Charles de Foucaulds Reconnaissance au Maroc, 18831884: A Critical Edition in English

By Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

Womanizer – Delinquent – Glutton – Deserter; Visionary – Linguist – Explorer – Hermit. The lexical fields do not match, yet both sets of descriptors apply to one man: Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), one of nineteenth-century France’s most complex and challenging figures. Upon graduation from the prestigious École de Saumur, Foucauld went to North Africa with his cavalry regiment. In a sense, he never went home: the desert had called to him, converted him even, and the once-renegade scion devoted the rest of his life to studying the land and culture of North Africa and preserving its language and traditions. The two halves of his life part almost mathematically: a dissolute, disconsolate orphan whose wealthy family, peers, and superiors did not know what to do with him; and then an intuitive, dedicated scholar and priest who revolutionized European knowledge of Morocco’s geography and culture, and defied the mission civilisatrice by refusing to evangelize the Berber population among whom he lived. Foucauld’s biography typically divides into these two sections, with his youth glossed almost as a fleeting adventure and clear priority assigned to his later years as a hermit and spiritual director.

This book seeks to turn that model on its head. Rosemary Peters-Hill provides an in-depth examination of the year Foucauld spent exploring Morocco in 1883–1884, after he had resigned his army commission and taught himself Arabic and Hebrew. This book is more than merely a translation: it is a meticulously researched and documented critical edition that addresses the history of nineteenth-century French colonial endeavors and Moroccan resistance to them; cultural traditions and spaces within the closed country where Foucauld sojourned; the intersections of language, politics, and economics with religion; the praxis of Arabic and Berber interactions and the ways in which official cartographies neglect local knowledge of tribal and seasonal rituals; and the failures of Empire when it comes to defining or delimiting national identity. Peters-Hill, as a literary scholar, also brings to bear a careful examination of Foucauld as author: the ways he pitched his account toward government bodies likely to pay attention to them, his use of literary tropes within his memoir, his narrative agency. And the way these things change: through Foucauld’s encounter, and increasing identification, with Morocco as not just a backdrop for imperial expansion but a subject and a plurality of voices in its own right. As Foucauld’s narrative advances, so too do its Arabic inflections, its lyricism about landscape and cultural practices, its investment in documenting and preserving Morocco’s own specific history. Another, much later, Foucault (Michel) would write that space itself has a history: he might well have been inspired by Charles de Foucauld’s conversion and dedication to the specific selves and possibilities discovered during his immersion in Moroccan space.

Peters-Hill has written a study of Charles de Foucauld’s youthful undertaking in unknown territory that seeks to represent as honestly as possible both the evolution of Foucauld’s mindset regarding French engagement in Morocco and the consequences of his work in that country. While delving into how the author is changed by Morocco, she nonetheless holds Foucauld accountable for his nationalist and religious biases, the details he discounts or ignores, the unavoidable oversights in such a brief cultural encounter, the things he got wrong. She situates Foucauld’s year in Morocco as the exegesis of his ultimate desert calling, the transformation of a black sheep into a sacrificial lamb, a man the Catholic Church venerates as a martyr. This critical edition draws from several discrete

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785274114

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Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884

Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884

A Critical Edition in English

Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

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Copyright © Rosemary A. Peters-Hill 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940483

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-409-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-409-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

There are no roads: Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc—a Critical Introduction

Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

Charles de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884

Letter to François de Bondy

Introduction

Avant-Propos

I. Tangiers to Meknès

II. Meknès to Qaçba Beni Mellal

III. Qaçba Beni Mellal to Tikirt

IV. Tikirt to Tissint

V. Sojourn in the Sahara

VI. Tissint to Mogador

VII. Mogador to Tissint

VIII. Tissint to the Dadès

IX. The Dadès to Qçabi ech Cheurfa

X. Qçabi ech Chorfa to Lalla Maghnia

Appendix: The Jews of Morocco

Note on the Materials Used to Draw Up My Itinerary

Report Delivered to the Société de Géographie de Paris in Its General Session of 24 April 1885 by M. Henri Duveyrier on the Journey of M. the Viscount Charles de Foucauld through Morocco

Itineraries in Morocco by the Viscount Charles de Foucauld

Afterwards: An Afterword

Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

1 Tikirt.—Demeure du Cheikh

2 Tikirt

3 O. de Bondy signature on the photogravure

4 Dahio, November 3, 1885

5 Image from the inauguration of the Foucauld Memorial Monument

6 Historic postcard showing the Charles de Foucauld Monument in Casablanca’s Parc de la Ligue Arabe (Parc Lyautey)

7 Excerpt from letter of September 7, 1907, to Louis Mercier

8 North face of the Beni Hasan hills. (Vista drawn 5 kilometers from Tetuan, on the road from Tangiers.) Author’s sketch

9 The western slope of Djebel Beni Hasan

10 Chefchaouen

11 Djebel Sarsar and Djebel Kourt

12 Djebel Tselfat

13 Foucauld’s sketch, uncaptioned

14 Djebel Gebgeb and Djebel Terrats

15 Eastern part of Fez and Bâll

16 Djebel Terrats from the mellah of Fez, Djebel El Behalli

17 Djebel Zerhoun

18 Tribal arms

19 Fez—general view of the town and its fields, from the peak of Aqba el Djemel

20 Djebel Riata

21 Gap where the Oued Innaouen passes

22 Tâza

23 Tâza, the city and its environs

24 Exterior enclosure and the countryside around it

25 Course of the Oued Innaouen and countryside northeast of Tâza

26 Djebel Beni Ouaraïn

27 Sfrou’s farmlands and Djebel Aït Ioussi

28 Djebel Zerhoun, Djebel Outita and the Saïs plain

29 Djebel Heçaïa

30 Bou el Djad

31 Bou el Djad

32 Mosque and mausoleum of Sidi Mohammed Ech Chergi in Bou el Djad; two of the three mausolea in Bou el Djad

33 Countryside around Bou el Djad, Qoubbas β

34 Qaçba Tâdla

35 Qaçba Tâdla

36 Fichtâla

37 Foum el Ancer and the village of Aït Saïd

38 Foucauld’s sketch of the cliffside caverns

39 Tirremt

40 Village of Ahel Sabeq; Zaouïa Sidi Mohammed Bel Qasem and the northern part of the gardens of Qaçba Beni Mellal

41 Zaouïa Sidi Mohammed Bel Qasem and the Tâdla plains

42 Qaçba Beni Mellal and the Tâdla plains

43 Djebel Beni Mellal

44 The first grades of the High Atlas, forming the left side of the valley of the Oued el Abid

45 Valley of the Oued Ouaouizert; Valley of the Oued el Abip

46 Ouaouizert

47 Caves hollowed out of the right side of the valley of the Oued Ouaouizert

48 Ouaouizert and valley of the Oued Ouaouizert

49 Entry of the long narrow pass where the Oued el Abid disappears, at the end of the Ouaouizert plains

50 Valley of the Oued el Abid

51 River-crossing device

52 Demnât

53 Western part of the city and gardens of Demnât

54 Adrar n Iri and Tizi n Telouet

55 Upper section of Tagmout and valley of the Oued Adrar n Iri

56 Adrar n Iri

57 Adrar n Iri and Tizi n Telouet

58 View toward the south, from the Telouet pass

59 Telouet pass, the plain of Telouet and the village of Aït Baddou

60 Tigert (Oued Iounil)

61 Village of Tizgi and valley of the Oued Iounil

62 Djebel Anremer and the village of Tazentout

63 Oued Tidili

64 The ruins of Tasgedît

65 Old gate at the north corner of the Tasgedît enclosure

66 Plain where the wadis Iounil, Iriri and Tidili come together

67 Mountain ranges of Morocco

68 Sides of the Oued Aït Tigdi Ouchchen valley

69 Right side of the Oued Aït Tigdi Ouchchen valley

70 Rocky massif located between Tazenakht and the Oued Azgemerzi and the right slope of the valley of this river; village of Adreg and Djebel Siroua

