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Introduction

ON 24 APRIL 1881, French military forces entered Tunisia, ostensibly to quell the Khmir tribe’s incursions across the Tunisian border into Algeria, France’s most cherished colony.¹ This task momentarily achieved, the thirty thousand troops did not withdraw; instead, over the course of the next three weeks, their presence solidified into an occupation.² From this position of strength, French authorities issued an ultimatum to the bey of Tunis, Muhammad al-Sadiq, and on 12 May, both sides signed the Treaty of Ksar Said (Bardo Treaty), an armistice agreement that abruptly established what amounted to a French protectorate over Tunisia—a country that had been, for roughly three hundred years, a virtually autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire.

Although French military leaders might have preferred to annex Tunisia, particularly as violent resistance erupted there in the wake of the Bardo Treaty, civilian officials rebuffed them.³ Instead of claiming that Tunisia, like Algeria, was an integral part of France, the foreign affairs ministry contended that it was a distinct state. Muhammad al-Sadiq would remain sovereign, and France would protect the Husaynid dynasty of beys he represented, while at the same time safeguarding its own interests in North Africa by securing a buffer on Algeria’s eastern border. This was hardly the only way France could have tried to control its new imperial acquisition. Given Tunisia’s diverse population—the result of its location at the crossroads of traditional Mediterranean commercial and trans-Saharan trade routes—one might have expected French officials to practice “divide and rule” tactics, manipulating or even fabricating factions among colonial subjects in an effort to achieve a more secure “imperium”—as the Latin phrase divide et impera implies.⁴ Instead, the French in Tunisia confronted a problem of “divided rule.”

MAP 1. Map of Tunisia showing the region of the Khmir tribe. Map by C. Scott Walker.

I call French rule over Tunisia divided because the protectorate arrangement institutionalized many sources of authority in the territory, dividing rule not only between France and the Husaynid dynasty of beys, as one might expect, but also between France and other European powers—especially Italy and Great Britain—whose prior treaty arrangements with the Tunisian bey secured them pockets of influence through consular courts, commercial accords, and other special privileges. The fragmentation of authority that was built into the original protectorate arrangement had profound effects on the whole arc of history in colonial Tunisia. Rather than serve unequivocally as a means of imposing French power, divided rule in Tunisia often frustrated it. For France, recognizing the bey’s sovereignty meant preserving Tunisian institutions, including the native courts, the bey’s army, the tax system, and more. To placate rival European powers, France also preserved the exceptional rights and privileges European governments had previously negotiated with the bey for their own nationals, including exemptions from native justice for many matters and immunity from conscription and head taxes. Thus, an intricate series of divisions—between the rights of Christian migrant “foreigners” or “Europeans,” on the one hand, and Muslim or Jewish “natives,” on the other, to cite one example—were institutionalized under the protectorate system. A consequence of the compromises France had made in order to claim Tunisia as part of its growing empire while at the same time preserving the “Concert of Europe,” divided rule thereafter presented a problem that French authorities continually struggled to overcome.

Above all else, France’s rule over its coveted protectorate was fragmented because ordinary Tunisians constantly took advantage of the protectorate’s system of divided rule, as they maneuvered within and between Tunisian, French, and foreign institutions to pursue material, legal, and social gains in their everyday lives. Individuals living in the Mediterranean region had, of course, long practiced affiliation switching to “improve their lot in life.”⁵ But while such “forum shopping” had been an irritant to local rulers for several decades, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it became a matter of high state.⁶ The Crimean War (1853–56), after all, had erupted in part over which power (France or Russia) had the right to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Now, the very act of jurisdiction jumping in Tunisia exploited and even altered imperial rivalries in North Africa more generally. By illuminating the dialogic relationship between personal politics and international power politics, this book tells the story of how efforts to address the problems of divided sovereignty often opened up new fissures in French rule.

