The city of Fez has given rise to a long tradition of literary and ethnographic description, both in the Arab and European worlds.
Our article considers the portrait of the inhabitants of Fez (Les Fassi) in Fez or the Bourgeois of Islam (1930) by the Tharaud brothers, from a colonialist and orientalist perspective by opting for a mixed and plural approach.
The ultimate aim of these two convinced colonialists was to contribute to spreading and magnifying the image of Resident General Lyautey. To do this, they exalted his expansion policy while allowing Morocco to be identified in France as a country in complete decadence to which Lyautey had given new life.
In the portrait they draw, the Tharauds essentialize the Fassi by reducing his identity to moral particularities, intellectual aptitudes, and psychological characteristics that are supposedly immutable and transmitted from generation to generation.
In short, the Tharauds have classified the Fassi according to his appearance, his religion, and, of course, his geographical origin, thus emptying him of his plurality and in particular of the possibility of embodying himself with complexity according to circumstances.