chapter 2

Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912

france’s tunisia: installing the framework

of the protectorate
qAli Bey well knew that retention of his office hinged on his rapport with the
French resident general Cambon. The new bey had initially condemned the
French invasion, but, once the antibeylical character of the resistance had
come to light, he took command of Tunisian forces serving with the French
army in Khmir territory. Mindful of rumors that some French officials
responsible for planning the 1881 operation had advocated deposing
Muhammad al-Sadiq in favor of his brother Taieb, despite his own desig-
nation as heir apparent, qAli had no reason to doubt that installing Taieb on
the throne remained an option. For Cambon, the beylical transition
afforded the opportunity to underscore the right of diplomatic supervision
that France had secured through the Bardo Treaty, as well as to prepare for
the extension of France’s role to the much broader administrative and
political oversight endorsed at the Congress of Berlin. Such oversight
might, if properly managed, also help to put paid to Ottoman political
claims in Tunisia. Toward these ends, and without objection from the
insecure qAli, Cambon orchestrated the October 28, 1882, accession cere-
mony of the new ruler. The resident general accompanied qAli from his
seaside residence in La Marsa to the Bardo Palace, where Cambon invested
him as bey in the name of France, bestowing on him the grand cordon of
the Légion d’Honneur. The adroit prior intervention of the French ambas-
sador in Istanbul ensured that this usurpation of the sultan’s customary
practice of issuing an investiture decree passed without incident in the
Ottoman capital. In the evening, the resident general, acting as the senior
diplomat in Tunis, gathered the foreign consuls together for an audience
with the bey.
Confident that qAli would toe whatever line the French chose to draw,1
Cambon now prepared to remove the two major obstacles to the exercise of
44

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 45
a totally free French hand: the International Finance Commission and the
Tunisian government ministries responsible for internal affairs. This he
accomplished on June 8, 1883, when he obtained the bey’s signature to the
La Marsa Convention. By its terms, France guaranteed the repayment of the
Tunisian debt (thus rendering the International Finance Commission
irrelevant) in return for the execution of administrative reforms stipulated
by the resident general. In depriving qAli of any meaningful sovereignty, the
accord converted Tunisia into a French protectorate. qAli Bey continued to
reign, but he no longer ruled. By the time his son Muhammad al-Hadi
(1902–6), and then his nephew Muhammad al-Nasir (1906–22), came to
the throne, protectorate officials took beylical subservience for granted.
The La Marsa Convention ended a debate in France, dating from the
invasion, about Tunisia’s final status. Many opponents of colonial expan-
sion lobbied for a total withdrawal, arguing that the deployment of troops in
Tunisia weakened the defenses of metropolitan France. They also feared
that the multitude of international agreements to which Tunisia was a
party, many of them including most-favored-nation clauses, in conjunction
with Tunisia’s substantial Maltese and Italian populations, made for a
diplomatic morass likely to confound the most determined French admin-
istration. French military leaders and businessmen already established in
Tunisia drew a quite different lesson from the same set of facts. To them,
any approach short of a declaration of full French sovereignty, suppressing
all foreign claims at a single stroke, would saddle France with the burdens of
annexation but none of its advantages. Protectorate proponents occupied a
middle ground. They believed that preserving the shell of an indigenous
government lessened the likelihood of stimulating the bitterness and hos-
tility that political assimilation to France had produced among the indige-
nous people of neighboring Algeria. Moreover, maintaining such a façade
allowed for the Tunisian funding of a French-supervised administration.
For the duration of the protectorate, French officials and residents in
Tunisia frequently referred to Algerian policies and practices, occasionally
as models to emulate but more often as examples of what not to do.
By 1883, the Tunisian debt had soared to more than 140 million francs, or
eleven times the government’s annual income.2 As the initial quid pro quo
for guaranteeing the debt, France insisted on placing key agencies, begin-
ning with the Ministry of Finance, under the leadership of French specialists
accountable to the resident general. Cambon made this department his first
target because the systematic collection and sound management of govern-
ment revenue were critical both to maintaining the confidence of foreign
creditors and to implementing the reforms envisioned in the La Marsa

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 46 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
Convention. To satisfy their chronic need for funds, leaders in the prepro-
tectorate era (with Khair al-Din as a notable exception) had imposed a
welter of generally regressive levies on production and commerce. After the
restructuring of the ministry into a directorate of finances, its French head
reduced the rate of many existing taxes and saw to the disciplining of state
agents responsible for irregularities in their assessment and collection. These
measures, coupled with the protectorate authorities’ greater thoroughness
and proficiency, increased revenue and placed the government on a solid
financial footing that enabled it, in the decade after 1883, to phase out most
export duties, lower market fees considerably, and reduce the majba by 25
percent.3 Even with these cutbacks, however, the payment of taxes still
occasioned significant hardships for many Tunisians.
Under Cambon and his successors, Justin Massicault (1886–92), Urbain
Rouvier (1892–4), and René Millet (1894–1900), all but three Tunisian
ministries experienced similar reorganizations under the supervision of
French officials. Collectively labeled as the technical services of the protec-
torate, these agencies employed a smattering of Tunisians, but only at the
lowest echelons or as interpreters, a practice that embittered the many
displaced administrators, clerks, and other officials of the beylical bureauc-
racy. With the resident general acting as the foreign minister and the general
commanding French troops as the minister of war (as stipulated by the
Bardo Treaty), only the minister of the pen (the chief clerk), the minister of
justice, and the prime minister were Tunisians and had Tunisian staffs. To
advise the prime minister and coordinate the bureaucracy, Cambon created
the office of secretary-general of the protectorate, to which he appointed
Maurice Bompard, a senior French diplomat.
Provincial governance lent itself less well to the displacement of Tunisian
office holders. The qaids and khalifas who represented beylical authority in
the cities, towns, and other sedentary regions usually came from powerful
local families; in rural areas where the tribe and the qiyada (the adminis-
trative unit headed by a qaid ) overlapped, they were tribal leaders. Few
showed any inclination to change habitual, and sometimes repugnant,
practices. In order to standardize administrative units, but also to curb the
tribal notables, the protectorate authorities redrew the boundaries of the
existing qiyadas to form divisions based on geography rather than on kin-
ship. Beginning in the 1890s, appointments as urban provincial officials
often went to promising graduates of Sadiqi College in the expectation that
they would bring an enlightened approach to these positions.
At the start of the protectorate, French consuls and vice-consuls repre-
sented the resident general in several of the larger provincial centers, while

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 Map 2.1. Cities and tribes, ca. 1912. With the exception of the desert regions of the deep
south, which were administered by French army officers, the cities and tribal areas of the
protectorate were presided over by contrôleurs civils, French officials whose supervision of
local Tunisian authorities replicated the resident general’s oversight of
the bey and his ministers.

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 48 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
French soldiers monitored the behavior of qaids and khalifas in rural areas.
Cambon worried that permanently sanctioning such a role for the army
would give rise to a destabilizing, Algerian-style “régime du sabre.”
Throughout his tenure he sought a viable alternative, but was thwarted
by the military’s insistence that it alone could guarantee security in the
countryside. In 1887, shortly after becoming resident general, Justin
Massicault built on Cambon’s efforts and created a corps of contrôleurs civils
(civil controllers) to act as his eyes and ears beyond Tunis. Posted from La
Goulette to Gafsa in thirteen circonscriptions corresponding to qiyadas, the
contrôleurs provided direction and guidance to qaids and khalifas and had at
their disposal small contingents of Tunisian gendarmes to carry out basic
police work. In those cities and towns where the size of the European
population warranted the creation of a municipal council, they also moni-
tored the work of that body.4 This arrangement preserved the façade of
Tunisian government, but the contrôleurs and the resident general, to whose
office they reported directly, expected nothing less than the diligent execu-
tion of their own suggestions. In a few remote areas of the south and west
where tribes had customarily heeded the writ of the government only under
duress, a Service des Renseignements (renamed Service des Affaires
Indigènes in 1900) based on the Algerian model of military administration
of the tribes fulfilled a similar function. Only in 1906, after twenty years of
intense efforts by Cambon, Massicault, and their successors, did the
Residency finally gain control over these officers and dispel the recurrent
nightmare of a military role in the administration of the protectorate.
The restructuring of the central and regional governments consolidated
French control over the Tunisian population, but Cambon also recognized
the need to bring the foreign community, 95 percent of whose twenty
thousand members in 1883 were not French,5 within the orbit of the
protectorate. The Ottoman-era Capitulations and the more recent treaties
negotiated with, or imposed by, European states, accorded foreigners
privileges, most notably the maintenance of consular courts, that had
limited the beylical government’s control over them and now similarly
constrained protectorate officials. Cambon ordered the consular courts’
suppression in 1883. Individuals subject to their jurisdiction acquired full
access to the French judicial system that was emerging in the protectorate
and consisted of local justices of the peace and a court of first instance in
Tunis (eventually supplemented by other courts in Sousse, Sfax, and
Bizerte).
Britain, which confronted a similar situation in Egypt, raised no objec-
tion to this decision. Italy’s acceptance was considerably more grudging,

