‘Disgusting and Intolerable’: Sexual Relationships between European Women and Moroccan Men in French Morocco in the 1940s and 1950s

This paper examines sexual relationships between European women and Moroccan men during the French protectorate in Morocco in the early twentieth century. These relationships were forbidden and often resulted in calls for expulsion as the women engaged in them were considered ‘dangerous for public safety’. The Moroccan men faced no such consequences due to French racial attitudes. Many of the women engaged in these relationships were married to French men who were responsible for managing the French imperial presence, either in the military or as fonctionnaires. Through correspondence sent from these women to their lovers, held within governmental reports on eighty‐three individual cases, this paper examines attitudes towards these sexual relationships as well as the experience of those engaged in them. These relationships were considered to reverse the well‐established function of imperial power through male sexual domination of ‘colonised’ women. Many Moroccan men may have been drawn to such relationships for this reason. Additionally, highlighting the role of female sexual desire demonstrates how the gendered hierarchies within the relationships themselves threatened imperial racial hierarchies.


October 1941
My darling, You know that I miss you infinitely, but I know that we only have to do another year like this… My love, in my thoughts I can kiss you with all my heart. I hold you tightly against me. Good night, my dear.

223
When her telephone call was overheard last year, word got out about their affair, and scandal erupted. She was warned that she should stop seeing him. But the twentyseven-year-old teacher from Bordeaux could not bear to stop.
She was forced to leave her job at the local lycée for girls in Rabat in French Morocco. She told everyone that it was because the girls were badly behaved, but the whole European community in Rabat knew the truth. Now she cannot find work anywhere else. Her family are struggling financially because of the war and both her sisters' husbands are prisoners.
A well-paid housing minister (Nadir des Habous), her lover, Abderrahman A buys her beautiful gifts that she could never have afforded herself, like sandals and a large gold bracelet. He might be married, but he is trying to leave his wife so that they can be together. They should only be apart for another two or three months ….
The following paper is based on the experiences of women like Geneviève, many of whom were forcibly expelled from Morocco for having intimate relationships with Moroccan men. Sexual relationships between European women and Moroccan men provoked fierce emotional reactions in the French administration borne of fears of a loss of control that was already well underway during the late colonialism. Additionally, the sexual desire felt by these European women threatened the carefully structured racial boundaries and imperial sexual hierarchies, as did the intensity of the emotional attachment some of these women experienced. These sexual relationships were considered to threaten the dignity of both the state and the individual men. Consequently, European women were punished for their transgressive sexual desire. The French administrators addressed these liaisons with the draconian decision to forcibly expel women from the protectorate in Morocco. Expulsion was often used to remove 'undesirable' foreigners considered a threat to public order in France in the 1940s, as Daniel Gordon has shown. 2 Yet what constituted a 'threat to public order' was often politically motivated, indicating governmental anxieties.
Most literature on interracial sexual relationships within the French empire has historically centred on relationships between European men and women of colour. Focusing on the experience of European men has resulted in centring male sexual agency as well as neglecting any discussion of emotional attachment alongside the carnal. Historians have chiefly concentrated on European men taking local wives in either Africa or Indochina and the legal questions of citizenship for the children born of concubinage or mixed marriages, focusing on how these male European agents of empire impacted indigenous communities instead of the experiences of their local partners or how the relationships themselves operated. 3 Extant scholarship concerning European women and indigenous men is often a discussion of the prevalent anxieties around the 'white slave trade' and the movement of European female sex workers at the beginning of the twentieth century, 4 or of the hysteria surrounding the 'black peril' in East and Southern Africa. 5 The accessibility of sources available on imperial red-light districts and efforts to control venereal disease, as well as an understandable desire to bear witness to suffering, means that discussions of female sexuality in the British or French empire are often built around sex work and prostitution. 6 The unavoidably violent nature of these interactions has meant that many historians have been more concerned with documenting sexual violence and coercion than discussing sexual 224 Gender & History desire felt by women, subsequently recounting how men had sex with women in overseas empires.
Although it is vital to recognise the sexual violence inherent to European imperialism, this disregards the possibility of female sexual agency or a desire for women to transgress interracial sexual boundaries. However, female sexual desire has been addressed in the literature concerning reactions to colonial troops in the metropole during the First World War, with a particular focus on their interactions with nurses or colonised men travelling to the metropole as migrants in the mid-twentieth century. 7 Although this work has engaged with shifting societal attitudes towards female independence and analysed the subsequently bellicose public reactions towards interracial sexual contact, it has often overlooked female voices as the archival material is dominated by discussions of men and their sexual desires. It has additionally foregrounded the movement of indigenous men to the metropole, instead of female movement to parts of the empire. Finally, most discussions of sexual relationships in an African colonial context have focused solely on their sexual aspects. Lynn Thomas and Jennifer Cole believe that reducing intimacy to the purely physical and ignoring emotional attachments in discussions of African sexuality prohibits us from understanding this sexuality fully, in addition to propagating an imperialist discourse that considers lust omnipresent in Africa and love absent. 8 Approaching the emotional aspects of sexual intimacy allows a consideration of those engaged in these relationships as agents with their own subjectivity and interior motivations, instead of reducing them to simply participants in a sexual act. Furthermore, understanding the emotional elements of these affairs reveals why they were considered so transgressive.

Methodology and sources
The following memo from Monsieur Sicot, head of the Service du Contrôle Civil, was circulated on 19 April 1941 and would have profound effects on European women in Morocco over the next fifteen years: Information from different sources has for a while now revealed a noticeable increase in relationships between native Muslims and European women … the majority are the result of a much more carnal than spiritual or intellectual attraction; finally, some, when French women are involved, can be motivated by antinationalist activity.
These relationships must not be tolerated: they are incompatible with the dignity of a European woman in a Muslim country … they help accentuate the loss of our prestige; they always represent a grave danger for public health and the future of our race.