French authorities initially had preserved beylical sovereignty partly in order to avert violent clashes such as those triggered by outright annexation in neighboring Algeria. Yet over time they sought to replace divided rule with undivided rule—instituting reforms that, by the 1920s, undermined the very sovereignty they originally had pledged to protect. As France’s leaders sought more authority over Tunisia in the 1920s and 1930s, however, they began to lose control of it, for their attempts to consolidate power helped engender challenges that eventually crystallized into a powerful independence movement. Although Tunisia had been designed as a kind of anti-Algeria in 1881, imperial governance in the protectorate came increasingly to resemble that of its neighbor by the 1930s. In turn, like annexation, protectorate rule provoked resistance, as Tunisia became home to one of the most precocious and organized nationalist movements in all the French Empire.

Uncovering this story does more than bring the twists and turns of Tunisian and European history to light. It also integrates many different strands of colonial, imperial, and international history. In recent years, the study of “empire” as a category of governance has flourished, as scholars have sought to define it and characterize what made it distinctive.⁷ Some have concluded that no empire has ever been unitary, in contrast to the ideal-typical nation state.⁸ Yet so much attention has been paid lately to the whole (the “empire” rather than individual “colonies”) that, at least for the so-called new imperialism dating from the late nineteenth century forward, scholars all too rarely have considered why imperial governance took the specific forms it did in distinct places and at different times.⁹ On the other hand, earlier studies of modern colonialism often presented the opposite problem, by focusing so intently on particular colonies that they gave the false impression of a closed-circuit relationship between colony and metropole. This organized colonial history, as James McDougall has critiqued it, “along the lines of colonialism’s own legitimate axes of movement” and neglected how a particular colony fit within the framework of imperialism or the world system writ large.¹⁰ Try as French officials might to contain Tunisian affairs within this small territory, the very structure of the protectorate instead made Tunisia a pivot for “interimperial politics” (between European powers) as well as intercolonial and intracolonial exchange (with neighboring Libya and French Algeria).¹¹ Accordingly, understanding how and why governance in the protectorate changed between the 1880s and the 1930s demands a reconstruction of relationships along hitherto underappreciated axes of political and diplomatic as well as social exchange.

These axes ran not only from Tunis to Paris but also from Tunis to Marsala (Sicily) and from Sicily to Rome. They went from Bizerte to Valletta (Malta) and from there to the British Foreign Office in London. And they traversed across the Sahara from the oases of southern Algeria to those of southern Tunisia and Libya, and from each of these to the imperial offices responsible for each territory.¹² Such an observation builds on the insights of the “new imperial history,” which demonstrated that metropole and colony are “interconnected analytical fields.”¹³ In much the same vein, competing imperial powers and neighboring territories should also be analyzed as “interconnected.” That is, instead of studying imperialism as a “centripetal” force rather than as a “centrifugal” one, the way the new imperial history did, I suggest that we look at the larger force field or “geographies of power” in which imperialism and colonialism operated.¹⁴

MAP 2. Tunisia as the gateway to the Eastern Mediterranean (map shows shipping routes). Map by C. Scott Walker.

The reorientation of imperial and colonial history I propose is not just geographic but also methodological. With the development of “postcolonial theory,” scholars often shifted away from focusing on factors we might characterize as “structural” to borrow instead from poststructuralism. For Edward Said, whose Orientalism is broadly credited as having founded “postcolonial” theory, imperialism was an epistemological system. Thus, while he acknowledged that “[t]erritories are at stake, geography and power,” he also contended that the contest over geography was “complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”¹⁵ If Said was convinced, even in his later work, that the material aspects of imperialism had been overemphasized, three decades after the publication of Orientalism, studies of “coloniality” and “postcoloniality” now abound.¹⁶ Yet for all these analyses tell us about the cultural facets of imperialism, important historical questions remain. If imperialism was about form, how did change come about? If the colonial encounter opened spaces for subversion, as Homi Bhabha suggests, then how can we explain the stubborn persistence of imperial rule?¹⁷

There is no universal answer to these questions. To address them, scholars need a methodological framework that transcends neat oppositions between colonizers and colonized, without denying uneven distributions in power.¹⁸ Beyond the circuit of metropole and colony, historians are beginning to expand their vision to include neighboring colonial territories, the full variety of imperial powers active in an area, and individuals who either traversed colonial boundaries or called them into question through their behavior.¹⁹ Such boundary crossing was not just ideational; it depended on and contributed to the geopolitics of empire. By this I do not mean simply the defense of colonial borders by soldiers or cannons, but rather the many other ways in which the act of defending interests and exercising influence in the context of imperial rivalry affected the entirety of what one might call, following Elizabeth Thompson, the “colonial civic order.”²⁰

