Syria and Lebanon were gone, so was Indo-China. Last week France was enmeshed in another colonial agony—this time nearer home.
Violence that came close to actual war fare blazed across French North Africa. In an 850-mile arc from Constantine in Algeria to Casablanca in Morocco, more than 800 were killed and thousands more wounded in a spreading, sporadic rebellion that brought the wrath of Islam close to the shores of Europe. The uprisings threatened to cut off France's vast colonies in equatorial Africa. More than 300 million Moslems were already feeling their impact, from Senegal to the Celebes. In the eye of the storm were 20,000 Americans—airmen and their families stationed at the four Strategic Air Command bomber bases in western Morocco.
Shocked Alarm. In Paris there was shock and alarm. Premier Edgar Faure, who had appointed an able man to bring peace to Morocco and had then hung back from letting that man put through the reforms he demanded, condemned "this terror and savageness," and grimly warned of French retribution. In the Moroccan capital of Rabat, his appointee, French Resident General Gilbert Grandval, was shocked at the bloody collapse of his efforts to win a compromise.
"The man who arrived in Morocco a month and a half ago with the ardent desire to restore order and peace by friendship has a broken heart," said Grandval. "There is no motive that can excuse such a crime."
Day before the fighting broke out, Grandval had rushed back to Morocco from Paris with a special invitation to the nationalist leaders, asking them to meet with the French Cabinet to work out a compomise. Because Grandval had won their trust, most nationalist leaders accepted this last-minute offer. But though the moderates in Morocco urged calm on their impatient people, the extremists would not be stayed. As so often before, the French concessions came too late.
Fateful Date. The seeds of revolt had been sown over 43 years of French insensitivity to the political and spiritual longings of North Africa's Arab peoples. France gave North Africa roads, hospitals and the works of Voltaire, but not the political liberty it demanded. The spark that ignited the violence was struck one day last week. It came on La Date Fatidique (literally, the fateful date).
It was the second anniversary of the dethronement of Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef as head of some 9,000,000 Moroccan Moslems. On Aug. 20, 1953, the French bundled Ben Youssef aboard a DC-3 and exiled him, ostensibly to "save" him from his own people, actually because he supported their demand for more political freedom. So flimsy a pretext was an insult to North Africa's faithful. Morocco's urgent nationalists flatly refused to accept the weak and wizened old man whom Paris foisted on them in Ben Youssef's place. Ben Youssef, never very popular as Sultan, became in exile a martyr.