belkhayat began his dental practice in 1892 and scandalized French doctors with his modern equipment. One doctor exclaimed: “he even bought his apparatus in Casablanca.”⁶¹

A Dahir of 1916 allowed the free exercise of native “Arabic medicine” and protected the French medical profession with strict standards on pharmacists, physicians, midwives, and herbalists. However, how could the medical profession be protected from Moroccans practicing “French” medicine?

Moroccan patients approached French doctors for magical and medical cures. In 1843, a Moroccan matron begged Candé to write her a jadwal, or Qur

anic amulet, “which would protect her against a second marriage and expulsion from the house of her husband by his heir.”

⁶³

After refusing, Candé was moved by her pleas and wrote on a piece of paper, “May the Lord bless you and me, too,” which the good lady put next to her bosom. Privately, many European patients consulted Moroccan healers. The wife of a European consul in Tangier consulted a tabib for a fever that seemed otherwise incurable.⁶⁴

RUMOR, VACCINATION AND MOROCCAN BODY POLITICS, 1860–1907

Despite this acceptance, Moroccans invested French technology with local social meanings and used those meanings to articulate political anxiety. As White has argued, African rumors “offer historians a way to see the world the way the storytellers did…. New technologies and procedures did not have meaning because they were new or powerful, but because of how they articulated ideas about bodies and their place in the world.”

⁶⁵

Burke has documented the structural and political disintegration of Morocco after 1860: European commercial encroachment through reparations, protégés, manufactured goods, and foreign loans; the efforts of Sultan Mawlay Hasan to extend the centralized state and the resistance of tribes; and, after 1900, pretenders to the throne, open revolt, and civil war under Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz.

⁶⁶

Popular rumor provides us with a social history of these changes at the local level, and technology provides a way to interpret these stories.

For example, the rumors surrounding Sharif Ahmad Tijani illustrate the complex relationship between the Taza tribes and the sultan in 1905. Sharif Tijani traveled from Taza to Fez, collecting tribute from the zāwiya of the Tijaniyya brotherhood. Ghiata tribesmen met the sharif with hostility:

The Tijaniyya had an entente with the French in Algeria,⁶⁸

and Europeans did adopt Moroccan disguise for the scientific exploration of Morocco: Charles de Foucauld dressed as a Moroccan Jew for the Reconnaissance au Maroc; the geologist Louis Gentil passed as a majnūn to explore the Atlas Mountains; and the Marquis de Segonzac posed as a mule driver to a minor sharifian personnage to conduct five geographical explorations from 1899 to 1904. However, I suggest that the details and meaning of the Tijani rumor must be read as an articulation of the Ghiata tribe's worldview in 1905.

The rumor confounds fear of the sultan, the French, and “Abu Himara,” the government functionary who fooled the Ghiata into accepting him as the elder brother of Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz. In 1901, Abu Himara led the Ghiata in revolt against the makhzan, which bombarded in 1903 and forced the pretender into retreat, where he set up a “government” north of Muluya.

⁶⁹

Artillery evokes the power of the makhzan; as we have seen, the sultans imported European artillery to Morocco, and Mawlay Hasan accepted the French artillery mission of 1877 to punish a Ghiata revolt.⁷⁰

Abu Himara is evoked both in the accusation of disguise and in the troops marching from Muluya, his stronghold. This composite sultan/Abu Himara/Sufi leader is both a gateway to French invasion (the general is hidden in the trunk) and contaminated by France; the French have infiltrated or stolen the body of Islamic religious authority. This example suggests that the tribal revolts in Taza in 1901–1903 arose from a crisis of political and moral legitimacy deeper than resistance to taxation or the centralized state.⁷¹

More important, this political anxiety was expressed in a language of technology and the body.

Before considering Mauchamp, we should ponder the social meanings of smallpox vaccination in Morocco, which made up the majority of Mauchamp's medical practice. Moroccans were not opposed to it in principle and, indeed, practiced variolation, a traditional form of inoculation: “[T]he mountain Berbers know inoculation against smallpox from time immemorial, and they practice it.”⁷²

Variolation operates on the same principle as vaccination. Whereas the Jennerian vaccine is a serum harvested from infected cattle, Moroccan variolators took pus directly from a person sick with smallpox and introduced it through an incision on the healthy body:

Thus, Moroccans accepted the concept of vaccination and practiced variolation, a similar medical procedure.