Tunisia provides a case in point. If, within the halls of the Quai-d’Orsay, Whitehall, or the Italian Consulta, the question of who controlled Tunisia in territorial terms seemed more or less settled by France’s treaty with the bey,²¹ consular dispatches from Tunis and other local records tell a very different tale. Instead, these on-the-ground records reveal the onset of a sub-rosa form of imperial rivalry that penetrated everyday life, affecting the most basic matters of justice, taxation, property acquisition and transmission, and even burial rites. France’s invasion of Tunisia coincided with the rise of an international state system that was based on distinct sovereign states and apparent zero-sum games.²² To be sure, this “new nationalist calculus,” as Anthony Pagden has termed it, meant that “the more of this earth you could take away, the greater you became.”²³ Yet this scramble for empire did not cease upon the carving up of territory, and it was measured by more than colors on a map. European governments still tried to broker influence in lands claimed by their rivals, and locals engaged in their own scramble for power over their everyday lives by adroitly recognizing the opportunities divided rule provided them. These two forms of power struggle did not merely overlap; they were intertwined. Local disputes—between husbands and wives, creditors and debtors, bureaucrats and taxpayers—had the power to both reveal and exacerbate divisions between European states. As this example suggests, social life and diplomacy were not two isolated arenas of the Tunisian colonial experience; accordingly, my method integrates social and diplomatic history to show how deeply connected the two really were.

Not all colonial situations lent themselves to the power plays I describe here. In North America, for instance, as Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have shown, natives “lost the ability to play off rivalries” as nations claimed exclusive sovereignty over their respective territories.²⁴ In North Africa, by contrast, the advent of colonial competition altered the significance of these local efforts by native Maghribis, foreigners, and people of all religions. The bey’s 1881 capitulation to France did not signal the acquiescence of Tunisians to a rigid system of colonial domination constraining their room for maneuver. Instead, the international order in the Mediterranean and the civic order in Tunisia now mutually constituted each other in a fluid and dynamic system. This dialogue drove French decision making about colonial governance in the protectorate for the first half century of its existence. By the late 1930s, the burgeoning nationalist movement in Tunisia had begun challenging the very premise of the protectorate. In so doing, nationalists helped usher in a new, more overtly confrontational, relationship between Tunisians and their would-be “protectors” that culminated in Tunisia’s independence in 1956. This, too, altered the imperial game in the Mediterranean in new ways, as Tunisian independence in turn affected Algeria’s own independence struggle.

In connecting local social behavior in Tunisia to imperial rivalries throughout North Africa and the Mediterranean, I aim to combine approaches to the history of empire that, in their compartmentalization, often have overlooked the specific ways in which imperial power has been exercised, contested, and transformed in different colonial settings. By adopting this perspective, I wish to offer a fresh approach to the study of imperialism generally, while also finally putting to rest the Manichaean categories through which French imperialism and colonialism, in particular, are often understood.²⁵ Especially in the past decade, the history of French imperialism and colonialism has been presented in absolute and often moral terms. Like the Black Book of Communism, French scholars also produced a Black Book of Colonialism, whose very title gives away its perspective.²⁶ Exposés such as the Black Book helped bring the long-neglected history of French colonialism to public attention. But the new spate of scholarship condemning colonialism’s “crimes” also encouraged equally passionate reactions in defense of the “positive side” of French imperial expansion.²⁷ These analyses respond to contemporary political debates more than they do justice to the historical record, for terms such as positive and negative are not very useful for understanding history unless we can be more specific about their application: Positive or negative for whom? In what ways? With what trade-offs? There is no binary framework that can account for the diversity and complexity of colonial situations found in the French Empire.

