LITMIR.BIZ

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informed the French diplomatic corps—but not “all of Europe”—that France’s objective always had been to “render impossible in the future any reprise of such acts of barbarity.” The establishment of the protectorate would, in his view, guarantee that.³¹ By “barbarity,” Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire was referring to the killing of some French soldiers during Khmir incursions across the Algerian border in April. But this was hyperbole, since the few hundred forays made by Khmirs in the past year did not prove their “barbarity” so much as their irreverence toward a border they regarded as arbitrary and their willingness to defend themselves against French maneuvers. Whatever assurances the French foreign minister had given the bey and European powers about the limited scope of the invasion in the past, he now retroactively suggested that no one should be surprised by the advent of the protectorate. Of course, he was partly right: France’s interest in Tunisia was hardly spontaneous. The impetus for French imperial expansion throughout North Africa considerably predated the 1880s, as France had long been concerned to protect its position in Algeria, where a state of rebellion continued on and off for decades following the 1830 invasion. At mid-century, as Julia Clancy-Smith has shown, the increasing reliance of Algerian rebels on Tunisian support had brought the French to intervene more directly on the Tunisia-Algeria border. Indeed, according to Clancy-Smith, “Tunisia’s open-door policy toward Algerian émigrés was one element, among several, that eventually brought its forced incorporation into France’s expanding empire.”³² That being the case, why not simply annex Tunisia to Algeria? This was what the European powers, once faced with the fact of the protectorate, were determined to prevent.

      • • •

      Of all Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire’s preinvasion promises to the bey and the European powers, the one he and his successors kept was that France would not annex Tunisia. As already suggested, this was due to both self-interest and international politics. The Bardo Treaty, which had established the protectorate without calling it one, was a carefully crafted compromise. In exchange for the bey’s consent that the French “military authority would occupy all areas deemed necessary for the reestablishment of order and security of both borders and coastline,” the French government agreed to protect the bey’s dynasty and to guarantee all preexisting international agreements between the bey’s government and other powers. In this way, France recognized, tacitly, both the bey’s sovereignty and the interests of other governments in Tunisia—most notably those of Italy and Britain.³³ Specifically, the treaty provided, in Article IV, that the French government would “guarantee the execution of existing treaties between the Government of the Regency and diverse European powers.”³⁴ For both Great Britain and Italy, Article IV became an article of faith, invoked repeatedly over the course of their subsequent relations with France in Tunisia.

      What rights did the bey’s “existing treaties” with European powers grant them? The most important probably were those that stemmed from the “capitulations” European governments had negotiated with the bey. In Tunisia, as in the Ottoman Empire more generally, the capitulations had originally been understood as revocable acts of generosity on the part of the grantor; over the course of the nineteenth century, they increasingly became the basis for expanding the extraterritorial rights held by European states on behalf of their subjects and protégés.³⁵ Consuls operated their own police services, but Tunisian authorities could arrest a European foreigner or protected person only in the presence of a consul’s janissaries or if caught en flagrant délit (“in the act”). Even then, the accused was supposed to be turned over to the appropriate consul immediately for adjudication by the consular justice system. If such foreigners were named in a civil proceeding, the Tunisian justice system served that person’s consul with an acte judiciaire. It was then up to the consul to follow up on the matter and summon or arrest his subject and encourage him or her to appear in native court. Any ruling by a native court finding against a European, meanwhile, required the exequator (“written authorization”) of his or her consul before it could be carried out. Consuls and consular courts, therefore, had considerable powers, including the power to ignore entirely the actes judiciaires with which they were served by the bey’s government. Since the capitulations provided the basis of foreign privilege vis-à-vis Tunisia’s native Muslims and Jews, European governments naturally wanted to make certain that these rights remained in place under the protectorate. Within days of the Bardo Treaty, the British government, in its eagerness to make clear the maintenance of its interests in Tunisia, issued an “Order in Council” that replaced those sections of the Ottoman Order of 1873 pertaining to Tunis with a new Order that explicitly asserted Britain’s continued extraterritorial jurisdiction in Tunisia (as manifested in the institution of the consular court), irrespective of Tunisia’s changed relationship to the Ottoman Empire.³⁶ As long as other European nations claimed extraterritorial rights in Tunisia, France was the preponderant but arguably not the only imperial power in the protectorate.³⁷

      The other main guarantee was the “most-favored nation” status that treaty beneficiaries were granted with regard to duties on commerce and virtually any matter implying a fiscal obligation to the bey on the part of Europeans. European governments guarded these very jealously, even though Tunisia never became a trading powerhouse to the extent that some other European colonies did. There were fishing and navigation rights to be protected, as well as exemptions from duties for both export commodities (e.g., esparto/alfa grass, phosphates, dates, olives, grapes) and imports of finished products from Europe.³⁸ Most-favored nation status and exemption from native justice were the pillars of European prestige in Tunisia, and they were what European powers continually insisted were guaranteed by the recognition of beylical sovereignty that was built into the protectorate system. No wonder, then, that the British and Italian governments became staunch defenders of the bey’s independence.³⁹ Although foreign consuls had long since ceased honoring the bey by kissing his hand, they defended his autonomy in the wake of the Bardo Treaty by insisting that their independent relationships with him should be guarded from French interference. Their own prestige was intimately intertwined with that of the bey.⁴⁰ If his power waned, so might theirs.

      The Italian consul was particularly attuned to the relationship of his own dignity to that of the bey. Less than a month after the conclusion of the Bardo Treaty, Consul Maccio wrote to Rome complaining of the new powers that Théodore Roustan, hitherto French consul general, had assumed. Roustan had informed the consular community that he had assumed the new title “resident minister” and would serve simultaneously as France’s representative in Tunis and the bey’s foreign minister.⁴¹ For Maccio, this was a legal impossibility: Roustan could not represent two countries at once, and he was clearly trying to establish himself as the “absolute master of the country” by undermining the personal authority of the bey and his ministers. Along with consuls from other countries, Maccio vowed to “abstain from responding” until he received further instructions from his home government.⁴² Although Foreign Minister Mancini offered him little immediate direction, the notes he jotted down suggest that he, too, wondered how it was possible, given that France and Tunisia were two distinct countries, that the “same individual can” represent both “debtor and creditor.”⁴³

      

      The announcement that Roustan was to serve as the “sole intermediary” between the bey and foreign governments took the British government “by surprise” as well.⁴⁴ Noting the lack of “known rule or precedent” for the French behavior, British Foreign Secretary Granville feared that if a friendly understanding on the question of consular representation were not reached with France, “complications may hereafter arise which it would be better to avoid.”⁴⁵ Yet, however loudly Granville proclaimed that the French move was unprecedented, surely it could not be lost on him that Roustan had just assumed the same title as that held by British administrators in India’s Princely States. General Menabrea, Italy’s ambassador in London, wasted little time in pointing out such comparisons to the British foreign office, underscoring that the title denoted the “vassalage of the power that received the resident in relation to the one sending it.”⁴⁶ Perhaps it was this awkward parallel that prevented her majesty’s government from pressing the issue, much to the chagrin of Italian authorities, who cautioned Granville that the

      government of

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