Plato thinks that those who want a well-governed city
ought to shun the sea as a teacher of vice.
HORDEN AND PURCELL, THE CORRUPTING SEA:
A STUDY OF MEDITERRANEAN HISTORY
Farid Boughedir’s 1994 film Un été à la Goulette (A Summer in La Goulette), set on the eve of the 1967 war, depicts the residue of a culturally striated landscape still found in many Mediterranean port cities even after the end of empire. The annual festival to honor Santa Maria de Trapani, transplanted from Sicily before 1881, remained a collective celebration. As in the past, Muslims and Jews took part in this most cherished of public processions for Maltese and Sicilian Catholics. In Boughedir’s film, religious affiliation presented few barriers to residential cohabitation, socializing, or employment, although cross-religious sexual relations or marriages rarely occurred, and if they did, social uproar ensued.1 Yet La Goulette’s populist cosmopolitanism should not blind us to the petty jealousies, daily struggles over work and resources, and moments of communal contention or violence often (but not always) following the shifting fault lines of national belonging, legal protection, religious identity, and social class. Indeed Boughedir intended to critique the nostalgic notion of a Mediterranean cosmopolitanism free from local strife and intolerance or the passions generated by distant political upheavals. The La Goulette that Boughedir offered up to filmgoers constitutes the end of our story and is needless to say a very different place from its early nineteenth-century avatar prior to large-scale immigration.
Ports are situated at the ragged interface between the legal and moral wilderness of the open water, on the one hand, and the political order of the city and state, on the other. Passengers disembarking entered a new or at least different sociopolitical system. And because the sea operates as “a teacher of vice,” ports have been regarded as spaces of danger and promiscuity.2 After 1830, North African ports were rapidly peopled by foreigners so that physical expansion was associated with outsiders or familiar strangers, although definitions of “outsider,” “foreigner,” or “stranger” differed from place to place and according to the observer. Older understandings of outside/in, of margins and center, often changed dramatically, in some cases more subtly. In keeping with our multisided ethnography, this chapter raises the following questions: How did La Goulette resemble or differ from other northern African ports? What kinds of vessels landed, what did they carry, and how did passengers disembark? When travelers, immigrants, visitors, merchants, or city inhabitants finally made it to Tunis proper, after crossing the lake in small craft, where was home in the city and which community welcomed them? Who was a “native” of the city and how were taxonomies of belonging or difference constructed? And who exactly were the resident Europeans or the cultural creoles that had long regarded Tunisia as their homeland and looked askance at the newcomers pouring in from across the sea?
The port’s Italian name—La Golétta—translated accurately the Arabic, Halq al-Wad, “the river’s throat.” Located ten miles to the northeast of Tunis proper, La Goulette sat on a narrow spit of land adjacent to a channel connecting the fetid lake to the Mediterranean. This geography sheltered the capital from the perils of the open sea—from whence came one of Tunis’s sobriquets, “the well-protected.” In 1830, the sullen, frayed remains of a once imposing Ottoman-Spanish fortress still stood then as now.3 Constructed by the Turkish sea commander Khayr al-Din Barbaroussa after his 1534 victory over the Spanish, the fort fell the next year to Charles V, who greatly expanded its fortifications. After the Ottomans retook the port and Tunis in 1574, they dismantled the fortress, or most of it, for reasons of security.