Consequently, I ask you kindly to research and monitor, with all the necessary diplomacy and discretion, European women guilty of having intimate relationships with Moroccan men.
Sicot then suggests that any 'European women indulging in debauchery with native Moroccans' be expelled from the protectorate or handed over to the police. 9 This paper is based on the archive to which this circulaire gave rise, a collection of files compilated by the French administration in Morocco concerning eightythree 'women considered dangerous for national defence or public security': French women having sexual relationships with Moroccan men. 10 Often married to men in the French army or administration or part of a new generation of independent women, the Disgusting and Intolerable 225 majority of these women were expelled from the protectorate and forced to return to the metropole. Some were even forcibly detained at a security centre in Meknes if expulsion to France was not possible. These files, held at the French Centre des Archives diplomatiques in Nantes, are a collection of governmental memos on this issue, interdepartmental communication on individual cases and intercepted correspondence from French women to their Moroccan lovers. Following orders to 'please seize outright any correspondence like this, as delivering it is particularly inadvisable for reasons of public order as well as for simple public morality', many personal letters were soon intercepted. 11 The one-way nature of the correspondence is revealing, as is the fact that none of these governmental files pertain to Muslim men. Only French women were held responsible for these relationships, having their letters intercepted and being forcibly removed from the country. The Moroccan men participating in such relationships are not always named and seemingly escape without consequences: almost none of these governmental files pertain to them as racism meant they were not considered transgressive.
From 1941 to the end of the protectorate in 1956, at least eighty-three European women were accused of threatening public security by engaging in sexual contact with Moroccan men. It is important here to note that the quantity of information available on each woman varies and many are only identified by name or age. From the information available, the average age was thirty-one, with the eldest being fifty-four and the youngest being sixteen. At least thirty-eight were married, with a further six divorced and three widowed. Thirty-one were employed, of whom twenty-two were professionals with jobs such as typist, secretary or other office worker (twelve), teacher (four) or small business owner (two). Nine worked as barmaids. Of the thirty-eight married women, we know where their husbands were employed in thirty-one cases. Of these thirty-one husbands, twenty-nine were either in the armed forces or colonial civil servants (this includes a judge, an engineer and a lycée teacher), and the remaining two were a musician or unemployed. The women can generally be sorted into two categories, which were not mutually exclusive: they were either relatively emancipated young women earning their own wage or were the wives of the men responsible for maintaining an imperial presence in Morocco. Additionally, the letters and phone transcripts contained as evidence within their case files and cited below offer a particularly revealing insight into female sexuality, female sexual agency and most significantly, female emotional attachment. The reader of these letters and phone transcripts can glimpse how these European women interacted with the men for whom they felt a sexual and emotional attachment in what they imagined to be a private setting.
It is important here to acknowledge the limits of my own research and the disappointing absence of the experiences of Moroccan women in the archival materials and primary sources available to me. I am sadly conscious of the inevitable discrepancy between the voices that my research has been able to amplify and those that it would most have liked to. Additionally, despite the sizable Jewish population living in the early twentieth-century Morocco, French protectorate files almost exclusively assume Moroccans to be Muslim, using marocain and musulman interchangeably, and understood Moroccan society as one that consisted of Arabs or Berbers but was fundamentally racialised as Muslim. Therefore, there is little mention of the Jewish experience of these interracial relationships within these files. Fortunately, Jonathan Katz's exploration of intermarriage in French Morocco and Germaine Aziz's memoire of her time as a Jewish Algerian sex worker in Algeria, Tunis and France are both elucidating as to the Jewish experience of sexuality and interracial relationships in Morocco and North Africa more broadly. 12 The material available is far too extensive to exhaustively analyse here; this is simply an overview of the anxieties surrounding French women, Moroccan men and white prestige that emerge from these files.

Sexuality and the late colonial state
The growing calls for Moroccan independence and the burgeoning nationalist movement are crucial to contextualising concerns over interracial relationships. During the 1940s and 1950s, alongside the war in Indochina from 1946 and the Algerian War from 1954, French imperialism was heavily threatened by growing anti-imperialist sentiment and calls for independence. In his discussion of the late colonial state, John Darwin creates a model for the 'Self-Destruct State' that is already fully aware of its own demise and wonders whether 'the real nature of the late colonial state was to be a self-consciously transitional institution bridging "real" colonialism and the coming age of independent statehood'. He concludes that 'once the illusion of permanence was punctured and a term set to colonial rule, however distant, "lateness" had set in with a vengeance. Colonial rulers looked over their shoulders at the new claimants to power waiting in the wings'. 13 Following the rise of the nationalist Istiqlal party from 1944 onwards and the meeting of Roosevelt and the Sultan of Morocco, Mohammed Ben Yousef, at the Casablanca conference in 1943, which marked the beginnings of discussions about Moroccan post-war independence, colonial officials in the French protectorate in Morocco from the 1940s onwards were increasingly anxious to prevent decolonisation being considered an inevitability. Upholding the illusion of permanence was paramount. Any behaviour threatening to question the colonial order was particularly dangerous as it could propel Morocco towards Darwin's model of a self-destruct state conscious that its days were numbered. Membership of the party advocating for independence from France, Istiqlal, rose from 3,000 in 1944 to 10,000 in 1947 and 100,000 in 1952. 14 As a result, the most pressing concern for the French protectorate in Morocco was ensuring that nobody began to wonder 'how long the inevitable could be postponed'. 15 Additionally, the watershed 1940 Fall of France and subsequent shame contributed significantly to a desire to avoid ridicule throughout the empire during the late colonial period. In her History of Modern Morocco, Susan Miller discussed the humiliation of 'the Marianne's broken sword', writing that post-1940 'the metropole was fractured and defeated and in North Africa, the interminable status quo was abruptly ruptured'. 16 Noting the original circulaire and the fear that these relationships could 'accentuate the loss of our prestige', French authorities were evidently hyperconscious that a loss of prestige was underway. While attempting to hold back the tide of independence, we can see how the French administration would want to tighten racial boundaries and uphold white prestige because of a perceived loss of control of Morocco. However, the only interracial sexual contact that threatened white prestige as crisis loomed was between a European woman and a Moroccan man.