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 49
and neither the Italian residents of Tunisia, who constituted more than half
of the foreign population, nor the Italian government intended to surrender
other dispensations secured in the 1868 Italo-Tunisian treaty merely at the
behest of France. The Italian premier, Francesco Crispi, described Tunisia
as “an Italian colony occupied by France,” while L’Unione, the leading
Italian-language newspaper in Tunis, insisted that the situation in North
Africa remained “unsettled, that it could not last, and that the rights of Italy
in Tunisia were equal to those of France.”6 As Italy stubbornly refused to
acknowledge the inevitability of French control, the Italian population of
Tunisia mushroomed, increasing by 88 percent during the first decade of
the protectorate. By 1896, when France acquiesced to Italian insistence on
retaining most of the privileges accorded in the 1868 Italo-Tunisian treaty in
return for Italy’s recognition of the protectorate, the fifty-five thousand
Italians living in the country outnumbered French citizens by a ratio of five
to one.7 Confident that the 1896 settlement had carved out a secure, albeit
not dominant, niche for them, Tunisia’s Italians began enlarging and
refining the numerous political, educational, social, cultural, and religious
institutions that already existed within their community in order to under-
score and preserve its distinctive identity.
The thin French population in the protectorate led to a search for
“demographic allies” to offset the Italians’ numerical superiority. Britain’s
retreat from Tunisia and the absorption of its subjects into the French legal
system made the seven thousand Maltese living in the country in 1883 prime
candidates for this role. When French Catholics first came into contact with
the Maltese in Tunisia, they tended to belittle the traditional, and in their
view unsophisticated, Maltese practice of the faith. Among other things,
they cited as evidence the blind obedience of the Maltese to their clergy and
their exceptionally high birthrate. By the end of the century, however,
supporters of the protectorate had come to see its twelve thousand–strong
Maltese community as a fertile source of settlers not only for Tunisia but for
all of French North Africa. In his dealings with the Catholic population,
Cambon had an important ally in Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, the arch-
bishop of Carthage and Algiers. Lavigerie fervently advocated linking
France’s political mission and the church’s spiritual one in North Africa –
a connection symbolized in Tunis by the situating of the Residency build-
ing and the cathedral directly opposite each other on the Avenue de France.
The prelate urged French priests to support the policies of the protectorate
and to foster the assimilation by Maltese and Italian Catholics of France’s
aims. A concordat between France and the Vatican in 1891 left the See of
Carthage a preserve of the French church, much as the Tunisian state had

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 50 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s

Figure 2.1. Avenue de France, ca. 1920. The main thoroughfare of the European city ran
from the medina to the Lake of Tunis. This view is from the Bab al-Bahr (Porte de France),
the most important junction between the old and new cities. The spires of the Cathedral of
St. Vincent de Paul can be seen in the left background. The headquarters of the protectorate
administration were across the avenue.

become a preserve of the French government. When the last Italian

Capuchin priests, whose order had worked in Tunisia since the seventeenth
century, decided to leave in the same year, Lavigerie made no effort to
discourage them.8
The establishment of French courts endowed Tunisia with two discrete
judicial administrations (not unlike the preprotectorate legal configuration,
except for the consolidation of the foreigners’ tribunals under a single
authority). Justice for Tunisians was dispensed in religious courts (both
Islamic and Jewish) or by the ministry of Tunisian justice, referred to simply
as wizara (ministry), unless the Tunisians became parties to a dispute
involving Europeans, in which case the French courts took precedence.
The wizara – in essence, the state secular court – derived its authority from
the traditional right of the ruler to adjudicate criminal and civil matters. The
sharia courts judged personal status cases and property disputes in accord-
ance with Islamic law, while the rabbinical courts applied the Mosaic law to
similar issues.
Preserving the sharia courts was essential to virtually all Muslims, but
considerable differences of opinion about an appropriate legal structure

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 51
emerged among Tunisia’s twenty-five thousand Jews. In the early years of
the protectorate, a number of prosperous Grana businessmen requested
access to French courts, and even to French citizenship, on the basis of the
1870 Crémieux Decree granting those rights to Jews in Algeria; however,
protectorate officials firmly rejected the extension of such privileges. They
pointed out that the Bardo and La Marsa protocols precluded the transfer of
Tunisians from beylical to French sovereignty, a prohibition that they knew
the contingent of politically conscious Tunisians emerging in the late 1880s
would defend vigorously. In any event, many Tunisian Jews also opposed
assimilation, the desirability of which became the central issue dividing two
well-organized and articulate political camps within the Jewish community.
In addition to advancing cultural and religious arguments, critics stressed
the imprudence of alienating the Muslim majority, with whom Tunisian
Jews had generally enjoyed good relations and with whom they had more in
common than with the French, particularly after the establishment of the
protectorate. Reminding their coreligionists of the virulent anti-Semitism of
many settlers, they cast doubts on the alleged benefits of integration and
warned of the cool reception its pursuers were likely to encounter.9
In 1909 the news that impending French legislation would facilitate the
naturalization of Tunisians provoked animated debate in Jewish circles, as
well as between Jews and Muslims. Under the final terms of the 1910
Messimy Law, however, very few Tunisian Jews qualified for citizenship.
Those whose hopes were dashed by the rigorous conditions of the bill
reacted with bitterness to their experiences of rejection by French officials,
contempt on the part of many private French citizens in Tunisia, suspicion
from their Muslim countrymen, and estrangement from their fellow Jews.
The search of these deeply frustrated individuals for a hospitable political
environment led some to French socialist circles and others to the
Aghoudat-Sion, a Tunisian Zionist movement organized in 1911. These
were the ideologies to which they subsequently devoted themselves.
Although French officials refrained from infringing on the operation of
the religious courts, they did introduce changes in the wizara, most dra-
matically in 1896 by placing it under the control of a newly created technical
service, the Directorate of Judicial Services, headed by a French judge. Over
the next few years, this agency established regional tribunals in six large
cities, leaving the wizara to hear cases from the capital but also to rule on the
most serious matters arising in the provinces and to resolve appeals from
lower court judgments. A decade later, the directorate attached French
representatives, called commissaires du gouvernement, to all Tunisian secular
courts, creating yet another network of French supervision ostensibly

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 52 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
parallel to, but in reality in control of, officials of the beylical government.
Not all of these men spoke Arabic – the language of the proceedings they
were meant to oversee – and few had any legal background or training, but
their negative assessment could result in the destitution of even the most
senior Tunisian judge. Between 1906 and 1913, French lawyers and Tunisian
wizara officials collaborated in drawing up a code of contracts, a penal code,
and a code of civil procedures, all of them deeply rooted in French law.
The jurisdiction of sharia courts over property matters had long enabled
Tunisians to use their knowledge of Islamic law to obstruct foreigners’
attempts to acquire land and to challenge their title to parcels they professed
to own. Cambon recognized the importance of sidestepping a procedure
certain to inhibit future European settlement, but, in deference to Tunisian
sensibilities concerning the sharia, he proceeded cautiously. He began by
appointing a Franco-Tunisian commission, a third of whose members were
either ministers in the beylical government or high officials of the Islamic
legal system, which he charged with the tasks of codifying existing property
laws and developing a method for representatives of the protectorate to have
a voice in their adjudication. In 1885 the commission formulated a mech-
anism, available to Tunisians and foreigners alike, for registering privately
owned land with the state, which then issued an unassailable title. Disputes
involving such land went before the Tribunal Mixte Immobilier (Mixed
Real Estate Court), presided over by a French judge and staffed by six other
magistrates, half of them French, half Tunisian.10 The placing of this hybrid
court under the aegis of the Directorate of the Interior rather than the
Directorate of Judicial Services confirmed its primary purpose of strength-
ening foreigners’ claims to land rather than guaranteeing the equitable
dispensation of justice.

