the consular courts was under negotiation, Paul Cambon initially rejected demands to settle Tunisia’s debt to the Ben Ayads, arguing that doing so would have “prepare[d] a new bankruptcy of the Tunisian government.”12 When the case went to international arbitration, the Ben Ayad family’s claims against the beylical state from before 1870 were dismissed, while its own debts to the government were not.13 Ben Ayad emerged the debtor, but the case nonetheless had been a major stumbling block in negotiations between France and Britain over the fate of consular jurisdiction. Now informed of protectorate officials’ desire for a list of British protégés, Consul General Johnston assumed that it portended a removal of protected status altogether and that the Ben Ayads “would dread reprisals for their anti-French policy in the seventies.”14 Of course, what Johnston was really worried about was that the “transference” of the Ben Ayads from British protection “against their will, and possibly much to their prejudice . . . would have a bad effect on British interests in North Africa.” Thinking beyond the Ben Ayads to the general principle, Johnston also took exception to the notion that “any phrase in the new Convention can be held to indicate that Great Britain intends to annul protection,” or what he called “quasi-citizenship,” if said status was granted prior to the French conquest.15
Not all in the Foreign Office agreed with Johnston regarding the necessity of maintaining British consular protection in Tunisia. The first reader of the dispatch, a Mr. Robertson (possibly Charles Boyd Robertson, a Foreign Office lawyer), found himself concluding that the “whole sense and tendency” of Article 1 of the 1897 Convention “shows that the object is to abolish special privileges for foreigners.” Under these circumstances, if the French government should, “as Sir H. Johnston puts it, seek to ‘annul the status’ of the Benayad family, it does not seem that we should have any legitimate ground for remonstrance, since that ‘status’ is, virtually, abolished by Treaty.” W.E. Davidson, the Foreign Office legal adviser, concurred. But Lord Salisbury, Britain’s prime minister and foreign minister, had a different view. “With all deference I doubt the above construction,” he wrote. “We have renounced for our Consul in the future the right to give protection. But we have not invalidated the protection which, in all legality, our Consul has given to them in the past. The status of protected person is given once for all and it does not require renewal, though it can be cancelled. But of that there is no question.”16
Sir Harry Johnston’s fears notwithstanding, French designs were quite in line with Lord Salisbury’s views. Protectorate officials did not want to “take over” protection from foreign governments so much as bring the practice to an end in the future. Accordingly, they were less concerned about the existing protection accorded to the Ben Ayads than about ensuring that it ended with the present generation. Johnston still considered this a “knotty point” and reported he was “personally . . . inclined to think that the status of British protection, once conferred on a man, would descend to his children unless revoked.”17 On this question, however, the Foreign Office was unified: all concurred with the foreign office librarian Augustus Oakes’s conclusion that “the system of giving British protection to persons of Foreign nationality and continuing it from generation to generation may be said to have been practically abandoned.”18 Oakes and the foreign office staff had anticipated French demands; over the next year and a half, the protectorate government required all European consuls in Tunisia to review their rosters of protégés; the bey then issued decrees definitively listing the names of persons protected by foreign governments.19
The impact of the new protégé registry was almost immediate. As early as November 1898, only two months after the bey’s decree issued lists of persons protected by Britain, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, courts began using the lists as a basis for judging their jurisdiction in hearing cases. The test case came over a certain Rahmine Boublil, a Tunisian Jew who claimed to be a Dutch protégé. Boublil had pursued one Braham Castro before the Tunis justice of the peace for a debt of 420 francs plus interest that Castro allegedly owed him. Upon the justice of the peace’s ruling in Boublil’s favor, Castro promptly appealed the judgment, claiming that the court was incompetent on the grounds that both he and Boublil were Tunisian. Citing the new protégé list on which Boublil’s name failed to appear, the court argued that it would be an “abuse of power” for it to ignore the “rights belonging to France and to his majesty the bey in Tunisia since the establishment of the protectorate and the suppression of the Capitulations regime.”20 However, the judgment continued, the Boublil case presented extenuating circumstances because the legal proceedings had been initiated before the decree of 1 September and, at the time, Boublil had been considered a protégé. He would be “European” for this case and “Tunisian” in the future. Boublil’s case was probably one of the last of the unlisted protégés for whom the French court in Tunis would claim jurisdiction. Henceforth, only those names on the decrees would be entitled to the benefits of foreign protection, much to the chagrin of those mistakenly left off the lists.21 Proceedings in Boublil’s case showed evidence of the residency general’s close watch over the Tunis court’s activity; indeed, the resident general had recently “informed the court that only natives who were registered on this list could claim to status of protégé.”22 This would not be the last time that the residency sought to influence jurisprudence with regard to jurisdictional judgments by the French courts in Tunisia.
With foreign consular protection set to extinguish itself within a generation, the resident general could boast, twenty years after the establishment of the protectorate, of France’s progress in reining in jurisdictional jumping: “European protégés have been registered, and the list of them has been officially issued.”23 Since protected status could no longer be passed from one generation to the next, the French administration in Tunisia finally stood poised, at the dawn of the twentieth century, to put an end to the politics of protection played by its imperial rivals.
• • •
But what of France’s own politics of protection? If European protégés’ crossing of legal boundaries raised the question of French rivals’ ongoing influence on everyday affairs in the protectorate, the jurisdictional jockeying of Algerian French nationals in Tunisia drew attention to other cracks in France’s imperial edifice.24 The irony of d’Estournelles’s diatribe against the protégés was that if any country had abused the practice of offering consular protection in Tunisia, it had been France. In the preprotectorate era, as France competed with Italy and Britain for influence over Tunisian affairs, the French consul at Tunis not only had offered protection to numerous long-standing beylical subjects but also had deliberately recognized the French nationality of thousands of Muslim and Jewish colonial subjects from other parts of Africa (mostly Algeria) as a means of increasing the number of French nationals in the Regency—a practice that generated protests from the bey and his government.25 Even at the outset of protectorate rule in Tunisia, moreover, French authorities continued to encourage Algerian migration, calculating that it would be helpful to incorporate such “foreigners” into the occupation army.26 Thus, for all that jurists like G. de Sorbier de Pougnadoresse or officials like d’Estournelles decried the “crowds” of native clients who thwarted local sovereignty and upset the colonial racial hierarchy by obtaining foreign protection, the numbers of foreign protégés were minuscule in comparison to the French charges. Indeed, the ability of Algerian Muslims and Jews living in Tunisia to claim French nationality had posed such an obstacle to the bey’s sovereignty that, in the 1870s, his government had proposed a “convention” between Tunisia and France whereby Algerians who had settled in Tunisia for two years or more without declaring to the consulate their intention of remaining French nationals would be considered Tunisian subjects.27
Like the protégés, Muslims and Jews who could claim Algerian (and therefore French) status threatened to undermine the colonial power hierarchy that distinguished the rights of “Europeans” from those of “natives.” Thus, at the same time that French authorities sought to curtail foreign governments’ practices of protection, they also introduced regulations to limit Algerians’ claims to French nationality outside Algeria.28
