Triumphant Exile

From the moment his plane touched down at Nice airport last week, Morocco's ex-Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef made clear he was not returning as a suppliant, grateful to be allowed to return from remote Madagascar to a more congenial clime. Two hundred Moroccans stood in the drizzling rain to cheer him as he descended, svelte in grey djellabah and white pointed slippers, and followed by his two sons, four daughters, two wives and 19 veiled concubines. The Foreign Ministry had ordered a Riviera hotel specially reopened for him. But after only one night, Ben Youssef abruptly announced that he was moving on to Paris (wailed the maitre d'hotel: "A 24-hour season! I have never seen anything like it!"). Hastily, the French government ordered the swank Hotel Pavilion Henri IV, twelve miles outside Paris, cleared of guests arid Ben Youssef moved in with his entourage.

Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay flew back from the foreign ministers' conference in Geneva especially to confer with him. At the end of two hours' talk, Ben Youssef was graciously understanding. He spoke soberly of "a Franco-Moroccan interdependence," and dispatched a "message of hope, of wisdom and of reconciliation" to the Moroccan people.

In the next few days, one Moroccan notable after another hustled to the Hotel Henri IV to pay his respects. Ben Youssef summoned his old enemy Hadj Thami El Glauoi to Paris, and 80-year-old El Glaoui took ship to comply. The four-member throne council so painstakingly created by the French to preclude the return of Ben Youssef now declared that the council's sole purpose was to reinstall him on the throne, and offered their resignation in a body.

In a matter of days, the whole elaborate contrivance of checks, balances, compromises and precautions which the French had devised in Morocco had collapsed on their heads. Last week, gulping bravely, the government issued a statement that it "welcomed the possibilities which now appear of ensuring for Morocco a calm, orderly evolution of its destiny in permanent cooperation with the renewed framework of France." In Morocco, where Ben Youssef has become in exile a hero he never was in residence, joyous nationalists bought lambs, chickens and goats to fatten up for slaughter when Ben Youssef returns. At week's end the French government itself bowed to the inevitable and formally decided that the man they had exiled so peremptorily two years ago could return to Morocco's vacant throne when ever it suited him. This might be hard on French pride, but what was pride if peace was to be had?

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