In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Ann Laura Stoler writes on miscegenation in the imperial sphere that 'hierarchies of privilege and power were written into the condoning of interracial unions, as well as into their condemnation'. 17 Interracial sexual relationships were considered acceptable when they simply cemented long-standing imperial, cis-heteronormative and patriarchal hierarchies of gender and race, with the subaltern women firmly subordinate to the European man because of both her race and gender. This served only to further enforce the established format of colonial power relations, one of sexual submission and possession. Edward Said chose to use Flaubert's depiction of an Egyptian courtesan, whom the writer 'possessed physically', as a metaphor for 'the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled'. 18 For Said, Orientalism was 'a male power fantasy' with the Orient as the receiver of penetration. 19 Political and sexual subjugation were one and the same for Said, creating for many male agents of empire Foucault's 'spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another'. 20 At this intersection of pleasure and power, sex could often serve as a tool of empire. For example, it was assumed that the domesticity of concubinage could act as a tool for political stability and could provide a preferable alternative to prostitution or homosexual contact. For the British in India, concubinage was often considered 'a relationship that kept men in their barracks and bungalows, out of brothels and less inclined to perverse liaisons with one another'. 21 For French forces, it was considered a tool to Gallicise parts of French West Africa before the First World War through spreading French influence. One manual for Europeans in West Africa informed the reader sympathetically: 'How should the European conduct himself in West Africa? For those who lack the moral strength necessary to endure two years of absolute continence, only one line of conduct is possible: a temporary union with a well-chosen native woman'. 22 It was a received wisdom that the women in these unions of marriage à la mode du pays would facilitate domestic life for the European and could act as walking dictionaries to teach Frenchmen their local languages. 23 However, sexual interactions between European women and colonised men disrupted these established socioracial hierarchies because of patriarchal attitudes that considered penetration as a metaphor for submission. Consequently, the colonial hierarchy that placed Europeans above colonised peoples was subverted by a traditional gender hierarchy that places men above women. Instead of reinforcing hierarchies, sexual relationships between European women and Moroccan men threatened the fragile structure of white prestige.
This became increasingly contentious as anxieties peaked surrounding transgressive behaviour in an imperial context. Attempts to maintain control and prestige were vital to avoid any suggestion that decolonisation was inevitable. Discussing the role of white working-class women and colonial soldiers in Britain during the Second World War, Philippa Levine writes that 'dangerous behaviours menaced a carefully constructed empire in which subject peoples should know their place; and in war, such anxieties grew stronger when patterns of obedience and questions of loyalty became much more important'. 24 Levine concludes that 'the preservation of empire by the early twentieth century, and especially in wartime, was perceived to rest rather on maintaining the traditionally subject but separate roles of white women and non-white colonials'. 25 White women became the focal point for many imperial anxieties, and policing their sexual behaviour seen to threaten racial hierarchies was an attempt to preserve empire.
As we can see in the circulaire above, it is the 'carnal' nature of these relationships and the possibility that these women were actively consenting or pursuing their partners that most troubled the Direction des Affaires Publiques. Much of the women's correspondence to their lovers displays a distinctly sexual tone. 'I will have a lovely bedroom to do what I want, and what you desire … Do not leave me long like this, without feeling the warmth of your body and listening to your voice', writes one Jeanne X to a government employee, Ahmed M, evidently displaying her own desire for sexual contact. 26 It was this wilful sexual attraction to Maghrebi men that French colonial administrators found most objectionable, as demonstrated by their treatment of the case of Germaine L, a twenty-one-year-old French woman from Lille.
Just after recovering from a serious accident in which she broke her back, Germaine moved to Rabat at the age of nineteen with her French fiancé, a noncommissioned officer stationed there, who would abandon her a few months later. Unable to work, she was taken in by a Moroccan family, and it was apparently 'inevitable' that she would become the son's mistress in exchange for financial support. 27 He repeatedly proposed that they marry, but Germaine was hesitant to agree. Throughout her file, one can sense that many of the civil servants managing her case felt a certain concerned responsibility towards her. These men described the sexual relationship she entered into as 'inevitable' and lamented that 'Miss [Germaine]'s situation is utterly heart-breaking' as financial need made her stoop to the 'debasement' of sleeping with a Moroccan man. 28 They sympathetically considered her to have been pushed by her own poor health and the actions of her ex-fiancé towards an action they considered deeply shameful. The Contrôleur Civil was so moved by Germaine's difficult situation that he personally 'promised to help her find a job that is compatible with the state of her health to allow her … money to live'. 29 Evidently, women were not exiled from Morocco simply for having sexual relationships with Moroccan men, but for purposefully pursuing them. In this case, the protectorate's administration was paternalistically eager to intervene and save Germaine from what they considered her ruin as her actions were not the result of her own female sexual desire. It is telling that the governmental files never mention any European women sexually assaulted or engaged in sex work with a male Moroccan clientele but focus on sentimental letters and snatches of whispered phone conversations replete with pet names that all demonstrate strong sexual desire. It was not sex itself that posed a threat to the late colonial state in Morocco, it was sexual agency and emotional attachment.
