The Bardo Treaty had placed France in a “humiliated” position, which foreigners were quick to exploit.21 As Cambon’s confidant Paul-Henri-Benjamin d’Estournelles de Constant, France’s délégué à la Résidence générale in Tunisia, characterized the problem, the “omnipotence [toutepuissance] of European jurisdictions in Tunisia” had given rise to “inextricable complications and abuses.”22 D’Estournelles very much regretted that the Bardo Treaty had guaranteed the bey’s existing agreements with third countries, which allowed there to be as many “States within the State as there were European nations represented in Tunisia.”23 This idea was hardly original to d’Estournelles. The Radical Party deputy Camille Pelletan had contended, as early as December 1881, that the Bardo Treaty blocked any possibility of reform in the protectorate because of “these consular powers that form States within the State,” and Cambon himself admitted that the treaty’s recognition of the capitulations had been a “huge mistake [grosse faute].”24 While the Italian government aimed simultaneously to defuse the Meschino conflict and defend its extraterritorial rights, Cambon had already set his mind to ending the capitulatory rights of all European powers in Tunisia.25 If France failed to do so, he later remarked to his wife in a letter, “we will find ourselves backed into a corner [nous voilà acculés].”26
The corner consisted of the commercial privileges, diplomatic immunities, and consular jurisdiction emanating from capitulations agreements negotiated between the bey and European powers. In particular, the maintenance of the consular jurisdiction meant that each consular court of every European power exercised a form of sovereignty in the protectorate. Moreover, because this sovereignty was jurisdictional (applying to persons), rather than territorial (applying to places), its effects were not limited to a geographically fixed enclave but rather followed all foreign subjects as they traveled throughout the protectorate and as they marked the watershed moments of their lives: marriage, the birth of a child, divorce, property purchase or sale, the opening of a business, or any other social activity that was mediated by the law, including death and inheritance.27 In this way, the European population of Tunisia, although smaller than Egypt’s or Algeria’s, was still sizable enough to present an obstacle to French hegemony.
At the time the protectorate was established, its residents included at least 11,200 Italians and 7,000 British subjects (mostly Maltese), as well as a smattering of Greeks, Dutch, and other foreign nationals. The size of France’s settlement, perhaps as small as 700, paled in comparison.28 Each of the 20,000 or more non-French Europeans living in Tunisia, therefore, constituted a potential crisis for protectorate authorities, since this meant that even the most mundane affairs could escalate into diplomatic rifts. Even as French settlement increased significantly and surpassed the Maltese in size, Italians still outnumbered French nationals considerably. By 1906, for instance, Italians still dominated at 81,000, while the number of French had climbed to over 34,000 and the Maltese had only grown to 10,300.29 Of equal concern were far less numerous “protected persons” or protégés—native Jews and Muslims, often merchants or persons otherwise doing business with Europeans, who had secured the legal protection of one or another European government and who, in so doing, multiplied the instances in which extraterritorial jurisdiction came into play and, more troubling, undermined the strict division between “Europeans” and “natives” when the latter claimed the rights of the former.30 In short, if the extraterritorial sovereignty of other European states, especially Britain and Italy, were allowed to persist, these states could thwart France’s control over the rule of law in Tunisia—not because of the size of the foreign population, but because of the significant number of everyday-life matters these individuals called upon foreign governments to mediate or resolve.31 As Cambon himself put it, the capitulations meant that “the administration can be paralyzed at any moment by the consuls.”32 It was this constant potential for outside intervention that he had in mind when he said France would be cornered if the capitulations were not suppressed.
There was another corner Cambon wished to avoid being backed into, as well: he wanted to keep France’s expeditionary force from gaining the upper hand in running the day-to-day affairs of the protectorate over civilians such as himself and d’Estournelles. Being caught between the prerogatives of foreign powers and those of France’s own military was frustrating to Cambon, but it ultimately helped produce the institutional change he desired. To quell the military’s power, which had expanded in the wake of insurrections in Sfax and Kairouan, he had to prove that a civilian administration could maintain order and security, which meant better control not only over Tunisia’s “natives” but also over its “unruly” Europeans. To persuade European powers that their interests lay in establishing a permanent French civilian justice system that would act in the name of all Europeans, what better way than to use the threat of arbitrary military justice as the only viable alternative? Indeed, at the time that the Meschino incident took place, Annibale Raybaudi Massiglia, the Italian consul, was convinced that this and other cases were being used deliberately to “open a breach in the capitulations by submitting to military jurisdiction all those accused of infractions [délits] against the army.”33 Once again, the Italian consul proved right. Cambon had been aware of, and had sanctioned, the military’s arrest of Paolo Meschino and others like him.34 But Cambon saw no advantage to relying on military might over the long term. Instead, he believed that French power in Tunisia rested on two reforms: establishing civilian rule and ending the extraterritorial rights of other European powers.
• • •
Negotiations to end the capitulations started off relatively smoothly for France. By mid-October 1882, Austro-Hungarian leaders, while preferring not to assent officially until others also had done so, nonetheless had informally indicated their willingness to close Austria-Hungary’s court with virtually no questions asked. French negotiators had presented the case to their counterparts in Vienna as analogous to Austria-Hungary’s own actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to which reforms the French had conceded immediately. According to the Italian chargé d’affaires in Vienna, Francesco Galvagna, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Gustav Kálnoky had fully accepted France’s argument: “France finds itself in Tunisia in a situation,” Kálnoky had told Galvagna, “having a clear analogy to the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina . . . [and] when the imperial [sic] government took, last year, the resolution to suppress the capitulations in the occupied provinces, the French cabinet offered its compliance right away.” This meant, as Galvagna paraphrased Kálnoky, that the “Vienna Cabinet cannot refuse its consent to the Government of the Republic for the abolition of the capitulations in Tunisia.”35 Germany, too, had few reservations. Of course, like Austria-Hungary, it also had very few direct interests in Tunisia. Because representatives for both Germany and Austria-Hungary did not need to worry about the practical effects that suppressing consular jurisdiction would have on their subjects in Tunisia, having virtually none there, they were able to respond to French queries with purely diplomatic interests in mind. Moreover, in the case of Austria-Hungary, conceding to French wishes seemingly offered its own maneuvers in Bosnia-Herzegovina greater legitimacy. From Italy’s perspective, on the other hand, there was a “quite remarkable” difference “between the juridical status of Bosnia, entrusted [affidata] by a European treaty to the complete administration and responsibility of the Austro-Hungarian government, and the condition of the Regency of Tunisia, where France’s only qualification [titolo] is the treaty of Bardo,” a treaty that, Mancini hastened to add, “guarantees vis-à-vis other powers, the maintenance of all existing international agreements.”36
In its discussions with Great Britain, the Quai-d’Orsay invoked both the Bosnia-Herzegovina analogy and that of Cyprus, where Britain had imposed its own judicial system. At first, it looked as if Britain would be receptive to this line of thinking. In mid-October, for instance, Lord Granville reported internally that in his view, “a country like France . . . had the means of introducing judicial institutions [in Tunisia] which would ensure substantial justice to foreigners.” As long as Britain’s commercial rights and privileges continued to be protected, “it was in the interest of British
