Word: grandval
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...Resident General Gilbert Grandval, sent from Paris to bring peace and a fair deal to restive Moroccans, acted like a man with no time to lose. The minute his plane stopped at Casablanca's airstrip, he jumped down from the plane, too impatient to wait until the ramp was shoved into place. In his first week, he fired nine of the protectorate's top French officials, "for essentially psychological reasons"; they were competent, he explained, but identified with the old, unpopular order. To Moroccan cheers, he declared a general amnesty for Bastille Day, freeing 77 political prisoners...
Leaflets & Buses. Next day, as the rioting rolled on, anonymous leaflets flooded the city urging Frenchmen to take up arms in protest against the Café Gonin bombing and Grandval's "soft" policy. In groups of two and three hundred, European vigilantes stormed through the city, pillaging and burning native shops, overturning buses. Most vengeful were the Pied Noir (Black Foot), half-breeds of mixed Italian, Spanish and Moroccan blood and Morocco's equivalent of the South's "poor white," who hate the native Moroccans with a fury based on economic insecurity. In the heart...
...week's end, defying warnings from demonstrators, the new resident general attended the funeral for the Bastille Day victims in Casablanca's big cathedral. The seething crowd made a rush at Grandval, yelling "Dirty Jew" and "To the gallows," ripped off an epaulet and his cap before police could hustle him into...
After three days of the bloodiest rioting Casablanca had seen since 1952, ten Europeans and at least 20 Moroccans were dead, more than 100 wounded. Casablanca was under martial law; tanks and armored cars patrolled the streets and surrounded the native quarters. Grandval announced grimly that he would continue the policy of moderation he had begun. Unhappily, for a man with no time to lose, too much time had already been lost...
...chance. His government, said Faure, "will never agree to renounce, palter with, or open to question the French position in Morocco." But there must be a new policy for Morocco and a new man to implement it. Out went ineffectual Francis Lacoste as Resident General; in came Gilbert Grandval, 51, a former Resistance leader who built an impressive reputation by the way he administered the Saar after...