the european settlers’ tunisia: prosperity

and penury
In the early years of the protectorate, French land acquisition followed a
pattern that had emerged soon after the 1861 constitution had legalized the
purchase of real estate by foreigners. Corporations and wealthy speculators
bought large tracts of land, often in the form of hanashir (rural estates
belonging to the royal family or other notables and usually consisting of a
combination of state-owned and habus land). In 1880, Prime Minister Khair
al-Din had sold one such property near Enfida that comprised more than
100,000 hectares. Five years later, the Enfida and Sidi Thabit holdings of
the Société Marseillaise de Crédit, along with 30,000 hectares controlled by

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 53
five other investment companies, accounted for 88 percent of all French
property in the protectorate, with the remaining 12 percent divided among
thirty-four other owners.11 Tunisian peasants continued to work this land,
occasionally as renters but more likely as sharecroppers, since the specula-
tors drove up its value to a level few Tunisians could afford. Alternatively,
the companies resold smaller parcels to individual buyers, many of whom
were Italians. Much of this land was well suited for growing wheat, but the
surge of Russian and North American cereal exports to Europe over the last
two decades of the century steadily reduced their prices, making it difficult
to export Tunisian wheat profitably. As a result, as much as a third of the
speculators’ land sometimes lay fallow.
Although the French population of the protectorate exceeded ten thou-
sand within a decade, few of the new arrivals chose to settle in rural areas.
Some 400,000 hectares had come into French hands by 1892, but the
number of properties had risen only to 333 and no more than fifteen
hundred French citizens were engaged in agricultural work. Only in 1897
did the number of French-owned properties reach 1,000, although the
census of the previous year placed a mere 22 percent of the French pop-
ulation (just over two thousand persons) on the land. By contrast, roughly
one thousand Italian families, some of whose claims predated the protec-
torate, owned and worked 27,350 hectares in the early 1890s, at a time when
the overall Italian population exceeded that of the French by a factor of
five.12 This pattern of large French commercial ventures with few settlers
and small Italian holdings farmed by their owners heightened concerns in
Tunis and Paris about demographic imbalances in the protectorate and
stimulated efforts to attract French colons (settlers).
In 1890, Resident General Massicault created a directorate of agriculture
to facilitate French citizens’ purchases of desirable agricultural property.
“Official,” or state-promoted, colonization began in the following year,
when the directorate placed on sale thousands of hectares of state-owned
land in the vicinity of Tunis.13 But the stringent conditions it imposed –
cash payments, a commitment not to resell, and the formal deeding of the
land only after the construction of a house and the start of cultivation on
two-thirds of the plot – deterred many would-be buyers. Not until 1896,
when these obligations were relaxed and the size of the parcels doubled, did
sales reach desired levels. A more immediately successful step entailed
simplifying the land registration process and making it less expensive by
transferring most of the costs incurred from the registrant to the govern-
ment. In 1893, the first year of this revised system, more registration
applications were filed than in the previous seven years combined, although

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 54 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
many of these claims originated with Tunisians. By beylical decree mawat,
or dead land, reverted to the state in 1896, thus also becoming available for
French purchase.
Land collectively held by tribes and habus land represented two other
large and lucrative reservoirs that were also tapped for the benefit of colons.
The government seized the former in 1901. Three years later, the Tribunal
Mixte ruled that tribes did not constitute organized groups and could not,
therefore, own property as collectivities. Extensive areas that had always
technically belonged to the state, but on which tribes had enjoyed rights of
usufruct and pasturage, were now subject to alienation. Even before the
inauguration of “official” colonization, a legal ruse had enabled non-
Muslims to lease habus lands on a permanent basis. Starting in 1898, the
government required the Habus Council to sell a minimum of 2,000
hectares of its property to French buyers each year. The Directorate of
Agriculture selected the parcels, setting their prices in consultation with the
council. Between 1892 and 1914, these and other “official” colonization
strategies transferred more than 250,000 hectares from Tunisian to
French control and increased French landholdings to approximately
700,000 hectares, or 84 percent of all the land in non-Tunisian hands, by
the outbreak of World War I.
The cultivation of vines and olive trees predominated on the property
acquired by the French during those two decades as grapes and olives, and
their by-products of wine and oil, developed into the most lucrative
products of colon agriculture. The devastation wrought on French vineyards
by phylloxera infestations beginning in the 1860s prompted the extension of
viticulture in both Algeria and Tunisia. In the latter, during the 1880s, the
area planted with vines quintupled from 1,000 to 5,000 hectares. Although
French production revived in the 1890s, the demand for Tunisian wine
remained strong, with the area devoted to viticulture covering more than
15,000 hectares by the turn of the century.14 Small-scale French settlers
owned most of the vineyards, which were located in the region of Tunis and
in the Majarda Valley, but often hired Italian agricultural laborers to work
them. Because Tunisians had no interest in acquiring the skills necessary to
produce wine, the profits of viticulture accrued almost entirely to colons.
Olives were an entirely different matter. In the Sahil, the focal point of
olive cultivation and oil production, small privately owned farms immune
to foreign acquisition except through voluntary sales, flourished. But Paul
Bourde, the director of agriculture from 1891 to 1895, envisioned the devel-
opment of colon olive plantations in the triangle of steppe land bounded by
Kairouan, Gabès, and Gafsa. He knew that the historical and archeological

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 55
record showed that this desolate region in which nomadic tribes pastured
their livestock and raised small crops of cereals had been an important olive-
producing area in antiquity. In 1892 he used his authority to open state lands
for colonization to place on sale, at bargain prices, a vast tract of land west of
Sfax that Muhammad al-Sadiq had confiscated from a family of local
notables, the Siala, in 1871. Within a year, the directorate received eight
hundred requests to purchase portions of the estate. Most came from the
Tunisian bourgeoisie of Sfax, but French settlers also laid claim to more
than a third of the land. At Bourde’s insistence the new owners negotiated
traditional agricultural contracts, called mugharasat, with Tunisian pea-
sants. In this arrangement, the owner leased the land to peasants who
planted and cultivated olive trees while raising cereal crops for their own
use between the trees until they bore fruit, at which point the owner and the
lessee divided the land equally. The cultivation of the Siala lands made the
Sfax region and its hinterland a major colon center for the growth and
processing of olives, albeit at the expense of the nomadic tribes.
Many French officials in both Paris and Tunis considered strong, mutu-
ally beneficial Franco-Tunisian commercial relations to be as important in
binding the protectorate to France and marginalizing the interests of other
European states as was the acquisition of property by French citizens.
Tunisian international trade entailed the export of agricultural products,
with olive oil foremost, and the import of manufactured ones. Even after the
inauguration of the protectorate, however, more of Tunisia’s crops went to
Italy than to France, owing to the former’s lower tariffs. In order to capture
this trade, in 1890 France removed the duty on many imports from Tunisia
and imposed only minimal taxes on the remainder. Skyrocketing sales to
France led to an immediate and massive influx of francs, which had become
legal tender in the protectorate in 1888. This glut, in conjunction with a
scarcity of piasters, which had begun disappearing from circulation as
Tunisians hoarded them to protest the new coinage, diminished the franc’s
value relative to the piaster. Within months of the new tariff regime taking
effect, the Directorate of Finances ordered the withdrawal of Tunisian
piasters and their replacement by coins minted in Paris and denominated
in francs and centimes. Each had a French reverse and an Arabic obverse, on
which the name of the bey, the value of the coin, and the hijra date
appeared.15
The most-favored-nation clauses of several commercial treaties negoti-
ated between Tunisia and European countries prior to the protectorate
continued, however, to preclude a reciprocal arrangement for imports from
France. Not until 1898, after Italy and Britain had renounced such