71 Oued Tazenakht at the foot of Tazenakht; the house of Chikh ez Zanifi in Tazenakht

72 Djebel Taïmzour, seen in the southerly direction, from the Agni pass

73 The Bani range, Djebel Taïmzour and Foum Tissint

74 Bed of the watercourse

75 Oases of Tissint and Aqqa; plateau, plains, Atlantic Ocean and High Atlas

76 Hartania of Tissint

77 Feïja, the oasis of Qaçba el Djoua and the Bani

78 Kheneg et Teurfa and Aqqa Igighen

79 Kheneg of Adis, Kheneg of Adis and the Oued Toug er Rih

80 Areg to the south of Tissint and portions of the Bani crest

81 Mrimima

82 Small plain surrounded by a ring of mountains, between Imiteq and the Tanamrout pass

83 Tizgi Ida ou Baloul

84 High valley of the Oued Iberqaqen

85 Qçar of Iligh and the valley of the Oued S. Mohammed ou Iaqob

86 View taken from Tizi n Haroun, in the northerly direction

87 Section of the Zenâga plain

88 Azdif

89 Northern and southern sides of the Anti-Atlas range, with Tesaouant marked on the southern side

90 Tesaouant

91 Oued Drâa, in the Mezgîta

92 Valley of the Oued Drâa

93 Oued Drâa and Djebel Kisan

94 Oued Dadès valley

95 Foucauld’s sketch

96 Foucauld’s diagram of the embankment

97 Oued Todgha and the qçar of Tiidrin

98 Headdress of a Jewish woman from the Todgha

99 Foum Jabel, southern portion of the Tiallalin plain

100 Aït Khozman, valley of the Oued Ziz and the qçar of Aït Khozman

101 Shape of the kheneg

102 Tizi n Telremt and Djebel El Aïachi

103 Djebel Tsouqt and Djebel Oulad Ali

104 Mlouïa valley, Misour, Middle Atlas and Rekkam

105 Middle Atlas, Mlouïa, Rekkam

106 Shape of the ravine

107 Djebel Oulad Ali and Djebel Reggou

108 Debdou and the valley of Oued Debdou

109 Oued Za valley and Djebel Mergeshoum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has spanned years, continents, and personal and professional addresses; therefore, I have many people on my own reconnaissance list!

First, my family. Andrew, Julian and Nathanaël have been my triune touchstone as I write and read and learn and travel. Thank you, my loves, for keeping me grounded, making sure I eat, getting me to play, and helping me see Foucauld and Morocco and translation and exploration and ultimately, of course, myself through new eyes. I owe you everything about this book.

The ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) foundation funded one summer of crucial research. A Fulbright Senior Scholar Award took me to Morocco during 2015–16 and brought the country and its history, culture and traditions to life for me. I am especially grateful to James Miller for his support and to the entire MACECE staff for guiding me and my family through our stay in Rabat. I cannot adequately express my thankfulness to Ceola Edwards, who has generously sponsored my research through the Albert and Angelle Arnaud Professorship in French Heritage in Honor of Louis Curet. Benjamin Guichard of the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Langues et Cultures in Paris granted me access to the Fonds André Basset, which contains some of Charles de Foucauld’s manuscript documents. Dominique Casajus has encouraged this project since our first conversation. Members of the French Colonial History Society and the Conseil International des Études Francophones heard presentations on Foucauld at various stages of this book’s preparation and gave me feedback and guidance that brought greater depth to my project.

Colleagues in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University—especially Kate Jensen, Jeffrey Leichman, Pius Ngandu, Adelaide Russo, Greg Stone and Jack Yeager—have been instrumental in supporting my travel, writing process, grant applications and general preoccupation—in this era of postcolonial studies—with the decidedly less palatable precolonial era. Todd Jacob has always smoothed the way for me, taken care of instrumental details and facilitated this work. Touria Khannous has helped with details of Arabic and Tamazight, Moroccan culture and traditions, geography and history, and read an early draft of the translation; without her willingness to reply to late-night text messages from across the Atlantic, this book would literally not have been possible. One semester, I put the Reconnaissance on my syllabus; I thank my students for reading and seeing Foucauld in a way that helped me rethink some ideas and open up to new ones: Samantha Belmont, Nicholas Franchitti, Ann François, Melissa Guerry, Jeanne Jegousso and Farida Ngandu Tshiebue. I am also grateful to colleagues and students at the École Normale Supérieure–Université Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco, for their gracious hospitality and insights on literature, translation and teaching: Nour Abouelfath, Mohammed Achraf, Soukaina Addou, Amina Adlouni, Chaimaa Ait Lahbib, Rim Almask,Sara Alouani, Ismail Alaoui, Asmae Aouaj, Yassmine Aroussi, Hind Atafi, Oumayma Aynaou, Abdellah Baida, Malika Bourais, Ghita Bourliomne, Bahia Dahbi, Fatima-Zahra Dahir, Chaimae El Bahloul, Soumia El Imame, Nadia Elyastaoui, Hajar Ghazaoui, Meryem Ghouzali, Jihad Herradi, Nassima Iderdar, Basma Lytim, Rania Makir, Imane Medaghri, Oumaima Mizarou, Ilham Mouhatta, Ibtissam Moukine, Chaimaa Mourabih, Imane Nejjar, Anas Oumlala, Hanane Sabbar, Safaa Taqui and Issame-Eddine Tbeur all contributed to my experience in Morocco in ways I will never forget.

Jean-Charles Brevet first introduced me to Charles de Foucauld, loaning me a biography and probably never imagining where reading it would take me. All members of the Brevet family (Marie-Hélène, Pauline, Jeanne-Marie, Dosithée, Louis-Lorain, Honoré, Raphaël and Noé) have given tremendous support and provided meals, beds and conversations that have sustained me and my work over the years.

Students in my classes have patiently sat through long digressions about thalwegs and ridgelines and protectorates, and also about poetry and ways of being in an other world: Jade Basford, Gina Breen, Jerod Hollyfield and Rachelle Mosing especially have accompanied me on this book’s journey so far. Brandt Boudreaux digitized a gigantic stack of books so I could travel with them on my Kindle. Gianna Mayberry and Mallory Holland have watched our boys as I worked, and brought their sunshine and wisdom to our home. Shannon Cantlay was our first babysitter, and she made sure life continued smoothly while I wrote. Macy Stogner brought a special flavor of love and care into our lives.

