Divided Rule. Mary Dewhurst Lewis

conditions at least as advantageous as those extended to Italy. The British government was also concerned to settle outstanding disputes pertaining to its protégés.⁶⁴ Negotiations with Britain turned so difficult, in fact, that Cambon dispatched d’Estournelles to London, where he lobbied the British government for several weeks before securing its agreement.⁶⁵ In the meantime, Cambon’s strategy of presenting the foreign governments with a fait accompli began to bear bitter fruit: as the courts began judging only Frenchmen, the new judges “render decisions as if they were in France,” Cambon complained, “without taking into account the customs of the country or the demands of the situation. Frenchmen are convicted, ruined, by virtue of the law, while foreigners are never convicted by their consuls.”⁶⁶

      Finally, in late December 1883, the British government agreed to close its consular court in Tunis effective New Year’s Day, 1884. Soon thereafter, France and Italy signed a protocol suspending the capitulations. Both the British and Italian press lamented the decision. For the Times of London, the concession meant that “the last vestige of visible power which it has pleased the French Republic to leave to the protected Bey of Tunis disappears” and, with it, British prestige. “At no period of Tunisian history has the British name sunk so low, or had British subjects in Tunis so much reason for genuine complaint.”⁶⁷ For La Riforma, Tunisia had become “a French colony,” much to Italy’s “humiliation.” It was so “painful [doloroso],” the paper continued, “that we cannot think of it without feeling our heart strings pulled.” La Tribuna was more measured, acknowledging that the reforms would end the previous era of uncertainty that had accompanied consular jurisdiction, for better or for worse, but nonetheless worrying whether the negotiations would “lead Italy to future concessions that would be absolutely incompatible with its interests as well as its dignity.”⁶⁸

      Although Italian public opinion saw the suppression of consular jurisdiction as a concession, the 1884 protocol also was a significant compromise on the part of France, the effects of which persisted long after the agreement was signed. H. G. Montferrier’s prediction in the Journal des Débats that “henceforth there no longer exists any subject or pretext of misunderstanding between France and Italy” proved overly sanguine.⁶⁹ In 1885, when General Boulanger reacted to a new incident between an Italian civilian and a French soldier by issuing an “ordre du jour” sanctioning soldiers’ use of force against anyone deemed threatening, the Italian government was so outraged that not only Cambon but also Prime Minister Freycinet were forced to issue apologies.⁷⁰ Although Cambon finally rooted out the influence of military justice, other conflicts emerged under civilian rule. The protocol’s secret clauses, for instance, caused a scandal in 1894, when they became public after three members of the Sicilian mafia committed a brutal double murder in Bir-Loubit, a provincial town between Tunis and Sousse, only to be spared execution by the French president—forced to honor his country’s promises to the Italian government.⁷¹ Once all these concessions were agreed upon, Great Britain, Italy, and other European states consented to close their consular courts. By late summer 1884, French jurisdiction applied to the subjects and protégés of all European powers.⁷²

      • • •

      The absorption of multiple consular jurisdictions into a single jurisdiction under French auspices presumed a community of interest among “Europeans” and their common distinction from “locals.” But identity in Tunisia was less absolute than the structure of the courts would suggest. Scholars have suggested other terms—“cultural creoles,” “Crypto-Europeans,” or “Euro-Tunisians”—all of which, as Julia Clancy-Smith notes, exemplify how “messy” this category was.⁷³ The Grana were a case in point. Grana were Jews who had lived in Tunisia for generations but whose origins ostensibly could be traced back to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Known as “Livornese Jews,” Grana (who actually hailed from Spain, Portugal, Trieste, and Genoa, as well as Livorno, and sometimes included Jews of North African origin who had become Tuscan subjects) refused to be easily categorized.⁷⁴ Although they were known to have a distinctive subculture, they were ecumenical in their legal claims, turning to rabbinical justice for matters concerning personal status and to consular courts for commercial claims.⁷⁵ Grana, like other groups living in Tunisia that straddled the divide between local and European, showed how artificial distinctions between “Europeans” and “natives” often were. In trying to institutionalize the difference between these two identities, Cambon failed to account for the fluidity of social life in Tunisia—a veritable crossroads of the Mediterranean where Muslims, Jews, and (thanks to recent migration) Christians of diverse regional origins had become accustomed to maneuvering within systems of legal pluralism to take advantage of whichever laws best furthered their social goals in a given instance.⁷⁶

      The advent of supposedly unified French courts did not entirely curtail this flexibility. What did change was the manner in which such shifting allegiances engaged the international system, itself increasingly organized around distinct national states whose claims for legitimacy often rested on the notion of comprehensive and exclusive territorial sovereignty.⁷⁷ This “impulse to claim territorial sovereignty over bounded space occurred,” ironically enough, “alongside the imperial project of devising a system of territorial differentiation recognizing degrees of sovereignty for colonial enclaves,” or what historian Lauren Benton characterizes as “quasi-sovereignty.”⁷⁸ In Tunisia, as probably elsewhere, the ideal of comprehensive sovereignty clashed with the practical choice European states had made, in the interest of empire, to embrace quasi-sovereignty. Underlying the French legal system in Tunisia was an assumption that all Europeans shared interests at the very moment that their states sparred with each other throughout Africa for influence. For Cambon, “international rivalries were alien to French justice.”⁷⁹ In reality, the coincidence of renewed imperial rivalry and a burgeoning international state system helped encourage local-level scrambles for influence among European states while at the same time giving new meaning to the legal strategies of Maghribis.⁸⁰ Although the social motivations for such legal maneuverings remained similar to those of the precolonial period, the consequences of such practices changed dramatically as a newly competitive state system emerged. Thus, while Cambon’s reforms succeeded in closing the consular courts, France nonetheless remained constrained throughout the tenure of its protectorate by the interpenetration of international interests and domestic civic life in Tunisia.

      To be sure, the closure of consular courts in the 1880s did streamline legal procedure in Tunisia. Gone were the days when a consul’s janissaries had to be present in order for an arrest of a foreign national to take place, or when an accused could take refuge indefinitely in his or her consulate. And sentences rendered by local courts against Europeans no longer required the written consent of countless consulates; the French “consulate,” or residency general, now assumed that role. In this sense, French authorities achieved their goal of guaranteeing French preponderance while maintaining the flexibility that recognizing local sovereignty provided.

      Nevertheless, the protectorate, as a “wonderfully flexible legal instrument,”⁸¹ proved sometimes too flexible for French liking, because it created new conditions for instrumentalizing allegiance, opening up spaces for foreign nationals and native subjects to exploit the limitations of French power.⁸² Instead of establishing a “common” rule of law for all Europeans, the reforms allowed residents of Tunisia to engage in a new form of jurisdictional politics, or “conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature and extent of different legal forums and authorities.”⁸³ Jurisdictional politics were what Cambon thought he had done away with when he closed the consular courts. Instead, they persisted in another form, for the suppression of European consular courts in the 1880s engendered novel legal maneuvers by individuals living in Tunisia that had the effect, if not always the intent, of exposing the limits of French authority in the protectorate. Over time, it was precisely the confrontations and negotiations engendered by this disjuncture between the intentions of lawmakers and the social uses of the law, especially when such social practices played one European legal jurisdiction off another, that brought French authorities to intervene more directly in Tunisian life.

      Cases like the infamous murders at Bir-Loubit perpetrated by members of the Sicilian mafia in 1894 demonstrated most