The prompt for this book was the fascinating public presence of Thami al-Glaoui; the constant references to him in various media and literature over the course of more than a century; realisation of the sheer number of people impacted by him in some way; the thrill, and the accompanying Pavlovian conditioning of uneasiness, that seems to manifest whenever his name is mentioned.

Regardless of the ways in which al-Glaoui has been judged by various people and discourses, his mode of living, his engagement in power relations and webs of loyalty, his actions with respect to the court, the various French agents, the tribal populations of southern Morocco, the local Jewish community, and various international actors: all these contribute to a full engagement with the complex fabric of modern Morocco, its history and its historiographies.

All this notwithstanding, much of the narrations of al-Glaoui’s biography are shrouded in fog and uncertainty. This book is an attempt to clear some of these historiographic and historic mysteries and to retrieve his story from the simplistic and reductionist interpretations that certain historiographies have proffered. I have attempted to provide fresh data and perspectives about the individual, simultaneously reflecting on his story and the various ways in which it has been told, how it continues to evolve, and how the story has influenced processes within Moroccan history and has reciprocally been shaped by them.

The quote above is taken from Albert Berdugo’s (1996) book Les Dessous d’une Conspiration. It gives a hint as to how Berdugo – a Moroccan Jew, serving as one of the Pasha’s secretaries since 1943 – thought that al-Glaoui regarded him.

Mountain Rescue in the Atlas

Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas (1966; see Chapter 6 for more about the book and author) – the starting point for many non-Moroccans of their acquaintance with Thami al-Glaoui – describes the 1890s kick-off of the Glaoui brothers’ astonishing rise to power with the following tale:

Mahi Binebine, a Moroccan writer and painter, was born in Marrakesh in 1959. He emigrated in his early twenties to Paris, moved to New York in 1994, and returned to live in Marrakesh in 2002. While still in the diaspora, Binebine wrote his first two books, both relating to his early life in Morocco. Les Funérailles du lait (The Milk Funerals, 1994), is constructed around the image of his mother, who single-handedly raised seven children in the medina of Marrakesh. The main theme of the book is her constant anxiety about whether her son was alive or not. That son was Mahi’s brother, Aziz, an army officer who participated in the failed coup against King Hassan II in the early 1970s, and was subsequently imprisoned at Tazmamart for eighteen years, his family denied any information about his fate (Jay 2015: 99; Salon maghrébin du livre 2018: 52–3).

The plot of Binbine’s second book, L’Ombre du poète (The Shadow of the Poet, 1997), is also set in Marrakesh and its environs but a few decades earlier, during the last twenty years of the French Protectorate. The book describes a conflict between two childhood friends who, on growing up, find themselves in opposition to one another. One is a protesting poet who joins an underground nationalist cell, the other became a man of power – al-Glaoui’s secretary – who ends up killing the poet (Binebine 1997). One key insight of the novel is that the character who ends up working for al-Glaoui is not necessarily a villain and that the one who joined the nationalist movement is not automatically a hero. Both were driven by their aspirations, emotions, constraints, and by coincidences, all unfolding within very complex situations.

During a recent conversation with a friend, I mentioned in passing that I was about to finish writing a book about Pasha Thami al-Glaoui. The friend, born to a Moroccan-Amazigh family who have lived in the diaspora for many years, contacted her family to ask what they know about the Pasha. The response was immediate. She contacted me soon afterwards, to say:

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Sultan Mohammed V declared Morocco’s unconditional support for France (Pennell 2000: 254) – despite growing tensions between the Moroccans and the French. France surrendered to Germany in June 1940; a short while later, a pro-German government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain was established in Vichy. General Noguès, the Resident-General in Morocco, pledged allegiance to the new regime, and the Sultan chose the same course (Abun-Nasr 1987: 393; Pennell 2000: 254–6).

The humiliation of France’s defeat rippled through the Pasha’s family, in part because his son Mehdi had witnessed the unfolding events personally. In the early 1930s, the Pasha sent Mehdi to be educated in France. After graduating from his lycée, Mehdi enrolled at the French military school at Saint Cyr, becoming an officer shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. During the war, his Moroccan Spahis unit fought in the 1940 Battle of France, part of the attempts to stop the German offensive. Mehdi was in the thick of the action and was awarded two medals for his bravery in leading his platoon in rescuing another unit that had been surrounded by the enemy. These smaller victories notwithstanding, the larger battle was lost. After the armistice, Mehdi returned to Morocco. Consulting with his father, he decided to quit the army, as there were no promotion opportunities in the French army for Moroccan officers.

Gustave Babin

Gustave Constant Babin was born in 1865 in the commune of Rezé, a suburb of Nantes in the Loire-Atlantique department in western France, to carpenter Gustave Babin and his wife, Mrs Constance Lebeaupin. His early childhood passed under the cloud of the French defeat and humiliation in the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War, which climaxed with Germany’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. The social context of this defeat likely had an impact on his later mindset: significant class conflict, demographic decline and economic depression that lasted until 1897 (Mayeur and Rebirioux 1994: 42–71).

The Third French Republic emerged from the aftermath of that war (in 1870; Gildea 1996: 1). The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century governments of the Third Republic ran economic reform programmes aimed at protecting French agriculture and industry from international competition. As such, France was a part of a reform discourse running across the continent and its adjacent regions, from Morocco in the west to the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the east (Chapter 2; and, for example, I?nalcik 1976; Shaw and Shaw 1977; Enayat 2013; Davison 2016; McDougall 2018). In 1878, the government initiated the Freycinet Plan, an ambitious public works programme intended (amongst other things) to extend the reach of the Third Republic to rural France; by the turn of the century, the French economy had fully recovered (Jones 1984: 16; Haine 2000: 124). Within the opportunities that had opened up, the young Gustave Babin, twenty years old in 1885, took up a job with his hometown’s bridge and road service.