What appears at first blush to be simple racism was also a matter of international power politics.
Consular protection also raised the possibility that France would face something of an international relations conflict with itself. The border between Tunisia and Algeria was an international one because Algeria had been annexed and Tunisia was merely “protected” by France.3 Muslim Algerians were considered French nationals (albeit not citizens with electoral rights) by virtue of the Senatus Consulte of 1865.4 Because a discriminatory regime of the indigénat (indigenous codes subjecting native Algerians to restrictions of their civil liberties and criminalizing infractions that were not criminal when committed by non-Muslims) prevailed in Algeria, Algerians’ nationality paradoxically ended up conferring more rights upon those who were located outside this supposedly national territory and who could claim consular protection as “Frenchmen” in countries like Tunisia.5 Tunisians, on the other hand, remained beylical subjects rather than French nationals. For all the differences in the legal organization of Tunisia and Algeria, however, colonial rule in each was premised on the notion that “Europeans” and “natives” constituted two distinct classes of people, with corresponding differences in rights. The practice of offering protection in Tunisia threatened that distinction in both Tunisia and Algeria not only because it gave Algerians rights they did not have at home but also because it gave Tunisians an incentive to claim to be Algerian. Thus, the fact that Tunisia and Algeria constituted discrete states under international law posed an even more intractable problem than did foreign patents of protection. After all, if the logic of protectorate rule dictated that France govern through the bey, then the bey had to have his own subjects over whom to rule. In the previous chapter, we saw that preserving the bey’s sovereignty had impeded a smooth transition to French rule inasmuch as it had provided the basis for extraterritorial claims by European governments, fashioned in treaties they had previously concluded with the bey. Yet, as the present chapter will demonstrate, insisting on beylical sovereignty remained essential to French efforts to control native Muslims and Jews. In this domain, France was as dependent on beylical sovereignty as it was interested in diminishing it.
Absent beylical sovereignty, it would be France, rather than the bey, that levied taxes, conscripted armies, policed behavior, maintained religious institutions, and adjudicated sharia law, among the many other domains of Tunisian statecraft. Taxes (especially head taxes) were deeply resented in Tunisia, and conscription had been partially responsible for rebellion in the preprotectorate era.6 Better to associate such impositions with the local sovereign than with a foreign colonizing power. By recognizing the bey’s authority in these areas, the French were able to administer justice, bring in revenue, and defend Tunisia’s borders without burdening the French taxpayer or identifying the protectorate administration too closely with unpopular taxes and conscription. Indeed, the genius of the protectorate system, French premier Jules Ferry told the Chamber of Deputies on 1 April 1884, was that its preservation of beylical sovereignty “frees us from installing a French administration in this country, which is to say it frees us from imposing significant burdens on the French budget. It allows us to supervise from above, to govern from above, to avoid taking on, in spite of ourselves, responsibility for all the details of administration.”7 Thus, throughout the first decades of the protectorate, the notion that the bey was sovereign was consistently invoked—by the bey himself, as one might expect, and by French protectorate authorities as well. As much as French officials insisted that Algeria was an integral part of France, they maintained that Tunisia was not.
As the French government strove to consolidate protectorate rule at the end of the nineteenth century, it simultaneously sought to assume control over all “Europeans” (generally presumed Christians) and to ensure that the bey retained authority over all “Tunisians”—Muslims and Jews. As explained in the previous chapter, the effort to bring all “Europeans” under French sovereign authority was thwarted by the ongoing influence of European governments in the protectorate, as well as the difficulty of defining precisely who a European was. Given Tunisia’s position as a Mediterranean crossroads, identifying the bey’s subjects was equally difficult. The frequent circulation of individuals between Tunisia and Algeria, Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Mediterranean islands such as Malta defied efforts to locate the origins of many would-be Tunisian subjects and allowed them to have roots in more than one place, or at least to claim that they did.8 Movement across international borders thus seriously threatened the bey’s efforts to assert authority over Muslims and Jews, and it raised a more enduring question of national jurisdiction than had patents of protection, since these, after all, had been liable to revocation. In the end, such efforts to clearly distinguish Tunisians from their neighbors highlighted the extent to which the colonial project in one part of the Mediterranean was inseparable from that in another. Since an effective protectorate required a compliant subject population, one of the first orders of French business was to shore up the bey’s domestic sovereignty.
The process of defending the bey’s sovereignty expanded the purview of the beylical state and the protectorate administration while at the same time underscoring the limits of authority in each. The Tunisian protectorate had been imagined in contrast to Algeria: it would be a less invasive, supposedly more enlightened, and most of all cheaper form of imperial governance. Yet, France’s approach to ruling indirectly through the bey turned out to be very labor intensive for the French government. Thus, the very process of reinforcing the bey’s authority paradoxically engendered an increasing degree of French intervention in the day-to-day affairs of beylical administration. This occurred especially in three of the most vital domains of government left under the bey’s nominal authority—taxation, conscription, and justice. Already identified by d’Estournelles as the three domains of statecraft perturbed by the politics of consular protection, each of these also demonstrated the extent to which France’s colonial domination in Tunisia depended on the bey’s ability to assert sovereignty over his subjects. And yet the administration of each of these domains exposed fault lines in authority that protectorate officials constantly scrambled to fill. As French officials intervened more intensively in the everyday affairs of Tunisian government, they incrementally undermined the very logic of protectorate rule, and Tunisia slowly came to resemble a directly ruled colony.
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There was nothing particularly novel about the Tunisian bey insisting that consular protection was at odds with the preservation of his own sovereignty. In 1866, observing the growing numbers of foreign protégés in the Regency, he had decreed that “we do not recognize any protection accorded to Tunisians, and we will continue to treat those with foreign patents of protection the same as our other subjects.”9 But the decree was a dead letter, ignored by European consuls. What was new in the 1880s and 1890s was that French officials themselves sought to revive the decree and curtail consular protection. After all, if Tunisia’s legal system were to be divided between “European” and “Tunisian” jurisdictions, one needed to be able to differentiate the two. Consular protection blurred, rather than distinguished, the boundaries between these categories by allowing Tunisians to jump jurisdictions as a result of acquiring foreign protection. Forcing the closure of consular courts had not alleviated the problem posed by this “crowd of clients”10 because the treaties and protocols signed as a condition of that closure granted protégés the same rights as native-born Europeans. This allowed other European governments to maintain an influence in the protectorate and also created circumstances in which foreign protégés obtained rights from which beylical subjects were excluded. Tunisians could reasonably wonder what benefit France’s protection of the bey conferred when affiliation with another European state seemed sometimes to offer greater personal advantages. This same problem had increasingly compromised the Ottoman sultan’s sovereignty, as growing numbers of dhimmī escaped Ottoman law by virtue of European protection.11 Thus, shoring up the bey’s authority over “native” Muslims and Jews and removing them from European protection were consistent with efforts to increase French control.
The ink had barely dried on the September 1897 Anglo-French Arrangement when protectorate officials asked the British consulate to provide the names of all Britain’s protected persons in the Regency.
