‘What Can They Criticise Us for, Loving Each Other Too Much?’: Visa Bans for Mixed Marriages Between Moroccan Soldiers and French Women After the Second World War

Abstract

This article examines segregation through the lens of gender, intimacy, race and colonial rule by engaging with how the French colonial state controlled the marriages permitted between French women and Moroccan soldiers who had fought in France during the Second World War. These marriages took place in many small towns throughout metropolitan France, yet these couples could not travel to Morocco. The French government expressly stated that entry to Morocco was forbidden by French authorities in Morocco ‘to French women married to Moroccans or wanting to marry Moroccans’. Furthermore, this visa ban was highly gendered and racialised, only banning one form of marriage: colonial authorities specified that ‘these concerns are not necessary in the case of marriage between a French man and Moroccan woman’. Mixed marriages were permitted within metropolitan France and in the colonial sphere if between French men and Moroccan women, but couples made up of Moroccan men and French women were refused entry to Morocco.

This article examines these relationships through approximately fifty case files held in the French colonial archives that show the limits of colonial racial segregation: which interracial couples were forbidden entry to Morocco or denied permission to marry by the French colonial state to maintain segregation and colonial racial hierarchies. More importantly, these case files give an understanding of how individuals navigated gendered and racialised boundaries in both colony and metropole, as well as how they attempted to construct their lives and navigate interracial relationships despite efforts from the French colonial government for segregation.