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Empire and Catastrophe France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization Series editors: A. J. B. Johnston, James D. Le Sueur, and Tyler Stovall Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic Society in Interwar French West Africa Margaret Cook Andersen Kathleen Keller To Hell and Back: The Life of Samira Bellil Apostle of Empire: The Jesuits and New France Samira Bellil Bronwen McShea Translated by Lucy R. McNair French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Introduction by Alec G. Hargreaves Imperial Histories Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti- Edited and with an introduction by Patricia M. E. Lorcin Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris and Todd Shepard Jennifer Anne Boittin The Cult of the Modern: Trans-Mediterranean France and Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the the Construction of French Modernity French Caribbean Gavin Murray-Miller Christopher M. Church Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental and Colonial History Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World Michael F. O’Riley Andrea E. Duffy Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis Jonathan R. Dull Richard C. Parks I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the Baya Gacemi North American Fur Trade Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Carolyn Podruchny Francophone World A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Edited by Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David Colonialism in Gabon G. Troyansk Jeremy Rich Contesting French West Africa: Battles over Schools and the The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Colonial Order, 1900–1950 Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 Harry Gamble Spencer D. Segalla Black French Women and the Struggle for Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout Equality, 1848–2016 Julija Šukys Edited and with an introduction by Félix Germain and The French Colonial Mind, Volume 1: Mental Maps of Silyane Larcher Empire and Colonial Encounters The French Army and Its African Soldiers: The Years of Edited and with an introduction by Martin Thomas Decolonization The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Ruth Ginio Encounters, and Colonialism French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French Edited and with an introduction by Martin Thomas West Africa Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Ruth Ginio Colonies, 1854–1952 Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Stephen A. Toth Practices, Theoretical Developments Madah-Sartre: The Kidnapping, Trial, and Conver(sat/s) Edited and with an introduction by Jane E. Goodman ion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Paul A. Silverstein Written and translated by Alek Baylee Toumi Franco America in the Making: The Creole Nation Within With an introduction by James D. Le Sueur Jonathan K. Gosnell Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of To order or obtain more information on these or other Louisbourg’s Last Decade University of Nebraska Press titles, visit nebraska- A. J. B. Johnston press.unl.edu. Empire and Catastrophe Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 • Spencer D. Segalla University of Nebraska Press © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved ISBN 9781496219633 (hardback) ISBN 9781496222138 (epub) ISBN 9781496222145 (mobi) ISBN 9781496222152 (pdf) is book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be download- ed from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5250/9781496219633 We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. For Maya and Ryan. • Contents Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Algeria, 1954 17 Chapter 3 Fréjus 1959, Under Water and at War 54 Chapter 4 Poison, Paralysis, and the United States in Morocco, 1959 78 Chapter 5 Death, Diplomacy, and Reconstruction in Agadir, 1960 108 Chapter 6 The Soul of a City 141 Chapter 7 Rupture, Nostalgia, and Representation 165 Chapter 8 Conclusion: Humanity and Environment 194 Notes 199 Bibliography 263 maps Map 1. The western Maghreb and southwestern Europe 8 Map 2. Agadir before the 1960 earthquake 123 Map 3. Reconstructed Agadir, c. 2000 145 Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the tireless support of my part- ner and spouse, Prof. Amanda Bruce, and the foundation provided by my par- ents, Wendy and David Segalla. I also thank Charles McGraw Groh for tackling the enormous challenge of serving as the founding chair of our new department so that I could focus on this book. This book has also been made possible by support from an American Institute for Maghrib Studies research grant, Uni- versity of Tampa David Delo research grants and Dana Foundation grants, and by Fred and Jeanette Pollock Research Professor grants. Digital access has been supported by a Mellon Foundation grant to the Sustainable History Mono- graph Pilot. A historical book such as this inevitably builds upon the scholarship of others, and the chapters that follow are particularly indebted to the work of El Djam- houria Slimani Aït Saada, Valentin Pelosse, Paul Rabinow, Janet Abu-Lughod, Marie-France Dartois, Thierry Nadau, and Yaël Fletcher. I am also grateful for the models and mentorship provided by Herman Lebovics and for the input provided by Brock Culter, Mitch Aso, Joomi Lee, Ahmed Sabir, Daniel Willi- ford, Julia Clancy-Smith, Stacy Holden, Mohammed Daadaoui, James Mokhi- ber, Moshe Gershovich, and Shana Minkin, and by the members of the Florida Maghreb workshop group: Ann Wainscott, Adam Guerin, Amelia Lyons, and Darcie Fontaine. In Morocco, I received invaluable assistance and insight from Lahsen Roussafi, Yazza Jafri, Mohamed Bajalat, Rachid Bouksim, Jamila Bar- gach, Suad Kadi, Abdallah Aourik, Hassan Bouziane, Jacques Lary, and Mo- hamed Mounib. I am also immensely grateful to the archivists, librarians, and staff at archives and repositories of sources on three continents, without whom I would have been lost. I offer special thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for the University of Nebraska Press, whose invaluable input on various manuscript drafts helped to improve this work, to UNP editors-in-chief Alisa Plant and Bridget Barry for their support of this project, to Erin Greb of Erin Greb Cartography, to Ihsan Taylor of Longleaf Services, and to copyeditor Bridget Manzella. Chapter 3 of xiv Acknowledgments this volume expands on “The 1959 Moroccan Oil Poisoning and U.S. Cold War Disaster Diplomacy,” originally published in the Journal of North African Stud- ies 17 (2012), 315–336, available online at https://tandfonline.com/. I am grateful to the journal editors for their support of my early work on this project. I thank Todd Shepard and Patricia Lorcin for their close readings and detailed com- ments on my contribution to their anthology, French Mediterraneans: Transna- tional and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), a piece which eventually grew into chapters 5 and 6 of the present volume. Finally, I thank the design and production teams at the University of Ne- braska Press, and the indexer, for their work on the print edition of this book. Introduction We have always lived in the shadows like obscure cockroaches, powerless before the reading of a newspaper, babbling before the morose enemy who stole our crops, stripped our land, converted them from wheat into vineyards useless for our hunger. We receive the natural verdict with relief. It would nally break the monotony of servitude. And it is the native soil that will shake the rocks and that now opens, to bury us with our denouncers, these arrogant masters who know the pain that they inict. — “Old Man,” in Henri Kréa, Le séisme: Tragédie the French Algerian city of Orléansville was devastated by an earthquake in September , the Franco-Alge- rian playwright Henri Kréa published a play that presented the seismic Adisaster as a harbinger of a painful but necessary decolonization. Kréa, a.k.a. Henri Cochin, son of a French father and Algerian mother, was an advocate of Algerian independence, and the struggle for decolonization was still under- way when Kréa wrote Le séisme: Tragédie. The Algerian Revolution, which had begun just weeks a er the earthquake, would not achieve the independence of Algeria from French rule until