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Map 2.2. Land in settler hands, ca. 1911. Colons acquired the most productive and profitable agricultural land throughout
Tunisia, often pushing indigenous farmers and herdsmen to marginal lands on which they could not survive. Pie charts on this
official map indicate the percentage of land held by Europeans in various regions.
 58 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
concessions, were protectorate authorities in a position to cancel duties on
goods originating in France while leaving them in place for the products of
other countries. As a result, France supplied approximately 60 percent of
Tunisia’s imports and was the destination for a similar percentage of its exports
at the turn of the century.16 Easy access to the French market served all
cultivators well but particularly advantaged the colons. Although agriculture
remained an overwhelmingly Tunisian pursuit, the modern methods
employed by the relatively small number of European farmers enabled them
to produce a disproportionate amount of the harvest in both quantity and
value. Assurances of the settlers’ ability to import machinery and other supplies
inexpensively and of their opportunity to export crops to France at a profit
contributed significantly to ensuring the success of “official” colonization.
With that success came the dispersal of Europeans throughout rural
Tunisia. In the mid-1880s three-quarters of all European-owned rural
property lay within an arc stretching from Bizerte to Nabeul, none of it
more than fifty miles from Tunis. Twenty years later, Europeans were
farming land in the Majarda Valley, the High Tell, the interior steppes,
and even some of the pre-Saharan oases. Furthermore, European shop-
keepers, businessmen, bankers, and government officials settled in regional
market towns and administrative centers – Béja, Souk al-qArba (now
Jendouba), Testour, Le Kef, Maktar, Kasserine, Gafsa, Gabès, and Kebili,
among many others – where their work supported the agricultural enter-
prise with essential goods and services. The settlers’ distinctively European
houses transformed the landscape, as did, in time, the roads and railroads,
and the telegraph, telephone, and electricity lines that snaked through the
country in their wake. Only in the rural Sahil were Europeans a rarity,
although many of them did live in its urban centers on the coast – Sousse,
Monastir, Mahdia, and Sfax.
Not surprisingly, however, Tunis and its suburbs remained the preemi-
nent European communities of the country, with some 55,000 foreigners
(35,000 Italians, 10,000 French citizens, 8,000 Maltese, and 2,000 others)
living there in 1904, along with 80,000 Muslims and 39,000 Jews.17 This
burgeoning European population, which at the start of the protectorate had
resided in a partially walled medina and two immediately adjacent neigh-
borhoods, literally reshaped the capital. In the 1880s and 1890s, a quarter
built to European specifications, with broad boulevards, multistory build-
ings, large retail shops, theaters, and churches, took shape in reclaimed
marshland between the medina walls and the Lake of Tunis. Most Muslims
and Jews continued to live in the original agglomeration, but virtually all of
the Europeans who had resided there decamped to the new city, as did some

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 59

Figure 2.2. Colon grain-storage building. Although not as numerous as in neighboring

Algeria, European settlers in Tunisia enjoyed considerable political and economic power.
The caption at the bottom of this interwars-era postcard reads: “The peopling of North
Africa by the French is the national work of France in the twentieth century.”

Jews. The creation of a new quarter beyond the walls of the existing city
“manufactured” space where Europeans could live and work in a familiar,
comfortable, and largely segregated setting. Sousse, Sfax, Bizerte, Kairouan,
and other cities imitated the Tunis model, which had itself drawn on urban
practices in Algeria. Because European Tunis was situated on unproductive
land, its construction did not necessitate the displacement of many indi-
viduals, although the development of some of the other nouvelles villes did
entail the displacement of Tunisians and provoked anger and resentment.
Accommodating rural European settlers posed greater complications.
Unclaimed cultivable land was rare and, unlike urban neighborhoods,
new fields and orchards could not be “manufactured.” In the first few
years of the protectorate, however, the European acquisition of rural prop-
erty hardly disturbed the Tunisian peasants living on it. They continued to
cultivate the large estates that they themselves had never owned and that
had passed into the hands of corporations, individual speculators, and

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 60 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
private proprietors, all of whom needed their labor to keep the land
productive. This situation changed in the 1890s. “Official” colonization
had as its goals the transfer of smaller parcels of rural real estate from
Tunisian to French hands and the promotion of the personal, physical
attachment of French citizens to Tunisian soil. Thus, as French settlers
began to carve out farmsteads from what had been state lands, collective
tribal lands, and habus lands, the Tunisians who had cultivated them or
grazed flocks on them were displaced. Those who opted to continue farm-
ing or herding could do so only on the marginal lands that held no interest
for the colonizers. Some peasants driven from the land found jobs on the
French farms, but their culturally divergent work habits and agricultural
practices led colon owners, especially those who were mechanizing their
operations, to prefer French or Italian laborers, despite having to pay them
higher wages. Others who had been uprooted turned to vagabondage and
lives of petty crime. Still others drifted to the towns and cities, where their
lack of education and skills gave them access only to the least desirable jobs,
if they found employment at all.
Bashir Sfar, an early graduate of Sadiqi College, headed the Habus Council
until his 1898 resignation in protest at the enforced sale of its land to settlers.
Like many other Sadiqi alumni who had benefited from their exposure to
Western culture, Sfar initially believed that the French presence, including a
thoughtfully managed program of rural colonization, could raise the quality
of all Tunisians’ lives. A decade of “official” colonization, however, left Sfar
frustrated, bitter, and angry. “France,” he wrote in 1903, “is wealthy enough
to finance the installation of its citizens without having to condemn its
protégés to starvation or flight, or turn them into a dangerous proletariat.”18
In the alienation of men like Sfar lay serious troubles for the protectorate.
The displacement of the rural population at the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth centuries had adverse economic effects
on many Tunisians in the towns and cities. For example, the tribes’ loss of
good grazing land diminished the size and quality of livestock herds, which
in turn reduced the supply of meat, butter, and other animal products in
urban markets. It also deprived weavers and leatherworkers of raw materials,
further crippling artisans devastated by decades of European competition.
In contrast to urban areas, where the growing taste for European goods had
lessened demand for locally produced commodities of virtually every kind,
rural regions had shown less enthusiasm for imports and so had provided an
important outlet for artisanal production. But the impoverishment of the
countryside enervated that market, delivering a near knockout blow to
craftsmen all over the country.

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 61
As French colons shouldered them aside, the productivity of Tunisian
peasant farmers and herdsmen declined precipitously. The taxes extracted
from them did not. By one estimate, government receipts in 1896 translated
into an average tax of ten francs per person,19 a considerable burden,
particularly in the distressed rural regions. This figure, averaged across the
entire population, masks the twenty-franc annual personal tax (majba) that
all rural Tunisian males paid, but from which some urban residents, and all
foreigners, enjoyed an exemption. The istitan, a personal tax set at ten francs
a year and imposed on all males, including foreigners, replaced the majba in
1913, but for many Tunisians, who accounted for 90 percent of the revenue
it generated, halving the levy provided very little relief. Other forms of direct
taxation weighed far more heavily on rural Tunisians than on their urban
counterparts or on foreigners. Without exception, cultivated land was
subject to the qushr, an assessment determined by the area sown, regardless
of yield. In 1914, settler farmers controlled 10 percent of Tunisia’s agricul-
tural land, but they paid just over 1 percent of the qushr owing to discounts
given farmers using machinery and modern techniques to work the land –
practices limited almost exclusively to foreigners.20 The inequitable distri-
bution of the qushr looms larger in view of the quality and productivity of
the tenth of the land in colon hands. Tunisians occupied more land, but of
marginal value; thus they produced less, but paid more. In a similar vein,
grapes, the quintessentially European crop, were not taxed at all, whereas
the harvests of olives and dates, crucial to the economy of the Sahil and the
desert oases where few colons had penetrated, carried additional levies. That
a significant portion of tax receipts financed the colonization projects that
were rending the fabric of Tunisian rural society added insult to injury.
Under the circumstances, conflict between settlers and Tunisians was
inevitable. The incursion of nomads’ livestock into sown fields provoked
frequent confrontations, but robbery, theft, marauding, and assault all
escalated in the 1890s. Tunisians as well as Europeans fell victim to these
crimes, which were spawned by the desperate misery permeating the
countryside. René Millet, the most liberal resident general since the begin-
ning of the protectorate, did not hesitate to place much of the responsibility
for the deteriorating rural situation at the feet of the colons. “Colonization,”
he chided them,
has made the European a competitor of the native, and a formidable one at
that. He gains control of land and raises its price, along with the prices of
essential goods. Each year he brings more land under his control, encloses it,
guards it, and defends it against pasturage and trespass. He introduces new
methods of cultivation and upsets the routine of the Muslim laborer.21