I need a special paragraph to thank the priests, lay-brothers and sisters, and Foucauld aficionados for their insights, prayers, encouragement and interest. To Abbé Marc-Antoine Dor, Abbé Xavier Garban, Father Paul Gros, Father Bernard Healy, Father Charbel Jamhoury, the Lay Fraternity of Charles de Foucauld, Abbé Tancrède Leroux, the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus, Father Andrew Merrick, Anna Pace, Abbé Timothée Pattyn, Père Gabriel Picard d’Estelan and Father Lennie Tighe: ma vive et profonde reconnaissance.

To friends and family in the United States, France, Spain, Morocco and beyond—my words of gratitude are inadequate, but I put them here anyway: you have taught me much and carried me with my great big book project over years and miles, and I thank you for all of it. Ahmed Alami, Zakaria Amine, Sabi Ardalan, Zerlina Bartholomew, Sarah Bedrouni, Diane Brown, Alex Burns, Anne Carlson, Tom Conley, Neila Donovan, Mark Dressman, Richmond Eustis, Saadia Faddoul, Seth Graebner, Adam Halamski, Hatim Hardaway, Christopher and Carol Hill, Laura and Takeshi Ikuma, Nancy and Jim Jurasinski, Rachel Kirk, Mark and Tori LaBelle, Carla Landry, Kristopher Mecholsky, Nadia Miskowiec, Melissa and Violet Morán, Mame Fatou Niang, Corinne Noirot, Lani Noreke, Leah Orth, Fred S. Peters, my maman Pam Peters, Scott Rainey, Pallavi Rastogi, Saossane Rifai, Elizabeth Stein, Jessie Stoolman, Diamond Terrell, Mary Vogl and Abby Zanger. Neighbors and friends-like-family in Rabat shepherded us through dépaysement and made sure our little family felt at home: Nezha and Habib Eddehbi, Baba Houssine, M. Brahim, M. Hamid, M. Karim, M. Mohammed, el Hajji Oussama, Tata Aïcha, Tata Nawal and Ta Tatie Qui t’Aime. And the doctors who brought our baby into the world and took care of our family as three became four—Drs Khadri, Alaoui and Sikou.

Megan Greiving in Acquisitions, and the production department at Anthem Press, helped refine my manuscript into a much stronger book. I thank the whole Anthem team for their contributions to my project, and their dedication to working with their authors every step of the way.

Many people have helped me with details of the following subjects: Arabic grammar, Amazigh studies, Moroccan geography, historic cartography, postcolonial studies, translation theory, Islamic practice, the list is long. Friends and colleagues have graciously offered suggestions and corrections where necessary. All remaining errors and oversights are my own.

Writing expressions of gratitude (for a book about a journey that began as an extramilitary endeavor and ended as its own expression of gratitude) is never easy: the thank yous are always insufficient and some formulaic. What I hope all the people mentioned in these acknowledgments, and any others I have unwittingly omitted, will read in this section is how deeply and truly they have all informed and supported and challenged and helped this book come to life. Because of your specific gifts to me through this whole long process, I have been able to explore more thoroughly Foucauld’s Morocco. In doing so, I have undertaken more than one journey myself, and come to a new way of knowing (a re-cognition) everything Foucauld did and how he wrote about it, and why writing about it and him matters. So I close these reconnaissances with this wish for my readers: that, wherever this book reaches you on your own journey and wherever you started from, you may find yourself humbled and inspired by the majesty of space; that what is foreign may become fascinating and friendly; that the world we inhabit will, despite borders and tribalism, reveal itself as indescribably unified and small; and that the end of all our exploration will, as T. S. Eliot put it, be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Thank you for being part of my book project, wherever you may have crossed its path.

Brother Charles, this is for you, and all the journeys.

THERE ARE NO ROADS: CHARLES DE FOUCAULD’S RECONNAISSANCE AU MAROC—A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

STRANGE it must appear that the account of perhaps the most celebrated and […] the most momentous voyage of discovery that has ever taken place […] has never before been given to the world in the very words of its great leader. It has fallen out in this wise.

—W. J. L. Wharton, Foreword to Captain Cook’s Journal during His First Voyage Round the World Made in H.M. Bark Endeavor 1768–71 (1893)

Writing Morocco: Pre(sup)positions of Place

Writing in Rabat in 1934–35, Roland Lebel opened his Les Voyageurs français du Maroc with the following claim: On s’est attaché, dans cet ouvrage, à étudier l’exotisme marocain à travers les livres des voyageurs français qui ont visité le Moghreb ou qui y ont séjourné quelque temps (I have set out, in this work, to study Moroccan exoticism through the writings of French travelers who have visited the Maghreb or lived there for some time).¹ Lebel’s point of departure provides an important perspective for much of the work that has represented Morocco—precolonial, as a protectorate, and then in the postcolonial era—that is, from the French, and therefore imperial, point of view. Even the opening of his first chapter stresses that his study will focus more on the French than on the Moroccan perspective: Le Maroc apparaît dans notre histoire littéraire à peu près en même temps qu’il entre dans notre histoire politique (Morocco appears in our literary history roughly at the same time as it enters our political history).² The inclusive/exclusive dialectic, through Lebel’s separation of the French from colonial others, his nous, emphasizes Morocco as an othered place and experience and reiterates both place and experience as not only outside the French frame of reference, but also secondary to it, something that can appear, an element that can enter the frame. Lebel’s language bears out this mindset through word choices such as curiosité (curiosity, but in the imperial/colonial context often used to refer to a curio or artifact brought back from the exotic territory),³ chez nous (from our side),⁴ even ce pays (that country)⁵ with its quasi-dismissive demonstrative pronoun. And it is worth noting that this last mention comes from Lebel’s historical overview of the Moroccan littérature (his emphasis) cataloged in French libraries and archives over the years; he writes here about Description de l’Afrique by Jean Léon, called Léon l’Africain: C’est donc un ouvrage important; et, bien que l’auteur soit un étranger, il semble utile de noter la date de sa traduction chez nous (It is therefore an important work; and, though the author be a foreigner, it seems useful to remark the date of his translation on our soil).⁶

Lebel presents a generalized French appraisal of a mysterious territory that tantalized the European colonial spirit during the nineteenth century—where Algeria succumbed, Morocco resisted. It therefore maintained its mystery, to a certain extent, and existed as a perturbing counterpart to a geographic region that provided France, as a nation, with the opening to a continent ripe with possibilities for expansion; and the French, as a people, with the opportunity to discover a world that defied the shape (the harmonious hexagon) of the life they knew. The peoples of Morocco, as Douglas Porch emphasizes, were organized differently from anything the French had yet encountered in their expansionary drives: These were not nation-states fighting for survival. Rather, these were aggregations of peoples unified by weak bonds of clan, culture, and language. They were accustomed to negotiation, compromise, and accommodation. That was how they evolved and survived.⁷ Conflicts on this soil would occur in ways different from what the French were prepared for; indeed, preparation itself was a constant trial-and-error process that often entailed the risk of failure, even fatality.

