THE MANY DEATHS OF DR. EMILE MAUCHAMP: MEDICINE, TECHNOLOGY, AND POPULAR POLITICS IN PRE-PROTECTORATE MOROCCO, 1877–1912

Abstract

On 19 March 1907, a doctor of the French government, Emile Mauchamp, was beaten to death by a Moroccan mob outside his clinic in the city of Marrakech. The French colonial lobby used this brutal murder to justify invading the Moroccan city of Oujda in 1907 and, eventually, to add Morocco to the colonial empire as a French protectorate in 1912. At Mauchamp's funeral, the minister of foreign affairs eulogized the doctor as a martyr to the barbarous Muslim hatred of civilization. In his (posthumous) study of Moroccan medical practice, La Sorcellerie au Maroc , Mauchamp wrote of Moroccan medicine as “sorcery” and the antithesis of rational science. However, Mauchamp's demise was neither an Islamic rejection of Western science nor an incidental death. Mauchamp's murder was a political event, an act of popular Moroccan defiance against Sultan Abd al- Aziz and anger at his impotence before the European powers. In the Moroccan political imagination, Mauchamp came to embody internal and external threats to the body politic and was made to suffer “many deaths”—for a crumbling Moroccan state, for foreign influence, and for social and economic crisis in Morocco.