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Paris was not for long content with such enlightened methods. Frenchmen poured into Morocco, grabbed up the best farmland with the help of laws dedicated to "extending the French presence," and allowing French farmers to pay 20% less tax than a Moroccan. They displaced the Moroccan administrators. They dug mines, made Morocco the world's second in production of phosphate, fifth in manganese, seventh in lead. They built roads and railroads, power plants and dams, constructed ports (Casablanca handles more tonnage than Marseille). They built 133 hospitals, at one time boasted they were opening a school a day. But the roads mostly went to French farms or French factories, the schools were chiefly for French children. Even now, only one in five Moroccan children goes to school; and in the 44 years of the protectorate, only an average of eleven Moroccans a year completed a pre-university education.
As a result, 875 Moroccan physicians are French, only 19 Moslem; there are 350 French lawyers, only 27 Moslem. The French lived in Morocco as in a good hotel, and luxurious apartment houses overlooked squalid bidonvilles where Arab laborers crowded into shacks roofed over with flattened gasoline tins.
The Third Son. Mohammed never expected to be Sultan of Morocco. But when his father Moulay Youssef died in 1927, the French passed over the two elder brothers and settled on shy, retiring 18-year-old Mohammed, had him duly "selected" by the council of Ulemas. Deeply religious, pensive Mohammed said little, always dressed in a flowing djella-bah, spent most of his time in pious ritual. He had been married off at 16 to a girl a year younger. The French mistook his shyness for timidity, his silence for ignorance. Mohammed was neither an intellectual nor a scholar, but he was intelligent and observant. "He loses nothing of what he's told, even less of what he sees," said an aide. "He stores up everything inside him."
The year after his enthronement, young Mohammed made his first trip abroad, came back resolved that he must liberate himself from the prison of Koranic tradition, adopt those European ways that would not conflict with what was essential in the Moslem code. When his wife first became pregnant, he went to Paris to bring back a crib, diapers, sterilized bottles, baby scales and a French midwife, explaining: "I want my son's umbilical cord cut in the 20th century manner."
Mohammed began collecting guns, race horses, and fast cars which he drove himself (he once drove a Bugatti 55 miles from Rabat to Casablanca in 32 minutes). He kept a reported 40 concubines, frequently adding fresh ones and sending faded beauties off to a convent. The French encouraged such distractions from more serious affairs of state (though later, to discredit him, they spread the word that he dealt savagely with servants who seduced some of his concubines, had one whipped to death). He exercised fully the Sultan's traditional right to exact gifts from his subjects, and the saying was that for the Moroccans, there were three possible catastrophes : drought, locusts, and a visit from the Sultan. Once he called on a minor caid and remarked pointedly on the caid's china, saying: "This is a tea set fit for a king." The cups were in the king's luggage when he departed.