In addition, as Moshe Gershovich points out, Lebel’s book appeared at a time when France sought reassurance about its geopolitical strength. In 1936, the threat from Germany loomed on the horizon, and works like Lebel’s, with a focus on imperial prowess, offered comfort about France’s capacity to survive.⁸ Algeria’s neighboring, yet closed, territory of Morocco initially frustrated the imperial attempts to spread French civilization through North Africa. And yet, for most of the colonial period, Morocco evokes fascination in France, whose attitude might be characterized as one less of conquest perhaps than of begrudging respect amid power struggle. One clue to this interpretation lies in Lebel’s title: Les Voyageurs français du Maroc (emphasis added). Rather than situate the French travelers "au Maroc," a prepositional choice that would insist on how their Frenchness was transplanted to another space (i.e., French Travelers in Morocco), Lebel uses du: he therefore ascribes a certain belonging-to-Morocco, a kind of Moroccan-ness, to these French travelers who write about their experiences. It is as if the place they explore and represent filters into the very grammar they use to narrate it; as if, by traveling in Morocco and writing about it, they shed a bit of the nous that limits their identities to French only and take on a different hue. The experience of Morocco makes them of Morocco.

Such an attribution contradicts the colonial attitude of much of the nineteenth century. As Emmeline Garnett writes, explaining the spheres of influence of northern European countries seeking expansion in Africa,

The great powers […] more or less sat around a table and divided the continent among them. Nowadays, this seems a particularly shocking thing to do; at the time, it seemed the only way. The continent was inhabited by completely primitive people, many of them constantly at war with each other, and all of them either pagan or, in the north, Mohammedans.⁹

Garnett’s description, disappointing in its own way, with its mention of primitive peoples—even a cursory reading of Foucauld’s Reconnaissance, to say nothing of his later linguistic work, shows how far from primitive were the people of North Africa in reality: they possessed a complex social organization among the tribes; a complicated linguistic system; and a nuanced sense of geographical and political borders that mystified the European powers attempting to colonize the desert—nonetheless presents a mindset about the African continent that is useful when reading Foucauld. Garnett continues: Naturally, because of her position, France already had many interests in North Africa. Algeria had nominally been French since 1830, although the Algerians did not always agree with this. She was therefore allowed to look upon almost the whole of Africa’s ‘bulge’ as her province.¹⁰ This Franco-centric mindset provides the perspective that informed Foucauld’s own beginnings as an explorer in Morocco’s untamed tribal territories. Very nearly the whole first half of the Reconnaissance extols the virtues of the imminent French arrival in Morocco, and Foucauld repeatedly claims that the Moroccans themselves desire this takeover, which will bring the benefits of trade, law, religion and education to the Africans.¹¹ Part of my work in presenting this critical edition of Reconnaissance au Maroc lies in showing Foucauld’s process of nuancing that bold claim, at the same time that he reaches a fuller understanding of how Moroccan tribes functioned according to their own organized system, which already included the benefits of trade, law, religion and education.¹²

Lebel’s work offers a unique point of entry for my study of Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884. For one thing, Lebel includes a chapter on Foucauld’s Reconnaissance, with a synopsis of Foucauld’s journey, its extraordinary accomplishments and its novelty. Le Maroc, pays fermé, très peu connu, le tente, Lebel writes. Cet empire défiant, mais si voisin de notre colonie algérienne, lui paraît destiné à compléter un jour notre domaine africain; et il estime que c’est aider la France de demain que de le parcourir pour l’étudier (Morocco, a little-known closed country, tempts him. This defiant empire, so near our Algerian colony, seems destined to complete our African domain one day; and he asserts that traveling through this country to study it is helping the France of tomorrow).¹³ Again in this passage we can read Lebel’s bias, which positions Foucauld forever on the side of the French colonial enterprise, without acknowledging the ways in which his own perspective changes as he travels, or indeed the many layers of presuppositions that unravel as he works his way through Morocco.

In the 11 months he spent exploring Morocco between June 1883 and May 1884, Foucauld’s position did change, geographically, spiritually and philosophically; and one reading of the Reconnaissance might suggest that it represents at least as much a metaphorical journey, a pilgrimage through spiritual and philosophical terrain, as an arduous physical project through geographical space. We can consider, for example, the following passage from his section on the road between Ouaouizert and Entifa: These are extremely challenging passages, the most difficult I have ever seen. They are too quickly overcome, however, for this traveler’s liking.¹⁴ Foucauld describes here the path along the Oued el Abid, which sometimes weaves through the mountains, over the walls of the gorge, and is sometimes carved into the rock, into the very side of those walls, and towers over the river. His language develops a lyrical complexity in this passage, with its interleaved clauses and imbrications that mirror the watercourse’s characteristics. For the intrepid young explorer, the challenge of such a passage makes part of its charm; and overcoming that challenge with relative ease disappoints him. He cannot yet, in September of 1883 (a mere three months into exploration—and only two months really, as we shall see), accept a challenge as is without wishing it to present more difficulty and hardship. This passage could have a parallel in the biblical story of Elijah, who looked for God in an earthquake, a fire and a strong wind. The Book of Kings narrates that God was not in the strong wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire—but after the fire [in] a still small voice (I Kings 19:11–13).¹⁵ Foucauld suffers the conundrum of wanting the arduous task of exploring Morocco—a task he undertakes at considerable danger to his life—to be momentous, an achievement hard acquired; he appears dissatisfied when he succeeds more easily than he had imagined he should. Along similar lines, Foucauld’s biographer Jean-François Six criticizes the early days of Foucauld’s conversion, when he seemed to Six too fervent, too passionate and caught up in the mythology of undergoing every hardship and making every sacrifice all at once, as if to purge himself of his secular life in some elemental way. One of the frustrations of a year’s exploration lies precisely in the fact that the only way from Point A to Point B is to take one step at a time. The mundane work of travel contrasts sharply with the exciting idea of exploration, much as the real (grueling, often banal and repetitive) work of religious life contrasts with the thrill of divine inspiration, mystical transcendence and exaltation that make the driving illusion of a conversion narrative.

Lebel’s book is one of only a few I have seen that discusses the publication process and reception of Foucauld’s published work. After summarizing Reconnaissance, Lebel describes it as a whole:

La Reconnaissance au Maroc est le récit même du voyage effectué par Charles de Foucauld. À la suite de ce récit, l’auteur a publié une deuxième partie, intitulé Renseignements, qui est la partie proprement scientifique, où se trouvent rassemblés les détails sur les tribus marocaines, avec chiffres à l’appui, des notes sur les rivières, sur les routes et les étapes, la liste des observations astronomiques faites au cours du voyage, ainsi que des renseignements sur la météorologie, et même une étude statistique sur les israélites au Maroc.¹⁶

[Reconnaissance au Maroc is the narrative of the journey undertaken by Charles de Foucauld. Following this narrative, the author published a second part, entitled Information, the scientific part proper, which assembles details about the Moroccan tribes, with supporting numbers; notes on the rivers, roads and steps of the itinerary; the list of astronomical observations taken during the journey; information on meteorology; and even a statistical study on the Jews of Morocco.]

