A look back at President Macron’s visit to Morocco: the shadow of Moulay Ismail, Benaicha and Louis XVI…what impact?

HIBAPRESS-RABAT- According to Aziz Daouda

His Majesty King Mohammed VI gave a historic character to President Macron’s state visit to Morocco. In living memory, only the great monarchies and the oldest nation-states can give a foreign head of state an authentic welcome, so rich in symbols.

There was indeed the President’s insistence when he mentioned France’s state position with regard to the southern Moroccan provinces and obviously the tens of billions of Euros of economic agreements signed but that is the essential?

In one of his speeches, President Macron did not fail to mention history. He even went back to the fascinating character of Ambassador Benaicha, the one whom Sultan Moulay Ismail had sent to the Sun King. It could have gone back further because there were many exchanges prior to the period or years mentioned.

To stay with the same reigns in Paris and Morocco, we can recall that Louis XVI had in 1689 sent François Pidou de Saint-Olon to the Sherifian Sultan Moulay Ismail. At the time, when a sovereign sent an emissary to another, it was called an embassy. It was therefore in response to this embassy that the Sultan in turn sent an embassy in the person of Abdallah Benaicha who set off for Paris in 1698, almost ten years later.

The journeys were long, tedious and risky at the time and the exchanges very little political except when it was a question of guaranteeing a little bit of security to allow and encourage commercial exchanges and a lot to free the captives on one side like in the others. At the time, the Cherifian Empire did a lot in the export of leathers, salt, and wheat in particular. Benaicha, who only met Louis XVI on February 16, 1699, had in fact come to negotiate the release of Muslim captives taken prisoner at sea by the Sun King’s ships. The unfortunate people were used by force in the quarries. He wanted to negotiate a treaty along these lines.

Abdallah Benaicha was a high-ranking sailor. We can compare him to a sort of Admiral of the time. He did not speak French but rather English and Spanish. These were the languages ​​that traders and knowledgeable people, especially those in navigation, spoke on the southern side of the Mediterranean as well. The maritime powers that were emerging were Spanish and English.

Who else could negotiate such a treaty than Benaicha who himself had been a captive in England in his youth and who had only been freed at the cost of a large ransom. It was commonplace. We captured people generally at sea, took advantage of their arm strength and knowledge when they had it, and negotiated their release for large sums of money afterwards. The rulers of the time easily gave in to this kind of blackmail. Religion was never far from the problem. Christians captivated Muslims and Muslims did the same to Christians. The world was thus divided according to the confessions of the inhabitants of this or that region.

In Paris, Benaicha will be warmly welcomed with great consideration, just to demonstrate the consideration of Versailles for Moulay Ismail and his power. Numerous visits to monuments were organized for him, obviously not at all for cultural purposes but rather to show him the power of the country and the reign of its sovereign at the time. It was necessary to impress him in order to come back and tell the story to his own Sultan. Louis XVI thus boasted of his power to intimidate the Sharifian Sultan. It was a way of impressing and dissuading anyone who might doubt the power of the country. We acted like this at the time and perhaps still today. These were the strengths of foreign policy: to scare people and show how advanced and powerful we were.

Benaicha by his class, his refined manners, his extremely rich attire, his appearance and his culture will be perceived as a rather interesting and attractive curiosity. It will even be said that he would have seduced more than one lady from the nobility of the Court of Louis XVI. The women of the court did not deprive themselves at the time and had their habits barely hidden as well…

During his very prolonged stay, not without apparent reasons or not, Benaicha also met James II, dethroned king of England, who had taken refuge in France. He had apparently known him in his youth when, as mentioned above, he had been made a Muslim slave. England at the time was experiencing real instability with a complicated religious underpinning. Catholicism was facing great difficulties. Normal that James II, himself a Catholic, took refuge with a Catholic King. As a reminder, while he was having difficulty remaining on the English throne, James II received an offer of help from Moulay Ismail. Only the military support had been accompanied by a complex and complicated condition. Moulay Ismail would have simply asked James II to convert to Islam and failing that to Protestantism.

Unlike President Macron’s state visit to Morocco which ended in apotheosis with major conventions, gigantic contracts and promising and sincere smiles, Benaicha’s mission ended with not much…Like all the expeditions of the time. However, we must not recognize that this embassy had left some seeds. She had the merit of letting both of us know what we each truly were.

The milestones laid then and the seeds sown by Benaicha during his Parisian journey will certainly have served as the foundations for what has just been experienced during the visit of President Macron who had the intelligence to mention it. This is precisely the moment that was seized by both sides to say loud and clear that only consideration and mutual respect could seal a great friendship and guarantee the interests of each other.

Four centuries of relationships were evoked intelligently, no doubt to say that we cannot do without being part of the historical perspective to reflect and build the present and the future.

In any case the shadow and spirit of Moulay Ismail, those of his ambassador Benaicha were very present and those of Louis XVI too.