However, Moroccan populations did suspect the use of needles and marks on the body. In Morocco, marks on the body, particularly tattoos, had military, religious, or tribal significance. All members of the corporation of riflemen attached to the Nasiriyya brotherhood were identified by a tattoo on the shoulder.⁷⁴

Native Jewish women carried off by rural tribes in the sacks of the mellahs of Fez and Casablanca were tattooed with the silaya, the facial tattoo of traditional Berber women.⁷⁵ Perhaps most troubling to Moroccans, soldiers of the sultan's jaysh troops were identified by a tattoo between the thumb and forefinger to prevent desertion.⁷⁶ Mawlay Hasan's military reforms put increased pressure on the Moroccan population to provide conscripts, who were required to serve for life.⁷⁷ In the tanners' revolt of 1873, the people of Fez rose against the sultan to protest recruitment of their children for campaigns against rebellious jaysh troops.⁷⁸ Thus, Moroccans had reason to suspect any procedure that made a mark on the body, by the French or the Moroccan state.

Those who accepted vaccination were close to the sultan. French doctors in Oujda (1844), Mogador (1875), and Safi (1907) observed that Muslims resisted vaccination and Jews accepted it. In Safi (near Marrakech) in 1907, Dr. Trolard remarked that, although vaccination was “admitted in the city by notables and universally requested by the Jews, it is absolutely rejected by natives of the countryside [the Rehamna and Haha tribes].”

⁷⁹

Trolard's Muslim clientele consisted of government administrators, quwwad, nuwwab, soldiers—all functionaries of the sultan. Likewise, Moroccan Jews served as the sultan's commercial agents in domestic and international trade, the tujjar al-Sultan.⁸⁰

Those who rejected vaccination were rural tribesmen who were suspicious of the makhzan. Rehamna and Haha tribesmen walked days to French clinics in Safi yet refused vaccination. Later in 1907, the Rehamna defied the sultan and switched their allegiance to his brother,

Abd al-Hafiz.

⁸¹

Vaccination was associated in the popular imagination with the makhzan, likely because European doctors came to Morocco through the court.

Vaccination sparked political rumor in Morocco, but not because Moroccans feared or misunderstood the medicine itself. Vaccination produced anxiety because of who administered it and for whom. Needles could penetrate the body to transform social identity, and the vaccinators were French doctors, historically agents of the sultan. Experiences in French clinics illustrate the tension between the meaning and the use of French medicine; rural patients both crowded French dispensaries and accused French doctors of poisoning.⁸²

In Mogador in 1909, a crowd tried to murder Dr. Dinguisly, then approached his colleague de Campredon for vaccine, “assuring us that smallpox is in the city.”⁸³ The people of Morocco did not reject Western science, contrary to the claims of Mauchamp and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, in 1907 French medical technology carried social meaning and could not be separated from political anxiety.

THE MANY DEATHS OF EMILE MAUCHAMP, 1905–1907

Of interest here is not Mauchamp's biography or his actual death but his “many deaths,” the rumors that surrounded him in life and his transvestic corpse after death. Although Mauchamp's spectacular 1907 demise was the cause célèbre of French colonial interests and precipitated the invasion of Oujda,

⁸⁴

Mauchamp himself was a minor figure. Unlike Linarès, who influenced Moroccan foreign policy, Mauchamp unsuccessfully courted

Abd al-Hafiz and the Glawa, offended the makhzan, and snubbed his French colleagues.

⁸⁵

His medical dispensary was one of seventeen in Morocco, and other clinics boasted triple Mauchamp's clientele.⁸⁶

Many Europeans were attacked and killed in Morocco after the Act of Algeciras in 1906. Why did the death of this minor actor embroil the sultan, his brother

Abd al-Hafiz, the Saharan jihadist Ma

al-

Aynayn, and the regional lords of Marrakech in a national and international crisis? Mauchamp became a vehicle for the post–Algeciras crisis of Moroccan political legitimacy. Through the body of a French doctor, the people of Marrakech indicted the rule of Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz and expressed rage at his weakness before the European powers.

The murder may have been instigated by the sultan, his brother

Abd al-Hafiz, European agents, Ma

al-

Aynayn, or local officials. Nooman Kouri, the French consul in Mogador, concluded in his 1910 investigation that

Abd al-Hafiz had staged the incident to destabilize the regime.