In Tunisia, as elsewhere, this was true because the opposition between “colonizer” and “colonized,” where meaningful, told only part of the story.²⁸ Even the class of “colonizers,” for instance, was not unified. Italians outnumbered the French for most of the protectorate’s history, and Maltese British subjects also constituted a significant portion of Tunisia’s “European” population. The importance of non-French Europeans in the protectorate, as well as Tunisia’s strategic position at the gateway to the eastern Mediterranean (see Map 2), meant that French colonial authorities had to think constantly about the impact their decisions would have on both Italy and Great Britain as their principal rivals for influence in this part of North Africa.²⁹ Even issues that seemed to be of a most domestic nature—such as family law—engaged the interests of these other states in a variety of ways and meant that in virtually no domain could the French act with absolute autonomy as the colonizing power. International competition amounted to much more than gunboat politics and cannot be explained primarily as a strategic response to intermittent local crises.³⁰ In fact, it provided a constant backdrop to life in the empire with subtler but nonetheless profound effects on the territories under competition, and Tunisia in particular. Indeed, Divided Rule suggests that France even had a kind of imperial conflict with itself, as it had to constantly consider what impact decisions taken with regard to Tunisia would have on neighboring Algeria, and vice versa. After all, the boundary line between Tunisia and Algeria was not just an intracolonial one; it was an international border.

International and domestic affairs were inextricably linked in Tunisia in part because of the extent to which domestic rights intersected with questions of international law. Wittingly or not, Tunisia’s residents—“European” or “native,” Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—engaged in social behavior that played European powers off each other. Maneuverings within the justice system exemplified such behavior. In keeping with the more “indirect” and less expensive approach of “protectorates” (as opposed to annexed colonies), the French had refrained from overhauling the native justice system and had merely instituted French courts alongside it.³¹ Having done so, they then confronted the problem of “forum shopping” now recognized as common in legally pluralist societies.³² In order to inherit property, disinherit siblings, request or contest a divorce, or settle countless other intimate disputes, residents of Tunisia exploited the ambiguity of legal pluralism, moving between jurisdictions. Within the same family, one might find a wife who claimed to be “French” in order to sue for divorce, while her husband might insist she was “Italian,” which would make the divorce illegal. In Jewish families, brothers wishing to inherit the entirety of their father’s estate could claim, as “Tunisians,” to fall under rabbinical law, while their sisters often demanded recognition as “Europeans” to assert their access to some portion of it. A Muslim man might view himself as “Tunisian” regarding marriage or property matters, but “Algerian” (and thereby French) when it came to claiming exemption from Tunisia’s onerous head taxes or conscription for the bey’s army. In these and myriad other ways, individuals at once displayed the fluidity of their social identities and exploited the impact of the “new nationalist calculus” on local jurisdictional boundaries. These strategies, and French protectorate officials’ reactions to them, proved over time to be an important source of change in colonial governance, precisely because the behavior engaged questions of international law and diplomacy.³³

While it is undoubtedly true, as George Steinmetz has suggested that “the colonized were not the authors of their own native policy,” the history of Tunisia from the 1880s to the 1930s proves that the everyday maneuverings of colonized persons posed obstacles to French administrators and forced them to react in ways that altered colonial governance considerably.³⁴ That these modifications were not always to the direct benefit of native Tunisians did not alter the fact that it was their actions that had helped to institute change. Tunisians’ actions often spoke louder than words, or at least they left more of a paper trail in an era when few Tunisians were literate and fewer still recorded their thoughts in writing. Thus, while it has been difficult to recapture Tunisian “voices” for all but the elite, I have made a conscious effort to reconstruct Tunisians’ behavior and to extrapolate from it, to the extent possible, their perspectives and priorities. It was precisely such actions, and their international political ramifications, that protectorate leaders continually sought to contain. Indeed, French efforts to bring “order” out of what they perceived as “chaos” led them to gradually abandon the protectorate premise and slowly replace it with a more invasive, even “direct” form of rule.³⁵