La Goletta inconvenient both for commerce and for military purposes . . . must be considered a part of the capital, being intimately connected with it by daily and hourly intercourse. This is nothing but a little channel, called in Arabic Halaq al-Wad or ‘throat of the river,’ and is the communication between the sea and the Lake of Tunis. . .. The fortifications on each side were built at various times. . . [and] are kept in tolerable repair, and well mounted with cannon, being by their nearness to the level of the water, and their position, admirably adapted both for the security of this narrow passage, as for the roadstead to the east and south-east.4
The peculiar topography of the Tunis region deeply inflected relationships with the Mediterranean and other maritime powers because the capital city enjoyed spatial distance from the open sea not found in many other ports, which may have paradoxically made it more amenable to sustained relations with Europe and Europeans.5 Until Napoleon’s 1798 invasion, Alexandria’s contacts with Christian states were restricted, since ships were frequently prohibited from directly entering port because of propinquity to the city center and thus fears of attack; when the French fleet sailed into Alexandria, no more than seventy or so European merchants resided there. Only after 1805 did Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha restore Alexandria to its rightful status as a great Mediterranean port by importing skilled labor, notably from islands such as Malta. And until the radical port modifications of the 1850s, warships could easily approach Algiers’s massive outer fortified walls—which Lord Exmouth did during the 1816 expedition with such destructive force. La Goulette, however, had remained “open to all Christian vessels” from nations at peace by treaty with Tunisia’s rulers, which attracted Europeans and merchandise from French and especially Italian ports, above all Leghorn, in great quantities.6 In about 1830, resident foreigners in Tunisia numbered over three thousand, although many were slaves, ransom captives, or formerly enslaved persons; this contrasts with late Ottoman Algiers where, before the “fly-whisk incident,” only a handful of Europeans permanently resided there, and many departed after the 1827 French blockade preceding the invasion.7 Thus geography and the relatively open status of Tunis help to explain the comparatively larger expatriate community relative to other North African port cities.
By the early nineteenth century, La Goulette’s centrality was undisputed vis-à-vis the country’s other ports. Ghar al-Milh (Porto Farina), thirty-one miles to the north, had been an active naval base, along with Bizerte, as well as a corsair hub in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But Ghar al-Milh’s maritime star faded as the nearby Majarda River changed course, dumping silt into the harbor, which could no longer accommodate large draft vessels. However, Porto Farina remained a smuggler’s paradise as we shall see. With the decline of her rivals, La Goulette welcomed most of the labor migrants and handled the bulk of the trade with the Ottoman Empire and Europe, although Sfax was important for the export of olive oil and other commodities. Tunisia’s political neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars made La Goulette a thriving commercial node and place of transit for colonial goods, such as sugar and cotton, imported into the Mediterranean by the British, although after 1815 its commercial place in Mediterranean trade was transformed. In addition, Tunisia (and Tripoli to a lesser extent) had always supplied Malta and other islands with foodstuffs. For the 1830 expedition to Algeria, Tunisia furnished the French military with critical quantities of horses, grains, and supplies.8
Traditionally, exports fell into two categories: raw materials, such as esparto grass or hides, and foodstuffs, when harvests permitted, such as olive oil, grains, honey, wax, and cattle. Second were luxury items, perfume essences, finely wrought handicrafts, and luxury textiles; for example, the Jewish prayer shawls produced with fine Spanish wool, worked by master craftsmen in Tunis, shipped to northern Italy, and traded to Poland. In addition to olive oil exports, always first in importance, the most valuable manufactured item giving rise to the largest volume of foreign trade was the round red cap, or shashiya (a wool cap worn by Muslim males), produced in the Tunis region and exported over a wide swatch of territory—to Morocco, Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans. As cheaper French and Italian machine-made imitations began to compete with Tunisia’s share of the shashiya market in the nineteenth century, the country’s most remunerative industry and the capital’s most prestigious guild were undermined.9 Openness and accessibility to trans-Mediterranean currents of trade came with a high price.