He then moves into publication and reception history, and even foreshadows Foucauld’s later return to the Sahara and religious life:

Le livre ne fut publié qu’en 1888. Mais dès 1885, un rapport était présenté à la Société de Géographie de Paris par l’explorateur Duveyrier, qui avait lu les notes et le manuscrit de Foucauld; après avoir mis en valeur les résultats scientifiques obtenus par le jeune voyageur (à qui fut décernée la première médaille d’or), le rapporteur terminait en disant qu’il ne savait ce qu’il fallait le plus admirer, ou de ces résultats si beaux et si utiles, ou du dévouement, du courage et de l’abnégation ascétique grâce auxquels ils furent obtenus. Il est curieux de remarquer sous la plume de Duveyrier, ce mot ascétique, qui caractérisera si bien plus tard celui qui se fit ermite au Sahara.¹⁷

[The book was not published until 1888. But as early as 1885, a report was presented to the Société de Géographie de Paris by the explorer Duveyrier, who had read Foucauld’s notes and manuscript; after highlighting the scientific results obtained by the young traveler (to whom was awarded the first gold medal), the reporter ended by saying that he did not know what was most admirable: whether the ample and useful results of the book, or the devotion, courage and ascetic abnegation thanks to which they were obtained. It is interesting to notice, written by Duveyrier, the word ascetic, which will later characterize so well the man who became a hermit in the Sahara.]

What I like in Lebel’s book is that the author, whose focus is literature about Morocco written by French travelers, pays attention to the impact of words chosen to represent both geographical space and the people who moved through it. He shows an awareness of how language can shape a reader’s perception of a place and, therefore, the place itself—especially true in the colonial context, where one battleground is precisely the language employed to conquer, subdue, educate, improve or convert native subjects. Moroccan native and literary critic Khalid Zekri, for example, examines the importance of words for space in his Fictions du reel:

La dislocation de la mémoire identitaire […] a introduit dans ces ethnies la perte d’une origine déterminée. […] Les romanciers marocains représentent, de différentes façons, les questions identitaires que la modernité pose au sujet culturel marocain. Ces questions ne sont jamais exposées de manière directe et brute. Elles sont suggérées par un dialogue permanent avec l’altérité et la modernité. Dialogue qui se fait […] à travers une philosophie du revenir où la voix populaire est réhabilitée. Ce retour produit un effet d’émotion à travers le contact avec l’espace sudique, c’est-à-dire la terre natale de l’écrivain […] il s’agit d’une Redécouverte de l’espace identitaire sudique à travers sa langue, ses coutumes et sa mémoire.¹⁸

[The dislocation of identity memory […] introduced into these ethnic groups the loss of a determinate origin. […] Moroccan novelists represent, in various ways, the identity questions modernity poses to the Moroccan subject. These questions are never exposed in a direct or brutal manner; they are rather suggested in permanent dialogue with alterity and modernity. A dialogue that takes place […] through a philosophy of coming back which rehabilitates the popular voice. This return produces an emotional effect through contact with the southernish space, that is, the writer’s home country […] It is a question of Rediscovering the southernish identity space through one’s language, customs, and memory.]

Discovering language and space, through writing in this place and its idiom, means engaging in a constant dialogue of self and other, self-ness and other-ness, and developing a language that can encompass both means of expression. For some, like the novelists Zekri studies, this language is one of reconnection and recovery; for others, like the writers Lebel studies—and indeed, like Foucauld—it is one of new connections and plural discoveries. It is one thing to study Arabic in France, quite another to find oneself in a landscape of immersion in that language.

Lebel, a French historian and professor who taught in Rabat, was uniquely placed to develop and share this spatial perspective. Throughout the French Empire, from its beginning in the nineteenth century until even decades after decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, colonial education imposed French ideologies on native populations around the globe. Education in a language imported by colonial forces participated in a sweeping process of belittling and ultimately subjecting native autochthones, as well as in the political system that kept indigenous populations subaltern to their colonizers. R. M. Blench explains, Linguistic nationalism [through] the suppression of minority languages is commonly a prominent feature of totalitarian governments.¹⁹ Writers from all over the francophone world—a term that rings less inclusively when we think about how it came into existence—have documented linguistic assimilation and its dystopian aftereffects on education, politics, psychology, religion, culture, history and so on.²⁰

Lebel’s attention, in the passage given above, to Duveyrier’s use of the word ascetic offers a model for reading other critical work on Foucauld—biographical as well as historical, religious and analytical. It is not only Foucauld’s word choice at stake in writing the Reconnaissance, but also the words used about him and about his time in the desert that we will examine and interrogate in this critical edition/translation.

Lebel then turns to the book’s appearance in print. Quand le livre parut en librairie, il connut un très grand succès, d’abord dans le monde des géographes et des coloniaux, puis aussi dans le public. Il fut également accueilli à l’étranger avec la meilleure faveur; et les Anglais particulièrement apprécièrent la valeur de cette exploration remarquable (When the book appeared in bookshops, it had great success, first in the world of geographers and colonial officials, then with the public at large. It was also welcomed abroad with the best reception; the English in particular appreciated the value of this remarkable exploration).²¹ The mention here of the English brings up the never-distant fact that most of Western Europe was involved in a sort of race, in the late nineteenth century, to colonize and tame the desert. Douglas Porch reminds us that by 1905, only Morocco and Ethiopia remained free of imperial suzerainty²²; in the decades leading up to the twentieth century, nearly every major European power had sent expeditions into the Sahara to try to domesticate and bring the vast desert space under colonial directive. Thus Lebel’s glance at the English and their appreciation for Foucauld’s work—especially given the fact that Reconnaissance was not published in translation—carries a sinister weight. This information on Foucauld’s readership and reception will come to bear later in this introduction.

As Lebel asserts, C’est, sans contredit, le plus important voyage qui ait été accompli au Maroc par un Européen depuis un siècle (It is, indisputably, the most important voyage accomplished in Morocco by a European for a century).²³ The detail of par un Européen should not go overlooked. Foucauld himself specifies in his Avant-Propos that explorers who had traveled through the closed country before him all adapted a disguise for reasons of self-preservation. Arthur Rimbaud, on the other side of the continent (in Ethiopia, the only other remaining noncolonized country in Africa at that time), did not disguise himself for his explorations and wrote disparagingly of European explorers who refused to respect local customs.²⁴ Porch writes, Travel in the Sahara, especially for a European, could be—quite literally—a murderous business.²⁵ While Porch lists the brutal heat, inexpressible distances and pitiless weather, he also specifies that explorers had to be prepared to encounter the often violent hostility of the population.²⁶ Indeed, Foucauld says of the Moroccans he plans to reconnoiter, On craint le conquérant bien plus qu’on ne hait le Chrétien (They fear the conqueror far more than they hate the Christian).²⁷ It is essential to his exploration project as well as, I argue, his identity developing like a photographic print in foreign waters that he undertake this journey in disguise, that he veil himself/his self, in order to encounter both a real picture of Morocco and a real Charles de Foucauld.²⁸ We will return to Foucauld’s disguise later in this introduction; for the time being, we can consider the odd, if apt, apposite by a European: Lebel does not mention any narratives from authors outside the European context. He insists on the importance of Foucauld’s work, but nonetheless suggests it has precedents in both Western and other traditions. While it is outside the capacity of my work here to enumerate exploration memoirs, I find it worth pausing on Lebel’s wording, because it reiterates the haunting idea (as Zekri, Orlando and other critics have studied)²⁹ of a disappeared language—like the Harraga who ‘burn’ the bridges of their lives behind them³⁰—as if the words for this unknown space might, unless provided with the proper shelter, dissolve into smoke and leave the territory uncharted.