Another layer of meaning is added when we consider these anxieties about female sexuality within the context of the late colonial state. Historically, women were fundamental to enforcing the patriarchal power structures and values heavily linked to colonialism through their role as mothers and wives to colonial administrators. A 1908 manual for French women in Indochina describes how as 'auxiliary forces' to the colonial administration, women were obliged to 'conserve the fitness and sometimes the life of all around them' and were responsible for ensuring 'the home be happy and gay and that all take pleasure in clustering there'. 30 However, following what Barbara Bush refers to as the 'feminisation of empire' from 1918, it was more respectable and secure for women to travel overseas, resulting in a growing number of European women present in overseas empires. 31 Women became more significant in colonial policy because of this increasing European female population. Additionally, their changing roles in metropolitan and colonial society meant that many could now be considered agents of empire in their own right.
The latter days of the colonial state also coincided with a movement for female emancipation emanating from the metropole and imported into a rigidly structured colonial society based on traditional gender roles. Many of the women criticised for their relationships with Moroccan men were part of a new generation of colonial woman distinct from the traditional roles of wives and mothers. Many were educated, working as typists, high-school teachers or secretaries. Here, we can see a cultural conflict as these women, who were progressively emancipated in the 1940s and 1950s, embodied a sexuality and independence that was increasingly acceptable in the metropole but not in the colonial sphere. Bush describes twentieth-century imperialism as a period when 'domesticity, marriage, and appropriate gender roles remained central to imperial stability', meaning that 'single women were regarded as an economic and sexual threat'. 32 Here, the uncertainties of late colonialism combined with an influx of more sexually liberated women from the metropole to form a toxic cocktail of threats to an already weakened white prestige and the 'imperial and patriarchal certainties of the Victorian era'. 33 As well as a generation of increasingly emancipated women, early twentiethcentury France also saw concurrent political and social movements that focused heavily on the role of women as mothers. The pronatalism, eugenics and social hygiene movements all feared declining birth rates and viewed correct motherhood and correct maternal behaviour as the path to ensuring the security of France's future. These movements were prompted by fears of racial and social degeneracy, and 'sought to improve both the quantity and quality of the French race, through upholding traditional morality'. 34 They focused heavily on fertility, with women pressured to faire naître and to forgo their own bodily autonomy for the sake of the nation state. 35 In the natalist ideology that dominated French society following the First World War, women were given worth through their reproductive maternal capacity and how this served French society as a whole. No longer was maternity a private matter. After the 1920 introduction of Mother's Day and medals for the mothers of large families, it became a matter for the nation state to celebrate. Women were bombarded by propaganda in popular novels, such as Madame ne veut pas d'enfant ('Madam doesn't want any children') and La Garçonne. Pamphlets, like Des Bébés, s'il vous plaît written in 1923 by an author of many popular medical books, Dr Gaston Cattier, repeatedly emphasised that motherhood was the only way a woman could ever be truly happy and to neglect it would be egotistical and certainly result in a woman's demise. 36 At this time, maternity was even more central for heavily racialised European societies in the French empire. Here, French women were expected to contribute to the imperial mission by dedicating themselves to a modern, 'civilised' idea of motherhood, the new French science of maternal care: puericulture. 37 Patriarchal social values merged with the eugenics and social hygiene movement and assumed a veneer of scientific respectability, as correct maternal conduct for European women in the empire came to be considered key to France's future there. Consequently, the behaviour of European women gained a quasi-scientific significance on an imperial scale, and many believed that transgressive behaviours would lead to the fall of France's empire.
Considering that at least twenty of the eighty-three women concerned were mothers, it would have seemed particularly threatening to many colonial administrators in Morocco in this period of imperial instability to witness mothers choosing their own sexual pleasure over a stable domestic life, and almost repulsive to consider that this pleasure was with Maghrebi men. One Simone B, whose French husband was a sergeant and whose Moroccan lover, Mustapha, a butcher, was heavily criticised. Her letter to Mustapha details how 'when I felt your lips on mine, I was no longer the mistress of myself … The field of wheat was the first witness of our "love". We experienced this pleasure together'. 38 When writing these letters, Simone was pregnant with her husband's child. The Directeur des Services de Sécurité Publique objected strongly to reading Simone's letters, feeling that 'it is undignified for a French woman, above all one who is pregnant, to go as far as to write letters like this'. 39 Motherhood required a higher standard, and Simone's overtly sexual longing for a man who was not her child's father directly contravened bourgeois expectations of suitable behaviour for a mother-to-be. To many French colonial administrators in this period, it would have seemed as though these women were threatening the well-being of their race by rejecting motherhood for this sexual contact.

