The Elements of the Tunisian Problem

Published on 27/03/2015

Henri DE MONTETY

article published in Politique étrangère, No. 1 - 1952 - 17th year pp. 447-466.

The military occupation of Tunisia by France in 1881 constitutes one of the facts of the history of European colonial expansion in the 19th century. Undoubtedly, the initial act aimed only at blocking Italy's path and protecting the flank of French Algeria, and the Treaty of Bardo did not go beyond this concern, which it allayed by placing the regency under the military and diplomatic protection of the French Republic. But the colonizing intention of the French was revealed as early as 1883 by the Convention of La Marsa, which granted the French government the means to equip the Barbary principality with a modern legislative and administrative apparatus, suited to enabling the establishment and life of a French community.

An authoritarian guardian, carried away by its reforming zeal, France soon took into its own hands the exercise of all the attributes of its ward's internal sovereignty, while a substantial French settlement took root in the country and claimed a predominant share in the management of internal affairs. The Western legal climate thus established furthermore encouraged the immigration of a European population, especially Italian. Thus, under the cloak of the protectorate, the French were building a French province, while the Franco-Italian colonial rivalry smoldered beneath the ashes.

At the same time, the Tunisians were strengthening their sense of national identity, and the new generations, nourished by our intellectual disciplines and imbued with our political conceptions, but held back from the slippery slope of assimilation by Islamic pride, were forging the ideal of restoring their homeland's independence. Tunisian nationalism, a branch of the universal movement of emancipation and anti-Western reaction triggered by European action itself, was spreading its foliage throughout the Regency.

Then the ambiguity of the protectorate suddenly appeared—a false annexation, a false guardianship. This ambiguity, a worm in the fruit, fueled Italian covetousness and Tunisian irredentism. The European conflict of 1939-1945 having eliminated the Italian counterweight—and perhaps prepared a union of European interests in Africa—Tunisian irredentism stood alone facing France and, to a certain extent also, allied with pan-Islamism, facing Europe and the West.

An old Frenchman, who had lived through half a century of the protectorate, once presented the Tunisian problem to us in the manner of an ancient tragedy. In the first act, only two partners, the "high contracting parties": the French Republic and the Bey, a despot who "possesses" his State and disposes of it for the benefit of his interlocutor, quietly approved by the chorus of great families who serve him. In the second act, two unexpected characters emerge almost simultaneously: the Tunisian people, a mass that takes shape and consciousness in the new atmosphere and expresses itself through its "intelligentsia," and the "French citizen of Tunisia," colonist and civil servant, an elite without a people who has taken command.

We are now in the third act, and what do we see: the protecting Republic assailed by the three other characters—the "possessor of the kingdom" and the popular "intelligentsia," now allied and claiming the rights of the people, the isolated French colonist, but strong in his achievements—all three demanding an accounting of the ambiguity of the initial pact. The speaker was careful not to omit the actors in the wings, those who appear for a brief role and those suspected of wanting to tear off the masks at the end: yesterday, the Italian; today, the Arab League and the U.N.; tomorrow, perhaps America or communism.

The Tunisians and Their Nationalism

The entry of the most dashing of peoples, the French, into the old Tunisian house, enclosed for centuries within the windowless walls of its antiquated traditions, disrupted the life of its society. The elders, turbaned in a sclerotic Islam, were scandalized; but the young bit into the fruit of modernism and, without renouncing their blood, rushed toward new paradises. The social castes that had framed a docile people disintegrated; a new elite arose, seeking its own path between West and East, an elite partly emerging from the people and drawing them along.

The development of modern education and instruction was the determining factor in this revolution and in the renewal of leadership. French academic disciplines rapidly raised the intellectual level, broadened the thinking class, and instilled in it a new conception of human values. The petty bourgeoisie was thus able to conquer positions and functions and rise to the highest ranks.

The intellectual revolution was accomplished within a political framework itself upended by the protectorate and the liberal institutions it brought. The new Tunisian generations entered directly into an administrative system prefabricated in the West, in such a way that the ferments of our modern and democratic civilization acted in vitro upon the people, while simultaneously our teachers indoctrinated the ruling elites.

The new regime first provoked, by its very principle, a splitting of authority, with a loss of prestige for traditional local authority. Many "makhzen" families attached themselves to serving the French power, and the administered populations, for their part, attracted by the fairness and liberalism of the French officials, detached themselves from their Tunisian leaders. The modernization of the administrative apparatus, specializing and separating services, multiplying links, attaching authority to the Law rather than to the person, undermined the power of the great caïds and sheikhs. Finally, through a contagion effect of the French democratic spirit, a public opinion awakened and found its means of expression and action in a bilingual press and in political parties organized after the model of our own.

At the same time, the Western economic system, liberalism, and the accelerated circulation of wealth ravaged the material foundations of a society built on the principle of the immobility of property. The old propertied families were ruined, while a substantial class of newly rich was forming. Furthermore, the industrialization of agriculture, the exploitation of mines, and the introduction of modern enterprises gave rise to a social class hitherto unknown: the working proletariat.