Scholars often have distinguished between “direct” and “indirect” rule in assessing the nature of colonial governance. By direct rule, they mean the administration of colonies by individuals from the metropole, often under the immediate oversight of the central government at home. By indirect rule, they mean rule through local chiefs or princes, who are often granted considerable autonomy vis-à-vis the metropolitan capital. In its most encapsulated form, the French mode of imperial rule is figured as having been direct or “assimilationist,” while the British are noted for having ruled indirectly.³⁶ This notion probably stems at least in part from the universalism of French republican rhetoric, by virtue of which all parts of France, however far-flung, are taken to be (and ostensibly treated as) fundamentally similar.³⁷ In a juridical sense, assimilation also refers to the fact that at least some of France’s colonial possessions (notably the “old” colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane and the newer colony of Algeria) eventually constituted integral parts of—or were “assimilated to”—the metropole. Moreover, to the extent that a new policy of “association”—a concept resembling indirect rule—was understood to signal a shift away from assimilation, the notion that the policy it replaced had been assimilationist was lent credence.

The perception that colonial governance was highly centralized in Paris has contributed to the view that colonies were, in this narrow respect, assimilated to mainland France and directly ruled from there. Alexis de Tocqueville’s remark regarding Canada, where “the administration, interfer[ed] in even more things than in the metropole, and want[ed] to do everything from Paris, despite the more than eighteen hundred leagues separating them,” has been taken to apply to all French colonies, with few taking into account that centralization was also one of Tocqueville’s bugbears and that his view, thus, may have been exaggerated.³⁸ Indeed, central control over France’s North American colonies has since been analyzed as very limited.³⁹ Moreover, as Martin Deming Lewis noted as long ago as 1962, if assimilation meant direct or centralized rule, then France’s many protectorates (Tunisia, Morocco, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos) and mandates (Syria, Lebanon, Togo, and Cameroon) obviously fell outside the scope of this supposedly typical form of French colonial rule.⁴⁰ More important, the notion that colonial governance can only be either direct and assimilationist or indirect and associationist is not borne out by the evidence even of those territories ruled most directly. All sorts of exceptional laws and rules applied in Algeria, for instance, even though there were those who contended until the bitter end that “Algeria is France.”

The standard narrative that French colonial rule began intending to assimilate and then shifted toward association is also of limited use.⁴¹ Even if, in some parts of France’s empire, methods of rule shifted from direct to indirect over time, Tunisia’s trajectory as a protectorate was quite the opposite. There, partly in response to the intersection of everyday social problems and international affairs, French governance became more interventionist over time. No doubt these reactions could be seen as another instance of empires’ “bloody battle against time.”⁴² Maintaining control was, of course, a preoccupation of all imperialists. But the solutions they offered to the problem of control were unique responses to specific circumstances. This was as true of France as it was of Britain, which also ruled its colonies along the whole spectrum from direct to indirect rule.⁴³

Mere theories of colonial governance, however, can take us only so far. Instead, we might ask how Tunisia was governed. Why did the French not annex it following the invasion of 1881, as they had Algeria in 1848, eighteen years after their invasion of that country? For one thing, the French government felt it had little choice. To be sure, French forces eventually conquered Tunisia militarily,⁴⁴ but more than Tunisia was at stake. The government had to tread carefully in order to expand its North African empire without risking a backlash that might threaten its hold over Algeria. Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the eastern Mediterranean and Horn of Africa had become the sites of renewed rivalry between France, Great Britain, and a newcomer to the imperial game—Italy. The invasion of Tunisia on 24 April 1881 was at least in part a response to this heightened competition, even if France claimed instead to be reacting directly to threats posed by the Khmir tribe as they pursued their feuds across the Tunisia-Algerian border. The rationale of protecting Algeria had allowed France to occupy its neighbor and gain another strategic Mediterranean foothold. But, despite the urging of some military officials, including General Georges Boulanger (later known for his demagogic and ultranationalist electoral campaign in which plans to mount a coup against the French president were intimated), France stopped short of outright annexation and instead opted to rule indirectly through the bey. After all, France was still smarting from Germany’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine following France’s 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and could hardly condone occupation as a strategy of rule. Moreover, annexation had proved costly, both literally and morally, in neighboring Algeria.⁴⁵ For all these reasons, Tunisia was figured instead as Algeria’s antithesis: By preserving the bey’s sovereignty and local institutions, French leaders hoped not only to achieve what Sara Berry has called, in characterizing indirect rule, “hegemony on a shoestring” but also to avoid provoking the kind of bloody rebellion that the annexation of Algeria had occasioned.⁴⁶