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 62 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
In 1896, Millet agreed to supplement the gendarmes attached to each
contrôle civil with village policemen, as the colons had requested, but attacks
on European property remained a fact of life in the countryside, their
frequency rising and falling in a rhythm dictated by local tribes’ encounters
with bad weather, poor harvests, detrimental government policies, and
settler arrogance.
Millet warned the colons, whom he knew objected vehemently to any
measure calculated to empower Tunisians, not to use the rural turmoil as an
excuse to attack protectorate policies, including his collaboration with
urban, Western-educated Tunisians (among them, Bashir Sfar). They
could not “openly demand that a million and a half Arabs be sacrificed to
20,000 of our nationals,” but if their assertion that “the Arab population
and its chiefs [are] resolutely hostile to our action and the development of
our influence” gained credence in French political circles,
there would remain no other choice. . .than to inaugurate in Tunisia a
regime of reducing and driving back the native population, a regime of
exceptional measures, of assigning to the French alone all the budgetary
resources. . .. Such a regime existed in Algeria and its results are too well
known to be necessary to recall.22

Millet’s running battle to restrain the settlers led to his recall in 1900,
underscoring the power the colon lobby wielded by that time and the extent
to which settler interests set the agenda of protectorate policy.
The transportation and communication infrastructure developed by the
Directorate of Public Works, one of the first technical services set up under
the protectorate, exemplifies the privileging of colons over Tunisians. In 1884
the Algerian-based Compagnie du Bône-Guelma completed the railroad
between Tunis and Algiers for which it had won the concession in 1878.
Passing through the Majarda Valley and the High Tell, where Europeans
were already acquiring land, the line expedited the movement of agricultural
products to market but also served a military and strategic purpose in
binding the new protectorate to the French departments of Algeria. As
French settlers spread more widely through the Tunisian countryside in the
1890s, they demanded the construction of new lines, but the company
resisted undertaking operations in areas thinly populated by Europeans. To
resolve this problem, protectorate officials arranged for the Tunisian gov-
ernment to absorb virtually all the costs entailed in extending the Bône-
Guelma’s main line to Bizerte, Sousse, Sfax, and Kairouan. The vast
majority of state revenues thus expended had come from Tunisian tax-
payers, but colons profited far more from the railroads than did Tunisians.

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 63
When the focus of railroad construction shifted in the early twentieth
century from supporting agricultural development to facilitating the exploi-
tation of mineral deposits, other European entrepreneurs benefited from
the company’s receipt of state subsidies to build spurs, and sometimes
whole new lines, to mineral-rich regions. Between 1902 and 1912, the
Tunisian government borrowed more than 200 million francs to finance
infrastructural expansion, of which the Compagnie du Bône-Guelma
received well over half.23 This growth shifted the company’s main focus
from Algeria to Tunisia and enabled it to survive the Algerian government’s
1915 takeover of its assets there.
In addition to the Bône-Guelma system, two other railroads were in
service at the turn of the century. The short Italian-owned Tunis–La
Goulette–La Marsa (TGM) route connected the capital with its eastern
suburbs; the Compagnie des Phosphates et Chemins de Fer de Gafsa
operated a line carrying phosphates from mines in the southwest to the
Mediterranean. Following the discovery of major phosphate deposits near
Gafsa in 1885, the government offered a concession for their exploitation,
but required that the concessionaire also develop a port suitable for export-
ing the ore and link it with the mines by railroad. These terms elicited no
serious response until the mid-1890s, when a consortium of investors began
raising funds that enabled them to form, in 1897, the Compagnie des
Phosphates et Chemins de Fer de Gafsa. In the interim, the government,
in view of expansion and modernization projects then underway at the port
of Sfax, had dropped its requirement to construct an export terminal. The
final terms of the concession authorized the company to work the mines and
run the railroad for ninety years. Participants in the Compagnie des
Phosphates included the St. Gobain Chemical Company (Europe’s largest
consumer of phosphates), the Mukhtar Hadid Mining Company (an
important investor in Algerian mineral development), the Duparchy
Company (the firm responsible for the improvements to the port of Sfax,
and for which the new company represented an invaluable customer), a
number of prominent French industrialists, and thousands of smaller
investors. The first shipment of ore reached Sfax on the newly completed
railroad in 1899.24
The railroads and the Compagnie des Phosphates, which became the single
largest employer and one of the largest taxpayers in the protectorate, illustrate
the important role of French capital investment, channeled through large,
specialized companies, in creating Tunisia’s colonial economy. The land
speculation in which the earliest of these companies had engaged never
diminished appreciably, even after the inauguration of “official” colonization,

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 Map 2.3. Transportation networks, ca. 1904. Railroad construction after the inauguration of the protectorate primarily served the
interests of colon farmers and European mine owners. By the start of World War I, a railroad through the rich farmland of the
Majerda Valley connected Tunis with Algeria, while other lines extended to Bizerte, Sousse, Sfax, and Kairouan. An industrial
railroad carried phosphate ore from deposits around Gafsa to the port at Sfax.

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 66 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s

Figure 2.3. A carriage of the Tunis–La Goulette–La Marsa railway. Italian entrepreneurs
operated this railway, built in the 1870s to link Tunis with its coastal suburbs, until 1898.
Thereafter, the Bône-Guelma Company ran the line until its incorporation into the Tunis
tram system in 1905.

with its preference for small farmers. From the 1890s on, however, other
sectors of the economy, with mining (iron, lead, zinc, and phosphate) in the
forefront, began to attract the serious attention of investors. During the four
decades from the beginning of the protectorate until the end of World War I,
the exploitation of mineral resources, the development of a transportation
system (dominated by railroads), the improvement of port facilities (at Tunis,
Sousse, and Sfax), the construction of a massive naval base (at Bizerte), and
the acquisition of land collectively accounted for three-quarters of all capital
investment.25 Wealthy colons joined metropolitan shareholders in reaping the
profits of these enterprises, but few Tunisians had the wherewithal to make
such investments. Nor did they even participate in these projects as workers.
The railroads and the companies developing the ports hired French and
Italian laborers and even in the mines migrants from Tripolitania, Algeria,
and Morocco were given preference over Tunisians, whom European fore-
men often characterized as unreliable and incompetent.

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 67

the tunisian bourgeoisie’s tunisia: from high

hopes to bitter disillusion
The effective replacement of the beylical government by a French admin-
istration, the ascendancy of French interests throughout the country, and
the relegation of ordinary Tunisians, in some cases quite literally, to the
margins of the economy and the society could not fail to provoke deep
resentment. The unsophisticated rural population most often manifested its
antagonism in inchoate and spasmodic violence, while the modest attempts
of a few Tunis ulama to express their discontent early in the protectorate era
had sputtered out inconclusively. A small cadre of educated urbanites with
training in a European language and an awareness of Western scholarship
and technology was, however, learning to articulate its grievances with the
protectorate in ways that were less physically aggressive than those of the
tribesmen, and in a format and vocabulary that their European interlocutors
understood better than they did those at the disposal of the ulama.
Prior to the protectorate, Tunisians had few opportunities to receive such
instruction, which was offered only at schools maintained by Christian
religious orders for the children of the European community and at spe-
cialized institutions like the Bardo military academy that admitted only the
sons of the elite. The formal education of male Tunisian Muslims took
place in a kuttab, whose curriculum revolved around the memorizing of the
Qur’an. A select group of young men continued their studies at the
renowned Zaituna mosque-university in Tunis. Only after Sadiqi College
opened in 1875 did Muslim youths have access to instruction ranging
beyond traditional Islamic topics, but admission to Sadiqi was quite limited.
The education of most Jewish boys in Tunisia went no further than
elementary religious studies in schools similar to the kuttab. Neither
Muslim nor Jewish girls customarily received an education beyond the
training in domestic skills they acquired in their homes. Louis Macheul,
the director of public instruction from 1883 until 1908, understood the risks
of intervening directly in Muslim and Jewish education. Instead, he chose
to oversee them from a distance and quietly promote select reforms aimed at
associating them with a secular education system, designed to encourage
Tunisian assimilation of French attitudes, that he began implementing at
the start of his administration.
The secular system rested on French-language elementary schools open
to Tunisian and to French and other European boys. These Franco-Arab
schools employed an appropriately modified French curriculum and
included Arabic as a subject of study. From the Directorate of Public

