Hotel Excelsior Palace

This guide to the Hotel Excelsior Palace in Casablanca opens behind a shuttered second-floor balcony, where a group of Frenchmen once tried to keep their country alive by radio after France fell in June nineteen forty. It follows the politicians who boarded the steamship Massilia in Bordeaux hoping to keep fighting from North Africa, among them former ministers Georges Mandel and Edouard Daladier, and the Vichy-loyal authorities waiting for them in Casablanca. The hotel itself had opened in nineteen eighteen as a showcase of French confidence, with electric light, an American bar and a hundred and fifty rooms of colonial glamour.