Like Lebel, Foucauld engaged in prepositional play, in a way we will examine further. Unlike Lebel, Foucauld engaged in the Moroccan point of view—the point of view of an outsider in this unknown country—as an insistent perspective for his writing. He did not take possession of the land or its peoples or impose his own values on them; quite the contrary. In the beginning (which is to say, the time of his year-long exploration through Morocco in disguise), we might chalk Foucauld’s attitude up to the novelty of his project and the sense of adventure it brings him. But that is just the beginning, and in the words of his reconnaissance we find the seeds of his later vocation and his ultimate self-positioning with regard to both North Africa and France. In his life as a hermit in the desert of southern Algeria, the early prepositional attitude becomes an active prise de position—religious, cultural, linguistic and political.

The Viscount Charles Eugène de Foucauld, Officer of the Fourth Hussards

On Sunday, November 13, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI pronounced the following address:

Let us give thanks for the witness borne by Charles de Foucauld. In his contemplative and hidden life in Nazareth, he discovered the truth about the humanity of Jesus and invites us to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation; in this place he learned much about the Lord, whom he wanted to follow with and poverty.

He discovered that Jesus, who came to join us in our humanity, invites us to universal brotherhood, which he subsequently lived in the Sahara, and to love, of which Christ gave us the example. As a priest, he placed the Eucharist and the Gospel at the heart of his life, the two tables of the Word and of the Bread, source of Christian life and mission.³¹

Blessed Charles de Foucauld³² was honored at a special Vatican Mass along with Blessed Maria Pia Mastena and Blessed Maria Crocifissa Curcio, foundresses of religious orders who, like Foucauld, dedicated their lives to Christ and presented anew to every Christian the sublime ideal of holiness.³³ Long venerated in the Catholic community as the inspiration for the order Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus, Foucauld had nonetheless remained behind the scenes, so to speak, when it came to official, canonical, recognition. The subject of a handful of glowing spiritual biographies focused on his later life (as a hermit living among the tribes of the Hoggar region of southern Algeria), and of several dozen footnotes, passing mentions and mostly oblique references to work in fields from cartography to linguistics, indigenous poetry to terrorism, Foucauld presents a diverse and somewhat overwhelming portrait that a single snapshot cannot contain. He is revered by both Christians and Muslims who appreciate his loving stance toward Otherness (including his own); favored by Catholics whose faith takes a complicated bent, especially for his Prayer of Abandonment.³⁴ One staple of all the work written about him and his contributions to the late nineteenth-century imperial-religious-political ethos, however, is a more or less glancing mention of his work as an explorer in Morocco, at a time when few Europeans had both gone into the country and come back out. Recent ventures into the Sahara had ended catastrophically, and France reeled from the disaster of the Trans-Saharan Railway and the Flatters expedition.³⁵ Much like his contemporary Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia, Foucauld had to follow the horrific example of European explorers who were so vastly unprepared for the realities of African space and customs that they essentially threw their lives away through an unfortunate combination of ignorance and arrogance.³⁶

Just a few years before his exploration, Charles de Foucauld presented a different kind of personality altogether. In 1878 he was at the bottom of his class at the prestigious St. Cyr military school; he graduated and went on to be bottom of his class at the equally prestigious Saumur cavalry school. When not confined to quarters, he would take off. Even when confined to quarters, he would take off, writes biographer Jean-Jacques Antier,³⁷ enumerating Foucauld’s escapades, some of which (like disguising himself as an indigent and begging for bread in the rural area around Saumur) earned him house arrest and the following blunt assessment: Little military spirit. Insufficient sense of duty. A certain refinement, well brought up, but frivolous, thinks only of enjoying himself. Very ordinary cavalryman.³⁸ Finally, upon his assignment to the Fourth Hussards in October of 1879, the colonel in command at Saumur admonished him: You leave in last place, I hope that ranking does not follow you, sir.³⁹

The Charles de Foucauld who entered the French Army in 1880 was in many ways the epitome of a certain mal de siècle: dissolute, overweight, given to lavish (even, according to various biographies, gluttonous⁴⁰) parties, a womanizer: He was never faithful to his girls for more than a short time, and they had to understand that, writes Emmeline Garnett. ‘I rent by the day, I don’t sign a lease’, he used to say to them insolently.⁴¹ He might have been a character from one of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s early novels, the decadent Des Esseintes or the indolent Durtal,⁴² bored with Paris and driven by boredom to seek out ever-greater pleasures, ever-more-extravagant experiences.

As Antier suggests, in laconic understatement, Foucauld did not show great enthusiasm for his chosen vocation.⁴³ After an unimpressive two years at the École Spéciale Militaire de St. Cyr, he finished the École de Cavalerie de Saumur eighty-seventh out of eighty-seven in his class and lived the life of an affluent scion. When his regiment, the Fourth Hussards [Cavalrymen], was sent to Algeria in 1880, he brought along his mistress Mimi under false pretenses (she traveled to Algeria on a steamer ticket he bought for her as Madame la Vicomtesse de Foucauld),⁴⁴ a flagrant act of disobedience that earned him dismissal from active service. He returned to France in disgrace. Then, upon learning that the Fourth Hussards was being redeployed to South Oran in late spring 1881 to combat the Bou Amama rebellion,⁴⁵ he requested permission to rejoin and, after some negotiating with his superior officer, was sent back to Algeria to rejoin his regiment. The adolescent whose favorite readings were Homeric epics⁴⁶ had had a taste of travel and adventure with which even the thrills of his former decadent life could not compare. Better the army in North Africa than the boredom of safety at home.

Foucauld fought alongside his army comrades for eight months in South Oran. During that time, he became fascinated with the local way of life, language and landscape. Antier points out that even before his military service officially began, in 1880, he had begun to love Algeria; the Kabyle people fascinated him. He had been devouring books and had carried out a few brief explorations. He was already dreaming of its mysterious southern regions, of the desert.⁴⁷ Moreover, as Bénédicte Durand remarks, this taste of adventure in his first military assignment had long-reaching consequences. Ironie du sort, c’est l’Armée qui va lui faire découvrir la passion, temporelle du moins, de sa vie: l’Afrique, terre au cœur de laquelle prendra racine toute son œuvre laïque puis religieuse (In a twist of fate, it was the Army that led Foucauld to discover the passion, at least the worldly one, of his life: Africa, the land in whose heart would be rooted his entire body of work, secular and then religious).⁴⁸ Elizabeth Hamilton credits his fellow officers in part with sparking his interest in desert landscapes and lives: Serving with him was the linguist Monsieur de Cassalanti-Motylinski. His captain was Comte Henry de Castries, the Islamic scholar.⁴⁹ In addition, he learned once the Bou Amama uprising had been quelled that Henri Laperrine⁵⁰ was planning an expedition south, to the Niger. He requested leave to join Laperrine but was denied.

