Diplomats in Barbary: Their political and personal activities in Morocco during the early 1830s

In the early nineteenth century there was an upsurge of interest in Morocco on the part of the European powers. Britain and France particularly invested heavily in their attempts to dominate and control the destiny of the decaying Sherifian empire. This article begins with a brief overview of the situation in Europe during this period with particular reference to Britain and France and their subsequent Moroccan rivalries. The author then focuses on the early 1830s, on the events surrounding the 1832 French embassy to the Moroccan sultan, Moulay Abderrahmane, and on the activities of the diplomatic community in Tangier, making use of the dispatches to the French foreign ministry of Count Charles de Mornay, of the journals of the French painter, Eugène Delacroix, and of the recently published memoirs of Julius Lagerheim, the Swedish diplomat in Tangier at the time.