Following the invasion of Spain from the coast of Morocco by the Umayyad Commander Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711, during the 8th century the Arab caliphate armies invaded Southern France, as far as Poitiers and the Rhône valley as far as Avignon, Lyon, Autun, until the turning point of the Battle of Tours in 732.

[2] In 1402, the French adventurer Jean de Béthencourt left La Rochelle and sailed along the coast of Morocco to conquer the Canary Islands.

[3] In the 16th century, the sealing of a Franco-Ottoman alliance between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent permitted numerous contacts between French traders and countries under Ottoman influence.

[5] France, under Henry III, established a Consul in Fes, Morocco, as early as 1577, in the person of Guillaume Bérard, and was the first European country to do so.

[8] Bérard was succeeded by Arnoult de Lisle and then Étienne Hubert d'Orléans in the double position of physician and representative of France at the side of the Sultan.

This was also a time when England was trying to establish friendly relations with Morocco as well, in view of an Anglo-Moroccan alliance, with the visit of Edmund Hogan to meet Muley Abd el-Malek in 1577.

[7] King Henry IV encouraged trade with faraway lands after he had ended of the French Wars of Religion (Edict of Nantes 1598).

They returned to France accompanied by an envoy in the person of caid Sidi Farès, whose mission was to take back the books of Mulay Zidan.

In 1624, Razilly was put in charge of an embassy to the pirate harbor of Salé in Morocco, in order to again solve the affair of the library of Mulay Zidan.

[16] After the end of the Seven Years' War, France turned its attention to Barbaresque pirates, especially those of Morocco, who had taken advantage of the conflict to attack Western shipping.

[17] Some contacts continued during the 18th century, as when the French engineer Théodore Cornut designed the new harbour of Essaouira for King Mohammed ben Abdallah from 1760.

After the troubled periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, France again showed a strong interest in Morocco in the 1830s, as a possible extension of her sphere of influence in the Maghreb, after Algeria and Tunisia.

[19] The war was formally ended September 10 with the signing of the Treaty of Tangiers, in which Morocco agreed to arrest and outlaw Abd-El-Kader, reduce the size of its garrison at Oujda, and establish a commission to demarcate the border.

In the aftermath of the war, Sultan Abd al-Rahman sent a mission to France in 1845 led by Ambassador ʿAbd al-Qādir ʾAshʿāsh of Tetuan.

[20] The visit was described by the faqih and royal scribe Muḥammad Bin Abdellah aṣ-Ṣaffār in ar-Rihla at-Tetuania Ila ad-Diar al-Faransia (الرحلة التطوانية إلى الديار الفرنسية The Tetuani Journey to the French Abodes) in a lone manuscript for the sultan.

[32] Mehdi Ben Barka was a Moroccan politician, head of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces (UNPF) and secretary of the Tricontinental Conference.

On March 3, 1973, King Hassan II announced the policy of Moroccanization, in which state-held assets, agricultural lands, and businesses that were more than 50 percent foreign-owned—and especially French-owned—were transferred to political loyalists and high-ranking military officers.

[36] These relations between the French Republic and the Kingdom of Morocco exist mainly in the domains of trade, investment, infrastructure, education, and tourism.

In 2021, the French government determined to "drastically" reduce the number of visas issued to Moroccan citizens (as well as Algerians and Tunisians), arguing the lack of collaboration from those countries vis-à-vis deportations from France.

[37][38] In November of the same year, relations cooled due to the incidents on the Ceuta border, the resurgence of the debate on the sovereignty of Western Sahara and the conflictive diplomatic situation of Morocco with all its neighbors, especially Algeria.

The termination took effect on the same day as the European Parliament’s decision to vote on a hostile resolution that accused Morocco of intimidating and harassing journalists and activists.

[43][44] In July 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron declared Morocco's autonomy plan as the “only basis” for resolving the conflict, his statement expressing support for Western Sahara to be ruled “within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty”.

France financed 51% of the Al-Boraq high speed rail project, which was inaugurated by King Muhammad VI and President Emmanuel Macron on November 15, 2018.