French Ministry of Foreign Affairs did denounce the treaty, just in time. But that, according to the British consul in Tunis, “left matters very much as they were,” with a large and intractable Italian colony in the Regency.147 Annexationist newspapers began carrying paranoid stories reporting on the martial behavior of Italians recently arrived from Sicily and Pantelleria. Likening the recent “invasion” of Italian immigrants to the “expédition des Mille” during the Risorgimento (almost 2,400 men reportedly arrived in Tunis alone in the course of five months in 1895), La Tunisie Française described the new arrivals as “overloaded with arms, rifle on shoulder, double-barreled pistols on the belt, knife on the side,” sarcastically adding that the Italians claimed to be “out for a pleasure walk with all this bellicose equipment!”148 Tunisie Française’s editor, the polemicist Victor de Carnières, led the attack on the Italians, libeling famous members of the Tunis Italian community and challenging one of them to a duel when he responded violently to the depiction of him in de Carnière’s paper.149
In view of these passions, the French government could have simply let the year following the denunciation run out, allowing the treaty to expire in September 1896. Instead, it initiated new treaty negotiations with both Italy and Great Britain, whose own treaty had no expiration date. For Italy, the biggest stumbling block was the implicit recognition that renegotiating the treaty would give France. The 1868 treaty, naturally, had been entered into with the bey. It was thus a “considerable political concession” to “negotiate with France for Tunisia, where, except for the suspension of Consular justice, the pre-1881 status quo is still in force for us.”150 Italy’s insistence that the capitulations were still operative, treaty or no treaty, was a source of continual frustration for French officials, who contended that once they had established French courts in Tunisia, the rationale for the capitulations (i.e., the protection of Christians from the Muslim justice system) no longer existed.151
Even months into the negotiations, the Italian government still expressed “reservations resulting from the fact of our non-recognition of the Bardo Treaty.”152 Italy’s position might have been different, Foreign Minister Onorato Caetani di Sermoneta told the French ambassador to Rome, Albert Billot, “if you had eliminated him [the bey] at the beginning and replaced the preexisting regime purely and simply with French sovereignty.”153 As Billot told it, he could only laugh in response to this, before adding, “Do you mean to say . . . that the annexation of Tunisia to France would leave no basis for your demands and would remove any cause of trouble? It’s never too late to make good. But, beware! Is it really in your interest to push us in this new direction?” What if, he continued, “we decided to do in Tunis as you yourselves have done in Massawa [Eritrea] and we are doing in Madagascar right now”?154 Billot’s mention of Eritrea was probably meant to irritate Caetani, since Italian officials under Francesco Crispi had expressed a willingness to make significant concessions in Tunisia if France were willing to engage in some territorial swaps on the Horn of Africa; the idea of the swap, of course, had predated the Italian army’s disastrous experience in March 1896 at the Battle of Adwa [Ethiopia], which had brought the bellicose Francesco Crispi to resign as premier.155
The new premier, Crispi’s fellow Sicilian Antonio Starabba, the marquis Rudinì, concluded treaty negotiations in the fall. On 28 September 1896, three conventions (on commerce and shipping, consular rights, and extradition) were signed, leaving Crispi to lament
The Italian-Tunisian treaty is a renunciation of all our rights and privileges in the Regency. With great care and in due form we had protected these privileges and, in a single blow, they came to be nullified.
We have sacrificed 50/t [50 thousand] Italians who reside in the Regency.156
More than the rights of the individual Italians in Tunisia, though, Crispi seemed to regret what the treaty meant for Italy relative to France as a colonial power. “Watch what France is doing,” he noted in his diary in November 1896. “She is working on making an African empire from Madagascar to Tunisia.”157
Crispi’s reactions to the agreement, like those of other treaty opponents in the Italian parliament, give the impression of Italy’s power in the protectorate being reduced to nil by the 1896 conventions.158 In a nominal sense, this was true. The conventions and the beylical decree of 1 February 1897, which “definitively” abrogated “treaties and conventions of all kinds relative to Tunisia,” terminated the capitulations by nullifying the treaties upon which they were based.159 In effect, with the new diplomatic agreements, Italy finally recognized the Bardo Treaty and the French protectorate, and it put to rest any pretension it had to establish its own official colony there.160 And yet, the 1896 conventions guaranteed virtually all the same rights as had the capitulations. “In essence,” the French civil controller in Tunis, Charles Monchicourt, wrote during a much later period of conflict with Italy over Tunisia, “the conventions of 1896 were nothing other than Capitulations concealed by a coat of modern varnish.”161 Aside from the “political concession” of negotiating with France as the representative of Tunisia, then, Italy’s most substantial compromise was to agree that its “most-favored nation” status pertained only in relation to third powers, not France. For a government that once vociferously protested Roustan’s assumption of the title “The French resident and delegate [to the bey] for external affairs,” this was no trivial matter.
However symbolically humiliating the 1896 conventions were to Italy, they nonetheless guaranteed Italians many concrete rights in Tunisia. Although the commercial convention subjected Italian goods to the French minimum tariff, this commercial blow was softened by a clause allowing Italians to practice cabotage (the transport of goods or passengers between two ports in the same country) along the Tunisian coast, which was not allowed French boats in Italian waters. Italians also would be allowed to fish freely in Tunisian waters, ending French efforts to extend to the Tunisian coast an 1888 law forbidding foreigners from fishing in the territorial waters of France and Algeria. Probably these concessions to Italian boats and fishermen were made in recognition of how sparse French settlers were just fifteen years after the establishment of the protectorate. As the Dépêche Tunisienne put it, “we have never desired that they [Italian fishermen] should leave our coasts; for a long time to come they will be impossible to replace.”162 Nonetheless, in 1904, when Italians still dominated anchovy and sardine fishing and made up fully half of the sponge fishermen in Tunisian waters, protectorate officials rued the treaty’s cabotage and fisheries concessions, which had created, in their view, a “serious obstacle to maritime colonization by the French.”163 Similar complaints would arise in 1924, but the very problem of Italian dominance in the Tunisian fishing industry made it difficult to reverse Italy’s long-held rights. The disappearance of Italian boats and fishermen would, it was thought, disrupt the alimentary provision of the protectorate.164
For its part, Britain also renegotiated its treaty, even though it did not have to. Only a few months before the Italian conventions had been signed, the British consul had mocked the
modest position which he [the Resident General] proposed to assign to Great Britain and Italy in their future Commercial relations with Tunis—views founded on the idea which with amusingly naïve frankness he more than once conveyed to me, that England would humbly throw up her Treaty and gratefully submit to any terms which France might choose to dictate, while Italy was to receive only such crusts as France might choose to throw her.165
The fact that Britain did not “humbly throw up her Treaty” led Resident General René Millet to vacillate between showing solicitude toward the community of British subjects in Tunis and threatening annexation, which he correctly ascertained “might have some weight in persuading Her Majesty’s Government to come to terms as to the new Treaty.”166 Indeed, Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, was quite concerned about the precedent established by Madagascar, where Britain had recognized France’s