But if France’s leaders initially viewed indirect rule in Tunisia as a way of avoiding the conflicts annexation had caused in Algeria, governance in the protectorate did not always remain detached. This book explains how and why the French mission in Tunisia changed, as leaders made choices that incrementally undermined the very sovereignty France originally had pledged to protect. Exploring this question also offers a new vantage point from which to analyze the nature and development of national sovereignty more generally. Was sovereignty—always an “organized hypocrisy” according to the political scientist Stephen Krasner—simply all the more hypocritical in the imperial context?⁴⁷ Was the bey’s sovereignty merely a “fiction” allowing the French government to disguise the invasiveness of colonial rule?⁴⁸ Or might the Tunisian case prove that sovereignty—especially in colonial contexts—has always been divisible, as Henry Maine argued in 1887?⁴⁹ To be sure, the bey’s sovereignty did not always constitute an unwelcome restriction on France’s power, for sometimes French officials exploited it in the interests of that power. As the British consul in Tunis once wrote, in crudely paraphrasing French attitudes toward beylical sovereignty, “Whatever we do right we take the credit of ourselves, and whatever mistakes we make we lay at the Bey’s door.”⁵⁰ The French also invoked beylical sovereignty for those aspects of domestic governance that they did not want to reform—such as the rights of indigenous people. In explaining why all Muslims and Jews living in Tunisia must be regarded as beylical subjects regardless of their origins, for instance, a French court reasoned that to do otherwise would constitute “meddling in the conduct [faits et gestes] of the Tunisian government,” which would be “unacceptable from every point of view.”⁵¹ In this case, recognizing the bey’s sovereignty worked to help the French maintain a particular colonial civic order—one that relegated Muslims and Jews to secondary status.

Yet the preservation of beylical sovereignty did not constitute a tool to be deployed at will by French officials, for it also sometimes frustrated their aims. To contend that the bey remained sovereign meant recognizing all existing treaties between him and the same foreign powers whose influence French authorities wished to curtail. While indirect rule had been, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, a secret to its power,⁵² in the new “age of empire,” it squared uneasily with the zero-sum game of imperial rivalry, which discouraged power-sharing arrangements. Concessions to foreigners in Tunisia conflicted with attempts to assert French primacy there. At every turn—when France set out to abolish extraterritorial justice, open an appeals court in Tunis, or change the nationality code, among other reforms—its imperial rivals invoked treaties with the bey in an effort to block (or at least influence the direction of) change. In the 1920s, some forty years after the establishment of the protectorate, the French still struggled to bring Tunisia’s European residents under the umbrella of a “common law.” In their effort to do so, they now contended that at a minimum France was the bey’s “co-sovereign” rather than just his protector. Imperial rivalry, and its effect on the rule of law in the protectorate, had brought France to abandon a central tenet of protectorate rule: that Tunisia was foreign territory. French leaders increasingly tried to have it both ways but found themselves in a trap, for their efforts to assume greater sovereignty over Tunisia fostered new conflicts with France’s rivals as well as Tunisians themselves. To be sure, Tunisia was never annexed. But neither did it resemble any longer the hands-off protectorate it once had promised to be.

This transformation in colonial governance was not just the inexorable result of what today might be called mission creep. France’s “mission” in Tunisia did not just grow. It grew in response to the mutually reinforcing nature of domestic and international conflicts of the time. Tax evasion and draft dodging, property and usufruct disputes, and divorce, custody, and inheritance battles were all common enough in any colonial context. What made them particularly vexing to French authorities in Tunisia, however, was that what might have been mere struggles for social authority often implicated, thanks to divided rule, foreign interests. As a result, conflicts that began between individuals could engender new international disputes, and changes in international relations could raise the stakes of matters normally confined to hearth and home. It was this compounding nature of local social life and international rivalry that led French authorities to seek to close the room for maneuver that divided rule had opened.