The United States and Moroccan International Status, 1943-1956: A Contributory Factor in Morocco's Reassertion of Independence from France

Abstract

Franco-Moroccan conflict may be considered as having begun on 22 January 1943 with the meeting at Anfa between Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.l With these words Stephane Bernard opens his discerning study, The Franco-Moroccan Conflict,1943-1956. Although there is some dispute as to exactly what was said at this dinner meeting and even why it was held, the incontrovertible fact is that the event represents United States' public acknowledgement that Morocco was not mere colony of France but that it enjoyed distinct international status, namely sovereignty under its own monarch, the sultan, albeit as protectorate of France. Bernard is not quite accurate in asserting that the Franco-Moroccan conflict began with this meeting, since Moroccan resistance to French domination goes back to the very date that the protectorate was imposed with the Treaty of Fez in 1912. Moreover, as Bernard indicates, the reaction to the Berber Dahir of 1930, the establishment of the National Party in the 1930s, the work of the Comitg d'Action Marocaine all bear witness to the mounting Moroccan opposition to French rule even before 1943. Yet Bernard's focus on the Anfa meeting is quite reasonable because this face-to-face contact between the sultan and the chief of state of the leading Allied power, which was not sanctioned by the French Protectorate authorities, ushered in new period in the Franco-Moroccan conflict. Not only did it, in the words of Roger Le Tourneau, transform the sultan into a totally new man who on leaving the President of the United States declared 'A new future for my country,'2 but it also markedly altered the nature of the Franco-Moroccan controversy from purely bilateral dispute to one with an international dimension, focusing on Morocco's international status.