Permeable boundaries and fragile hierarchies
In his study of French imperial soldiers and their relationships with women in France during the First World War, Richard Fogarty writes that the sexual relationships between European women and Maghrebi men were seen as a threat to the French empire as they could raise 'larger and more unsettling questions about the permeability of political and cultural boundaries between European and "other", between colonizers and colonized. Crossing and blurring these lines in such a dramatic way destabilized the separation of people into categories upon which colonial domination depended and confused questions of national identity'. 40 Similarly, in Morocco, a European woman could be 'considered dangerous for national defence or public security' for demonstrating the permeability of these boundaries through her choice of sexual partner, friends or dress. 41 The behaviour of women who transgressed the boundaries of European society in Morocco threatened to upset hierarchies between socioracial groups. Elaine G, for example, was a nineteen-year-old woman from Eastern France who was heavily criticised for her 'impropriety, particularly in Muslim environments' in 1948. After being abandoned by her French husband, who left Morocco for an unknown location, she and a Moroccan courier named Berrada began to live 'as husband and wife'. However, the greatest source of French anxiety here was not their sexual relationship, but that she 'sometimes dresses in the French style, sometimes in the Moroccan style (djellaba and veil)' and 'no longer has any contact with the European colony'. She was often seen in Pile ou Face, a well-known dance club in Marrakech that was part of the Café de France, 'accompanied by Berrada and other Moroccan men only'. 42 Elaine not only transgressed all the limitations placed on European women in a colonial setting through the company she kept and her sexual partner, she even began to adopt local customs of dress. It seems that the reason this was the most objectionable element of her behaviour is that by dressing in both French and Moroccan styles, she appeared comfortable switching between different cultures, thereby blurring the strictly regimented boundaries between the groups. According to fashion cultural theorist Joanne Entwistle, clothing 'operates at the interface between the individual and the social world … the private and the public'. 43 Consequently, Elaine publicly demonstrated that as a French woman dressed in an amalgamation of different cultures, socialising in European nightclubs with Moroccan men, she internally identified with both the French and the Moroccan way of life; she felt able to operate at the intersection of two cultural frameworks of reference. In her History of Modern Morocco, Miller writes that 'the end of Empire eroded confident imperial identities'; within a world of rapidly dissolving structures of identity, the late colonial state would understandably prioritise expelling anyone whose behaviour encouraged this disintegration. 44 Cultural boundaries were fundamental in Morocco. While France's occupation of Algeria was founded on the heavily celebrated myth of assimilation, Résident-General Hubert Lyautey drew from the campaign's perceived shortcomings to create a vision for Morocco based on what he imagined to be the British policy of association and Gallieni's politique des races, which tailored colonial policy to different ethnic groups. As a protectorate, Morocco was not officially colonised and would theoretically remain 'sovereign but protected' until the day it would be 'developed, civilised, living its out autonomous life, detached from the metropole'. 45 Lyautey's ideology of solidarisme supported a policy of indirect rule through social measures. He sought to expand French influence 'peacefully', like a tache de huile (oil stain), through established elites and social policy while leaving intact traditional Moroccan religious and cultural practices. 46 For this, he considered racial segregation and distinct cultures crucial to preserve European dominance. In his study of colonial conceptions of the 'Moroccan soul' and colonial education, Spencer Segalla writes of Lyautey's belief that 'segregation was not merely an administrative convenience or a tool to facilitate exploitation; it was seen to be the essence of a healthy society', adding that this also stemmed from his 'long-standing European fear of miscegenation and métissage'. 47 Consequently, behaviour that reflected any cultural hybridity between separate socioracial spheres was considered by the French authorities to threaten the foundational policies of the Moroccan protectorate.
In the 1940s and 1950s, as nationalism swept through the country and decolonisation loomed, it became increasingly urgent to maintain threatened socioracial hierarchies and white prestige. In Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell recounts an experience working as a policeman in Burma where he felt obliged to kill an elephant to maintain his reputation in front of the local people and to avoid feeling a fool. He decided that 'the real nature of imperialism -the real motives for which despotic governments act' is to avoid mockery and that '[his] whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at'. 48 Similarly, a major concern for the French administration in Morocco was to uphold white prestige despite the threat of ridicule from the collective humiliation of European women cuckolding them with men further down the racial hierarchy. This was particularly challenging as twenty-nine of the eighty-three of the women engaging in these affairs that French officials considered 'particularly damaging to our prestige in this country' were married to the men responsible for maintaining the French imperial presence in Morocco. 49 This prompted Vallat, the Contrôleur Civil of Rabat, to complain that 'too often this concerns the wives of civil servants or mobilised troops'. 50 Women who were married to colonial officials but conducted extramarital affairs with Moroccan men were considered to be humiliating their husbands and the entire French protectorate, thereby jeopardising white prestige and colonial racial hierarchies.
In addition to the risk of humiliation and ridicule from Moroccan people, European superiority was also threatened by the way in which the European and Moroccan parties interacted within these sexual relationships. European women frequently made melodramatic statements of supplication to their indigenous lovers that demonstrated markedly imbalanced power dynamics within the relationships. Colonial racial hierarchies appeared fragile enough to be reversed by gendered hierarchies within interracial relationships. Xavie anxiously waits for a mine worker to pardon her: 'Why don't you write to me? Maybe you're angry. You're right, I'm so horrible. Thankfully you're coming back soon, so I'll be able to ask for forgiveness'. 51 Jeanne tells government employee Ahmed that his presence is her 'source of life', that she suffocates when she is not near him and then pleads with him not to leave her unable to feel the heat of his body or hear his voice. 52 Simone, again mentioned above, implores her Moroccan butcher: 'I'm scared of losing you, and the thought makes me like a hunted animal waiting for death … I beg you not to leave me like this, you make me suffer a pain that will never wear off and the wound you'll carve in my heart will never heal for any other love'. 53 In one particularly revealing transcript of a telephone exchange, we overhear how Geneviève L's entreaty that she could not possibly survive twelve nights without her lover is met with a terse request that she not be so silly. 54 Geneviève repeatedly addresses him with pet names, her joujou (an infantile word for a toy) and her trésor (treasure), and coquettishly pretends that she is kissing him 'the way [he] like[s] it'. In response, he replies that he is at home and will call her at 6:30 the following evening, attempting to put an end to the conversation. Additionally, we know that she made this call at 21:50 on the evening of the 8 October 1941 from the Grand Hotel in Rabat, where she ate most of her meals and was well known, all the way to Meknes, 151 km away. A young, unmarried woman making a long-distance interurbain call at this time in the evening to a Muslim minister would have been suspect. Geneviève would have had to request the central office to use the intercity line to Meknes and would likely have had to wait to be called back if it were in use. 55 Geneviève was in a setting where everyone knew who she was, and the large number of people necessary to make this long-distance call meant it would have been incredibly easy to trace her suspicious request back to her. As an unmarried teacher at the local lycée for girls, her local reputation was hopelessly linked to her professional success. Yet Geneviève was evidently so desperate to speak to Abderrahman that it was worth risking being caught for just a few lines of conversation. He evidently did not feel the same desperate need to speak to her.
