French Tunisia

The French protectorate over Tunisia was established by the Treaty of Bardo in 1881, after a French column crossed from Algeria on the pretext of punishing a border tribe and marched on Tunis instead. The real cause was debt: the beys had borrowed heavily in Europe from the 1860s, defaulted in 1869, and been placed under an international financial commission of France, Britain and Italy, which made the country's finances a matter of European politics. Italy, which had a far larger settler community in Tunisia than France did, regarded the seizure as theft and it poisoned Franco-Italian relations for two decades, pushing Italy into the Triple Alliance. The protectorate kept the bey on his throne and governed through a French resident-general, which was cheaper than annexation and left the Islamic legal and religious institutions in place - a lighter arrangement than Algeria's and a deliberate contrast to it. Colonisation still took much of the best land. The nationalist movement was correspondingly constitutional in method: the Destour party from 1920, then Habib Bourguiba's Neo-Destour from 1934, which built a mass organisation through trade unions and professional bodies. Repression, exile and imprisonment followed, and an armed campaign by the fellagha in the early 1950s raised the cost. France, already fighting in Indochina and about to fight in Algeria, conceded internal autonomy in 1955 and full independence on 20 March 1956. Bourguiba deposed the bey the following year and ruled for thirty. Tunis had been the seat of a hereditary dynasty since 1705. The Italian community outnumbered the French one for decades after 1881. Bourguiba abolished the monarchy in 1957. He was declared president for life in 1975 and deposed on medical grounds in 1987.

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