⁸⁷

One Moroccan witness testified that the crowd was assembled on order of the sultan,⁸⁸

and the makhzan did support armed resistance in Mauritania.⁸⁹

There are other suspects. Supporters of Ma

al-

Aynayn, the Saharan jihadist and Islamic reformer, confronted but failed to kill Mauchamp on 24 September 1906. Mauchamp also disputed with his landlord, Pasha Warzazi, the German renegade Holzmann, and British Vice-Consul Lennox. Politics further complicate the facts: the French used the murder to justify invading Oujda, and some Moroccan witnesses changed their testimony between 1907 and 1910.

⁹⁰

Although they simply recounted events at first, witnesses later blamed

Abd al-Hafiz explicitly for the murder, which suggests political intrigue.

⁹¹

However, if someone did organize the crowd, he only unleashed popular rage that already focused on Mauchamp.

From the moment Mauchamp arrived in Marrakech, he was the subject of multiple rumors. On 8 November 1905, he wrote, “The rumor circulates that I am not a doctor but a secret envoy of the French government sent to make maps, do topography and spy to prepare for French invasion.”⁹²

In January 1906, Mauchamp noticed that his clientele had suddenly dropped, and his former patients were avoiding him. He sent a servant to investigate, who returned with the following rumor:

Shortly before Mauchamp's murder in 1907, the sultan wrote to Pasha Warzazi of Marrakech after hearing a rumor that the French geologist and Sorbonne professor Louis Gentil was smuggling telegraph equipment into Morocco:

Another rumor circulated in Marrakech four days before the attack that Mauchamp planned to plant the French flag on his roof and rule the city.⁹⁵

The morning of the murder, personnel of Pasha Warzazi went to the clinic to tell Mauchamp to remove a suspicious antenna from his roof that was drawing a hostile crowd. When the doctor came out to remove it, the crowd confronted and killed him.

Certainly, these rumors reflect historical realities. Mauchamp may not have been a freemason, but he was an agent of the Affaires Etrangères, and the French did use doctors for the “peaceful penetration” of Morocco. The French army used science and technology for espionage. All members of the 1877 French military mission had intelligence roles, and the Mission Scientifique du Maroc of 1905 helped prepare the 1907 and 1912 invasions. As for the wireless telegraph, a Frenchman was installing telegraph stations on the west coast of Morocco without the sultan's permission, but it was Henri Popp, not Gentil or Mauchamp. Moroccans were right to be anxious, for the French later executed the 1907 invasions of Oujda and Casablanca from Oran by wireless telegraph.⁹⁶

However, the rumors also reveal the politicization of the Marrakech population and shed light on the origins of the Hafiziyya movement.

Abd al-Hafiz conspired with the powerful Marrakech qaid Madani al-Glawi to take the throne in 1904. However, the “Hafiziyya” became a popular movement only after Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz signed the Act of Algeciras on 18 June 1906. The Act, which gave France broad political powers to intervene in Morocco and made the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas the director of Moroccan finances, “consummated the break between the sultan and those Moroccans who favored continued resistance to France.”

⁹⁷

Abd al-Hafiz gained the support of the Marrakech qaids Madani al-Glawi and

Abd al-Malik al-Mtouggui and the ulama of Marrakech, who declared

Abd al-Hafiz sultan on 16 August 1907. The French invasion of the Chaouia in 1907 radicalized the Marrakech Hauz tribes, who lent their support to

Abd al-Hafiz and compelled him to send a mahalla of 3,000 men to the Chaouia on 16 September 1907.

⁹⁸

The Hauz tribesmen were the core of anti–French jihad—how and when did they develop this political consciousness?

The Mauchamp rumors describe an organized conspiracy of French doctors who injected Christianity and Western government (freemasonry) through the needle, a slow poisoning process that destroyed and transformed Morocco from the inside. The French army would invade Marrakech using information transmitted by means beyond Moroccan control—topography, the wireless telegraph, and a signal flag.⁹⁹

Rumor ascribed crisis to invisible causes with long-term effects, a fitting metaphor for French control over the 100 million francs of Moroccan debt; 65 percent of Moroccan customs revenue; and the resulting currency devaluation, food shortages, and famine. Economic conditions in 1906 Marrakech were desperate: a third of the population nourished itself on boiled locusts; a typhus epidemic claimed 1,500 victims, and “twelve people die daily of hunger in the mellah.”¹⁰⁰ However, it is curious that of twenty-five Europeans living in Marrakech in 1907,¹⁰¹ rumors should identify the boorish Mauchamp as the source of foreign threat.

