Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938

THE AHMANSON FOUNDATION has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of

FRANKLIN D. MURPHY who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

Divided Rule

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Divided Rule

SOVEREIGNTY AND EMPIRE IN

FRENCH TUNISIA, 1881–1938

Mary Dewhurst Lewis

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, Mary Dewhurst.

Divided rule : sovereignty and empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 / Mary Dewhurst Lewis.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27915-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520957145

1. Tunisia—History—French occupation, 1881–1956.2. Tunisia—Politics and government—1881–1956.3. France—Colonies—Africa, North—History.I. Title.

DT264.L352013

961.104—dc23

2013018465

Manufactured in the United States of America

23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Peter

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Note on Arabic Spelling

Introduction

1 • Tunisia in the Imperial Mediterranean

2 • Ending Extraterritoriality?

3 • The Politics of Protection

4 • Contested Terrain

5 • Over Our Dead Bodies

Conclusion and Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first started working on this book, people would sometimes ask me where Tunisia was. No one does that anymore, since the remarkable revolution of 2011 showed the world not only where Tunisia is but also what Tunisians are capable of. This book is not the story of the unexpected overthrow that year of Tunisia’s autocratic leader, Zine el-Abidine ben Ali, but rather of a much slower process of governmental change: the transformation of what was supposed to be an indirect form of colonial rule, whereby France would rule through the local sovereign and his institutions, into a much more invasive form of colonial governance barely distinguishable from the direct rule that prevailed in many other parts of the French Empire. I deliberately try to tell this story from multiple angles: from the supposedly high level of international power politics to the more quotidian power struggles of everyday life experienced by individuals. Telling the story this way requires tacking back and forth between many different sorts of sources and also reading them differently. Thus, I use many diplomatic archives, but I don’t read them only for what they tell me about international relations in the traditional sense. Instead, I read them alongside local documents—from courts, taxation authorities, and conscription offices, among others. This method allows us to reconstitute the actions of the Tunisian people—even when their voices were not recorded—as well as the actions of those who endeavored to control them. Reading these disparate sources together allows a new picture of colonial rule to emerge—one where domestic governance and international relations are intimately intertwined in ways not hitherto appreciated.

Using so many different sources, I have incurred many debts in researching this book. At the Tunisian National Archives, I am grateful to the director, Henda Ammar, and her staff, particularly Amma, for assistance in a project that at first surprised them. Research in Tunisia also was greatly facilitated by the assistance of the Centre des Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) and by the then-director, Jim Miller, and associate director, Riadh Saadaoui. Béchir Yazidi, Leila Blili, Tom DeGeorges, and my sister-in-law Helen Sanders also offered invaluable advice about navigating Tunisia’s archives, libraries, and landscapes. In France and Italy, the following archivists, scholars, and librarians also provided precious aid: Damien Heurtebise at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes; Fabrizio Alberti at the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento a Roma; Mariapina Di Simone at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome; Stefania Ruggeri and Signor Pinacchio at the archives of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri in Rome; and the amiable staff in the ministry’s library, all of whom helped me gain access to records that were in the process of relocation. Colonel Frédéric Guelton at the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes helped secure access to records for me and a research assistant, Miranda Richmond Mouillot. In the United Kingdom, the National Archives (former PRO) are so well organized that I did not need help from anyone in particular. Current and former Harvard students who have provided research assistance and/or insight on the project include, in addition to Miranda: Ali Asgar Alibhai, Mathieu Bouchard, Dzavid Dzanic, Liora Halperin, May Khoury, Dana Lindaman, Sarah McIntosh, Iliana Montauk, Holly Redmond, Devony Schmidt, Guillaume Wadia, and Skye Weinberger. Ali Asgar Alibhai’s assistance in translating Arabic into English was particularly invaluable, especially as he did not just translate but also asked probing questions about what he was translating; his inquisitiveness has improved this book. For assistance in securing permissions to reprint images, I would like to thank Jean-Luc Vives of the Montpellier médiathèque; Katia Cordova of the Réunion des musées français; Gerhard Gruitrooy and Kay Menick of Art Resource in New York; Stefania Ruggeri, Maria Aicardi, and Pierfranceso Sacco of the Archivio Storico Diplomatico in Rome; Damien Heurtebise and Laure Guelho at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes; and Anna Voellner at Heidelberg University Library. I also thank David Leyenson of Harvard’s Widener Library for cleverly tracking down the original source of one of the cartoon maps I use in the book and Scott Walker for drawing the other maps that appear herein.

Since 2004, I have presented parts of this work in many different venues and thank fellow panelists, chairs, and commentators, as well as the audiences at all of the following institutions and meetings for useful feedback: Society for French Historical Studies meetings in 2004 (in Paris) and 2007 (in Houston); American Historical Association meeting in 2007 (in Atlanta); the Harvard Global and International History Colloquium; the Johns Hopkins University History Seminar; the Comparative Sociology Department at Yale University; the University of Minnesota; the Jews and Empire Conference at the University of California Los Angeles; the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where I was kindly invited by Nancy Green to serve as a visiting professor; the Cornell University History Colloquium; the Colonialisms and Imperialisms conference at Columbia University; and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, where I thank all my fellow fellows of 2011–12, the director, Carol Dougherty, and the administrator, Jane Jackson, without whose support I could not have completed this book during my sabbatical.