Most ships arrived in La Goulette during the summer sailing season, when central Mediterranean winds are, for the most part, northwesterly and less treacherous. In winter months, winds known in the period as Kara Yel (Turkish for “black wind”) blew savagely from the northeast, smashing moored vessels and destroying life and property. Storms blocked the flow of supplies and correspondence for weeks on end as well as the movements of ships, travelers, merchants, or migrants: “all news and information from London comes through Malta . . . if very long continuous winds blow, no vessels can come into port in Tunis or Barbary.”10 Complex local wind patterns and inclement weather delayed messengers, envoys, and delegations, shaping to no small degree the conduct of trade and international diplomacy. When Ahmad Bey sent a representative in November 1843 to the French captain of the Jemmapes anchored off La Goulette to discuss diplomatic matters, the Tunisian official found it impossible to board due to huge seas and gale-force winds that forced him to wait for days on the quays.11
Before the advent of steam, passengers experienced delays, discomfort, and great uncertainty. Depending upon the vessel and season, journeys from Valletta to North Africa took six to ten days or more; from Istanbul or Smyrna to La Goulette, between seventeen and twenty days. When the Catholic missionary Emilie de Vialar booked passage in the winter of 1843 with a “bad Sicilian sailing vessel” in Marseilles bound for Tunis, she anticipated an eight-day voyage, bringing along provisions only sufficient for a week. Instead, shifting, violent winds transformed the journey into a two-week ordeal. Several years later, the captain of the Saint Anne, Antoine Moresco Roch, left Ajaccio in March 1846 “with a load of oak wood, cheese, dried fruit, and a case full of women’s clothing” and six passengers destined for Tunis, Bône, and Philippeville, but his small vessel was blown from island to island for weeks until it mercifully landed in Tabarka, where a Tunisian ship and ra’is (captain) provided assistance to crew and passengers.12
For trans-Mediterranean communications, the steamship was revolutionary, as indeed it was elsewhere in the globe. In the early 1840s, French and British steamships began arriving in La Goulette, drastically reducing the voyage from Egypt, Malta, Algeria, or Europe from weeks to days to hours. By 1877, Tunis was thirty-eight hours from Marseilles on the fastest steamer. That year, 447 ships entered port of which 207 were steam driven, indicating that more than half continued to be sail powered, although ships could not yet draw up to docks.13 A wide range of ships dropped anchor: from small fishing vessels, to low-draft shabbak (small three-masted vessels), to large commercial or warships—brigantines, frigates, corvettes, schooners—which increased in number as the nineteenth century wore on. A partial list of local ship names from the early nineteenth century—Baya, Fatima, Gamba, Kara Mabruk, Kara Soliman, Mabruka, and Sa‘ad, of Arabic, Turkish, and Italian origins—communicates Tunisia’s intimacies with various parts of the Mediterranean.14
FIGURE 3. Portrait of Ahmad Bey. The ruler is dressed in the new military uniform of his modern army; some of the decorations may have been bestowed by European monarchs. (Institut National de Patrimoine, Tunis.)
Even after the advent of steamships, older ways of conducting business prevailed. A typical example occurred in March 1842 when a small Maltese vessel loaded with wheat from Egypt finally arrived in La Goulette after selling off cargo for weeks in various ports along the way. Many, perhaps most, transactions were conducted this way, since small sailing vessels hawked goods like maritime street vendors and transported undocumented travelers who paid modest fees to be deposited here and there along the coast, often in violation of treaties and/ or regulations regarding immigration.15 For smaller vessels, cabotage (coastal navigation and trade) was the preferred, indeed the only, feasible method for making a living from the sea, but this form of commercial movement means that statistics for who, and what, were transported where are almost impossible to come by. With regular steamship service, record- keeping improved somewhat. But we are getting ahead of our story.
After savoring the striking beauty of the Bay of Tunis from shipboard, first-time visitors expressed disappointment at Halq al-Wad’s lackluster appearance, as it was a place of no great distinction in the early decades of the nineteenth century. La Goulette’s facilities dated from the late eighteenth century, when Hammuda Bey (r. 1782–1813) improved dredging operations, constructed jetties, and restored the arsenal as well as shipyards; docks, ships chandlers for supplies and provisions, customs houses, and storage facilities for goods awaiting entry or export lined the shore. In calmer weather, goods, passengers, and the mail were arduously unloaded into small boats; the port was situated near dangerous shoals, forcing ships to anchor a distance from the docks. Small flat-bottomed boats ferried them to the quays lined with the offices of the gumruk, or customs house.