It was not just the sexual mechanics of penetration of white women or sexual contact itself that destabilised white prestige and the established racial hierarchies crucial to imperial rule, but the strength of the emotional attachment felt by these women. If, for Foucault, sexuality is 'an especially dense transfer point for relations of power', then surely falling in love functions even more strongly as an exchange of power'. 56 By begging Moroccan men to contact them or stating that they cannot function without them, these women reversed the traditional power dynamic of colonial society 233 and transferred the power available to them as Europeans to their lovers. Furthermore, by cuckolding their husbands and inviting comparisons between their lovers and their spouses, these women played into European male sexual anxieties and common fears of virulent African male sexuality. Simone does this explicitly, by comparing her lover's sexual prowess to her husband's when stating that only Mustapha knows how to 'take' her and that his 'embraces are so different to anyone else's'. She places her husband at the very bottom of this sexual hierarchy and transfers his power to Mustapha. These women were suspected of prompting colonised peoples to begin to question the racial hierarchy that formed the foundations of an imperial structure that was already deteriorating.
The outrage Simone's behaviour elicited is palpable. The reader can sense the anger with which the Directeur des Affaires Publiques has heavily underlined the word 'immediately' in a handwritten scrawl that 'the husband should be immediately repatriated or at least that the wife be expelled', with wife again underlined. 57 His choice to refer to returning to the metropole as repatriation for the husband and expulsion for the wife also emphasises his desire to punish Simone. The sentimental attachments these relationships produced in these women prompted equally strong sentiments in the men who chose to police them, an anger so fervent that the stuffy bureaucratese and neatly typed formulaic statements give way to scribbled outrage. For example, the intensely visceral reaction evident in the comment 'it's disgusting and intolerable … can't we do something about it?' scrawled on a letter to the Directeur des Affaires Publiques regarding reports of frequent parties with many young European female guests at the homes of two North African men. 58 Evidently, the writer's bile rose at hearing how twenty young people of both races would drink 'refreshing drinks', dance together and kiss. 59 Some couples would be seen indiscreetly 'isolating themselves in neighbouring rooms'. 60 Relationships between European women and non-white men did not just produce anxieties that resonated on a political level, but deeply personal emotional reactions that were felt passionately and viscerally, bubbling through the professional façade of bureaucracy. This is partially due to how they produced sexual anxieties that were experienced by administrators as individuals with their own interior sexual identities. Upon reading about the extramarital sexual activity of the wives of their fellow sergeants, captains and lieutenants, their minds may well have strayed to their own disquiets about their own spouses. One officer complained that affairs like these 'harm our prestige and particularly those of certain Officers', alluding to a collective male humiliation. The male readers of these memos and reports undeniably identified with the male spouse, and the frequent references to 'our colleagues' in these letters confirm this sense of masculine solidarity. 61 A shared sense of embarrassment was produced by a fragile collective imperial masculinity that felt threatened by colleagues who they considered insufficiently masculine to be able to control the behaviour of their wives. Individual, personal fears of the social humiliation of being cuckolded or drawing imperial masculinity into question were transliterated into law.

Colonising the coloniser
It is harder to assess what these relationships reveal about Moroccan men during the late colonial period. This is chiefly a consequence of the flow of information, as we 234 Gender & History only have a written record of the letters sent by French women and intercepted by the French authorities, with little evidence of the male role in these relationships. That the police did not feel it worthwhile to intercept correspondence addressed to the women participating in these affairs is telling.
French authorities assumed it was the norm for a Moroccan man to seek to bed French women and there was certainly a prevailing view that North African men were overly sexed and had more fervent sexual desires than European men. 62 Lyautey's understanding of the 'colonial man' was one of exaggerated hypermasculinity, and French officials considered Moroccan masculinity tied to their role as 'natural warriors'. 63 When Moroccan troops joined the troupes indigènes in France during the First World War, French officials seemed fond of a saying supposedly originating in classical Arabic that 'Moroccans are warriors, Algerians men, and Tunisians women'. They considered Moroccan men, the North African race, most suited to warfare, but with a 'fiery impulsiveness' that meant they could not be left unsupervised on French soil as their 'instinct for piracy' meant they would likely rape and pillage the local population when fighting in France. 64 Georges Hardy, Director of Public Instruction in Morocco from 1920 to 1926, wrote in his 1926 work L'âme marocaine (The Moroccan Soul) that 'affectively, the Moroccan was detached and resigned, when not consumed by fleeting passions or sensuality', and quoted Henri Terasse's belief that for a Moroccan man 'his interior life is composed of simple tendencies and violent desires to which he submits without analysing'. 65 This popular understanding of Moroccan masculinity, based on a combination of contemporary racial science and Orientalism, meant that by sleeping with European women, Moroccan men were only confirming what colonial authorities believed they knew. Indeed, the dissonance between the fervent longing expressed by the European women and the responses from Moroccan men that they hint at would have perfectly matched the above expectation of emotional detachment. Consequently, no agency was permitted to the Moroccan men, who were often unidentified, and the female party was considered wholly culpable. European women were assumed to be able to control their own sexuality, whereas Moroccan men could not help but follow instinctive sexual drives.