In old Tunisia, an invisible border separated into two countries, foreign to one another, the vast Bedouin countryside from the thousand cities scattered along the eastern coast. It was in these cities, and more particularly in Tunis, that the metamorphosis of the elites took place. But at the same time, the city dwellers penetrated the Bedouin country, colonizing the lands, providing administrative and intellectual leadership. On the other hand, the Bedouins developed a taste for agriculture, settled on the land by dividing it among themselves, scattering the tribe, breaking it apart. From the tribal framework that had encompassed the entire social life of these nomads, they moved into a territorial administrative framework linking them to the city. They also began to frequent the cities, leaving behind as sediment a good number of their own who formed the working proletariat.

Thus, Tunisian society has lost, in the last seventy years, its compartmentalization into castes and tribes; it is unifying at an ever-accelerating pace and tends to assume a unanimous soul. And it is no longer the simple soul of a people that had achieved its equilibrium in a motionless mediocrity, under a fateful sky; it is a tormented soul, heeding the call to progress, to modernism, to critical thinking, to effort itself, and hearing at the same time the voices of the past, of mystical certainty, of racial atavism; a soul where regret mingles with hope in a permanent contradiction.

This contradiction of minds, we see it first in customs, whose evolution is slower than conception and proceeds by abstention rather than by innovation: people renounce traditional prerogatives that are no longer in harmony with the new spirit (polygamy, for example); but they do not overturn positive traditions, vaguely tinged with Islamism (the wearing of the Fez, the veiling of women). Muslim youth is still held back in its forward movement by a religious scruple that confuses faith and the past.

Islam, let us never forget, encloses within its iron framework both spiritual and temporal life; it is a civilization, with its single language. Muslims tend to consider that only the East is spiritualist, the West possessing only the earthly kingdom; it is difficult for them to distinguish religion from spirituality. The fear of Western materialism and yet the attraction of the well-being it represents give Tunisian evolution its contradictory and nuanced character and explain many reactions incomprehensible to Western secularists.

One must sense in the Tunisians this inner tearing under the double attraction of West and East, to understand the full significance of their political behavior. It is on this political stage that the drama plays out in broad daylight, for Tunisian nationalism is the public expression of the inner turmoil of these souls, which has been rising for a quarter of a century and sends coursing through the veins of the bourgeoisie a political energy it had never possessed in previous centuries.

Tunisian nationalism is not an artificial and accidental movement: it is an inevitable phenomenon, rooted in the depths of the Berber soul, erupting upon contact with French expansion, amplified by the breath of the pan-Islamic awakening and the universal colonial revolution. Berber it is by the blood that irrigates most of these minds and, through this, it connects to the ancient revolts for independence, although Tunisians, since they were Islamized, pride themselves on being "Arab" and pretend to ignore their pagan heroes. It thus derives from an old xenophobic atavism and partakes of the susceptibility, vanity, and duplicity—in short, that complex which Roman historians discovered in this race and which foreign domination can only exalt. Berber still, when it animates rival "çofs": old and Neo-Destour, when it adopts as its banner a national hero: Habib Bourguiba, the "supreme combatant."

Tunisian nationalism is also the transposition of our European sentiment of the territorial homeland, a belated offspring of the French Revolution. Nationalist youth learned on the benches of our schools to worship this new idol: the nation. And it discovered its nation: a territory whose unity goes back centuries, a heritage of civilization, economic interests (including access to public office, the primary motive of nationalist action). This nationalism is not a rallying around a dynasty; the throne is for it only a useful symbol; it is not the nation. Only the Old Destour shows genuine loyalty to the dynasty because it represents the Muslim theocratic tradition; the Neo-Destour is beylical out of opportunism. We observe here, already, the dividing line between the two currents that stir the public conscience.

This divergence, or rather this tearing apart of conscience, we find again in the attitude of Tunisian nationalists toward the pan-Islamic movement, from which they cannot escape. Like all Maghrebis, Tunisians call themselves "Arab," because the Arabs were their noble conquerors, because Arabic became their language of faith and resistance, because Arabic and Islam are one and the same thing in their concept. It is therefore not surprising to sometimes see patriotic fervor transform into religious fervor: such as Quranic preaching tours substituted for political campaigns during periods of repression. At the Islamic Congress of Jerusalem in 1931, the Old Destour leader Taalbi pledged on behalf of his country to reconstitute the one and indivisible Arab nation, and in 1951, the leader of the Neo-Destour brought Tunisia's voice to the congress of Muslim peoples in Karachi.

Many Neo-Destourians are agnostic and inspired by the secular ideals of the West: these seek in the East only support and in Islam only an instrument of solidarity. But they make full use of this solidarity, not hesitating to ride religious fanaticism when needed: witness the incidents of 1933 regarding the burial of naturalized French Muslims, considered apostates—a pretext widely used by both Destours to maintain agitation. However, in the party's internal rivalries, the contradiction of conscience bursts forth: we then see the Old Destour allying with the Great Mosque against the Neo.