In January of 1882 Foucauld resigned his army commission. He would remain a reservist until 1886, when he was suspended from his duties for a year following a rash act that put him under suspicion of conspiracy and intensified his break with the army.⁵¹ But in 1882 that incident was hardly even a shadow on the horizon. Foucauld had developed a plan to carry out undercover reconnaissance in the unknown territory of Morocco. Why Morocco?

Morocco had advantages. Not only was it a country as yet little known. It was one which, in a not far distant future, France was likely to occupy. In exploring Morocco he would be doing more than proving his courage and initiative, he would be contributing to the development of France’s colonial empire: not only individual travelers coming after him, but France, would be in his debt.⁵²

He spent the next 15 months studying Hebrew and Arabic and seeking guidance from experts in Algiers—historians, geographers, doctors, soldiers⁵³—on how to set up his reconnaissance trip; and then he traveled into Morocco. Though inspired by several of his military comrades, along with the examples of previous explorers whose expeditions did not fare well, the main personality who encouraged him was Oscar MacCarthy, curator of the Algiers city library and archives (and a former explorer himself). Antier imagines a conversation between MacCarthy and Foucauld that provides the practical, imperial reasons for exploring Morocco and helps the young ex-soldier decide to undertake this mission, with MacCarthy explaining the political realities of the nonunified tribal rule of Morocco, the sultan’s desire to create a Sharifian kingdom, the necessity of intervention by a European force and the lack of irrefutable documentation to convince the French to establish a protectorate:

"Our government’s game is to persuade the sultan that he won’t be able to gain true control without our protectorate, since only our army can end the looting, the corruption, the disturbances. Many of the kaids look at the example of Algeria, pacified and prosperous. They are hoping for a French peace to cement their shaky authority. The people, who live in dread of rezzous, know that their country’s riches will not provide general prosperity without the help of our swords."

Then why does our government hesitate?

It’s a matter of the right time, internationally speaking. Also, they are lacking irrefutable documentation. They need an objective assessment of Moroccan disintegration and expectations.⁵⁴

As MacCarthy understood it, Morocco was a poorly charted wilderness whose Islamic inhabitants were—rightly, given the example of Algeria—hostile to any perceived encroachment on their territory.⁵⁵ The maps of Morocco that existed at that time remained vague at best: indeed, no maps existed of the Sahara.⁵⁶

The military, being the military, drew a line on their maps, but it was a hazy demarcation that meant little to those on the spot and which applied only to the fertile regions of the coast. Further south, towards the Sahara, the line petered out. Thereafter, the border between Algeria and Morocco was left to the imagination. Nobody knew at which particular dune either country began or ended. ⁵⁷

And, indeed, whether the territory south of that demarcation line was officially Algerian or Moroccan or something else entirely mattered less than the fact that "neither the Sultan of Morocco nor the Governor of Algeria exercised the slightest control over the land through which it ran. […] In the bled el siba, […] most people obeyed local chieftains and had only the vaguest sense of either the Sultan’s existence or the fact that they were actually Moroccan."⁵⁸

One of Foucauld’s biographers, Jean-François Six, takes him to task for the frantic quest for knowledge, the mania to explore everything and fill in all the gaps⁵⁹—but filling in gaps was precisely what was at issue in the French endeavor to colonize North Africa. Foucauld, in the early 1880s, embodied the zeitgeist of colonial cartography and exploration. The iconic conceptualization of the geographical space Morocco played on accepted notions of presence and absence, black and white, power and lack. The maps of the time have significant unknowns where the desert is concerned. How could one target a place about which one knew nothing and beyond whose frontier (where, and if, it existed) all maps portrayed a blank?⁶⁰ Fleming’s language about the imagistic representation of the desert finds echoes in literature of the period. Not until the travels of the Marquis de Ségonzac, after the turn of the century, would a different approach emerge. [Ségonzac] n’a pas fait qu’une exploration scientifique. Son ambition n’est pas que de noircir sur la carte du Maroc une des taches blanches dont le mystère inquiète les imaginations. ‘L’explorateur, dit-il, ne saurait se résigner aux seuls rôles de voyageur, de topographe, de photographe, de collectionneur’ ([Ségonzac] did not do a merely scientific exploration. His ambition was not limited to darkening on the Moroccan map one of the white spots whose mystery troubles the imagination. The explorer, he claims, cannot limit himself only to the role of traveler, topographer, photographer or collector).⁶¹ With Tunisia’s falling to the French in 1881 (at the time Foucauld was in South Oran with the Fourth Hussards), Morocco presented the next logical conquest, one that would secure the northern part of the continent, regularize it through colonial rule and consolidate the French Empire all the way from the twentieth parallel to the Atlantic. However, Morocco, the westernmost territory of North Africa, presented significant geographic, political and cultural obstacles to this project, and mobilizing French military troops for the endeavor proved difficult.

If the Algerian military was to move west it needed to know where it was going. It needed to know the terrain, the nature of its inhabitants and the willingness of local rules to form allegiances with a foreign power; it needed to know which villages were important, where they were, how much taxable land they had at their disposal and how they could be reached. Where did Morocco’s roads lead and in what condition were they? Were rivers seasonal or did they flow all year round? How high were the mountains and who lived in them?⁶²

MacCarthy convinced Foucauld that he could answer these questions crucial to French intervention in Morocco, and the two organized Foucauld’s year, in terms of finances and personal safety, as well as the actual act of reconnaissance (instruments hidden in the folds of his clothing and within a medical bag). Foucauld chose the costume of a Jew rather than an Arab, and took a real Jew as his guide, the rabbi Mardochée Abi Serour: Part rabbi, part adventurer, part peddler.⁶³

For 11 months in 1883–84, Foucauld traveled with Mardochée through the still-closed country of Morocco, accomplishing what no European had previously been able to do: study the country’s terrain, waterways and diverse tribes in their political economy. He wrote a book, Reconnaissance au Maroc, about the near-year spent exploring this hostile, fertile country and was awarded the Société de Géographie de Paris’s gold medal for his work in 1885—the Société’s first gold medal, a prize created specifically for Foucauld—before the book had even come out. In fact, Oscar MacCarthy engineered that gold medal: ‘M. de Foucauld, he wrote, ‘is now back from a marvelous voyage of exploration covering 3,000 kilometers of Morocco. What he has to tell us shows how much we erred in everything we thought we knew about this great country.’⁶⁴ Henri Duveyrier, speaking at the Société de Géographie de Paris’s meeting of April 24, 1885, further lauded Foucauld’s work: He has delivered a mass of precise intelligence that revolutionizes, quite literally, our geographical and political knowledge of almost the whole of Morocco. […] We have M. de Foucauld to thank for opening what is indeed a new era.⁶⁵

Duveyrier continues, especially lauding Foucauld’s meticulous accomplishment in providing details about Morocco:

