Moroccan colonial troops: History, memory, and the culture of French colonialism

"Moroccan Colonial Troops: History, Memory, and the Culture of French Colonialism" deals with the history of Moroccan colonial troops between 1912 and 1945. By concentrating on the Moroccan soldiers who were recruited under the French, this dissertation relates the history of colonial Morocco to that of metropolitan France. France created the colonial army in Morocco in order to deploy it both for its colonial expansion and for its European wars. I argue that the case of the Moroccan colonial soldiers provide us with a good example of how to start viewing the history of the metropole and the colony within the same analytical frame which requires us to rethink the category of "nation". By doing so, we see how the historical subjects of French history were not fixed by national borders. By including the history of these soldiers into the historical narratives of the First and Second World Wars, this work attempts to challenge the very concepts of France and "Frenchness" as fixed and hermetically sealed entities.;This dissertation also seeks to present the history of colonialism as a shared history which goes beyond the fixed categories of "colonizers" and "colonized". It is therefore a direct critique of the Moroccan nationalist historiography which has excluded the history of colonial troops from its grand narratives of nation and nationalism. I suggest that in order to fully grasp the complex dynamics of the colonial encounter in Morocco, we can no longer look at colonial history as mainly the history of indigenous resistance to imperialist intrusion. I therefore explore the history, institutional contexts and memory of the Moroccan colonial soldiers in an effort to rethink the colonial period of Moroccan history.;This dissertation combines military history with social and cultural history. While I deal with the contribution of Moroccan colonial soldiers who served in various contexts, including Morocco, Europe in World Wars I and II, I use the concept of collective memory and discourse analysis to explore the cultural dimensions of an eminently political and military institution. I use oral interviews in the final chapter of this dissertation as way of opening an important debate about the place of orality in the construction of the Moroccan colonial past. I suggest that one way of rethinking colonialism is to start confronting the archives and the written texts with the language of the people who are the real subjects of this dissertation and the authors of their history.