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 68 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
Instruction’s point of view, the schools enabled it to pose as a guardian of
Tunisia’s Arab heritage, as befit a protectorate administration, while still
promoting assimilation through the spread of French. For the settlers, the
schools gave their sons a basic French education, while the study of Arabic,
despite having some distasteful overtones, equipped them with a potentially
valuable skill that relatively few Europeans possessed. Some Tunisians
welcomed the schools as points of access to the European community,
but government officials and local notables often enrolled their children
only under duress or to curry favor with the French. Many more Tunisians
opposed the Franco-Arab schools, usually on religious grounds, than sup-
ported them.
Nevertheless, the realities of life under the protectorate made at least a
passing familiarity with the culture and language of the colonizers all but
essential, particularly in urban areas. Starting in 1908, liberal Tunisian
educators organized “reformed” kuttabs that provided such an introduction
to Muslim students who rejected the secular Franco-Arab schools in favor of
a religious education. Within the Jewish community, the Westernized
Grana gravitated to French public schools, an environment that most
Jews of Tunisian origin found uncomfortable. Teachers working for the
French Alliance Israélite exposed this more tradition-bound community to
the rudiments of Western education.
The first elementary school to offer a modern curriculum to Muslim girls
opened in 1900 with the enthusiastic backing of Louise Millet, the wife of
the resident general. The school took as its objective the dissemination of
progressive ideas that would “ameliorate the lot of [Tunisian women] and
provide a direct opportunity for French influence to be exercised on
them.”26 To alleviate parental anxieties about sending their daughters to
the school, its headmistress, the French widow of a protectorate official who
knew Tunisian society well, observed traditional social standards, even
hiring elderly instructors from the Zaituna mosque-university to teach the
Islamic component of the curriculum. The Habus Council provided funds
that sustained the school through several years of low enrollments, while its
moral support constituted an invaluable imprimatur in the Muslim com-
munity. In 1905, enrollment reached one hundred, and by 1912, when its
relocation led to its designation as the Ecole Rue du Pacha, almost five
hundred young women were attending the school. The Directorate of
Public Instruction did not establish public primary schools for Muslim
girls until 1908. In them, Muslim women assisted French instructors with a
curriculum that combined academic studies with vocational and domestic
training.

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 69
Beyond the elementary level a few other public schools included both
Arab and European students. The Collège Alaoui, established in 1884 at
Macheul’s prodding, but officially by order of the bey, prepared young men
to teach in the Franco-Arab schools. Although intended primarily for
Tunisians at its inception, the college also enrolled the sons of settlers and
protectorate officials. By the early twentieth century, some 20 percent of its
students were Europeans.27 The Lycée Carnot presented a mirror image of
Alaoui College. French missionaries founded the school for young men
under the name Collège Saint Louis in 1875, but when it later proved to be a
financial burden, Cardinal Lavigerie handed it over to the Directorate of
Public Instruction in 1889. Renamed Lycée Carnot in 1894 in honor of the
French president assassinated in that year, it stood at the pinnacle of French
public education in Tunisia. Accordingly, it had a predominantly European
clientele, although it always included a handful of the best Muslim and
Jewish students to have gone through the Franco-Arab schools. A corre-
sponding institution for women, the Lycée Armand Fallières, trained female
teachers and was overwhelmingly European.
Alaoui College and Lycée Carnot also attracted those Sadiqi College
graduates capable of continuing their education, but the Sadiqi curriculum
did not adequately prepare most students to compete successfully with
young men trained in the Franco-Arab schools for admission to the post-
elementary institutions. Recognizing Sadiqi’s value as a source of clerks and
translators for their administration, French officials had acted quickly to
bring the college under their control. In 1882, even before the La Marsa
Convention formalized the protectorate, Resident General Cambon’s
appointment of an administrative council to oversee the school undercut
the authority of its director, a protégé of Khair al-Din who did not welcome
the French presence. Thereafter, the Directorate of Public Instruction had
no interest in altering the nature of the college, but only in introducing
changes in the course of studies to better serve French needs.
Thus, in the first decade and a half of the protectorate, thousands of
Tunisian men and a much more modest number of women were receiving
an education that exposed them to an array of new ideas and brought them
into direct contact with the French population. For most, the experience
ended at the primary level, but hundreds went farther. By the 1890s, those
who had completed the highest levels of the public education system were
assuming positions in the protectorate government. There they joined
Sadiqi College graduates of the preprotectorate era who had studied in
France and returned to launch careers in public service. Macheul and other
officials saw in these Western-educated Tunisians, and especially in the

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 70 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
nucleus of Sadiqi graduates, bridges to the broader Tunisian society and,
therefore, invaluable allies in the campaign to secure broad public accept-
ance of the protectorate. Many of the Tunisians shared this view and
were prepared to act accordingly. Attuned to the principles of 1789, they
believed that the application of those ideals in Tunisia would benefit
the entire society. Their country would become a modern state, as France
had; technology would bind the country together as never before; and
republican rule would replace arbitrary monarchical power.
For all that, these men were not deracinated and they continued to care
deeply about their Arab-Islamic heritage. For most of them, a second
intellectual concept, Salafiyya (Islamic reform), exerted at least as strong a
pull as did European progressivism. Its advocates preached a renewal of the
core values of their ancestors (al-salaf ), arguing that Muslims had aban-
doned or distorted them over the centuries. The ensuing ignorance and
neglect weakened the Muslim community, ultimately leaving it vulnerable
to the ills plaguing it in the nineteenth century, not the least of which was
European imperialism. Adherents of the Salafiyya did not necessarily reject
all things non-Islamic, and many approved of the adaptation of Western
cultural features capable of enhancing Muslims’ lives. The thinking of Khair
al-Din embodied Salafiyya ideals, which had naturally taken their place in
the Sadiqi College curriculum. In 1883, a follower of Khair al-Din,
Muhammad al-Sanusi, founded in Tunis a chapter of the most prominent
Salafiyya organization of the time. At al-Sanusi’s invitation, Muhammad
qAbduh, the movement’s leading light, visited Tunis in 1885 and again in
1903. qAbduh understood that Tunisians lacked the capacity to break the
French hold on their country. Under the circumstances, he counseled his
audiences to work in the protectorate system for reforms embodying
Muslim principles of equity and justice – advice modeled on his own
engagement with the British in Egypt.
Three years later, a group of Salafiyya adepts, including al-Sanusi, qAli Bu
Shusha, Muhammad al-Qarwi, and Bashir Sfar, established an Arabic
newspaper, al-Hadira, to publicize their call for modernization and social
change that respected the centrality of Arabic and of Islam in Tunisian
culture. These men all had links to the Khair al-Din era of reforms, either as
collaborators of the former prime minister or as Sadiqi students of the
preprotectorate era. Al-Hadira particularly targeted the two most literate
Arabic-speaking components of Tunis society, the baldiyya and the ulama.
Its appeals met with some success among the former and among the more
progressive ulama, for both of whom the message echoed the words of The
Surest Path, Khair al-Din’s treatise on government. But the more