Travelers landing in La Goulette first encountered local port authorities and consular agents, although not all nations maintained vice-consuls there in the early part of the century; the same agent might serve several nations, either permanently or temporarily. The most powerful Husaynid official was the kahiya, or governor, who as amin al-tarsakhana oversaw the arsenal, naval affairs, and the prison. He verified captains’ papers and examined merchandise being sent to Tunis, assuring that items, such as spirits, were not introduced as contraband. Because of his functions, the kahiya sustained ties with foreign traders, vice-consuls, or the wakils (agents) who represented the interests of Ottoman and Moroccan subjects. Importers paid duties to the gumruk and frequently had to store their goods in warehouses until the contents could be properly ascertained and weighed. Exporters had to furnish a sarah khuruj, or license, for commodities subject to state monopoly and/or export restrictions—notably for olive oil and grains—which required the ruler’s permission to ship from the country.16
In Tunis–La Goulette, as was true elsewhere, rigorous formalities were connected to quarantine. From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Husaynids had adopted stringent maritime health regulations; a small island, al-Shikli, in the Lake of Tunis, and another off Tabarka, served as quarantine facilities, however inadequate to the task. Ships without valid patents of health were denied permission to disembark in La Goulette and vessels suspected of “foul bills of health” were ordered to depart immediately for ports endowed with large-scale quarantine facilities, such as Mahon or Valletta. Leghorn boasted the first modern lazaretto, constructed around 1590, and by the late eighteenth century Malta’s facility had grown into a 323,000-square-foot complex. During Mediterranean-wide epidemics, ships suspected of carrying diseased crews or passengers were refused permission to disembark and theoretically were required to return to their country of origin; even ships with clean bills of health were only to put in to La Goulette where precautions could be taken.17 When the Englishman Godfrey Feise headed to Tunisia in 1812, he left Valletta on a Maltese rebecque whose passengers included “a mixture of various religions, Christians, Turks and Jews.” Due to contrary winds, the ship put in at Trapani in western Sicily, where passengers were forced into quarantine. Upon reaching La Goulette, the captain and his serviano (mate) immediately went ashore, but passengers, including Feise, had to remain onboard until an order came from the bey for disembarkation.18
The epidemics of 1816–1821, followed in 1831 by an unfamiliar and terrible disease, cholera morbus, that provoked panic around the Mediterranean, moved Tunisian officials to establish more effective sanitary policies.19 By 1824, La Goulette boasted facilities for disinfecting contaminated goods; local quarantine agents were stationed along the coast from Bizerte to Djerba.20 Alarmed by newspaper reports of cholera devastating England, Husayn Bey established an observation system requiring thorough examinations of vessels before granting permission to communicate with shore. As Husayn Bey strove to implement quarantine restrictions, a Tunisian vessel from Alexandria with returning hajjis anchored in Sfax in 1831; some pilgrims and sailors had already succumbed to cholera. Worse still the rumor mill had it that the qa’id of Sfax had allowed the ship to take on provisions in violation of quarantine. After ordering the ship to immediately depart for Leghorn, the bey threatened to severely punish his official, should the story prove true. When cholera was confirmed in Genoa, Leghorn, and Algiers in 1835, the bey determined not to receive “any vessels from these ports, and . . . likewise established regulations in the quarantine department of the most rigorous kind, for ships which may arrive from any other places whatever, not excepting Malta.” In the British consul’s estimation at the time, “If it [cholera] should unhappily make its appearance here, the consequences would be frightful, principally on account of our being almost destitute of medical aid.”21 Tunisia was largely spared the first outbreak of cholera, although it was less fortunate during later episodes. With heightened ship movements into La Goulette, the public health danger grew, inducing Ahmad Bey to impose more stringent regulations, notably during the cholera epidemic of the 1850s.22
After clearing quarantine, nationals or protégés were authorized by respective consuls to debark in port; it appears that passports or papers, if required, remained in the possession of consular agents until the individual, whether permanent resident or not, left the country.23 Husaynid subjects returning home had to go through formalities as well. However, rudimentary record keeping in the port, together with the consular system of counting principally nationals or protégés, means that credible statistics on arrivals and departures from La Goulette are lacking for the most part. “I . . . transmit herewith answers to the questions which had been received at the Colonial Office from the Board of Trade . . .. There has been great difficulty in answering these questions precisely owing to no commercial returns of any nature being kept by the Tunisian Government at their Customs House and indeed being so totally devoid of any commercial institutions whatever.”24 Passenger manifests were supposed to be closely scrutinized to ascertain that passengers debarking matched the numbers and names on the manifests. However, the coastal trade was rarely subject to this kind of surveillance because crews were multinational, constantly changing from port to port. In 1858, the British ship Carmela arrived from Bizerte after fourteen days of trading with six sailors and a cargo of butter. The owner and master, Paulo Darmania, from Senglia, Malta, made this declaration to the British agent:
[That] he has been in this port for about ten days but that he was not aware of the necessity of presenting his papers at this consulate; he further declares that having left Malta more than a year since, and having been engaged in the coasting trade between Tunis and Tripoli and Algeria, he has, since he left Malta, disembarked three men named Lorenzo Buttigieg; Palonia Xuereb, and Michele Cassar, at different ports and has taken on board four others named: Giachino Zrafa, Paulo Avela, Manuele Azzupardi, and Mouhamed Ben Abd Allah.25
While improvements were made in identifying, counting, and tracking passengers after the introduction of steam transportation, still the system left much to be desired, as seen in this 1873 report: “the English steamer, the Lamefield, arrived yesterday in the evening from Malta with forty-three passengers on board, thirty-five Maltese carters and day laborers, three Greeks who left Tunis some time ago and are returning; five Muslims . . . if you want to know the names of the three Greek passengers, which I wasn’t able to obtain here, you can get this information from Mr. C. Foa, who is the boat agent and who is the only one to whom a passenger list was given.”26 Naming was more important for some social groups than others. Middle-class male passengers were listed by name, nationality, and profession; wives, servants, and children might be recorded but not named. Subsistence migrants, many barely tolerated protégés, elicited the least interest on the part of port or consular officials, unless they posed some social danger. However, single women were more likely to be identified for purposes of sexual supervision. Quarantine, passports of various types, and gendered travel restrictions raise a larger question of women at sea.
If male travelers theoretically could not disembark until cleared by port officials, health agents, and/or consuls, women faced an additional impediment; females traveling alone, unaccompanied by male relatives or escorts, were subject to special formalities, irrespective of nationality or social class, imposed by the Tunisian state until Ahmad Bey’s reign. These represented a local expression of older Mediterranean-wide restrictions on women’s displacements, notably those from the “common classes.”27 Women could not leave a ship until recognized male guardians obtained written permits, which was required each time “women without men” arrived. In 1829, the English consul petitioned the palace for a “teskera [permit] for the disembarkation of the wife of Vella [the Maltese] and five children Maltese.” Responding positively, Sidi Hassuna al-Murali, the bey’s interpreter, seized the opportunity to complain energetically about the increasing numbers of Maltese in the country during a period of great distress occasioned by “the failure of the crops of oil and grain.”28 The same restrictions applied to the members of other nations, even well-known, longtime residents. In 1824, Madame Monge desired “to disembark from her ship in port” but she had to have permission. “I went to the son of the kahiya to get his help; he was disposed to allow her, as she is a resident, to go on to Tunis before procuring the bey’s permit, just in time the order came from the bey.”29 Although the port official was willing to bend the rules for Mme. Monge, from a respectable family established in the capital, the consular officer insisted upon observing procedures.
Naturally, subterfuge countered efforts to deny entry to undesirables. A French naval officer, Beaussier, brought his mistress ashore in 1822 disguised as a sailor so that—dressed as a man—she could sightsee and visit the suqs in Tunis. When discovered, the deception provoked a great hue and cry; from La Goulette, Pierre Gaspary, the French vice-consul, warned the consul in Tunis of a serious breach in the system of control:
I hasten to inform you by express pouch that I have just learned that the woman in question disguised as a man just left for Tunis accompanied by Mr. Beaussier. It is certain that I never would have allowed her to leave if I had known before. I should inform you that Mr. Beaussier came the other day to ask me to allow this woman to debark in La Goulette and I refused to allow it in accordance with the order that I had received from you. It appears that Beaussier then took the expedient of disguising her as a man and that Beaussier had given his word to the captain of the ship not to land the woman in port. Monsieur Beaussier accompanied the woman to Tunis.30
Whether she was able to shop in the suqs before being apprehended and hustled back to port is unknown. (Since navies forbade females onboard ships, the ruse of dressing like a man was not uncommon for women sea travelers.) In addition, the vice-consuls put up outbound families in distress and provided hospitality and sometimes lodging for ship captains and officers. Shipwrecked or seriously ailing seamen were sent to Tunis, where consulates served as short-term shelters or primitive hospitals.
