Between Reform and Reification: The Moroccan Legal System under the French Protectorate

The administrators of France’s protectorate in Morocco set themselves a dual mission; on the one hand, France undertook to help civilize Morocco and bring its government, institutions, and people out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era.  On the other hand, French officials did not want Morocco to become another Algeria—which they considered a failed attempt at assimilation; rather, they sought to preserve the Morocco they found.  These dueling goals reflected the contradiction at the heart of the mission civilisatrice—civilize, but not too much—which manifested in various ways throughout France’s empire, from the Caribbean to Cambodia.

The tension between preservation and innovation shaped France’s approach to reforming the Moroccan legal system.  Hubert Lyautey, Morocco’s first resident general (1912-25), was firm in his belief that his administration should preserve local legal institutions.  Thus he maintained the various legal orders which had coexisted and to some degree overlapped in the pre-colonial period—including sharī‘a courts, Jewish courts, and local administrative courts—while adding a new set of French courts for Europeans.  However, Lyautey also insisted on rationalizing law in Morocco, which meant two things in particular: reducing the authority and jurisdiction of religious (sharī‘a and Jewish) courts, and imposing a measure of legal centralism on a wildly pluralist environment by preventing individuals from crossing boundaries among different jurisdictions.  The trajectory of these reforms and their successes and failures in the first decades of colonial rule bring to light the largely neglected legal history of the protectorate in Morocco.  More broadly, the changes and continuities of law in colonial Morocco illuminate the nuances of France’s civilizing mission in North Africa and beyond.