The lack of male Muslim voices means we can only speculate on the masculine motivation behind these affairs, but their profession can occasionally bring a degree of clarity. These men were referred to as 'young Muslim évolués who easily enter European spaces where they experience many amorous affairs and lead a life of debauchery'. 66 To be referred to as an évolué means that they were considered more 'civilised' than the average Moroccan: they had benefited from a European education, spoke French, lived in cities, were professional elites, had adopted French values and beliefs and had assimilated into French culture. If we believe the assumptions made about the internal values of these Moroccan men, could a French lover or wife have provided the ultimate stage in assimilation? Many were teachers, soldiers or commerçants, with a governmental employee (head of the Section Musulmane de l'Assistance au Maroc) 67 or even part of the aristocracy; Madame V was married to an officer stationed locally and romantically linked to both the son and the nephew of Thami El Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakech. 68 It is easily possible that many Moroccan men desired white women for the privilege and prestige they embodied, echoing Frantz Fanon's sarcastic comment that 'when my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilisation and dignity and make them mine'. 69 Fanon here critiqued men of colour who believed that sexual intimacy provided a point of contact into the French society they strove to join, either to achieve the advantages afforded to Europeans or because they had internalised the discourse of the mission civilisatrice. Frantz Fanon mocked évolués he felt were overly keen to assimilate through sexual contact: 'I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white … who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love … I am a white man'. 70 For him, sleeping with a white woman was strongly rooted in self-hatred and the rejection of one's race due to viewing it as deficient. He analyses Martinican writer René Maran's Un homme pareil aux autres, in which the author surrogate Jean Veneuse strives through academic and professional excellence to be accepted in Paris. Fanon quotes Veneuse's speech to a white female love interest where he explains that most black men 'tend to marry in Europe not so much out of love as for the satisfaction of being the master of a European woman; and a certain tang of proud revenge enters into this', wondering aloud whether his desire for her stems from white women being historically forbidden to black men and whether he is subconsciously 'attempting to revenge myself on a European woman for everything that her ancestors have inflicted on mine throughout the centuries'. 71 Sexual contact with European women allowed colonised men the opportunity to reverse the well-established form of sexual domination of North African bodies that was a foundation of imperialism and in their own way emasculate French men by sleeping with French women. Historian Christelle Taraud found this in an interview with an anonymous Algerian man in 2001, who said that same: 'sleeping with a white woman was revenge for the colonial history endured. It was the case for me, but also for many Algerians that I mixed with'. 72 Literature emerging from late colonial Morocco demonstrates that certain men relished the opportunity these liaisons provided to reverse the power dynamic of colonial rule. The 1954 novel Le Passé Simple from Moroccan writer Driss Chraïbi echoes this with 'Neomi's place', a European brothel. Here, the Moroccan protagonist, also named Driss, sleeps with all twelve European prostitutes and evidently takes great pleasure in dominating white women. He inverts the traditional erotic Orientalist description of North African harems by describing them as furniture decorating the room and by exoticising their French names, remarking that 'Neomi told me their names … Françoise … Paula … names I would have said for rare birds'. Driss considers them interchangeable, delighting in their coquettish submissive shyness when they 'gave a little bow with the points of their breast and took refuge behind their smiles', before grabbing the first one by the throat and taking her to bed. Perhaps tellingly, Chraïbi married his French wife Catherine Birckel the following year.
Mohamed Choukri's autobiography Un pain nu, published in 1973 and set twenty years earlier, describes how the narrator lusts after the French woman who employs him, Madame Segundi. Choukri argues with her husband, finding it emasculating to wash his underwear and refusing to do so. A few days later she catches him masturbating over naked photographs of her he discovered in her photo album, seemingly as a form of onanistic revenge against her husband. 73 Likewise, as many of the women mentioned in these files were married to army officers or functionnaires, the opportunity for revenge against the men enforcing the colonial rule to which there was increasing opposition may have been a key motivation.
The late colonial setting is vital, as growing independence for women coming from the metropole contrasted with the traditional role of women in North Africa. This new generation of European women were more sexually available than their Muslim counterparts for cultural reasons and because many lived alone with their own source of income, providing far more opportunity for sexual interactions than Muslim women living in the family home. In his paper on Algerian nationalists who entered into relationships with European women, Neil MacMaster explains that 'in Algeria the patriarchal family ensured that women remained strictly segregated from contact with all adult males, apart from the immediate kin group, and any men who breached the conventions by inviting contact with women outside the home and the surveillance of the extended family could invite a severe and often bloody retribution'. 74 Strong cultural sexual taboos shared by Algerian and Moroccan women meant they would have faced the same severe consequences for premarital or extramarital sex. The perception of European women is equally important, as Algerian women 'regarded European women in France as creatures of loose morals, sirens out to seduce Algerian males, while the latter were tempted by relationships free of the opprobrium and dangerous consequences that such liaisons would carry'. 75 This expectation of easier sexual fulfilment would have motivated many North African men to pursue European women in France or North Africa. Additionally, many of the European women known to have slept with Moroccan men worked in bars and cafés in a period when this employment meant they were on a par with prostitutes; they would have been considered easily seduced. 76 Additionally, it is also vital that the original circulaire describes a 'noticeable increase in relationships between native Muslims and European women'. 77 Morocco's protectorate was only established in 1912, meaning that the men participating in these affairs were the first generation to come of age under colonial rule. Believing this increase, as the secrecy of illicit relationships means they are almost impossible to quantify, would mean that there was a shared motivation felt by these men that grew over time. Whether this is interpreted as proof that imposing French culture onto a class of évolués meant they aspired to assimilation through sexual contact or whether Moroccan men sought to express their frustration at the colonial administration by seducing the wives of administrators, this increase in numbers reflects a growing desire for the privileges enjoyed by Europeans and undercurrent of anger among the Moroccan people in the later days of the French protectorate.