My editor at the University of California Press, Niels Hooper, intuitively understood this project from the beginning and supported it through completion, with the help of his very efficient assistant, Kim Hogeland, and the production team both at UC Press and Westchester Publishing Services. This book was conceived of, researched, and written in two distinct phases: before children and after. Accordingly, it went through a first phase of review at the University of California Press while still incomplete and another after the book was finished. This syncopated process allowed me to benefit from the collective insights of five different anonymous reviewers—two of whom have since revealed themselves to me as Julia Clancy-Smith and Martin Thomas. I am grateful to both of them, as well as to the three subsequent reviewers who remain anonymous. Clancy-Smith also provided feedback for the Journal of Modern History (JMH), where an article based on preliminary research for this book was published in 2007. Other still anonymous readers at the JMH and Past & Present also provided helpful suggestions that have improved this work. I thank both the JMH and Past & Present for allowing me to adapt portions of those articles in this work.

Other scholars and friends have read part or all of the manuscript or have provided a useful sounding board for ideas. They include Nourreddine Amara, Caitlin Anderson, David Armitage, Paul Arpaia, Sugata Bose, Vicki Caron, Herrick Chapman, Frederick Cooper, Tom De Georges, Victoria De Grazia, Nadya Hajj, Will Hanley, Maya Jasanoff, Cemal Kafadar, James Mc Dougall, Charles Maier, Mark Mazower, Susan Gilson Miller, Molly Nolan, Phil Nord, Roger Owen, Katy Park, David Powers, Emma Rothschild, Emmanuelle Saada, Sarah Stein, Moshik Temkin, Peter Wien, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Tara Zahra, and Malika Zeghal. My in-laws, Ann and John Dizikes, have provided intellectual, moral, and other support during the years I have been working on this project. My colleague and friend Alison Frank Johnson read almost every chapter, some more than once, and has provided stalwart friendship and support throughout this project. Only my husband, Peter Dizikes, has read more pages.

Research in four countries requires financial support, and I am indebted to the following sources for their generous funding: the Harvard University History Department; the Milton Fund of Harvard University; the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies Junior Faculty Research Fund; the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and its C. Douglas Dillon Fellowship and Distinguished Research Faculty Funds; the American Academy in Rome; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Newhouse Center at Wellesley College provided a lovely office in which to complete the manuscript. I also could not have completed this without the support of the staff in the History Department and the Center for European Studies at Harvard. In particular, I would like to thank Paul Dzus, Janet Hatch, Lori Kelley, Mary McConnell, Cory Paulsen, and Anna Popiel; your dedication and support are deeply appreciated.

This book is dedicated to my husband, Peter, who sacrificed time from his own career to accompany me to Tunisia, London, and Rome to complete the research for this book, and who is also a great line editor as well as an unflagging supporter of this book and my career. I am also grateful to our young children, Sebastian and Simon Dizikes, for brightening our lives and keeping everything in perspective. Sebastian, almost five years old, recently started asking me, Mommy, did you finish your book today? Now I can finally answer Yes.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

March 2013

NOTE ON ARABIC SPELLING

This is a book about a place where the majority of people spoke Arabic but at a time when very few of them wrote it. Accordingly, only a few of my sources were in Arabic and the perspectives of local populations were filtered through documents written in French, Italian or British English. These languages follow different traditions of Arabic transliteration, making consistency in spelling difficult. For common Arabic words found in the French, Italian, Tunisian and British archives, I have provided transliterations following the style sheet of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). For instance, instead of the French spelling caïd, I have used the transliterated qā’id; instead of the French habus, I have used ḥubūs, and so on. However, I have made an exception to this rule in the notes when they refer to specific letters or documents using the French transliterations. Thus an endnote may refer to a letter written by the caïd du Cap Bon, where the text itself would call the same person the Cape Bon qā’id. I also have made an exception in cases where the transliterated word (e.g. shari‘a; fatwā) has become common enough in English (sharia; fatwa) to be considered part of the English lexicon.

For proper names, I have generally left the spellings as I found them in the archives. If, for instance, an individual’s name was rendered as Mohamed (following French transliteration) rather than Muhammad, as has become standard in English, I left the name as Mohamed to remain true to the archives. However, when persons, places or events are well-known in the English-language world, I have used the common English spelling rather than the correct transliteration. Hence: Habib Bourguiba and not Ḥabīb Būrqībah, Abdelaziz Thaalbi and not ‘Abd al-Azīz al-Tha’libī, Zaitouna Mosque rather than Zaytūna, and Eid al-Kabir rather than al-‘Īd al-Kabīr. I have dropped diacritical marks from all proper nouns. When individuals are well-known by multiple spellings, I have used the most common in the text and mention alternative spellings in the notes. For assistance with translations from Arabic to English, I thank Ali Asgar Alibhai, May Khoury, and Himmet Taskomur.

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