Divided Rule - Mary Dewhurst Lewis

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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.

      ONE

      Tunisia in the Imperial Mediterranean

      THERE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED to be a protectorate. Or at least the bey of Tunis did not think so. After all, he already had a protector in the Ottoman sultan—albeit one from whom he had long asserted his independence and whose ability to protect any of his regents had been compromised by the Crimean War and its aftermath. In part because of that war (and the cost of raising a Tunisian army in defense of the Ottomans), Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey had found his finances under international receivership for over a decade.1 Nonetheless, he clung to what remained of his autonomy. In fact, the bey was caught between two imperial systems that clashed in the late-nineteenth-century Mediterranean: the Ottoman Empire and the New Imperialism.

      Claiming autonomy from the Ottoman sultan, the beys had cultivated relationships with Western European governments and their consular representatives for decades, even negotiating separate capitulations treaties with them.2 Similar to agreements by the same name that the Ottoman sultan had entered into with European states in other parts of the empire, these treaties granted European governments the right to judge their subjects under their own laws and thereby avoid their subjection to Islamic law, which was perceived to be prejudicial.3 By brokering these arrangements, the bey had deliberately sought the support of European powers as counterweights to the sultan. In the late nineteenth century, however, as Western powers scrambled to divvy up the African continent in a “new” phase of imperial acquisition, older forms of empire such as Ottoman suzerainty began to look more attractive to the bey.4 The trouble was that the sultan, like the bey, increasingly confronted challenges from those same Western European powers and struggled himself to maintain control of his many provinces. In an effort to capitalize on these dynamics, French leaders had tried to convince Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey that the Ottoman sultan was scheming to install a pasha in Tunis, as had been done in Tripoli. Arguing that the bey’s independence would be better safeguarded by France, the Quai-d’Orsay had offered to “protect” the bey in February 1881. In reply, the bey repudiated the charges and declined the offer as unnecessary.5 Later that spring, when the French used the Khmirs’ activities on the Tunisia-Algeria border as an excuse for intervention, the bey protested French military encroachment on his territory, even sending his own troops to try to quiet the Khmirs himself.6 But nothing he did could satisfy the French, who forced his hand on 12 May; the resulting Treaty of Ksar Said (Bardo Treaty) established the protectorate without mentioning the word.

      Like the bey, top officials in the British foreign office also had not regarded a formal protectorate as necessary, even though they had made clear to the French for some time prior to the spring 1881 invasion that Queen Victoria’s government harbored “no jealousy” with regard to French interests in Tunisia.7 That did not prevent her majesty’s government from expressing dismay at how the defense of French interests had mushroomed from a quick securing of the Algerian border into a full-scale occupation of Tunisia and its placement under French protection. Meanwhile, the advent of the protectorate was so upsetting to members of the Italian parliament that it helped bring down the cabinet of Benedetto Cairoli, who had served as Italy’s premier and foreign minister during the Tunisia crisis. For a while, it even looked as though the French parliament, too, might oppose the occupation-cum-protectorate, since debate in the National Assembly called into question the wisdom of an endeavor supported by Bismarck just ten years after France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany.8

      The Tunisian crisis accompanied the dawning of the “Age of Empire” or the “New Imperialism,” in which the acquisition of colonial territory was viewed as a zero-sum game, where one nation’s gain was another’s loss. In North Africa, this territorial competition helped set in motion the gradual dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.9 Yet, as the case of Tunisia exemplifies, this game was played not only on a purely geopolitical level, with sparring over boundary lines on a map. It was also about human beings and the boundaries of their allegiances. That this was so explains why Italy and Great Britain, both of which had substantial subject populations in Tunisia, were more exercised than other European powers about France’s establishment of a protectorate. Yet alongside this early phase in the “Age of Empire” coexisted the notion of a “Concert of Europe.” Whatever their misgivings, neither Italy nor Great Britain found France’s conquest of Tunisia worthy of upsetting European peace. Nor, evidently, did the Ottoman sultan, who, confronted at the same time with Western European powers encroaching on territory closer to his imperial center, did not raise an army to defend Tunisia—partly because France threatened him with war if he did.10 Nonetheless, even as Western European powers acquiesced to the expansion of territory falling under France’s influence, they remained concerned about what the conquest meant for their ability to defend their commercial interests and the rights of their own subjects or citizens who lived there, as well as what impact it would have on international relations in the Mediterranean more generally.

      Once the protectorate over Tunisia was a fait accompli, France’s imperial rivals quickly became invested in ensuring that it never became an annexed colony. To this end, they defended a set of premises they saw as distinguishing the protectorate form of governance from outright annexation: first and foremost, the maintenance of the bey’s sovereignty and the recognition of the beylical state in international law and, second, as a corollary, the continued recognition of all treaties and agreements the bey’s government had hitherto negotiated with foreign powers. France’s imperial rivals thus became staunch defenders of beylical sovereignty, since their own rights and those of their subjects hinged on his. The ongoing impact of the bey’s treaties with a variety of European nations, particularly Italy and Great Britain, was manifest in countless dimensions of Tunisian life—from property rights and taxation to criminal and civil law—and so ensued incessant jockeying with regard to issues large and small. This everyday maneuvering by residents of Tunisia will be examined in detail in the following chapters, but in order to understand how and why such behavior could affect Mediterranean politics more generally, it is worth considering the state of that politics at the time the protectorate was established, as well as what this form of governance meant for France, the bey, and the European governments maintaining interests in Tunisia.

      When France launched an invasion of Tunisia in April 1881, the stated casus belli was the threat posed by the activity of the Khmir tribe of northwest Tunisia to France’s colony in Algeria.11 At the outset, the French government pledged to begin its expedition on the French side of the Tunisia-Algeria border, which French soldiers would cross only if “military operations required it.” As the British ambassador to France recalled his conversations with the French foreign minister, Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, the latter had spoken “of the operations as if they would be confined to the neighbourhood of the frontier, and . . . directed only to the punishment of the lawless frontier tribes.”12 But as the invasion quickly extended beyond Khmir lands, Muhammad al-Sadiq wrote to inform the French that he regarded the invasion as “contrary to the rules of international law.”13 Several days later, he made his second plea for foreign aid in two weeks. In his letter to the British and Italian foreign ministers, he complained that instead of merely punishing the Khmirs, as the Quai-d’Orsay had continually promised both the bey and Europe was its sole intention, French

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