pre-Islamic past through excavations and restorations of archaeological sites. The French had a very different conception of historic preservation to that of the Moroccan Muslims. As the historian Gwendolyn Wright puts it, "The Islamic sense of history and architecture found the concept of setting off monuments entirely foreign", which "gave the French proof of the conviction that only they could fully appreciate the Moroccan past and its beauty." Emile Pauty of the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines criticised the Muslims for taking the view that "the passage of time is nothing" and charged them with "let[ting] their monuments fall into ruin with as much indifference as they once showed ardour in building them." The French programme of excavation at Volubilis and other sites in French-controlled North Africa (in Algeria and Tunisia) had a strong ideological component. Archaeology at Roman sites was used as an instrument of colonialist policy, to make a connection between the ancient Roman past and the new "Latin" societies that the French were building in North Africa. The programme involved clearing modern structures built on ancient sites, excavating Roman towns and villas and reconstructing major civic structures such as triumphal arches. Ruined cities, such as Timgad in Algeria, were excavated and cleared on a massive scale. The remains were intended to serve, as one writer has put it, as "the witness to an impulse towards Romanization". This theme resonated with other visitors to the site. The American writer Edith Wharton visited in 1920 and highlighted what she saw as the contrast between "two dominations look[ing] at each other across the valley", the ruins of Volubilis and "the conical white town of Moulay Idriss, the Sacred City of Morocco". She saw the dead city as representing "a system, an order, a social conception that still runs through all our modern ways." In contrast, she saw the still very much alive town of Moulay Idriss as "more dead and sucked back into an unintelligible past than any broken architrave of Greece or Rome." As Sarah Bird Wright of the University of Richmond puts it, Wharton saw Volubilis as a symbol of civilisation and Moulay Idriss as one of barbarism; the subtext is that "in ransacking the Roman outpost, Islam destroyed its only chance to build a civilised society". Fortunately for Morocco, "the political stability which France is helping them to acquire will at last give their higher qualities time