In the Neo-Destourian tendency, Tunisian nationalism appears more as a branch of the universal movement for the emancipation of dominated peoples. Yet, while it receives added strength from this enveloping movement, it is indeed from within itself that it draws its dynamism. The Destour was born in Tunisia from purely Tunisian elements. The great ancestors: Bechir Sfar, Bach Hamba, Taalbi, Zaouch, the first Tunisians trained in Western culture, expressed as early as 1906 an exclusively Tunisian sentiment of reaction against subjugation, of defense of a national heritage, and also of modernist progress: they were the emulators of the Young Turk movement.

This first movement, suppressed and driven underground, resurfaced in 1920 in the form of an organized party: the Tunisian Constitutionalist Party, or "Destour." Aiming at the emancipation of the Tunisian people, it combined the democratic ideal with nationalism. But soon the dual tendency it reflected caused it to split: in 1933, the young, the most modernist and democratic, founded the Neo-Destour; while the old party, now called the Old Destour, retained the traditionalists, those whose eyes were turned toward the Islamic East and who heeded the calls of the apostle of the Islamic awakening: Chekib Arslan.

The two destours converge in their supreme goal: the independence of Tunisia. Both more or less accept stages, the first of which would be the restoration of a personalized Tunisian state within the framework of an expanded protectorate. They differ in the conservative tendency of one and the social tendency of the other and, above all, in the tactical positions they adopt, which vary according to the rivalries of their leaders. The neo-destour has often been criticized for its double face: Western and democratic before Westerners, Islamic and xenophobic when addressing its troops. The party's doctrinaires are, however, sincere in their love of Cartesianism. But, as a popular party, they must speak to the people in their passionate language, at the risk of being drawn beyond the shared boundaries imagined by these men of two civilizations.

The old destour, for its part, has only one game: it rejects the West. It seeks no support from the infidels and dreams of incorporating itself into an Islamic empire. Its supporters, most of whom descend from families that served Turkish domination, are neither democrats nor patriots in the European sense of these words: they are radical Muslims.

The neo-destour, more active than its elder, more flexible too, and addressing the masses, has widely outpaced the rival party. Possessing a network of disciplined and active local cells, it practically holds under its sway, through sympathy or fear, the entire merchant bourgeoisie of the cities and makes inroads into the countryside. The Tunisian trade unions, apart from a few meager elements subordinated to the communist-aligned federation or the socialist-aligned one, are firmly attached to the neo-destour and practice a unionism whose first article is national action. This party has thus become the determining element of public opinion; besides its numerous militants, its shock troops recruited from the plebeians, it is generally followed by the student youth and the new intellectual elite.

The destour is not, however, the entirety of Tunisian nationalism; the latter presents a range of nuanced forms, from xenophobic exaltation, haughty intransigence, to opportunism, passivity, or even loyal collaboration with the protector. But, apart from a few renegades, one can say that all Tunisians are nationalists, if by that one means they wish to see their country attain the dignity of an independent nation, or at least of a nation master of its own government.

This unanimity of national aspirations, we have seen it crystallize around Moncef Bey, when he was banished by the Allied authorities. It disperses and regroups, like a ballet, depending on whether the music is strings or brass; the stars perform their number at the front and the troupe, in the dark background of the set, stamps its feet and pretends to rush forward.

The recent events that have taken place in Tunisia have highlighted the profound influence exercised by the neo-destour and its leader Bourguiba. It was he who imposed on the Bey and his government the course of conduct to be adopted after the breakdown of the friendly talks in Paris: that is, the appeal to the U.N. Demonstrations, turning into riots, drew world attention to Tunisian demands, and the placing of the leader under house arrest served his plan even better, by provoking widespread unrest throughout the country.

This measure of removal in no way freed Tunisian officials from Bourguiba's hold. So much so that the conciliatory words spoken by the French prime minister, which were of a nature to satisfy Tunisian aspirations and to provoke a favorable psychological shock, met with only a faint echo in these circles. It seems that friendly Franco-Tunisian talks can only be resumed with the liberation and agreement of Bourguiba. Moreover, the latter favorably considers a direct agreement for the establishment of an internal autonomy regime, the first objective of the neo-destour.

The French and Their Works

It was inevitable that the European tide would pour into Tunisia, as later into Morocco. The conquest of Algeria had been an accidental anticipation; fifty years later, Europe was in full fever of expansion; it burst forth in all directions toward so-called virgin lands. Tunisia was at the crossroads of this migration and two main currents converged upon it: the Italian and the French. France's political seizure of the Tunisian state and French colonization did not halt the Italian flood. So much so that the French political act benefited European expansion; it is recorded in the great ledger of Europe's colonial push.

The European flood found on the spot an ethnic element that immediately mingled with it: the Jews. These—Jews of the first diaspora, Judaized Berbers, Jews re-imported from Europe—had been awaiting Western civilization somewhat like the messiah: they drank it in avidly. Intelligent and studious, they quickly formed a copious modern intellectual elite, better armed than the Muslim elite, competing with the Latin elite.