With sailors from around the Mediterranean putting in, violent clashes erupted on ships or the docks and spilled over into the port, mirroring larger international struggles for mastery of the sea. Vice-consuls mediated disputes involving captains and/or crews, as jumping ship was a frequent occurrence that provoked quarrels; in the 1840s, disgruntled Greek crewmen abandoned their vessel to board another under France’s flag, unleashing bitter recriminations between the captains and long negotiations. In September 1842, a spectacular free-for-all erupted onshore, pitting sailors from the British ship Snake against a French war steamer’s crew. While a French sailor was charged with initiating the brawl, it was concluded that both sides were at fault because the officers had “encouraged the fight”—a fool-hardy act since English sailors outnumbered the French four to one.31 Increased ship traffic through Tunisia’s busiest port after midcentury only confirmed the collective view in Tunis that La Goulette was a space of quasi-permanent moral disorder.
The port functioned as a communications nerve center for news coming from all over. Agents reported ship movements, assembling statistics of monthly traffic for home governments, and served as postmasters for mail. Before steam transportation became widespread, correspondence took weeks, even months, to reach its final destination. The “Diary of Official Proceedings,” kept by the British consulate for a six-month period in 1828, and dispatched to London by the first available vessel, was not logged into the Foreign Office until nearly five months later.32 Of course, bureaucratic inefficiency in London caused delays—in addition to the vicissitudes of transportation in stormy winter sailing months. Dispatches from the central government were most frequently sent to La Goulette via Malta, although not necessarily on British ships. But travelers provided by far the most information about trans-Mediterranean events. When the English ship Maiden finally arrived from Valletta in February 1839, with the British consul, Sir Thomas Reade, and his family, the consul shared “abundant news” gathered while in Malta with Gaspary, including French fleet movements about which the French vice-consul was unaware. After 1830, Algeria functioned as another informational web for Tunisia. French warships or small vessels sailing under different flags, running shuttles between Algiers and La Goulette, brought tidings that were not always glad; the news of the devastating cholera epidemic in Bône’s military hospitals first reached Tunis via this channel.33
Who called the port home in the early part of the century? A small, heterogeneous population of beylical subjects, twenty “European” families, consular agents, customs officials, boatmen, and shipyard laborers resided in La Goulette. Some sixty French nationals worked in state-owned arsenals as engineers or skilled artisans. Inns, taverns, and cafés were few and usually run by Sicilians or Maltese, although expanded immigration resulted in a hefty increase in places of sociability. By 1830, the former bagnio for Christian captives awaiting ransom had been transformed into a vast prison, the karraka, one of the main incarceration centers for criminals condemned to forced labor, notably smugglers and petty thieves. Lacking their own prisons, European consuls often confined protégés in the karraka, employing it either as a pretrial detention center or for short-term punishment. A resident described Halq al-Wad this way in 1835: “Ships supplied their [the inhabitants] general needs with wine, spirits, tobacco, and vegetables in the numerous storage shops which surrounded the port and were run by Italians and Maltese. Adjacent to the city walls were offices and residences for the governor, diverse Europeans, and the French vice-consul, Gaspary.”34 Until 1848, a small chapel in Gaspary’s private residence served as the sole place of worship, but that year Ahmad Bey donated a small piece of land for a church, which later boasted a special altar consecrated to the Virgin of Trapani.35 Surrounded by walls, the older houses of wood gradually gave way to modest one-storey stone constructions; a monumental gateway, the “Tunis door,” provided access to the outside. Ahmad Bey built a summer palace on the site of an older construction on the southern shore of the canal, established a mosque, and expanded the arsenal and the mole. As was true in Tunis, drinking water came from underground cisterns fed by the winter rainwater.