The rise in interracial relationships in Morocco is also concurrent with the rise in nationalism, and many North African nationalists were romantically linked to European women. This was partially because of a liberal nationalist view that embraced political assimilation with the French metropole; interracial marriages were markedly popular among lawyers, teachers and doctors educated within the French educational system in Algeria. MacMaster discusses a popular discourse among Algerian nationalists in the 1930s encouraging choosing an educated European wife to avoid any incompatibility with an 'illiterate, tradition-bound Algerian woman who impeded an attempt to embrace modernity and the conjugal life of the modern couple'. 78 Messali Hadj, often considered the father of Algerian nationalism and the founder of the Etoile Nord-Africaine and the Mouvement nationalist algérien, was married to a radical French feminist, Émilie Busquant. This was not uncommon and hundreds of the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN) supporters in France 'entered into intimate partnerships and raised families with French women who were nationals of the colonial power against which they were engaged in a long struggle for independence'. 79 Similarly, twenty-three-year-old Moroccan law student Ahmed explained in 1966 that a Maghrebi student who has studied law or medicine in France 'would not put up with a marriage with a Moroccan woman' as they would not be independent or educated enough. 80 Despite decades of anti-assimilationist French colonial policy that meant that Moroccan nationalists were less likely to aspire to French citizenship, Morocco also had its own system of élites. They played a similar role as cultural intermediaries and advocated for the same rights and privileges that French citizens enjoyed, having profited from an education at the French collèges musulmans. 81 Many used this education to travel to Paris, where several of the future leaders of the Moroccan nationalist movement, including Ahmed Balafrej, Mohammed al-Fasi, Mekki Naciri, Mohamed al-Kholti and Mohamed Hassan Ouazzani, circulated within North African nationalist networks in the 1930s. They linked the Moroccan student movement to Tunisian and Algerian reformers and nationalists in Paris. 82 These shared intellectual networks meant many young Moroccan nationalists may have internalised similar ideas surrounding European women as Algerian nationalists. French educational policy in Morocco was explicitly against transmitting des valeurs républicaines to avoid creating the class of insurgent évolués that was present in Senegal and Algeria. That Moroccan men engaged in sexual relationships with European women were referred to as évolués in the above report suggests that because these relationships hinted at the 'assimilationist nationalism' present in Algeria was part of the reason they were considered so dangerous for public security. 83 We can also see examples of nationalists romantically entangled with French women in Morocco. Ahmed Ben Mohamed Ben C, a writer for the nationalist paper El Widad, was very friendly with a twenty-nine-year-old secretary at the Direction du service vétérinaire. 84 In Oudja, a teacher at the local high school known for his nationalist tendencies was having an affair with a French woman who taught there, prompting her to have 'very intimate relations with many native nationalist intellectuals' to such an extent that her home became a 'veritable meeting space for nationalists'. 85 However, the tide of nationalist influence could turn and a relationship with a French woman could result in neglecting the independence movement. Marcil Abderrahim Ben Hadj M married a French woman, Eva P, in 1951 and although 'known as a nationalist' and a 'sympathiser of Istiqlal', he stopped attending nationalist meetings in Rabat a few months before his wedding. Alongside the fact that he did not demand their two children born out of wedlock be brought up as Muslims, this behaviour was felt by French officials 'to show [he was] ignoring all fanaticism to come closer to the French customs from which all "good nationalists" try to liberate themselves'. 86 As this was seen as proof of embracing French values and abandoning nationalism, Abderrahim was eventually accepted as a Sécretaire d'état civil marocain at the Services Municipaux de Rabat. A French wife enabled Adberrahim to transition from nationalist to évolué in the eyes of the French state and enjoy the professional advantages that évolué status was supposed to confer. His wife, conversely, was banned from Morocco following their divorce two years later. It seems that while French women were punished for these liaisons, Moroccan men were occasionally rewarded and privileged.

Conclusion
Sexual relationships between European women and Moroccan men were considered 'dangerous for public security' because they did not follow established patterns of European male sexual domination of 'colonised' peoples. It was European male sexual anxieties and fears of being publicly and privately humiliated by the desires of their wives to enter into sexual relationships with men below them in the colonial racial hierarchy that lead to such bureaucratic outrage and draconian punishments. Fundamentally, it was a sense of collective male humiliation through transgressive female sexual desire that meant a woman could be classified as a threat to public security and expelled from Morocco. Colonised men, however, were not permitted any real sexual agency by French authorities, which meant they appear to have suffered no consequences for these relationships. Some may have been attracted to European women through a desire to subvert colonial hierarchies through patriarchal attitudes that equate being penetrated as submitting, thereby 'colonising the coloniser', others through a desire to assimilate into French culture or clutch at European privileges. Regardless, colonial racial science and Orientalism meant they were considered slaves to their instinctive sexual desires. A lack of sexual agency meant they were not considered responsible for any transgressions.
Although female sexual agency has often been neglected in studies of sexuality in overseas empires, overlooking the desire these European women felt towards these 'colonised' men disregards an entire new element of colonial power operations that came at the intersection of gendered and colonial hierarchies. This power dynamic was built around female sexuality, desire and emotional attachment. The women in these relationships, often mothers and married to colonial administrators, begged the 'colonised' men for affection, subverting every expectation of what it meant to be a white woman in a European empire. Changing gender roles contributed to this widening gyre as late colonialism witnessed increased female emancipation in the metropole, creating tensions as sexually liberated women moved into the imperial sphere where women were expected to fulfil a more traditional, maternal role. These women were punished for how their own desires to transgress interracial sexual boundaries threatened colonial hierarchies at a time of global French imperial crisis as decolonisation became an inevitability. It was not sexual contact itself that resulted in calls for expulsion, but the proof of wilful sexual desire and their emotional attachment that emerges from these letters.
The European women involved in sexual relationships with Moroccan men were repeatedly objectified and reduced to inanimate sexual frontiers. While the focus within the French archive was policing these borders, the focus within contemporary Moroccan literature seems to have been crossing them. Yet this was not how the European women themselves experienced these relationships. Julian Barnes hypothesises in his novel The Only Story that 'most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling'. 87 The undeniable strength of the emotional attachment experienced by these women can be glimpsed through their intercepted letters. For dozens of women, these emotions were the most important part of their experience in Morocco. These relationships were likely those that they carried with them for the rest of their lives, the forbidden romance that they mythologised and retold to themselves. For them, this was their only story worth telling.