The largest part of this Israelite elite became French through naturalization. Whether of French citizenship or remaining subjects of the Bey, one can say that the Jewish population belongs to the European minority, through its ways of life, sentiments, and tendencies. However, through the close contact it has maintained with Muslims, possessing their language and psychology, through the centuries-old familiarity of these two ethnic elements, the Jewish community profitably plays a role of intermediary between Europeans and Tunisians, a role of link between West and East. This role was visible during the latest negotiations between the Tunisian government and the French government.

The Italian colony, which already had a foothold in the Regency before 1881, developed at great speed in the first twenty years of the protectorate. It numbered 50,000 souls in 1900, 100,000 in 1936. The first Italian immigrants went to the land: laborers, sharecroppers, becoming, through relentless toil, small landowners. Then they provided the skilled workers and foremen necessary for the modernization of the Tunisian economy.

The Italian colony transplanted its Sicilian life into the Regency and, being of low social condition, mixed little with the French colony; it partially disintegrated in favor of the latter through the process of naturalization. The expulsion of the Italian propertied classes, in the aftermath of the last war, deprived it of its elite, and the application of French laws on nationality by birth progressively dissolves it; it now numbers only 85,000 souls and almost all its children are born French. Among the other European colonies, rather small, one must single out the Maltese, close cousins of the Italians, who also gradually merge into the French colony.

In the European rush, the French colony presents itself as a colony of concentration, today triumphant with its 160,000 souls. No doubt it is only French by stock in a small proportion: a statistic from 1936 already showed a third of French by naturalization; if one takes into account descendants of naturalized citizens and mixed marriages, one can estimate that only a quarter of the French can claim pure French ancestry. But this entire colony has been unified in the mold of French citizenship, which earns it a preeminent position in the country. This position, combined with its isolation from the motherland and the zeal of French neophytes, gives it a proud, dynamic character, and also a patriotic hypersensitivity.

This French society, despite its diverse origins, forms a politically coherent whole. The regional groupings do not constitute small cliques, except perhaps for the Corsican group, which, through its numbers and solidarity, constitutes the core of resistance of the French minority. The major political parties of the metropole have few militants there; which explains the success of the "French rally" formula that today holds the majority. For the most part, the 15,000 Jews set aside, it is Catholic and practicing.

Religion has not created a communal bond between Italians, Maltese, and French. Yet all these colonies and the Israelite population present themselves as a single entity facing the Muslim population. In the human fresco of Tunisia, this group of 350,000 Westerners stands out from the mass of three and a half million chechia-wearers, as an elite stands out from the people in an ethnically homogeneous country. This is because this minority holds, in the intellectual and active life of the Regency, a place at least equal to that held by Muslims, and because it is integrated into the country.

It is a European and Tunisian community; for most, Tunisia is the native land: for the Jews first, in whose eyes France, despite its broad welcome, and Palestine, restored to its function as a Jewish homeland, still remain somewhat foreign; for the Italians, the Maltese, immigrants with no thought of return, having lost all ties with their roots (those we expelled live as strangers in their own countries); for a large part of the French who came from France, rooted here for themselves and their descendants. Cemeteries bind as much as estates and businesses.

This European settlement does not live in isolation, as in the days of the ghetto and the Frankish quarter. It has embedded itself in the veins of the country, in the countryside and in the cities. And yet, although its activity keeps it in permanent contact with the native people, it has remained on the margins of the Tunisian population, through its ways of life, its psychological reflexes. Or, rather, European society towers over Tunisian society. Did the French not describe themselves as "preponderant," an expression that refers to their political domination but characterizes the whole of their behavior. Served by the modern laws of the protectorate, all members of the European colony dominate, to varying degrees, through their merit, their capabilities, their activity. They thus constitute a ruling elite, in all fields, more substantial and better established than the new educated elite drawn from Muslim ranks.

Modern Tunisia is their work and they have a high awareness of their role. They can see that out of several hundred engineers only three or four are Tunisian; that their doctors or administrators are more reputed than the Tunisian ones; that the natives cannot even supply a quarter of the foremen and skilled workers in modern enterprises. This sense of superiority, the French colony draws not so much from the political authority it holds as from the knowledge of its own worth and the work it has accomplished.

The French achievement in Tunisia has been pursued on two parallel planes: that of the State and that of private enterprise.

The Tunisian state was a poor shack: no public services, for in a Barbary principality there was no question of serving the administered, but of living off them. The French made of it a most perfected establishment. They codified the confused customs, brought the most modern legal institutions (such as the land registration system); established a regular and prosperous financial administration; they created specialized public services: public works, agriculture, commerce and industry, education, public health, social affairs...

But, in doing so, they in a sense colonized the Tunisian state; for, given the inability of the natives to provide cadres, even subordinate ones, for these modern and technical establishments, they themselves supplied the administrative personnel and monopolized the civil service. The major directorates of the Tunisian state, staffed from top to bottom by French officials, placed under the authority of the Residency General and linked to French technical ministries, practiced an authoritarian administration and, although proceeding in principle in the name of local sovereignty, became an authority in their own right. Of the former Tunisian government, only puppet ministers had survived, Court figures kept in ignorance of the conduct of public affairs, losing even contact with what remained of traditional institutions: the corps of caïds and cheikhs, habous, guilds..., desiccated institutions, retaining some life only through the trickle of sap that the French deigned to grant them by making use of them.

