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Mohammed V was brought back from Madagascar to France. The throne council which was supposed to replace him flew to Paris to pledge their allegiance. So did scores of Moroccan chiefs and notables. Sycophant El Glaoui humbly prostrated himself before Mohammed, kissed his monarch's feet and begged forgiveness. Suddenly anxious to please. Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay agreed not only that Mohammed should return to the throne, but that France would help Morocco to "achieve the status of an independent state, united to France by the permanent ties of an interdependence freely accepted and defined." Pinay even agreed that the terms of "interdependence" could be negotiated later (they are still unsettled). Grumbled one unreconstructed colon: "The Sultan asked for a cup of water and Pinay gave him the ocean."
The Triumph. Mohammed returned to Morocco in triumph. All Morocco went on a week-long celebration. Berbers staged feasts in crenelated mud-walled casbahs. In the cities Arabs paraded with flags and portraits of the Sultan. In factories and mines, work stopped. In the hills, guerrillas calling themselves the National Liberation Army looted French plantations, murdered rich Moroccan farmers who had sided with the French. In the subsequent panic, thousands of Frenchmen packed up and fled to France, taking with them capital roughly equivalent to Morocco's whole annual budget.
Well aware that Morocco needs French capital, Mohammed V reacted with typically shrewd sense. He appointed 27-year-old Prince Moulay Hassan commander of the Royal Moroccan Army (trained and equipped by the French), and sent him out to disband the Liberation Army by swearing its men into the Sultan's own force. Steely-nerved Moulay Hassan had soon sworn in some 5,000 irregulars, sent the rest home except for some holdouts mostly in the deep south. The Sultan himself toured all Morocco, traveling in a huge caravan and camping in tents on the plains. Talking to crowds of 100,000 at a time, Mohammed V drummed home his message that independence was not an end in itself, that the new nation must go back to work if it wanted new schools, roads, houses. Morocco needed the French, and Mohammed V indulged in no rabble-rousing rhetoric about "expelling the oppressors." He called for the "creation of democratic institutions resulting from free elections . . . within the framework of a constitutional monarchy."
Until democracy can be established (municipal elections are scheduled this fall, provincial elections the following year for an assembly which will write a constitution), Mohammed is still conducting an autocratic reign, with the help of a Cabinet which he appoints and a 76-man consultative assembly which he selects. Out of a palace budget of $4,000,000, the Sultan maintains a yoman "Black Guard" and their 300 horses, keeps 35 cars ranging from a Rolls Royce to a jeep, and big villas and staffs for his two sons and the three elder daughters. Apple of her father's eye is three-year-old Lalla Amina, daughter of the Sultan's second wife, who can break up any council of state by dashing in and flinging herself into her father's arms.