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Divided Rule. Mary Dewhurst Lewis
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isbn 9780520957145
Автор произведения Mary Dewhurst Lewis
Издательство Ingram
We have sacrificed 50/t [50 thousand] Italians who reside in the Regency.156
More than the rights of the individual Italians in Tunisia, though, Crispi seemed to regret what the treaty meant for Italy relative to France as a colonial power. “Watch what France is doing,” he noted in his diary in November 1896. “She is working on making an African empire from Madagascar to Tunisia.”157
Crispi’s reactions to the agreement, like those of other treaty opponents in the Italian parliament, give the impression of Italy’s power in the protectorate being reduced to nil by the 1896 conventions.158 In a nominal sense, this was true. The conventions and the beylical decree of 1 February 1897, which “definitively” abrogated “treaties and conventions of all kinds relative to Tunisia,” terminated the capitulations by nullifying the treaties upon which they were based.159 In effect, with the new diplomatic agreements, Italy finally recognized the Bardo Treaty and the French protectorate, and it put to rest any pretension it had to establish its own official colony there.160 And yet, the 1896 conventions guaranteed virtually all the same rights as had the capitulations. “In essence,” the French civil controller in Tunis, Charles Monchicourt, wrote during a much later period of conflict with Italy over Tunisia, “the conventions of 1896 were nothing other than Capitulations concealed by a coat of modern varnish.”161 Aside from the “political concession” of negotiating with France as the representative of Tunisia, then, Italy’s most substantial compromise was to agree that its “most-favored nation” status pertained only in relation to third powers, not France. For a government that once vociferously protested Roustan’s assumption of the title “The French resident and delegate [to the bey] for external affairs,” this was no trivial matter.
However symbolically humiliating the 1896 conventions were to Italy, they nonetheless guaranteed Italians many concrete rights in Tunisia. Although the commercial convention subjected Italian goods to the French minimum tariff, this commercial blow was softened by a clause allowing Italians to practice cabotage (the transport of goods or passengers between two ports in the same country) along the Tunisian coast, which was not allowed French boats in Italian waters. Italians also would be allowed to fish freely in Tunisian waters, ending French efforts to extend to the Tunisian coast an 1888 law forbidding foreigners from fishing in the territorial waters of France and Algeria. Probably these concessions to Italian boats and fishermen were made in recognition of how sparse French settlers were just fifteen years after the establishment of the protectorate. As the Dépêche Tunisienne put it, “we have never desired that they [Italian fishermen] should leave our coasts; for a long time to come they will be impossible to replace.”162 Nonetheless, in 1904, when Italians still dominated anchovy and sardine fishing and made up fully half of the sponge fishermen in Tunisian waters, protectorate officials rued the treaty’s cabotage and fisheries concessions, which had created, in their view, a “serious obstacle to maritime colonization by the French.”163 Similar complaints would arise in 1924, but the very problem of Italian dominance in the Tunisian fishing industry made it difficult to reverse Italy’s long-held rights. The disappearance of Italian boats and fishermen would, it was thought, disrupt the alimentary provision of the protectorate.164
For its part, Britain also renegotiated its treaty, even though it did not have to. Only a few months before the Italian conventions had been signed, the British consul had mocked the
modest position which he [the Resident General] proposed to assign to Great Britain and Italy in their future Commercial relations with Tunis—views founded on the idea which with amusingly naïve frankness he more than once conveyed to me, that England would humbly throw up her Treaty and gratefully submit to any terms which France might choose to dictate, while Italy was to receive only such crusts as France might choose to throw her.165
The fact that Britain did not “humbly throw up her Treaty” led Resident General René Millet to vacillate between showing solicitude toward the community of British subjects in Tunis and threatening annexation, which he correctly ascertained “might have some weight in persuading Her Majesty’s Government to come to terms as to the new Treaty.”166 Indeed, Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, was quite concerned about the precedent established by Madagascar, where Britain had recognized France’s protectorate in 1890 and the French had promised to respect Britain’s prior treaty rights on the island. Despite repeated assurances that France had no intention of annexing Madagascar, this is precisely what happened in the wake of France’s 1895 invasion.167 Relations in the colonies between France and Britain were in general tense at this time, and many feared that the ongoing “race to Fashoda” might end in war. Although the Fashoda conflict did not, according to historian Arthur Marsden, “cause Salisbury sleepless nights,” the prime minister did feel some urgency to avoid unnecessary colonial conflict.168 Britain thus agreed to many of France’s terms, while Italy ended up with much more than crusts of bread. In the Franco-British agreement of September 1897, only cotton products emerged exempt from the French minimum tariff. Given the importance of cotton to British commerce, this was hardly a small concession by France. Yet Italy secured far more from France than did Great Britain, despite the fact that Britain’s treaty with the bey, unlike Italy’s, had not been set to expire. This was ironic, since the whole point of initiating discussions with Britain in the first place had been to leverage negotiations with Italy. When Italy gave in first, the reverse occurred, and it was the British government that was isolated. Article I of the Convention between Great Britain and France gave up all of Britain’s special rights under the capitulations, stipulating that the British government “will abstain from claiming for its Consuls, its subjects, and its establishments in the Regency of Tunis other rights and privileges than those secured for it in France.”169
The conventions with Italy, on the other hand, went far beyond the vague guarantees of the capitulations to institute numerous positive rights for Italians, including the free exercise of virtually all “liberal professions” (lawyer, doctor, dentist, pharmacist, engineer, and so on) without a French diploma. The agreement maintained the “status quo” for the Italian hospital and for the twenty-one royal schools and two private Italian schools operating in the protectorate. Although the conventions included an extradition agreement, much like that signed by Britain in 1890, Italians could still request assessor pools composed in half of Italians. Most important, the conventions guaranteed Italians and their descendants born in Tunisia the right to maintain Italian nationality, a right that Resident General Millet had vowed to eliminate little more than a year before.170 Protectorate officials would regret the concession regarding Italian nationality for decades to come.
All in all, the French government’s concessions to the Italians gave the impression, as Paul Doumer put it, of “amazement and disbelief.” A ministry presided over by the protectionist Jules Méline, the man behind the famous Méline tariff of 1892, had concluded a treaty “where it appears that France gave everything without there being any indication that the slightest thing was conceded in exchange.”171 Doumer, who had been finance minister under Méline’s predecessor, Léon Bourgeois, may have had an ax to grind. But his conclusion had become by now a common refrain: “the Italian colony will continue to constitute a State within the State.”172 That had been the complaint launched against the Bardo Treaty at its inception. After fifteen years of reforms tightening France’s hold on the protectorate, the remark remained apt.
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France’s struggles to assert judicial power in Tunisia demonstrate the complications of its imperial project in North Africa. French rule in Tunisia engendered a division, first of all, within France’s own leadership: Some wanted to annex the territory outright, while others favored the indirect form of rule offered by the protectorate. Among the latter group, officials like Paul Cambon became increasingly aggressive in their efforts to end the capitulations in large part to outflank those who favored direct rule.
Convincing the military leadership that French civilians were in control required proving that other