Thus, the Tunisian government had been confiscated by an essentially French administration, carrying out reforming action. This action resulted not only in the discipline of economic and social life, but in the rapid equipping of the country with modern public services: ports, railways, roads, public buildings, hydraulic works, post and telegraph, courts, police, hospitals, scientific establishments, schools, etc. This dry enumeration evokes thousands of kilometers of means of communication, thousands of hospital beds, hundreds of thousands of children in school, and an entire modern state infrastructure that would be superfluous to detail. The most recent achievement lies in the great dams of the Medjerdah valley, which will ensure the electrification and irrigation of this valley and the water supply of the major cities, a work entirely conceived, carried out, and financed by the French.

This equipment was not for the sole benefit of the French. If the ports, roads, and railways were built to allow European settlers, industrialists, and merchants to exploit the country's riches, the native population drew the largest share of benefits from them, directly and indirectly. On the other hand, a large part of this equipment was intended for Tunisians: for example, almost all of the educational and health infrastructure. And all these investments were only possible thanks to the generous contribution of the French Treasury.

The French achievement in Tunisia was equally considerable in the private sector, for the colonization of the Tunisian state was not an end in itself; it was the corollary of a human and economic colonization. Mineral resources were uncovered and exploited by European companies, fallow lands were developed by thousands of French and Italian pioneers, industries of all kinds were founded by the French, as well as the great banking and commercial establishments that allow a country's economy to reach its full scope.

This private endeavor did not only allow French or European people to enrich themselves; the sources of wealth thus created spread their waters over the indigenous masses (workers, small traders, etc., received their share) and over the State itself, whose resources are backed by private French activities, in a proportion that can be estimated at 50%. Above all, it was primarily an educational force; one need only observe the fever of land clearing and planting that seized Tunisian fellahs upon contact with French settlers to judge its beneficial repercussions.

Having accomplished this work, the French of Tunisia consider themselves to possess a right over the country: first, the right to continue directing the affairs of the State, since their direction has proven so effective and the Tunisians are not yet in a position to ensure equally sound management - which is the exact truth. Secondly, the right to security in their private enterprises, a security that in their eyes can only be guaranteed by maintaining French authority over the organs of the State. Going further, they claim that their work has earned them a right of co-sovereignty in the Regency, a co-sovereignty that they exercise, in fact, in the assemblies and in the administration.

In short, the French built in Tunisia, with their own hands, their own money and their own materials, a modern State and economy, and they refuse to accept the situation defined by the civil code for one who has built on another's land. While the Tunisians, who watched as bystanders as the edifice rose, who contributed only as laborers, now that the building is comfortable, not content with having their place in it, claim ownership of it.

The treaties and sovereignty

The Treaty of Bardo, of May 12, 1881, strengthened the eastern frontier of Algeria by authorizing the French army to occupy the Tunisian glacis; it placed Tunisia outside the play of international intrigues by subjecting the internal sovereignty of the Tunisian State; but it conferred upon France no right in internal affairs, apart from that of ensuring security.

Within the framework of this diplomatic convention, it seemed that Tunisia should retain the autonomy of its internal government. The French would have had the latitude to establish enterprises in the country, under the benefit of the capitulary regime previously established and under the protection of their army. In this initial form, the Regency would have been an autonomous satellite of French Africa.

The Convention of La Marsa, of June 8, 1883, motivated in part by the financial embarrassments of the Tunisian State, placed it under the administrative tutelage of the French Republic: "in order to facilitate for the French government the accomplishment of its protectorate, His Highness the Bey undertakes to carry out the administrative, judicial and financial reforms that the French government shall deem useful."

One cannot seriously contest the validity of this convention; the emotion caused by the military intervention had subsided and the Bey would not have alienated the independence he still enjoyed in internal affairs had he not felt a pressing need for money to bail out the public Treasury, and had he not also had in view the advantages that the modernization of his institutions would bring to his country.

Moreover, this commitment did not appear likely to entail direct French control over the Tunisian administration, since the French parliament had refused to ratify an initial draft convention, of October 30, 1882, under the terms of which the French government was "authorized to exercise in Tunisia the administrative and judicial functions it deemed useful." By refusing to accept the direct administration of Tunisia, the French parliament marked the limits of the protectorate: Tunisian sovereignty was no doubt to be placed under tutelage, but it retained its identity, its integrity, its unity; it was sovereignty that was to act, under French impetus.

In fact, the policy of the residents general of the French Republic drew from the Convention of La Marsa a veritable delegation of all powers. The legislative and executive branches did indeed remain connected to the beylical seal, symbol of sovereignty, but only the French current flowed through it. Through the institution of complete oversight at all levels, through the creation of numerous administrations entrusted to French officials, through the confiscation of all initiative, the practical result was a system of direct administration.

