Twenty-second International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Few studies have examined the first four governments of independent Morocco (1955-1960). As a result, current historical narratives provide no satisfactory answer to a major question, namely the identification of the mechanisms that led to the failure of the social, political, and economic democratization programs pursued by these governments, which benefitted from almost unanimous support from the population. This paper proposes to advance a synthetic analysis of the events in question. To do so, I limit my study to the first four governments of independent Morocco – the last one was dissolved by King Mohamed V in 1960. In addition, I examine new sources, including testimonies, newspaper clippings from the time, and documents from family archives. The current decade, with its technological advances, has allowed ordinary people to transcend the limits imposed on freedom of expression, and to publish information of collective interest on various platforms. Thanks to these sources, I have been able to reconstruct in part the historical facts that occurred during the period studied, and to highlight omissions perpetrated by the official historical accounts. Finally, I adopted mixed subalternist approaches to apprehending these texts. Beyond the reconstruction of historical facts, this presentation raises the issue of the links that exist between democracy and history. Inevitably, it highlights the “invisibilization” of certain social categories in historical narratives, which results from multiple factors, such as gender, class, and urbanity/rurality division.