The American historian Mary D. Lewis studies inter- and intra-imperial connections in Tunisia from the 1880s to 1930s, transformed into a French protectorate. The status of “ protected » and “ topics » constitutes one of the challenges of French sovereignty.
In recent years, the history of colonial empires has flourished. While being part of this current, Divided Rule striking by his approach. Mary D. Lewis does not limit her analysis to a colonial space, nor even to the relations between an imperial center and periphery. It observes, more broadly, inter- and intra-imperial connections around a specific territory: Tunisia, transformed by France between 1881 and 1883 into a protectorate, that is to say a portion of an empire retaining an administration internal, but delegating the management of its police, its finances and its external affairs to the French power.
Following “ geographies of power » (p. 5), Mary D. Lewis sheds light, for a period extending from the 1880s to the 1930s, on international issues: the European competitions around the French colonization of Tunisia. To do this, it is based on the careful examination of daily personal struggles between the French colonial authority and British, Italian, North African and West African citizens, subjects and protégés. She thus succeeds in demonstrating how, even in an imperial context, the sovereignty of an apparently colonized state does not always constitute a “ hypocrisy “, but, on the contrary, how this sovereignty is constantly disputed, even divided.
French hierarchy
By the method she uses and her conclusions, the author refuses to judge French colonization in terms “ absolute and moral “. Better, it intends to complete and go beyond one of the questions forged by the proponents of postcolonial studies: that of the subversion of colonization by the colonized. “ If the colonial encounter opens spaces for subversion, as Homi Bhabha suggests, how can we explain the stubborn persistence of imperial power? ? » From this perspective and following Lauren Benton, Mary D. Lewis explores the dialectics that lead to the rearrangement of a colonial order ; in other words, how permanent contestations of this order result in constant reformulations of colonial domination, of its legal and administrative hierarchies.
The work is built around two forms of contestation and reformulation of this colonial order: first, around cases which concern European nationals then, around cases which involve North African and West African subjects. According to a first level of conflict, the French authorities in Tunis must dismantle an entire system of privileges that the Ottoman power had granted to Europeans since the XVIe century and more particularly since the 1860s (whether commercial advantages linked to “ most favored nation clause » or extra-territoriality clauses allowing Europeans to evade local justice).
These privileges, which had allowed French representatives to interfere in the affairs of the Ottoman province of Tunis, then to assert themselves against other imperialist forces, became dangerous once colonial preeminence was assured: they could be brandished by a few some of the 11,200 Italians and 7,000 British subjects (mostly of Maltese origin) in order to challenge French authority. Colonization therefore does not stop at military conquest, it is conditioned by daily negotiations with rival powers. The French administration therefore aimed to place European residents under a French judicial hierarchy, established in Tunisia from 1883.
“ Protected ” And “ topics »
According to a second level of conflict, the colonial authority must face the claims and resistance strategies of two types of local subjects: the protégés and the subjects who call themselves French (or of French nationality). THE “ protected », more and more numerous from the 1830s in the Sultanate of Morocco, in the province of Tunis and throughout the Ottoman Empire, have long benefited – as their name indicates – from diplomatic protection European. Registered on consular lists and often from commercial and administrative elites, they sought protected status which would protect them, just like European nationals, from local, patrimonial powers which they considered arbitrary, and in concrete terms, from justice and local taxes.
With the French conquest of Tunisia, these protégés are demanding more than ever to continue to benefit from these exemptions. However, the French power is uncomfortable with these men from the in-between, no longer only from here – from the local – and not yet fully from there – from the metropolis. We must of course prevent Great Britain, Italy and other rival powers from exploiting these consular clients. It is necessary, more fundamentally, to raise the barriers between the men of the colony and the natives: on principle, in order to create social and racial distinction, but also out of pragmatism, in order to make them pay taxes. After all, wasn’t the Tunisian state placed under supervision to get it to repay its debts to French, Italian and British banks? ?
The second group of Muslim and Jewish subjects who, rightly or wrongly, by virtue of this or that evidence, claim to come from colonial Algeria or French West Africa after 1895, poses similar problems. Here again, they do not want to be considered local subjects of the sovereign of Tunis, in order to escape local constraints (taxes and military conscription). In the same way that Europeans were led to find themselves under the legal and administrative wing of France, local subjects, Muslims and Jews, are placed under the sovereignty of the governors of Tunis and aggregated to a sphere of Tunisian legal belonging. . The protected lists were gradually refined and a Tunisian nationality was created in 1914.
This is one of the fascinating demonstrations of this work: the French colonial authority created this Tunisian nationality and needed to highlight the sovereignty of the governors of Tunis in order to resolve all these conflicts of identification and sovereignty .
Degrees of local action
The result of these multiple conflicts, the aggregation of the different statuses of state belonging to two spheres, one “ French » and the other “ Tunisian “, help to understand an entire process which has been reduced, in many historical studies, to a simple political confrontation, from the 1920s, between French authorities and Tunisian nationalists – a confrontation resolved by the independence of the country in 1956. By grasping the multiplicity of tensions in this part of the empire, Mary D. Lewis brings to light the deep social dimensions and the subtext of these multiple confrontations. It restores intelligibility to the doctrine of co-sovereignty developed by the French authorities from 1921 in order to assert rights over Tunisia: from then on, France was no longer content with a form of indirect domination, but directed towards a colonization of the Tunisian state and territory.
Divided Rule also sheds light on certain aspects of the strategy of Tunisian nationalists, notably the campaign they launched during the 1930s to prevent naturalized French Tunisians from being buried alongside Muslims. These nationalists not only seized legal tools forged by the French colonial administration, but they extended their understanding to the world of the dead, to cemeteries, to territories that they annexed to a national and nationalist imagination.
The entire demonstration is convincing. It is stimulating and will generate discussions for other colonial empires. It can also be refined by exploring two backgrounds of the work: the question of legal pluralism and that of the capacity for action (agency) local. Unlike many studies on the Maghreb which claim to be linked to an imperial history, Mary D. Lewis has meticulously grasped the ins and outs of the local context. It thus situates the French courts among the institutions of Tunisian state justice, among those of the Sharia or the Mosaic law. But the question of the hierarchy between these justices and the system remains to be clarified in order to understand the interactions between the two spheres of French and Tunisian belonging which gradually crystallize the variety of individual identifications.
Likewise, varying degrees ofagency local deserve to be distinguished. The second part of the book mainly follows the action of the nationalists of the neo-Destourian party led by the future president Habib Bourguiba. However, the political landscape is not limited to this party. Habib Bourguiba emerged victorious from the fight he waged against other oppositions to colonization, but these oppositions and resistances, whether they were partisan or not, whether they were led by more or less structured groups, conveyed, to from sources in French and Arabic that are much more numerous than the author admits (p. XIII and 9), other conceptions of sovereignty and national belonging that it is high time to explore with the current democratization of Tunisia. Already in the 1930s, “ the question of sovereignty was no longer simply a matter for the courts or the palace (of the governors of Tunis) ; she belonged to the street » (p. 137).