Until the surge in immigration, La Goulette’s European community was “too small for members of the community to be able to hide any of their activities.”36 Keeping tabs on the whereabouts and displacements of protégés demanded vigilance, which in turn depended upon access to the kinds of social networks that provided needed information. Despite the fact that everyone more or less knew everyone else in the port, the critical consular functions of naming, identifying, and locating were becoming increasingly difficult. Gaspary vainly tried in 1837 to find an individual named Papaolo Borjé by consulting those in the know about who lived or worked where at any given moment in the day: “I did my best to discover the whereabouts of Papaolo Borjé and I am assured that this individual is not presently in La Goulette; neither is he onboard the Tuscan ship which is leaving for Malta and for Bône. But I did find aboard someone named Paolo Borj, a mason, who is going to Bône . . . he is carrying a passport which bears a French visa.”37
Expanding settlement, trade, ship traffic, and creeping colonialism triggered the port’s physical expansion. As its population spilled outside the older city walls, more residential houses were constructed, facilities were enlarged, and places of popular amusement thrived, especially with the opening of the light railway in 1875 linking La Goulette with Tunis. By the eve of the Protectorate, the town boasted two-storied neo-Moorish balconied houses built by Italian architects and painted various shades of ochre. Decades of immigration gradually transformed the port into a “Sicilian town.”38 At the same time that La Goulette became a space of heightened intercommunal intercourse, it acquired a reputation as a tough place where drinking, brawls, knife fights, and smuggling were common. Or so it seemed to the prim notables of Tunis in whose eyes the port was not a fashionable address.
Until La Goulette was connected to Tunis by a newly dredged seven-mile canal and rail, the journey’s next leg entailed crossing the shallow, noxious-smelling buhaira in small flat-bottomed boats; Maltese and Sicilian boatmen increasingly shoved their way into this occupation.39 But it wasn’t all bad. During the ride, flocks of bright rose-colored flamingoes migrating from West Africa might be seen as well as the fortress of al-Shikli “a castle built on a small island, rising prettily amidst the soft green waters” of the lake.40
When weary passengers reached Tunis, they were deposited on a quay and promenade adjacent to Bab al-Bahr, the Sea Gate; those bringing merchandise into the city dealt with a second, larger customs house. Elite native travelers would probably make their way to the madina proper, where notables tended to cluster together. Tunisian Jews headed to the hara (Jewish quarter); men without families often stayed in the numerous wakala (temporary lodging places) in the more popular quarters of the city’s two suburbs, or ribats. For centuries, European diplomats and traders had lodged in funduqs (large, walled compounds combining residence and commerce) of their nation in the lower madina near the Sea Gate.41 Later, when they became too crowded, Europeans rented rooms or houses from Tunisian proprietors in the streets adjacent to the funduqs, thereby transforming entire neighborhoods. The Sea Gate constituted the physical limits of the walled city nearest the buhaira until after the middle of the century, when land reclamation in the lake’s marshy edges furnished terrain for buildings extra muros—houses, workplaces, and shops—to accommodate the newcomers. Thus a gridlike more or less “modern” city existed long before colonialism.
