because the behavior engaged questions of international law and diplomacy.33
While it is undoubtedly true, as George Steinmetz has suggested that “the colonized were not the authors of their own native policy,” the history of Tunisia from the 1880s to the 1930s proves that the everyday maneuverings of colonized persons posed obstacles to French administrators and forced them to react in ways that altered colonial governance considerably.34 That these modifications were not always to the direct benefit of native Tunisians did not alter the fact that it was their actions that had helped to institute change. Tunisians’ actions often spoke louder than words, or at least they left more of a paper trail in an era when few Tunisians were literate and fewer still recorded their thoughts in writing. Thus, while it has been difficult to recapture Tunisian “voices” for all but the elite, I have made a conscious effort to reconstruct Tunisians’ behavior and to extrapolate from it, to the extent possible, their perspectives and priorities. It was precisely such actions, and their international political ramifications, that protectorate leaders continually sought to contain. Indeed, French efforts to bring “order” out of what they perceived as “chaos” led them to gradually abandon the protectorate premise and slowly replace it with a more invasive, even “direct” form of rule.35
Scholars often have distinguished between “direct” and “indirect” rule in assessing the nature of colonial governance. By direct rule, they mean the administration of colonies by individuals from the metropole, often under the immediate oversight of the central government at home. By indirect rule, they mean rule through local chiefs or princes, who are often granted considerable autonomy vis-à-vis the metropolitan capital. In its most encapsulated form, the French mode of imperial rule is figured as having been direct or “assimilationist,” while the British are noted for having ruled indirectly.36 This notion probably stems at least in part from the universalism of French republican rhetoric, by virtue of which all parts of France, however far-flung, are taken to be (and ostensibly treated as) fundamentally similar.37 In a juridical sense, assimilation also refers to the fact that at least some of France’s colonial possessions (notably the “old” colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane and the newer colony of Algeria) eventually constituted integral parts of—or were “assimilated to”—the metropole. Moreover, to the extent that a new policy of “association”—a concept resembling indirect rule—was understood to signal a shift away from assimilation, the notion that the policy it replaced had been assimilationist was lent credence.
The perception that colonial governance was highly centralized in Paris has contributed to the view that colonies were, in this narrow respect, assimilated to mainland France and directly ruled from there. Alexis de Tocqueville’s remark regarding Canada, where “the administration, interfer[ed] in even more things than in the metropole, and want[ed] to do everything from Paris, despite the more than eighteen hundred leagues separating them,” has been taken to apply to all French colonies, with few taking into account that centralization was also one of Tocqueville’s bugbears and that his view, thus, may have been exaggerated.38 Indeed, central control over France’s North American colonies has since been analyzed as very limited.39 Moreover, as Martin Deming Lewis noted as long ago as 1962, if assimilation meant direct or centralized rule, then France’s many protectorates (Tunisia, Morocco, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos) and mandates (Syria, Lebanon, Togo, and Cameroon) obviously fell outside the scope of this supposedly typical form of French colonial rule.40 More important, the notion that colonial governance can only be either direct and assimilationist or indirect and associationist is not borne out by the evidence even of those territories ruled most directly. All sorts of exceptional laws and rules applied in Algeria, for instance, even though there were those who contended until the bitter end that “Algeria is France.”
The standard narrative that French colonial rule began intending to assimilate and then shifted toward association is also of limited use.41 Even if, in some parts of France’s empire, methods of rule shifted from direct to indirect over time, Tunisia’s trajectory as a protectorate was quite the opposite. There, partly in response to the intersection of everyday social problems and international affairs, French governance became more interventionist over time. No doubt these reactions could be seen as another instance of empires’ “bloody battle against time.”42 Maintaining control was, of course, a preoccupation of all imperialists. But the solutions they offered to the problem of control were unique responses to specific circumstances. This was as true of France as it was of Britain, which also ruled its colonies along the whole spectrum from direct to indirect rule.43
Mere theories of colonial governance, however, can take us only so far. Instead, we might ask how Tunisia was governed. Why did the French not annex it following the invasion of 1881, as they had Algeria in 1848, eighteen years after their invasion of that country? For one thing, the French government felt it had little choice. To be sure, French forces eventually conquered Tunisia militarily,44 but more than Tunisia was at stake. The government had to tread carefully in order to expand its North African empire without risking a backlash that might threaten its hold over Algeria. Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the eastern Mediterranean and Horn of Africa had become the sites of renewed rivalry between France, Great Britain, and a newcomer to the imperial game—Italy. The invasion of Tunisia on 24 April 1881 was at least in part a response to this heightened competition, even if France claimed instead to be reacting directly to threats posed by the Khmir tribe as they pursued their feuds across the Tunisia-Algerian border. The rationale of protecting Algeria had allowed France to occupy its neighbor and gain another strategic Mediterranean foothold. But, despite the urging of some military officials, including General Georges Boulanger (later known for his demagogic and ultranationalist electoral campaign in which plans to mount a coup against the French president were intimated), France stopped short of outright annexation and instead opted to rule indirectly through the bey. After all, France was still smarting from Germany’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine following France’s 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and could hardly condone occupation as a strategy of rule. Moreover, annexation had proved costly, both literally and morally, in neighboring Algeria.45 For all these reasons, Tunisia was figured instead as Algeria’s antithesis: By preserving the bey’s sovereignty and local institutions, French leaders hoped not only to achieve what Sara Berry has called, in characterizing indirect rule, “hegemony on a shoestring” but also to avoid provoking the kind of bloody rebellion that the annexation of Algeria had occasioned.46
But if France’s leaders initially viewed indirect rule in Tunisia as a way of avoiding the conflicts annexation had caused in Algeria, governance in the protectorate did not always remain detached. This book explains how and why the French mission in Tunisia changed, as leaders made choices that incrementally undermined the very sovereignty France originally had pledged to protect. Exploring this question also offers a new vantage point from which to analyze the nature and development of national sovereignty more generally. Was sovereignty—always an “organized hypocrisy” according to the political scientist Stephen Krasner—simply all the more hypocritical in the imperial context?47 Was the bey’s sovereignty merely a “fiction” allowing the French government to disguise the invasiveness of colonial rule?48 Or might the Tunisian case prove that sovereignty—especially in colonial contexts—has always been divisible, as Henry Maine argued in 1887?49 To be sure, the bey’s sovereignty did not always constitute an unwelcome restriction on France’s power, for sometimes French officials exploited it in the interests of that power. As the British consul in Tunis once wrote, in crudely paraphrasing French attitudes toward beylical sovereignty, “Whatever we do right we take the credit of ourselves, and whatever mistakes we make we lay at the Bey’s door.”50 The French also invoked beylical sovereignty for those aspects of domestic governance that they did not want to reform—such as the rights of indigenous people. In explaining why all Muslims and Jews living in Tunisia must be regarded as beylical subjects regardless of their origins, for instance, a French court reasoned