Furthermore, the French colony was itself called upon to take part of the effective power in internal affairs, when representative bodies were created (economic chambers, budgetary assembly), in which it first held predominance, only to see its position subsequently crystallized into a parity or bipartism, which appeared to imply a sort of co-sovereignty. This apparent confusion of sovereignty even gave rise to the strange doctrine of French territoriality in Tunisia in matters of nationality.

However, some new institutions had been established on a conventional basis: thus the financial organization, the postal and telecommunications services, and above all the French judiciary, which derives its powers from texts predating the Convention of La Marsa and became, with the agreement of the European powers, the heir of the capitulary jurisdictions. These bodies rest on a foundation independent of the protectorate and of the deductions drawn from Article 1 of the Convention of La Marsa.

Some have sought to justify in law the de facto co-sovereignty thus established: they consider that it is founded on an interpretation of the protectorate treaties given by the acts carried out in their execution. Through these "subsequent acts," endorsed by the beylical seal, tacitly accepted by the great powers, the protectorate would have become a co-sovereignty. Unfortunately for this thesis, one cannot assert that the Bey voluntarily alienated part of his sovereignty by sealing decrees or by allowing certain acts of co-sovereignty to be accomplished, since he was after all obligated once and for all, by Article 1 of the Convention of La Marsa, to consent to everything that was proposed to him.

All the texts that granted the French colony of Tunisia a de facto participation in the organs of the Tunisian State can only be interpreted in light of the original treaty. Now this treaty, as we have seen, suggests no intention of delegation of sovereignty, by the very will of the French parliament. If there was no delegation to the French government, a fortiori there can be no delegation to the French colony. Moreover, in a foundational work on "the Tunisian State and the French protectorate," published in 1931 under the high patronage of the resident general, which therefore reflects the official French thesis, it is clearly stated that the restrictions placed on Tunisia's independence affect "the exercise and not the enjoyment of sovereign rights."

The theory of the protectorate is in truth vague and imprecise; jurists, struggling to classify it, have had to distinguish: colonial protectorate, very close to annexation; protectorate under international law, a sort of allegiance leaving the identity of the protected State intact. The Tunisian protectorate is without any doubt of this latter category, and if interference was pushed to the point of direct administration and the participation of French citizens in the functioning of the State, this de facto interference cannot have given rise to a right over the very essence of sovereignty.

This practical interference, which proceeds from a power external to the Tunisian State, has moreover varied over time. The protectorate evolves, and not always in the same direction. A recent act, freely and bilaterally consented to this time, brings a true novation to the Convention of La Marsa: the declaration of August 17, 1950, by which His Highness the Bey and the resident general, depositary of the powers of the French Republic, made known that they had reached agreement to negotiate successive reforms leading Tunisia to its internal autonomy.

In this text, reference was made to three initial institutional reforms announced by the resident general in a speech of June 23, which further specified that the evolution was to be accomplished within the framework of the treaties and in an orderly manner. But the agreed goal opened the door to other subsequent reforms, and the accepted principle of negotiation restored to the Bey a power of initiative, which he had ceased to exercise in fact, but of which he had not been dispossessed by the terms of the Convention of La Marsa. By this new act, dialogue was substituted for dictated reform, and this dialogue proposed an institutional reorganization restoring to Tunisia the exercise of its internal sovereignty.

A first set of reforms, negotiated within this framework, appeared on February 8, 1951. They aimed, on the one hand, at affirming the personality of the Tunisian government, by giving Tunisian ministers real authority and by lightening the oversight of their acts, and, on the other hand, at broadening the employment of Tunisians in public functions. But the texts adopted refrained from pronouncing on the Tunisian national character of the government and the civil service, and this same question of principle paralyzed the negotiations undertaken for the organization of a municipal system. They left lingering the ambiguity of a co-sovereignty, of a political right of the French in the civil service, over the government and in the representative municipal system.

As much to resolve this ambiguity as to secure for the demands of Tunisian nationalists the support of the people within a legitimate framework, the Bey in turn took the initiative of proposing a fundamental reform. By his speech from the throne of May 15, 1951, he announced his desire to grant his people a parliamentary system and delegated his prime minister to obtain the agreement of the French government.

The memorandum submitted by the Tunisian ministers to the government of the Republic on October 31, 1951, referring to the goal stipulated by the act of August 17, 1950 (internal autonomy) and invoking the principle of the unity and integrity of Tunisian sovereignty, requested the completion of governmental reform through the constitution of an entirely Tunisian council of ministers, the finalization of civil service regulations recognizing their Tunisian national character, and, as a crowning achievement, the institution of a Tunisian parliamentary assembly before which the government would be responsible.

The occasion for this last reform was offered by circumstances; indeed, the representative body in office, the grand council with budgetary powers, saw its mandate expire on November 9. The French government thus found itself confronted not only with an assertion of exclusive Tunisian sovereignty, but also for the first time with the Tunisian constitutional question.

