Colonel Charles Mangin greets the new French Resident General of Morocco, General Hubert Lyautey, at the gates of Marrakesh in 1912. Lyautey instructed Mangin to seize Marrakesh despite strict orders from Paris to the contrary.

The short-term causes of what became known as the ‘Tangier crisis’ resided in the equally ill-fated attempt on the part of von Bulow to isolate France diplomatically. France’s major ally, Russia, was already engaged in a catastrophic war with Japan. If Germany supported Moroccan independence, the German chancellor calculated, Britain would back off from her alliance with France. It was a neat plan, but it contained at least one fallacy – it assumed that Britain would desert her new ally. This was unlikely. For the British, the Fashoda crisis followed by the Second South African War had demonstrated all too painfully how friendless Britain was in the world. The German naval laws of 1898 and 1900, which were a direct challenge to British mastery of the seas, drove this point forcefully home. By 1904, Britain had found her friend in Europe. She intended to stick by her. The Tangier crisis of 1905 was the first step in transforming the colonial entente of 1904 into the European military alliance of 1914.

At the best of times, Morocco would be a difficult country to conquer. The land was vast, much of it mountain or semi-desert, all of it remote. Its inhabitants were fiercely independent, although as elsewhere, opposition to the French was spasmodic and unsustained. The greatest risk to the French was that an invasion might provoke a German reaction. Twice, in 1905 and again in 1911, French encroachments into Morocco brought Berlin and Paris to the very brink of war. Aware of the delicate political situation, General Hubert Lyautey digested eastern Morocco, moving forward by stealth from Algeria to occupy sites within the territory claimed, but not occupied, by the sultan, renaming the villages to throw journalists, diplomats and politicians off the scent. In 1907, the French placed a large force ashore at Casablanca after Europeans were massacred there, and pursued the conquest of the Chaouia, the hinterland behind the city. Moroccan tribesmen mounted a briefly effective mobile campaign against the French columns sent out from Casablanca. However, resistance largely collapsed in March 1908 after French General Albert d’Amade twice caught the resisters in their camps against which he brought the full power of French artillery and small arms.

In eastern Morocco in that year, Lyautey provoked an uprising of the Beni Snassen when French forces occupied Oudjda on the Algerian frontier. A harka, or war party, numbering perhaps 4,000 men, imprudently attacked up a narrow ravine against a concentration of French forces on the Wadi Kiss and was decimated by artillery. A second harka attempted to take Port Say on the Mediterranean coast and was driven off by naval gunfire. A third harka surprised a French camp at Mennaba in eastern Morocco at dawn on 17 April 1908. But despite initial success they fell to looting, which allowed the more disciplined French forces to counter-attack. Final battles occurred in May at Bou Denib, and in September at Djorf, where the Moroccans again foolishly massed against French artillery and machine-guns and were slaughtered in great numbers. The final French push into Morocco was precipitated in 1911 by a mutiny of the sultan’s askars against their French advisers in Fez. A French expedition launched to rescue the Europeans and the sultan besieged there touched off an international crisis which was only extinguished in November 1911, when the French won the freedom to act in Morocco by giving the Germans territorial concessions in the Cameroon.

The conquest of Morocco underscored the rising costs to France, both diplomatic and military, of imperial warfare. If the 1911 accord settled the Moroccan question, it was only the beginning of France’s attempt to impose its control over the country, the last corner of which did not submit until 1934. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the French Army counted 15,300 white and 7,420 indigenous troops in its colonial forces, including those stationed in Algeria. The rebellion against the French takeover of Tunisia had caused Paris to dispatch 35,000 troops from France in July 1881, most of whom had to be quickly withdrawn because of disease, and replaced by Algerian units. The French invasion of Tonkin began with 4,000 troops in 1883, and swelled in the face of Chinese intervention and popular resistance to 40,000 by 1885. The Madagascar campaign of 1895 required around 15,000 officers and men. Most of the expeditions in sub-Saharan African could be accomplished with less than 3,000 men (Dodds took 3,400 to Dahomey in 1892), in part because it was difficult to support larger numbers logistically, but also because enemy resistance was seldom overwhelming. The Fashoda crisis so stretched military resources that in 1898 the army violated French law to place over 12,000 metropolitan conscripts in the colonial forces. The 60,000 troops dispatched to deal with the crisis of 1911 made Morocco the most costly of all French imperial expeditions. The French intervention there came at a particularly bad time, for it brought an unwanted financial burden at the very moment when the government added a third year of conscript service to match an increase in German army strength. The costs of Morocco also complicated plans to add heavy artillery to the army’s arsenal. The French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, feared that the Moroccan expedition would compromise French mobilization for war against German~ By the outbreak of the First World War, 42,100 white and 88,108 native troops were drawing rations in the colonies or France. The French maintained the equivalent of two army corps to garrison Algeria before 1914. The great cost of occupying the colonies fuelled the debate between colonialists like General Charles Mangin, who argued in his 1910 book, La force noire~ that the colonies offered inexhaustible repositories of manpower to defend the homeland, and others, like Georges Clemenceau, who insisted that colonial expansion subtracted military strength from the vital north-eastern frontier with German~ Ironically, it was Clemenceau who, as prime minister from 1917, proved most willing to mobilize colonial manpower to defend France. Therefore, the greatest benefit of colonies for France was the million and a half subjects they sent to support the French war effort between 1914 and 1918.