ABSTRACT
Relations between the French left established in Morocco and the young nationalists who came to the fore as a result of the struggle with the Berber Dahir in 1930 were by no means fluid, since the former were alienated by the bourgeois nature of the movement. In the territorial dispute with Mauritania, which resulted from the latter gaining independence in November 1960, the Moroccan Communist Party declared that the territory belonged to Morocco. In 1974, the territorial question became the focal point of political life in Morocco, after Spain held a referendum on autonomy in Western Sahara at the request of the United Nations. In the first issue of Clarte, the French Communist Party’s newspaper in Morocco, Leon Sultan, writing under the pseudonym of Marc Forclaude, stated that his party was adopting ‘the program of the Moroccan proletariat’s immediate demands’, without making any explicit reference to the Moroccan Action Committee reform programme.