In accusing a French doctor, the rumors indirectly accused Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz for the erosion of Moroccan sovereignty. As we have seen, French doctors were the sultan's agents, and the Moroccans who accepted vaccination were associated with the court. Rumors of a poisoning doctor thus blamed

Abd al-

Aziz for his introduction of Europeans and their science, forces that had gone out of control and threatened Moroccan independence itself. The murder of Mauchamp can be read as an act of defiance against the sultan, which

Abd al-

Aziz may have recognized, for he condemned the act in an open letter to mosques throughout the country.

¹⁰²

The rumors express a Moroccan political consciousness that led to popular action, first killing Mauchamp and later fighting the French in the Chaouia. These nascent political ideas, developed through rumor and action, were finally formulated in the proclamation (bay

a) of

Abd al-Hafiz as sultan in Fez in 1908.

From a variety of Moroccan eyewitnesses, we know that an armed crowd of men, women, and children led by the muqaddimīn of the quarter waited outside Mauchamp's clinic in

Arsa Mawlay Mussa street and beat him to death when he emerged, clubbing and stabbing him more than twenty-five times and crushing his head.

¹⁰³

The crowd stripped the corpse naked, tied a rope around its neck, and dragged it to an empty lot. As they debated whether to burn it with kerosene, khalifa troops sent by

Abd al-Hafiz arrived to confiscate the body and take it to the dispensary. Ali ibn Brahim, Mauchamp's servant, testified that he saw a crowd in the vacant lot chanting “Sla salām alik yā rasūl Allah.”

¹⁰⁴

The crowd threw rocks at the mounted soldiers as they took the corpse and shouted, “Cursed be the father of Hadj Abd al-Salam (al-Warzazi) the Christian.”¹⁰⁵

Later, French acquaintances found Mauchamp's corpse at the dispensary dressed in Moroccan clothes. Pasha Warzazi arrested ten Moroccans, all residents of the quarter and rural migrants from tribes outside Marrakech—three Mesfiwa, two Zemran, an Ouzgita, a Dra, a Soussi, and a deaf-mute of unknown origin. The men worked in the Marrakech market as vegetable, bread, and water sellers; grain measurers (

abar); and carpenters.

¹⁰⁶

We cannot know whether these were the actual assailants, but their residence in Marrakech shows the mixing of city and countryside and the engagement of the rural tribes in national politics.

¹⁰⁷

Makhzan sources identified the assailants as “Rehamna,” a reference to the tribal confederation organized by the Rehamna tribe.¹⁰⁸

In May 1907, the Rehamna tribes demanded that prisoners not be handed over to the French; that Europeans leave Marrakech; and that Jews uncover their heads and go barefoot in the city.¹⁰⁹

The identity of the prisoners suggests the membership of the Rehamna organization—the Mesfiwa, Zemran, Ouzgita, Dra, and Segharna tribes.¹¹⁰

In September, the Rehamna-led Hauz tribes repudiated the sultan in favor of his brother

Abd al-Hafiz. This was against their own local interests, for

Abd al-Hafiz's ally was their local enemy, the qaid Madani al-Glawi. The Glawa had tried unsuccessfully to conquer Hauz tribal lands in 1886.

¹¹¹

However, in 1907 the Rehamna tribes put national defense ahead of their own security. The Rehamna pressured the reluctant

Abd al-Hafiz to declare jihad on the French, and most of the troops sent to the Chaouia were Rehamna tribesmen.

When the Hafiziya movement spread to the capital, Fez crowds echoed the Rehamna demands. On 30 December, a mob of Fez tribesmen and urban dwellers thronged the streets, declaring themselves independent of both the sultan and the ulema. Forty thousand people crowded the Qarawiyyin mosque demanding that the ulema write a fatwa to declare

Abd al-Aziz an illegitimate ruler, which the ulema reluctantly did. On 3 January 1908, tribal chiefs, notables, ulama, and a large crowd proclaimed

Abd al-Hafiz sultan. However, the bay

a (formal proclamation) presented the new sultan with a list of duties, including the suspension of the Algeciras Act, the restoration of Morocco's territorial integrity, the expulsion of the French, and the restoration of Islam.

¹¹²

The bay

a document was less a vote for

Abd al-Hafiz than a public definition of Moroccan political legitimacy and a demand that the new sultan live up to these obligations.

