ABSTRACT

Europeans rather than North Africans furnished most of the documentation for this study. In addition to material published in books and periodicals, I have relied heavily on two documents collections, the archives of the French Ministry of War (Vincennes) and the Algeria series of the Archives d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence). The bulk of the material in both collections represents the views of French army officers serving in the Algero-Moroccan frontier zone or in Morocco with the Military Mission. Many of the letters and reports contained in some dozens of boxes are irrelevant to questions of Moroccan history. Almost all of them are pervaded by biases, prejudices, or distortions of one sort or another. It is certain, for example, that the army consistently reported events in such a way as to secure the government’s permission for further territorial expansion. Nonetheless, these documents are important because the army collected and analyzed, often with thoroughness and perceptivity, a great deal of political data, as well as general ethnographic information, concerning Moroccan groups both within and beyond its administrative control.