‘La Vie Alpine Marocaine’: colonial mobility, physicality and limitation in the Haut-Atlas, 1920s–1950s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of ‘Alpine’ mobilities and physicalities in the pursuit of colonial territoriality in Morocco under the French Protectorate. It focuses on the development of alpinisme (mountaineering) and sports d’hiver (winter sports) as variants of tourisme en montagne (mountain tourism) in the Haut-Atlas Mountains, the highest altitude point of ‘Greater France’. Amidst what was a protracted situation of unsettled sovereignty in the Atlas Mountains, interwar alpinists embodied movement and authority at the outer limits of French territorial knowledge and control, in what was transitional civil–military space. By the later 1930s, the aims of équipement de la montagne (outfitting the mountain), and of securing mountain mobility and physicality came more to the fore of French interventions. Marshalling of the high mountain for political and economic ends intensified during the Vichy period and after, though the aspiration to fuller European movement and physicality at high altitude continued into the later Protectorate to run aground of limitation and contingency. These evolving forms, meanings and investments around movement on the high altitude periphery of the Haut-Atlas show a close intersection of Alpine and colonial imaginaries, and provide a window onto the larger arc of France’s (failed) colonial reordering of Moroccan territory.