Divided Rule - Mary Dewhurst Lewis

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the bey’s subjects was equally difficult. The frequent circulation of individuals between Tunisia and Algeria, Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Mediterranean islands such as Malta defied efforts to locate the origins of many would-be Tunisian subjects and allowed them to have roots in more than one place, or at least to claim that they did.8 Movement across international borders thus seriously threatened the bey’s efforts to assert authority over Muslims and Jews, and it raised a more enduring question of national jurisdiction than had patents of protection, since these, after all, had been liable to revocation. In the end, such efforts to clearly distinguish Tunisians from their neighbors highlighted the extent to which the colonial project in one part of the Mediterranean was inseparable from that in another. Since an effective protectorate required a compliant subject population, one of the first orders of French business was to shore up the bey’s domestic sovereignty.

      The process of defending the bey’s sovereignty expanded the purview of the beylical state and the protectorate administration while at the same time underscoring the limits of authority in each. The Tunisian protectorate had been imagined in contrast to Algeria: it would be a less invasive, supposedly more enlightened, and most of all cheaper form of imperial governance. Yet, France’s approach to ruling indirectly through the bey turned out to be very labor intensive for the French government. Thus, the very process of reinforcing the bey’s authority paradoxically engendered an increasing degree of French intervention in the day-to-day affairs of beylical administration. This occurred especially in three of the most vital domains of government left under the bey’s nominal authority—taxation, conscription, and justice. Already identified by d’Estournelles as the three domains of statecraft perturbed by the politics of consular protection, each of these also demonstrated the extent to which France’s colonial domination in Tunisia depended on the bey’s ability to assert sovereignty over his subjects. And yet the administration of each of these domains exposed fault lines in authority that protectorate officials constantly scrambled to fill. As French officials intervened more intensively in the everyday affairs of Tunisian government, they incrementally undermined the very logic of protectorate rule, and Tunisia slowly came to resemble a directly ruled colony.

      • • •

      There was nothing particularly novel about the Tunisian bey insisting that consular protection was at odds with the preservation of his own sovereignty. In 1866, observing the growing numbers of foreign protégés in the Regency, he had decreed that “we do not recognize any protection accorded to Tunisians, and we will continue to treat those with foreign patents of protection the same as our other subjects.”9 But the decree was a dead letter, ignored by European consuls. What was new in the 1880s and 1890s was that French officials themselves sought to revive the decree and curtail consular protection. After all, if Tunisia’s legal system were to be divided between “European” and “Tunisian” jurisdictions, one needed to be able to differentiate the two. Consular protection blurred, rather than distinguished, the boundaries between these categories by allowing Tunisians to jump jurisdictions as a result of acquiring foreign protection. Forcing the closure of consular courts had not alleviated the problem posed by this “crowd of clients”10 because the treaties and protocols signed as a condition of that closure granted protégés the same rights as native-born Europeans. This allowed other European governments to maintain an influence in the protectorate and also created circumstances in which foreign protégés obtained rights from which beylical subjects were excluded. Tunisians could reasonably wonder what benefit France’s protection of the bey conferred when affiliation with another European state seemed sometimes to offer greater personal advantages. This same problem had increasingly compromised the Ottoman sultan’s sovereignty, as growing numbers of dhimmī escaped Ottoman law by virtue of European protection.11 Thus, shoring up the bey’s authority over “native” Muslims and Jews and removing them from European protection were consistent with efforts to increase French control.

      The ink had barely dried on the September 1897 Anglo-French Arrangement when protectorate officials asked the British consulate to provide the names of all Britain’s protected persons in the Regency. The most notorious of these were the Ben Ayads, a wealthy family protected by Britain since the 1840s. Property belonging to the Ben Ayads was so substantial that, at the time that the closure of the consular courts was under negotiation, Paul Cambon initially rejected demands to settle Tunisia’s debt to the Ben Ayads, arguing that doing so would have “prepare[d] a new bankruptcy of the Tunisian government.”12 When the case went to international arbitration, the Ben Ayad family’s claims against the beylical state from before 1870 were dismissed, while its own debts to the government were not.13 Ben Ayad emerged the debtor, but the case nonetheless had been a major stumbling block in negotiations between France and Britain over the fate of consular jurisdiction. Now informed of protectorate officials’ desire for a list of British protégés, Consul General Johnston assumed that it portended a removal of protected status altogether and that the Ben Ayads “would dread reprisals for their anti-French policy in the seventies.”14 Of course, what Johnston was really worried about was that the “transference” of the Ben Ayads from British protection “against their will, and possibly much to their prejudice . . . would have a bad effect on British interests in North Africa.” Thinking beyond the Ben Ayads to the general principle, Johnston also took exception to the notion that “any phrase in the new Convention can be held to indicate that Great Britain intends to annul protection,” or what he called “quasi-citizenship,” if said status was granted prior to the French conquest.15

      Not all in the Foreign Office agreed with Johnston regarding the necessity of maintaining British consular protection in Tunisia. The first reader of the dispatch, a Mr. Robertson (possibly Charles Boyd Robertson, a Foreign Office lawyer), found himself concluding that the “whole sense and tendency” of Article 1 of the 1897 Convention “shows that the object is to abolish special privileges for foreigners.” Under these circumstances, if the French government should, “as Sir H. Johnston puts it, seek to ‘annul the status’ of the Benayad family, it does not seem that we should have any legitimate ground for remonstrance, since that ‘status’ is, virtually, abolished by Treaty.” W.E. Davidson, the Foreign Office legal adviser, concurred. But Lord Salisbury, Britain’s prime minister and foreign minister, had a different view. “With all deference I doubt the above construction,” he wrote. “We have renounced for our Consul in the future the right to give protection. But we have not invalidated the protection which, in all legality, our Consul has given to them in the past. The status of protected person is given once for all and it does not require renewal, though it can be cancelled. But of that there is no question.”16

      Sir Harry Johnston’s fears notwithstanding, French designs were quite in line with Lord Salisbury’s views. Protectorate officials did not want to “take over” protection from foreign governments so much as bring the practice to an end in the future. Accordingly, they were less concerned about the existing protection accorded to the Ben Ayads than about ensuring that it ended with the present generation. Johnston still considered this a “knotty point” and reported he was “personally . . . inclined to think that the status of British protection, once conferred on a man, would descend to his children unless revoked.”17 On this question, however, the Foreign Office was unified: all concurred with the foreign office librarian Augustus Oakes’s conclusion that “the system of giving British protection to persons of Foreign nationality and continuing it from generation to generation may be said to have been practically abandoned.”18 Oakes and the foreign office staff had anticipated French demands; over the next year and a half, the protectorate government required all European consuls in Tunisia to review their rosters of protégés; the bey then issued decrees definitively listing the names of persons protected by foreign governments.19

      The impact of the new protégé registry was almost immediate. As early as November 1898, only two months after the bey’s decree issued lists of persons protected by Britain, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, courts began using the lists as a basis for judging their jurisdiction in hearing cases. The test case came over a certain Rahmine Boublil, a Tunisian Jew who claimed to be a Dutch protégé. Boublil had pursued one Braham Castro before the Tunis justice of the peace for a debt of 420 francs plus interest that Castro allegedly owed him. Upon the justice of the

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