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 71
conservative ulama showed themselves stubbornly resistant to innovation.
The paper survived for twenty-two years, thanks in no small part to a
subsidy paid by protectorate officials, who considered it a useful tool in
reconciling Tunisians of a certain persuasion with the French presence.
The appointment of René Millet in 1894 brought a sympathizer with the
reformist strain of Islam to the office of resident general. Millet reinforced
the status of the men associated with al-Hadira as the most apt interlocutors
between Western and Arab-Islamic culture by discussing with them their
expectations as summarized in an article that appeared on his arrival. He
indicated his broad support for their objectives, which addressed the issues
of greatest concern to urban, educated Tunisians: the respect of the protec-
torate authorities for Muslim practices and institutions, the engagement of
Muslims in government service, the expansion of public education, and the
institution of tariffs to protect domestic craftsmen. He further encouraged
the reformers to explore additional methods of disseminating their message.
In 1896, Sfar and Muhammad Lasram took the lead in founding the
Khalduniyya, an educational society that opened a window to the West
for Arabic-speaking Tunisians. With the goal of “expanding among
Muslims a taste for the sciences . . . destroy[ing] once for all their prejudices
and . . . open[ing] to them, in the practical and commercial domain, many
horizons which were totally unknown,”28 its members offered free instruc-
tion in a variety of subjects not taught in the Islamic schools. Any Tunisian
could study at the Khalduniyya, but the organization made a special effort
to attract students from the Zaituna mosque-university, where a highly
traditional Islamic curriculum remained in place. As one of the few venues
where young men from the different school systems interacted, the
Khalduniyya focused not on building bridges between Tunisians and
Europeans, but on familiarizing Tunisians of divergent educational back-
grounds with each other.
Millet’s positive approach to Tunisians prepared to reach an accommo-
dation with the government under certain circumstances distressed the
colons, who deemed the competition for political and economic power in
the protectorate a zero-sum game. By the turn of the century, Western-
educated Tunisians represented a threat to settler hegemony. Despite their
modest numbers – in any given year between 1885 and 1900, less than 0.5
percent of the Tunisian population attended a school with a Western
curriculum, while only about 3 percent of the entire Tunisian population
in 1900 had ever followed such a course of studies – they induced a splenetic
rage among the many settlers who abhorred the thought of educating the
colonized population. They insisted that Tunisian children did not belong

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 72 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
in the Franco-Arab schools, where they slowed the progress of European
students, but should learn only the skills needed for employment as agricul-
tural workers on colon properties.
Victor de Canières, the publisher of La Tunisie Française, the journalistic
voice of extremist settler opinion from 1892 until the 1950s, insisted on the
limitations of the Tunisians, who were, “after all, just Arabs.” Misguided
French officials who believed that “Arabs are men like any others and ought
to have rights equal to those of the French” failed to understand that “they
constitute a race that a depressing religion and a long atavism of laziness and
fatalism have rendered manifestly inferior.”29 Modern education raised
Tunisians’ expectations and even promoted competition for certain kinds
of jobs between them and settlers at the lower end of the economic ladder.
Their expectations could obviously not be fulfilled at the European pop-
ulation’s expense, but ignoring them ensured Tunisian enmity. “[S]cholarly
familiarity kills the respect,” thundered de Canières, “without which hun-
dreds of colons embedded in the midst of a hostile population cannot enjoy
full security.”30 Educating Tunisians simply endangered the privileged
position the settlers had monopolized since the start of the protectorate.
These views could not have been at greater variance with the thinking of
leading figures in the Directorate of Public Instruction, as a comment by the
headmaster of Alaoui College clearly revealed. While harboring no doubts
about the superiority of his own culture, he bemoaned the inability of so
many of his compatriots to appreciate that they lived
in the midst of a civilization – other than ours, it is true; let us hasten to add,
inferior to ours . . . but, in a word, a civilization. Let the burnous and the
chechia not create any illusion: it is with very cultivated people that we have
business here.31

In this fundamental policy disagreement, the colons prevailed, persuading

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to order the protectorate to scale back
education for Tunisians. Reluctantly, between 1898 and 1901 the
Directorate of Public Instruction closed ten Franco-Arab schools that had
only a few French students. For the first time since the inauguration of the
system more than a decade earlier, Tunisian enrollments declined steadily
over the same period. The directorate responded to another aspect of the
settlers’ educational agenda by establishing a vocational school in 1898.
Most of its students were European, however, and those Tunisians who
did attend were pushed into training as traditional craftsmen rather than
receiving an opportunity to learn more modern, and better remunerated,
skills.

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 73
The colons’ success in this campaign demonstrated their effectiveness in
articulating a shared perception, presenting it with conviction and persis-
tence, and pressuring key organs of government to accept it. La Tunisie
Française played an important part in this process, as did the settlers’
participation in the Consultative Conference, a body formed in 1892 to
advise the resident general, principally on budgetary matters. Originally
consisting of two colleges that were extensions of the settlers’ chambers of
agriculture and commerce, the conference expanded to include a third, for
government officials and members of the liberal professions, in 1896.
Although it had no power to legislate and could not compel the resident
general to follow its recommendations, the conference afforded a forum for
the airing of colon opinions and grievances. Tunisians had no parallel official
forum, nor were any appointed to the Consultative Conference for more
than a decade. In 1907, the addition of sixteen Tunisians brought the total
membership of the conference to fifty-two. Even this obvious underrepre-
sentation of Tunisians (30 percent of the conference as opposed to more
than 90 percent of the total population) incensed the settler delegates, who
succeeded in segregating the Tunisians in 1910 by recasting the conference’s
three chambers into two, one for the “natives,” the other for the French
préponderants.
The curtailing of educational opportunities for Muslims, which the
reformers had always seen as a sine qua non for the society they envisaged,
profoundly disappointed and frustrated them. Their encounters with wide-
spread and overt racism compelled reformers to acknowledge that the
settlers would never accept Tunisians as equals simply because of their
“otherness, no matter how far down the road to assimilation they traveled.”
Their confidence in both the will and the ability of protectorate authorities
to persevere in implementing policies that improved the lot of Tunisians
also diminished. Even specialists like Macheul answered to Parisian minis-
tries that came under intense pressure from colonial lobbyists whose ear the
Tunisian settlers had. Western educations detached Tunisians from the
mainstream of their society and underscored their minority status. As a
result, the reformers risked falling between two stools, credible neither to
their fellow Tunisians nor to the Europeans. Finally, as they took stock of
the setbacks to their agenda, they realized that similar, and even more tragic,
misfortunes had befallen many of their countrymen in the 1890s. For years,
the reformers had focused on articulating the desires of the urban educated
class, downplaying criticisms of the government in order to stay in its good
graces, but the devastatingly pervasive effects of “official” colonization and
all that had followed from it could no longer be ignored.

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 74 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
These realities encouraged the reformers to adopt a more aggressive and
political position, one with a broader outlook. In the transition from
advocacy of social change to engagement in political activism, Bashir Sfar,
who had already crossed swords with the French over the sale of habus land,
led the way. In a 1906 speech he called attention to the pauperization of
Tunisian society, noting that the quality of virtually all Tunisians’ lives had
deteriorated in the quarter century of French control. To reverse this trend,
Sfar demanded that the government introduce measures protecting rural
land from the grasp of the settlers, reviving artisanal production but also
developing new industries, and expanding the number of academic, voca-
tional, and agricultural schools for Tunisians.
Later that year, Sfar’s Khalduniyya colleague Muhammad Lasram
embarked on the first of three endeavors to publicize the reformers’ views
to a more extensive audience when he spoke before the Congrès Colonial in
Marseille. Appealing to the French to treat Tunisians as equals, not sub-
ordinates, he emphasized the imperative of building an education system
that prepared Tunisians for the widest possible range of employment, not
merely to work as “interpreters for the police or subaltern agents of the
administration.”32 Lasram assured his listeners that he and his associates
were not calling for the end of the protectorate, but only that its admin-
istrators redirect their attention to their original charge of implementing
beneficial reforms. With that in mind, he advocated the association of
French and Tunisian citizens in a genuine partnership putting the genius
of both to work for the development of the country, while acknowledging
that important differences of perspective and interest separated the two
peoples. Authorizing Tunisians to sit in the Consultative Conference con-
stituted, in Lasram’s view, the most logical initial step toward engaging
them in public life.
The reformers took advantage of the 1908 Congrès de l’Afrique du Nord
in Paris to communicate for a second time with an audience drawn from
France and its dependencies. No fewer than six prominent figures in the
movement, now widely referred to as the “Young Tunisians,” addressed the
congress. They hammered away at familiar themes and unveiled new
initiatives, including one to replace the majba with a universally applied
levy assessed on ability to pay. This time, however, de Canières and other
colons were in attendance, and their public derision of the Tunisians sparked
a verbal brawl. The disgusted response of one Tunisian to the settlers’
defense of “official” colonization epitomizes the feeling of bitterness and
futility that enveloped the entire delegation: “No doubt you wish to drive us
back to the zone where scarcely any rain falls. Go and colonize it yourselves:

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 75
you have the financial means and technical knowledge to modify its
hydraulic regime.”33
The third example of the Young Tunisians’ placing their ideas before new
audiences was the publication, beginning in 1907, of Le Tunisien. In this
instance, however, a new type of activist presented the message. The news-
paper’s editor, thirty-one-year-old qAli Bash Hamba, was the product of an
exclusively Western education, culminating with a French law degree. He
showed little interest in the Salafiyya precepts that had influenced his older
colleagues, deriving his inspiration from the ideology of pan-Islam and the
campaign of the Young Turks (whose intellectual backgrounds so closely
resembled his own) to breathe new life into the Ottoman Empire (whose
moribund condition so closely resembled his country’s). Bash Hamba
wanted to explain the Young Tunisians’ objectives directly, and in their
own language, to French centrists and leftists (the right-wing colons imme-
diately dismissed the paper as “dogmatic . . . a screen behind which war
against the French is prepared”34) in order to correct misunderstandings
about the movement, assuage concerns, and perhaps even win allies. The
strategy met with very limited success, but Le Tunisien did fill an important
niche by giving bilingual Tunisians who were movement sympathizers news
and information presented with a far more secular and cosmopolitan out-
look than that of al-Hadira. To make the same perspective available to all
literate Tunisians, Bash Hamba supplemented Le Tunisien with an Arabic
counterpart, al-Tunisi, in 1909. Its editor, qAbd al-qAziz Thaqalbi, was an
atypical graduate of the Zaituna mosque-university whose modernist and
controversial views had involved him in several clashes with the establish-
ment ulama.
The divergence of viewpoint between Bash Hamba and the al-Hadira
group reflected the influence of the Khair al-Din era on the first generation
of reformers and the impact of education under the protectorate on the
second. The activity of an alumni association that Bash Hamba helped to
create at Sadiqi College in 1905 further manifests this difference. A key
objective of the Association des Anciens Elèves du Collège Sadiqi was to
advocate the transformation of the school into a genuine lycée on the
French model. Five years later, their efforts resulted in government approval
of a major curriculum revision that far better equipped Sadiqi students to
pursue higher education leading to a career in the liberal professions. The
organization also sponsored public classes similar to those at the
Khalduniyya. But in contrast to its predecessor’s philosophy of fostering
the coexistence of traditional Islamic and modern educations, the
Association des Anciens Elèves focused on instruction that subordinated

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 76 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
the former to the latter, in keeping with the school’s evolving course of
studies. Bash Hamba’s high profile meant that when the government
named Bashir Sfar to a post in Sousse in 1908 (primarily to remove him
from the hub of Young Tunisian activity in the capital), the editor of Le
Tunisien effectively assumed the leadership of the movement.
Virtually all of the Young Tunisians came from baldiyya families in Tunis
or their counterparts in provincial cities. This shared social background
underscores the importance of different educational experiences in account-
ing for their varied assessments of the centrality of Salafiyya principles to
their objectives. The Young Tunisians’ bourgeois origins inevitably dis-
tanced them from the bulk of the population. Although they began to close
that gap to some degree after 1906, the concepts of appealing directly to a
mass audience or mobilizing popular demonstrations in support of their
demands remained alien to them until the closing days of their activities.
Nor could most of them ever bring themselves to endorse measures poten-
tially harmful to the class with which they identified. A case in point was the
dissipation of Young Tunisian support for tax reforms that they themselves
had sought once they realized that the Directorate of Finance’s proposed
solution, while easing the plight of the most impoverished of their country-
men, had costly consequences for the more prosperous.
Despite his secular education and modern outlook, Bash Hamba never
lost sight of the importance of positioning the Young Tunisians as defenders
of the traditional Muslim social and cultural values that continued to form
the core of most of his countrymen’s lives. This image sat well with the
Tunisian public, but it also had the advantage of making it difficult for the
non-Muslim protectorate authorities or the conservative ulama to criticize
the movement. In 1911, Bash Hamba invoked a combination of contempo-
rary pan-Islamic political rhetoric and traditional concepts of Muslim
identity to raise money and collect supplies to support the resistance of
the people of neighboring Tripolitania to Italy’s invasion. Amid the fervor
generated by this solidarity campaign, an incident in Tunis, at the Muslim
cemetery of Jellaz, seemed to reveal a threat to Islam much closer to home.
The municipal council had scheduled a survey of the cemetery for
autumn 1911, but it abandoned the plan when qAbd al-Jalil Zaouche, a
council member and prominent Young Tunisian, warned of Muslims’
resentment at such an intrusion. Although word of the impending survey
had spread through the city, the news of its cancellation did not, and a
crowd gathered at Jellaz on the appointed day. After clashes between the
protesters and the police, French soldiers, brought in as reinforcements,
opened fire on the demonstrators and drove them into a nearby Italian

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 Whose Tunisia? 1881–1912 77
quarter. Shooting from houses there touched off a riot that left dozens of
Europeans and Tunisians dead.35 French officials strongly suspected the
Young Tunisians of orchestrating this outbreak of urban mob violence – the
first of its kind, and a terrifying event for colons and protectorate officials
alike. Bash Hamba’s journalistic and oratorical exploitation of European
infringements on Islamic sensibilities undoubtedly inspired some protest-
ers, but he had not yet decided to advance his agenda by popular recruit-
ment. Despite a dogged attempt by French investigators to link the Young
Tunisians to the Jellaz events, none of the thirty-five men found guilty of
participating in the riots held leadership positions in the movement.
Tunisian antipathy toward Italians, already quite strong owing to the
competition between them for jobs, escalated after the Jellaz incident and
increased still further a few months later, when an Italian streetcar driver ran
down a Tunisian child. Bash Hamba took advantage of the public’s acute
outrage to plunge, at last, into broad political mobilization by organizing a
boycott of the city transportation system. Two conditions for the boycott’s
termination – limiting employment on the streetcars to French and
Tunisian staff and adopting an equal pay for equal work rule – directly
concerned the system’s workers, but a third – the election rather than
appointment of the Tunisian members of the Consultative Conference –
had a far broader political thrust. Protectorate officials who had supported
the early Salafiyya reformers and then the Young Tunisians regarded the
strike as a betrayal. More worryingly, Bash Hamba’s success in galvanizing
the previously inert masses contained within it the germ of full-scale
rebellion, and the government ordered an immediate end to the boycott.
The Young Tunisians refused to give in until their demands were met, but
after a month of defying the authorities, Bash Hamba, Thaqalbi, and Hassan
Guellaty, all of whom had been instrumental in mounting and sustaining
the boycott, were arrested and expelled from the country. Several other key
organizers were sent to internal exile in the southern town of Medenine.
Decapitated before belated efforts to broaden its base had produced an
entity strong enough to survive such a loss, the Young Tunisian movement
never recovered from this blow. The state of emergency imposed by the
nervous government, and kept in place until 1920, prevented the appear-
ance of any new leadership cadre. French officials, thwarted in their efforts
to reconcile Tunisians to the protectorate through the mediation of elites
with modern educations, executed an about-face in the aftermath of the
Jellaz incident and the streetcar strike. Although they had little use for the
conservative, and in their view retrograde, ulama, they quickly began to
cultivate them lest public sympathy for the Young Tunisians push the

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 78 k e n ne t h p e r ki n s
religious leadership into opposition to the protectorate. The ulama naturally
welcomed this attention, as they did the apparent failure of their nemeses,
the reformers. When the Ottoman sultan urged a jihad against the Allies at
the start of World War I, the Tunisian ulama’s expressions of loyalty to
France neutralized the appeal from distant Istanbul. Despite the dispatch of
many French troops to the front, the forces that remained were able to
suppress the single serious incidence of opposition during the war, a tribal
uprising in the south. Tunis, which the Young Tunisians had threatened to
turn into a battleground, remained calm, but it was the calm before the
storm. By the end of the war, Sfar and Bash Hamba were dead, but
Thaqalbi, Guellaty, and their comrades in exile were reassembling in
Tunis, reenergizing old networks of sympathizers, and awaiting an oppor-
tune moment to return to the political arena.

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