There is no direct line from the Mauchamp rumors to the 1908 bay

a of Fez. Still, the Mauchamp incident suggests that popular rumors used Mauchamp to conceive a Moroccan polity larger than local interests. Rumors spread these political ideas and mobilized crowds in the streets of Fez and Marrakech. As White has argued, rumor is a public analysis of events, and tellers and listeners use rumor to relate personal experience to politics.

¹¹³

The 1907 Mauchamp rumors describe a different political community from that of the 1903 Tijani rumors. In 1903, the Ghiata feared for their tribal security and combined the sultan, Abu Himara, the Tijaniyya, and the French as a composite threat. The Mauchamp rumors describe Moroccans as under French attack and cast blame on Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz for social crisis. The “Rehamna” tribes acted to defend Morocco because they understood themselves as Moroccans. They chose

Abd al-Hafiz as sultan because they defined Moroccan political legitimacy for themselves. Rumors suggest the process by which the Rehamna created this political understanding, and medicine offers a way to interpret these rumors.

A TALE OF TWO BODIES: THE SULTAN OF MOROCCO AND MAUCHAMP

The spectacle of Mauchamp's corpse provides support for a political and symbolic reading of the doctor's death. In pre-protectorate Morocco, as in early modern Europe, the person of the sultan conjoined “a Body natural and a Body politic”—“that is, the King's Two Bodies” were inseparable.¹¹⁴

Royal processions, Muslim festivals, and diplomatic rituals affirmed the sultan's body as the center and source of the Moroccan body politic. In a hadiyya, or “gift,” ceremony, tribal delegations presented the sultan with gold, carpets, and livestock, reinforcing royal authority and filling the royal coffers.¹¹⁵ The sultans visited the countryside on mahalla, or “mobile court,” from which they meted out justice and performed pilgrimage to the saintly ancestors.”¹¹⁶ The person of the sultan himself was a source of sacred authority, and his cannons were a space of horm, or sacred asylum.¹¹⁷

The relations between Moroccan sultans and Europeans were also defined through symbolism. When the French Consul Chenier angered Sultan

Abd al-Rahman, he was “led around the city of Rabat on a donkey, his face turned toward the tail, which he was obliged to hold in his hand.”

¹¹⁸

When Sultan Mawlay Hasan accepted the 1877 French military mission, he insisted that its members wear Moroccan attire and assume ranks in his army. This “disguise” was symbolic submission to the sultan and incorporation of the French experts into the court. When Linarès accompanied Sultan Mawlay Hasan on mahalla in 1893, a member of the crowd exclaimed, “There is a Christian among you!” Linarès responded to the heckler in Arabic, which affirmed the sultan's official fiction and drew appreciative laughter from the crowd.¹¹⁹

However, as the Moroccan state weakened and social crisis grew, the symbolic order of Sultan

Abd al-

Aziz began to unravel. After 1900, the Marrakech population expressed its rage in a series of attacks on native Jews, the sultan's commercial agents, who were forced to remove their shoes outside the mellah.

¹²⁰

French officers became less willing to participate in affirmations of royal authority. In 1899, the artillery expert Burckhardt declined to appear at the hadiyya ceremony and rejected orders from his Moroccan superior.¹²¹

Mauchamp refused to speak Arabic or wear Arab clothes and declared, “I am here…as a French doctor, to make France known and loved; the natives must recognize me as a Frenchman.”¹²²

With his fedora, tailored suits, and French language, Mauchamp was a final affront to Moroccan authority.

On 19 March 1907, an angry mob of men, women, and children took to the streets of Marrakech. The mob beat Mauchamp to death, stripped his body, and destroyed and looted his house, then attacked the homes of Dr. Assiegeait and British Consular Agent Lennox. Hours later, Professor Louis Gentil, his compatriot M. Lassalas, and a Moroccan agent of the French consulate discovered Mauchamp's corpse on the floor of the dispensary. The corpse was not naked, as the soldiers must have found it. Nor was it wrapped in a white shroud, the custom for Muslim burial. Rather, someone had taken exquisite care to dress the corpse in a Moroccan man's white qamis and jallaba, place a turban on its crushed head, and lay it out on a bed of freshly cut grass.¹²³

Mauchamp lay dressed as a Moroccan Muslim man.¹²⁴ The anonymous authors of this mock funeral used Mauchamp's body for a political commentary. By dressing Mauchamp in Moroccan clothes, these Moroccans argued for the restoration of Moroccan authority over European agents and over Moroccan territory itself.