[Foucauld] at least doubled the length of the routes so carefully drawn up across Morocco. He took up, and perfected, 689 kilometers of his predecessors’ work, and added 2,230 new kilometers to the work. As for astronomical geography, he determined forty-five longitudes and forty latitudes; and, where we had knowledge of altitudes numbering only into the couple dozens, he brought back 3,000. Truly, you understand, thanks to M. de Foucauld, a new era opens before us, in geographical knowledge of Morocco, and it is impossible to decide which to admire most: the wonderful, useful results he brought back, or the dedication, courage, and ascetic abnegation thanks to which this young French officer obtained them.⁶⁶

But something else was at work as well. The former débauché had felt something in the desert, become aware of a spiritual life that had nothing to do with the Catholicism of his youth, stained with national history in France and complicated, on the large scale by a century of revolutions and secularizing revolts, on the personal scale by loss, disillusionment and subjective confusion.⁶⁷ In 1886, the story goes, Foucauld walked into the church of St. Augustine in Paris and struck up conversation with the local priest (his cousin Marie’s spiritual director). Over the course of the next three years, Abbé Huvelin helped Foucauld discern his own spiritual vocation; and in January of 1890, the young man who had been solider, womanizer, explorer and so on took orders as Frère Marie-Albéric⁶⁸ in the Abbaye de la Trappe Notre-Dame des Neiges.⁶⁹

Writing Foucauld: Biographic Itinerary, Itinerant Biography

For most of his biographers, the story begins there—with a call to conversion and ever more radical renunciation. Biographers from René Bazin (Charles de Foucauld: Explorateur du Maroc, Ermite au Sahara, 1923) to Jean-François Six (Vie de Charles de Foucauld, 1962; Itinéraire spirituel de Charles de Foucauld, 1983), Michel Carrouges (Soldier of the Spirit: The Life of Charles de Foucauld, 1956), Elizabeth Hamilton (The Desert My Dwelling Place, 1968), Cathy Wright (Charles de Foucauld: Journey of the Spirit, 2005), Emmeline Garnett (Charles de Foucauld: Adventurer of the Desert, 1962) and Charles Lepetit (Two Dancers in the Desert: The Life of Charles de Foucauld, 1983) treat Foucauld’s biography as a spiritual itinerary first and foremost, the early part of which—like any journey—is peppered with anecdotes of misadventures and self-discoveries rendered banal by their place in the larger framework of conversion and spiritual development. This tendency is in part due to the biographers themselves, many of whom are either members of religious orders (such as Gorrée, of the Moines-Missionnaires du Père de Foucauld) or write primarily from the standpoint of a specific Christian denomination or organization: Six, for example, is a Catholic theologian who has also written about Thérèse de Lisieux, the Beatitudes and Louis de Massignon; Lepetit and Hamilton published their biographies with the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America and Hodder and Stoughton (St. Paul’s House), respectively. Other works, from France, the United Kingdom and the United States alike, have been produced through Éditions du cerf, Pauline Books and Media, Desclée de Brouwer or Nouvelle Cité. It is worth noting that for some time, religious presses have been the only publishing venues interested in bringing works on Foucauld to light; so some of these authors may have chosen to publish with specific presses simply because they could not place their work, no matter how scholarly, elsewhere. Also worth noting: recently, this publishing limitation has begun to change. Seuil (known for its series in international literature and humanities and social sciences) and Grasset have published several of the most important works on Foucauld in recent years (Seuil: Foucauld’s Lettres et carnets; Grasset: Marguerite Castillon du Perron’s Charles de Foucauld). Then, too, religious presses have begun publishing works of a different nature as well: Saint-Léger éditions, for example, put out Charles de Foucauld: amitiés croisés, a series of essays that emerged from a day-long conference in 2006, examining Foucauld’s role in the larger questions around colonization, geopolitics and Saharan exploration at the beginning of the twentieth century.

An author’s specific perspective does not of course mean that a reader should discount their works; but it does color the way they represent Foucauld, the episodes of his life they concentrate on and, naturally, the weight they give to his life as a religious over his life before conversion. Even Jean-Jacques Antier, whose biography presents a more complete and complicated portrait than most, balances the two Foucaulds with imaginative and lyrical prose while nonetheless conscribing most of Foucauld’s pre-conversion years to the first quarter of the book.

Foucauld’s life in the desert outpost of Tamanghasset, where he chose to live among the Tuareg (historically known as an aggressive, fractious people⁷⁰), offers a model of quiet resistance to the mission civilisatrice the French undertook throughout their African colonies, and which Foucauld (eventually) saw as flawed and harmful. In a 1908 letter to his brother-in-law, Raymond de Blic, Foucauld explains his role as he then conceives it: Je reste moine, moine en pays de mission, moine-missionnaire, mais non missionnaire (I am still a monk, a monk in mission-country, a monk-missionary, but not a missionary).⁷¹ At the same time, he was undeniably at least a participant in that mission, first as an explorer in the future Moroccan Protectorate, then as a marabout among the Muslim tribes of the Sahara. While his later life is thoroughly documented and studied, however, his early life has dissolved into anecdotes. Most of that early life is used as moralistic improving stories about the dangers of luxury, gluttony, discouragement and boredom, the contrast proving somehow the virtue of his later years, his vocation, even his martyrdom. Charles de Foucauld’s biography tends to split into the early half (at the service of the later half) and the later half (at the service of the Catholic Church). His early letters are frivolous, his later ones edifying; his early expenditures are extravagant, his later ones self-denying. From hedonistic feasts in his youth he went to solitary, sparse meals of dates and flatbread he made himself with barley flour and water.⁷² For all the critical attention given to his youth and first writings, he might be merely a fictional character, like Durtal, an exemplum of moral progress.

A French maxim holds that Dieu écrit droit avec des lignes courbes (God writes straight with crooked lines), and following the logic of that adage means accepting Foucauld’s youthful wanderings as mere digressions on the way to his ultimate destination. But part of the reason for my book lies precisely in that, according to the same logic, God also writes the crooked lines, which deserve to be studied in their own right. I therefore present his spiritual biography here as context for the work of the whole person who undertook the Moroccan exploration.

The year Foucauld spent exploring Morocco remains a complex vein of life and writing still as yet mostly untapped. Only a handful of scholars—Bénédicte Durand (Charles de Foucauld. Explorateur malgré lui, 2011), Fergus Fleming (The Sword and the Cross: Two Men and an Empire of Sand, 2003) and Dominique Casajus (Charles de Foucauld: Moine et savant, 2009), along with two or three people in articles (including myself)—have discussed the Reconnaissance critically and sought to situate it within the life and work of Foucauld as an important figure of the late nineteenth century, and the larger historical and artistic context of that period. In the early twentieth century, Jacques Ladreit de Lacharrière—statesman, professor and adjunct secretary general to the Comité du Maroc—used Foucauld’s book as a model for travel through the westernmost Maghreb. His Au Maroc en suivant Foucauld retraces Foucauld’s footsteps—with both credit and blame—through the country under the recently established French Protectorate.⁷³ Along with making Foucauld visible to a wider audience, my critical edition and translation is geared toward showing how the Reconnaissance brings together several kinds of narratives from the late nineteenth century; how it engages with the political, economic, spiritual and ethnographic questions of France’s colonial enterprise; how, or whether, it diverges from the nationalistic project; what it indicates about