A Constellation of Outposts: French Intelligence Services and the Administration of the French Protectorate of Morocco, 1912-1937

Abstract

This dissertation examines the metastasis of the French colonial intelligence state. It argues that rogue intelligence officers hijacked power in the French Protectorate of Morocco and created a covert regime to evade outside scrutiny into the practices of empire. Generally, scholarship on the French Empire has assumed that the security services were only tools of executive power and that they were without opinions on the situations they were called to handle. “A Constellation of Outposts,” however, shows that French intelligence and security services played a fundamental but previously unrecognized role in the formation of the colonial state in Morocco. In response to political instability in the Protectorate, intelligence officers organized an entire layer of institutions in which they doubled as magistrates, agronomists, economists, psychiatrists, teachers, and acquired technical expertise in a host of other areas necessary to making and administering the Protectorate. Their job was to not only collect information, but to also use it on the spot to create policies, institutions, and patronage networks that helped allay some of these tensions. Yet, the covert state created by intelligence officers also provided Moroccans with new options for resistance and accommodation. These negotiations are examined through the prism of environmental history and political economy. As Moroccans faced famines brought on by droughts and high rates of pauperization because of the Great Depression, the continued presence of the French in Morocco required French intelligence officers to provide everyday Moroccans with solutions to manage the effects of ecologic and economic disasters. Nationalism is also an important part of this story. This dissertation recasts the volatile politics of empire not only as a response to the oppressiveness of colonialism, but also as demands for greater access to the political and economic opportunities that the French Empire offered.