Morocco through the lenses of four French writers

This paper aims to examine how Morocco is represented in the works of Jean and Jérome Tharaud, Henry de Montherlant and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. More specifically, the paper attempts to develop a more nuanced vision of how Morocco is viewed in French travel writing than what previous studies (mainly those adopting the Saidian approach) suggest. Indeed, since Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, French literary representations of Morocco have generally been examined in terms of their engagement with the French imperial establishment. This paper focuses on the images of Morocco in the works of the four selected writers to offer a new conceptualization of French Orientalism, one that can be considered as both an application and a criticism of Said’s Orientalism. The outcome of the analysis shows that while the Tharauds’ views of Morocco are marked by the same racism and imperialism Said talks about, Montherlant’s and Le Clézio’s views of the country seem to subvert traditional clichés and stereotypes, providing two paradigms of a Western portrayal of the Orient that go against Said’s study of Orientalism. It is therefore argued that the French literary construction of the Orient (Morocco in this case) is neither completely racist and imperialist as Said and the saidists pretend, nor completely objective and innocent as the Orientalists would have us believe. French Orientalism, as conceptualized in this paper, contains a mixture of different views and attitudes. Hence the use of the plural form ‘Lenses’ instead of the singular ‘Lens’ in the title.