FRANCE: Tale of Two Sultans

A French general with eight police inspectors, 30 gendarmes and a section of paratroopers drew up in a hurry outside the Hotel des Thermes in Madagascar one day last week. They came not to try the golf course, to splash in the pool or to take the waters (which are said to be good for that old weakspot of Frenchmen, the liver). They came instead to see a splendidly installed prisoner, the exiled Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef. French General Georges Catroux, 78, found His Majesty waiting for him in a nearby villa once occupied by Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth.

Back from Madagascar. General C-troux’s mission was to win Ben Youssef’s approval for Premier Edgar Faure’s ingenious plan to settle the Moroccan crisis (TIME, Sept. 5). The French propose to depose the present puppet Sultan. Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, but not to restore Ben Youssef, who would, however, be able to leave Madagascar and live more luxuriously in France.

Ben Youssef, theoretically, was in a strong position. Until he approved Faure’s plan, Morocco’s loyal nationalists would not give the French an inch. Yet Ben Youssef was miserable in exile: his Buick had been stolen, he had less than half his usual complement of 40 concubines with him, and he daily complained about drafts in the hotel. Three sessions with Catroux were enough to convince His Majesty where his best interests lay. Ben Youssef agreed to broadcast a message ordering his faithful subjects to avoid more violence.

Over to Tangier. Convincing the other Sultan, Moulay Arafa, was a task for another French general, Pierre Georges Boyer de Latour, the new French Resident-General in Morocco. Last week De Latour called on the old man in his dazzling white palace at Rabat and delicately indicated that the time had come to leave.

From the French colons and their ally in intransigeance, aged El Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakech, came exactly the opposite advice: Stay where you are. Moulay Arafa uncomfortably announced that only Allah could recall him, but at the same time looked longingly at the sumptuous palace waiting for him across the border in Tangier.

The next move was up to Premier Faure, who had promised a “solution” by Sept. 12. At week’s end, he announced what he had in mind: once the old and new Sul tans had been replaced by a three-man regency council, a Moroccan government with control over most of Morocco’s internal affairs would be set up in Rabat. This new regime would negotiate a new political link with France, revising the obsolete protectorate treaty of 1912.

The new arrangement would set Morocco on the way to what Paris called “independence within interdependence.” It was not freedom, and it might not last, but it was an improvement.

our hundred French air force reservists, recalled for service in Morocco, refused to board a southward-bound troop train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris this week. “Leave Morocco to the Moroccans,” the airmen shouted. “We don’t want to go.” Unable to push them into the coaches, police finally rounded them all up and drove them back to their barracks.