Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · French Protectorate · Cracking

French Morocco - 1947

French Morocco in 1947 is a protectorate whose central mechanism is turning against it. The technique of ruling through the Sultan worked so long as the Sultan lent his authority to French rule - and in 1947 Mohammed ben Youssef stops doing so. In April he travels to Tangier and delivers a speech that says, by what it includes and what it pointedly leaves out, that Morocco is an Arab and Muslim nation with ties to the wider Arab world, and that omits the customary praise of France and of the protectorate. To the Residency it is a rupture: the throne France governs through has aligned itself, in public and in the international city, with the nationalist cause. Days earlier, Casablanca had been convulsed by riots in which colonial troops fired on Moroccans, sharpening the mood. The Istiqlal party, founded in the war years on a demand not for reform but for independence, is organising in the cities. Paris responds by replacing a conciliatory Resident-General with the hard soldier Alphonse Juin. The strategic identity is the protectorate cracking at the top: the king and the colonial power no longer pulling together.

Starting position

The starting board in 1947 is a contest between a Residency and a palace that used to be allies. The Sultan, after the Tangier speech, is no longer a compliant figurehead but the symbolic head of the national movement, careful and constitutional in method but unmistakable in direction; the Istiqlal supplies the organised political demand for independence and the urban mobilisation behind it. Against them, France sends Juin with a mandate to restore the Residency's authority, lean on the Sultan, cultivate the rural caïds and Berber notables as a counterweight to the nationalist towns, and hold the protectorate together by pressure. The country itself is more developed and more strained than in 1939 - Casablanca larger and more industrial, its bidonvilles crowded with rural migrants, its labour restive - and the international frame has changed, with a newly assertive Arab League and an America uneasy about colonialism both watching. The pieces are a Sultan turned national symbol, an Istiqlal pressing for independence, a hardline Resident-General, and a rural-elite strategy meant to isolate the palace from its own people.

What turns the campaign

What France wants in 1947 is to keep the protectorate by restoring the old bargain - to bring the Sultan back into line, contain the Istiqlal, and rebuild the fiction that Morocco is governed with the throne's consent, using Juin's firmness and the loyalty of the rural caïds to do it. What the Sultan and the nationalists want is the opposite: to convert the protectorate's own logic - that Morocco is a sovereign state merely being protected - into the demand that the protection now end. The campaign turns on that struggle over the throne. Can France re-domesticate a Sultan who has publicly cast his lot with nationalism, or has the Tangier speech made the palace an engine of independence that the Residency can only fight, not co-opt? Can the rural-notable strategy isolate the towns, or will it merely deepen the split? Beyond 1947 lies the escalation that in fact follows - the French deposition and exile of Mohammed V in 1953, the resistance it detonates, and independence in 1956. In this year the break is open but not yet final, and the protectorate can still be contested rather than simply lost.

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