Womanizer - Delinquent - Glutton - Deserter; Visionary - Linguist - Explorer - Hermit. The lexical fields do not match, yet both sets of descriptors apply to one man: Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), one of nineteenth-century France’s most complex and challenging figures. The two halves of his life part almost mathematically: a dissolute, disconsolate orphan whose wealthy family, peers, and superiors did not know what to do with him; and then an intuitive, dedicated scholar and priest who revolutionized European knowledge of Morocco’s geography and culture, and refusing to evangelize the Berber population among whom he lived. Foucauld’s biography typically divides into these two sections, with his youth glossed almost as a fleeting adventure and clear priority assigned to his later years as a hermit and spiritual director.

This book seeks to turn that model on its head. Peters-Hill has written a study of Charles de Foucauld’s youthful undertaking in unknown territory that seeks to represent as honestly as possible both the evolution of Foucauld’s mindset regarding French engagement in Morocco and the consequences of his work in that country. While delving into how the author is changed by Morocco, she nonetheless holds Foucauld accountable for his nationalist and religious biases, the details he discounts or ignores, the unavoidable oversights in such a brief cultural encounter, the things he got wrong. She situates Foucauld’s year in Morocco as the exegesis of his ultimate desert calling, the transformation of a black sheep into a sacrificial lamb, a man the Catholic Church venerates as a martyr.

Drawing from several discrete fields - travel writing, botany, hydrology, and topography; cartography, ethnography and sociology; linguistics and amazighité, alongside formal literary criticism and French (post-) colonial studies – the book presents a fuller view of a writer whose legacy remains an inspiration, a frustration, and an enigma.