Municipal Order and Imperial Disorder: Policing Tangier in Interwar Morocco, 1925–39

Tangier’s status as an International Zone in the 1920s and 1930s, a political oddity carved out of Morocco and loosely administered by an international commission under the aegis of the League of Nations, created an active fault line for imperial, international, and local politics. Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Europe and the Middle East, control of Tangier while crucial for the French who relied on the stability of Morocco to protect the western border of Algeria, the Levant, further East, and French West African possessions south of Morocco. For other Europeans, disorder in Tangier was an opportunity to gain diplomatic concessions from the French by applying pressure in right amounts on France’s weakest points, the chief one being Morocco’s burgeoning nationalist movement.

To be sure, Tangier offered a free zone for Moroccan nationalists to congregate with one another and with sympathetic foreigners. The United States Consul General to Tangier was always keen on lending an ear to Moroccan nationalists who crossed over from the Protectorate to resupply with propaganda materials or moral stamina. Italians and Germans too, eager to slight the French, looked to the nationalist cause as a proxy for their interests. The nationalists, however, were not simply pawns in the fractious diplomacy of others, but actors in their own right, participants in the international discourse, and interlocutors in the public sphere of the day.

Policing Tangier then was of the utmost importance for the French. This talk will explore the creation of a French intelligence and police network meant to stave off criminality in Tangier, as well as monitor and control Moroccan nationalists and foreign agitators. The work of the Tangier’s police was eminently political owing to city’s political and geographic position in the French Empire of the Interwar years.