When in 1705 the agha of the janissaries, Hussein ben Ali, had seized power and founded the beylical dynasty, he had simply taken over from a Turkish governor. An Ottoman officer turned king, he had quite naturally preserved for the Tunisian State its structure of Turkish colonial government. The Husseïnite family maintained this tradition until the establishment of the French protectorate: a despotic monarchy, external to the people, enjoying an ancient centralization, unchecked by any feudal power.

However, echoing the national and constitutional revolutions shaking Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and on the pressing advice of the French consul, Mahmoud Bey promulgated in 1857 a fundamental pact, a sort of declaration of the rights of man, and his successor Sadok Bey, in 1861, granted his people a constitution (in Arabic: destour). This instrument, more bourgeois than democratic, would have been suited to founding a liberal and modern regime, if the people for whom it had been written and the leaders who were to implement it had been in a position to read it and in a mood to understand it. The latter condemned it to opprobrium, and no Danton arose from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; the constitution was suspended in 1864.

The French protectorate thus covered a colonial principality with despotic powers, which facilitated its reforming action and its work of development. The Tunisian absolute monarchy was only tempered by the republicanism of the French who held its levers of command. The democratic spirit first insinuated itself into the French colony, which obtained the right to make its voice heard in the councils of the State, then among the Tunisians, who could not be denied at least parity in these councils.

It was, indeed, the French settlers who were the first to demand the granting of public liberties: of the press, of association, of assembly, the right to vote - liberties that were subsequently and progressively extended to the Tunisians, up to the point of parity. It was the socialists who paved the way for trade unionism and universal suffrage. By the logic of things, the Tunisians came to consider that these liberties should be inscribed within the framework of their sovereignty, and consequently be the subject of a constitution. They want the restoration and rejuvenation of the constitutional charter of 1861 - the destour - and this name adopted by the Tunisian nationalist movement suffices to demonstrate that it does not separate the ideal of independence from that of democracy.

In truth, Muslim nationalists invoke democracy because placing power in the hands of the people would constitute one of the most effective means for the conquest of independence. For many, democracy simply means the right for a people to be governed by their own; they do not disregard the old atavism of passivity among the population; it is a bourgeois and authoritarian democracy they have in mind. However, the republican ideal is ancient in the Berber world and the social idea, sown by the West, finds fertile ground there.

The demand for a parliamentary constitution thus remains, above all, a means of nationalist action aimed at independence and the assertion of Tunisian sovereignty. Such a constitution would, however, entail consequences for the dynasty; it would lose its traditional absolutism, but could still play an arbitral role between parties, and we can see clearly in the East that royal power retains its strength under a parliamentary system. The succession to the throne, regulated for a century and a half on the principle of primogeniture in the collateral line, could be called into question by a parliament, which would be quickly tempted to arrogate constitutional powers to itself.

A parliamentary constitution would above all result in freeing the Tunisian State from the internal protectorate. Would it not become difficult, indeed, to exercise the right of reforms that the French Republic holds from the La Marsa convention, with regard to an elected sovereign assembly? Nor can one see how the parliamentary oversight of the Tunisian State and the oversight of the protecting power could overlap. Whatever means one might imagine to reconcile the exercise of Tunisian democracy and the obligations of the protectorate, none of these means could hold against a popular will that would henceforth have legal power.

Finally, the institution of a parliamentary regime in Tunisia requires resolving the question of the political rights of the French established in that country, which they "had exercised until then thanks to an ambiguity, and indirectly raises the question of safeguarding their interests. In a parliamentary State, where the representative body is the emanation of popular sovereignty, where the executive is responsible before parliament, the French in Tunisia appear as foreigners; they can no longer exercise powers through the fiction of an unofficial delegation from the protecting State; yet it was from the exercise of these powers that they derived the guarantee of their interests.

The beylical initiative and the Tunisian memorandum, by requesting the immediate establishment of institutions based on the principle of the unity of Tunisian sovereignty, thus starkly revealed the precariousness of the French colony's position under a regime of internal autonomy. The French government, which had contemplated gradually ending the regime of direct administration, suddenly found itself overtaken in its intentions by the logical consequences that the Tunisian government intended to draw from the promise of internal autonomy. The incompatibility of such autonomy with the protectorate regime, as it had been conceived until then, in the form of active guardianship with participation of the French colony in the functioning of the State, became apparent.

To resolve this legal incompatibility and ensure the French colony the guarantee of its interests, two new paths were available:
- one would be Tunisia's adhesion to the French Union, as an associated State; but Tunisian opinion had shown until then some reluctance to enter this federal system, despite all the advantages it would derive from it; the French in Tunisia themselves were hardly keen on it, because of the autonomy that the Tunisian State would ipso facto acquire;
- the other would consist in concluding a special convention, regulating the particular status of the French in the Tunisian State and the economic, cultural, and social relations between that State and the French Republic; all things that had not been provided for by the La Marsa convention, whose sole purpose was to endow Tunisia with modern institutions, a purpose achieved; the new convention would consecrate the results obtained and ensure the continuity of the legal system in which the French and European community lives.

The Tunisian ministers proposed to pursue this latter path and to grant precise guarantees to the French colony. But the French government refused to take such a leap and, in its response to the Tunisian memorandum of 15 December 1951, adhered to the traditional policy of evolution based on previous practices. Carefully refraining from uttering the word "sovereignty" and from recalling that of "internal autonomy," citing France's fruitful contribution to Tunisian prosperity, affirming the permanence of the ties uniting the two countries, and finally claiming for its colony the right of representation in the assemblies of the Tunisian State, the French Republic sought to demonstrate its concern to extend its protectorate within an evolutionary framework taking into account established realities more than legal logic.

The French response of 15 December was regarded by the Tunisians as a rejection. It seemed to them that, under pressure from the French colony, the French government was going back on its promise to grant them autonomy, and above all was making the participation of the French in Tunisia a condition for the establishment of a representative assembly. The ambiguity of co-sovereignty continued to hover over Franco-Tunisian relations.

Thus, under the influence of Bourguiba, the Tunisian government decided to appeal to the good offices of the U.N. The Tunisian petition was doubtless not admissible in form; but world opinion was officially drawn to the dispute; street agitation, riots, and bloodshed made it urgent to resolve it.

While suppressing the disorder, the French government made amends and stripped the note of 15 December of its ambiguities. In his declaration of 22 January, the president of the council solemnly recognized the unity of Tunisian sovereignty, merely expressing the wish that the French in Tunisia be invited by the Bey and his people to collaborate in the country's institutions; and he confirmed the promise to lead Tunisia to its internal autonomy.

It is to be presumed that negotiations will soon resume, on the basis of a single Tunisian sovereignty, for the establishment of a parliamentary constitution. Municipal reform will be included. The most substantial stage of internal autonomy will thus be reached. As for the participation of the French in Tunisian political institutions, it can be envisaged either in a communal form (the sovereign offering the French community a certain number of places in these institutions), or in the more intimate form of granting the French Tunisian citizenship (without causing them to lose their status and citizenship as French nationals).

This latter formula appears the most fruitful for maintaining the French presence and influence in that country. In any case, sooner or later, the logical and legal consequences of the evolution of the protectorate will have to be drawn, that is to say, the basic treaties will have to be revised, as they are no longer in accordance with the facts they fostered but do not sanction.

Prospects

The Tunisian problem presents itself like one of those faceted mirrors in which one reads the future: each person sees only one facet at a time and discovers in it the future he has in mind. Each facet offers a solution to one aspect of the problem and, when one steps back to gain an overall view, all one sees is an indistinct shimmer.

The settler, seeing only his land and the docile peasants around him, will believe that a show of authority suffices to ensure order and happiness for all. The French civil servant, an excellent mechanic of the administrative machine, will cry recklessness if his machine is entrusted to inexperienced hands. They are right. But educated Tunisian youth proclaims its right to public office and the patriot rebels against being under the political domination of a foreign minority; the Muslim aspires to free himself from infidel hands. They are also right.

The sociologist worries about seeing relations sour between two ethnic groups that History has placed side by side and whose cooperation is fruitful. He thinks that what is just and reasonable in Tunisian aspirations must be satisfied, in order to sterilize as soon as possible the evil ferments that the current quarrel infuses into children's minds and that might rise tomorrow in a harvest of hatred.

The jurist, probing the texts and finding no justification in them for the position acquired by the French residing in the country, seeks formulas allowing some to govern themselves and others to preserve their legal environment. He would wish to see the initial contract revised and supplemented. He will propose dual citizenship, so that European residents may participate in local political life; he will sketch out a confederal system harmonizing in equity the relations between European and African nations.

The diplomat, considering that the current difficulties may have as their immediate cause the collusion of the Bey and the Destour, would be tempted to try to dissociate these allies of the day, in order to maintain a status quo dear to statesmen. If he looks deeper, he will understand that the new Tunisian elite, with its popular roots, has become the virtual sovereign of the country; that the conflict is one between two elites, one established, the other rising. He will then endeavor to arbitrate.

On the other hand, the Tunisian problem cannot be isolated from the imperial upheavals of our era, from this new "Eastern question," which has shifted to the southern shore of the Mediterranean, where the ideals of young peoples afflicted with the fever of independence confront the designs of two ideological blocs that divide the world.

Tunisia lies within the defensive perimeter of the liberal West; but it is also one of those lands conducive to the development of an unsatisfied colonial nationalism, a primary infection opening the way to communism. Its health concerns not only France, but the entire Atlantic coalition.

Finally, in the edifice of the Maghreb, whose elements are all keyed together, though shaped in different ways, one cannot move the Tunisian cornerstone without risking the balance of the whole. The solution to the Tunisian problem must therefore be part of a comprehensive architecture for North Africa.

Source:
De Montety Henri. Les Italiens en Tunisie.
In: Politique étrangère N°1 - 1952 - 17th year pp. 447-466.
doi : 10.3406/polit.1952.2691
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/polit_0032-342X_1952_num_17_1_2691