What did Tunis represent in the collective mind as human traffic from across the Mediterranean began to transform it into a mini Ellis Island? Its sobriquets, al-hadhira (the city as civilization), al-khadra’ (the verdant), al-mahrusa (the well-protected), suggest a conflation between the refinement characteristic of illustrious Islamic centers and notions of “garden” or “paradise” with subtle connotations of salvation. Thus, Tunis constituted the Ifriqiyan prototype of al-madina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad and exemplary urban core. With nearly twenty congregational mosques, illustrious madrasas, and two hundred masjids (smaller mosques), the city had long been a major religious, intellectual, and commercial hub for the Maghrib and sub-Saharan Africa as well as the political capital, associated in the modern era with a ruling dynasty, the Husaynids (1705–1957). With the fall of Constantine to the French army in 1837, Tunis acquired even greater importance for Algerian Muslims as an Islamic haven for refugees unwilling to live under infidel rule.42
The wood famine that had plagued the Mediterranean rim for centuries molded North African cities; Tunis was mainly built of tub (baked bricks), tile, dressed or carved stone, and marble, the last two for the wealthy, as well as spolia from Carthage or Utica that had been incorporated into urban structures and seaside pleasure villas for centuries. The ecological fact that the Maghrib and many islands were especially wood poor had some tangible benefits, as cataclysmic fires were infrequent and so too opportunities for drastic urban reordering. Istanbul, where wood residential structures were found in abundance, suffered a series of devastating fires in the nineteenth century, clearing the way for extensive, at times brutal, modern urbanization. By the early nineteenth century, Tunis’s architecture combined Ifriqiyan, Ottoman, and Moroccan influences; Italian spatial organization, materials, and decorative elements were increasingly in evidence and included furniture, objects of daily use, and material culture, which reflected the growing clout of Italian mamluks in the political class and the importance of the Leghorn merchants. But that influence was not confined to private residential structures. One of the last congregational mosques constructed, the Sahib al-Tabi‘ jami‘, built in 1814, and the Dar al-Bey, employed Italian materials and craftsmen.43
FIGURE 4. Worshippers leaving the Zaytuna mosque-university, Tunis. The oldest mosque in Tunis, the Zaytuna was a place of worship as well as an institution of higher learning that attracted scholars from throughout the Maghrib and Africa. (library of Congress Prints and Photographs, LC-DIG-ppmsca-06043.)
Considered among the dynasty’s most magnificent structures, the Dar al-Bey impressed even the most jaded visitors with its exquisite interior spaces—marble patios, fountains, and courtyards—and rich décor, with ceilings in hues of vermillion and blue inlaid with gold sequins. The site was originally chosen due to proximity to an important mosque, the city’s most prestigious guild, and to the Qasba, where the army was quartered. Decorated in a quasi-Italianate style, the Dar al-Bey enclosed within its vast structures civilian, military, and administrative functions. It had served as Hammuda Bey’s principal residence but by the nineteenth century was sometimes used as a palatial residence-hotel for VIPs, such as the English Princess Caroline, whose sojourn during 1816 may have spared the city from bombardment.44 The court only resided there for part of the year, notably for religious festivals such as Ramadan, but the palace complex also boasted a hall of justice, bayt al-diwan, and a throne room. Ahmad Bey installed the prime minister’s offices there and Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey (r. 1859–1882) added salons and reception halls for official ceremonies built in the European mode of the period.45 (A section of the Dar al-Bey served until very recently as the Tunisian National Archives.) The nearby Qasba enclosed the principal janissary barracks until their disbandment in 1811 after a revolt. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Qasba boasted an arsenal with a factory for fabricating canon and gun powder, overseen from 1826 on by a French Polytechnique officer, de Bineau.
Let’s inspect the principal streets, structures, and neighborhoods, since the built environment shaped the city’s social architecture and in turn opportunities for newcomers from across the sea or rural folk from the provinces seeking a better life. Residential patterns were determined by a combination of religion, kinship, profession, and ethnicity; those from outside the capital city region, from other parts of North Africa, or eastern Ottoman lands tended to cluster together. The absence of indigenous Christians meant that predominantly Christian quarters, like those in Cairo or Damascus, did not exist, although a small, but growing, largely European neighborhood occupied the quarter near the Sea Gate. The hawma (neighborhood) represented a key spatial construct understood by its inhabitants as a sort of semipublic, semiprivate domestic space characterized by intense, day-to-day exchanges; waves of settlement gradually transformed the older configurations of some neighborhoods.46
Until Ahmad Bey’s urban renewal program was launched in the 1840s, the city was entirely surrounded by walls with two adjoining suburbs (ribats), Bab al-Suwayqa and Bab al-Jazira. The axis mundi of Tunis was the madina, whose core boasted the eighth-century Zaytuna mosque-university, hundreds of guilds or artisan corporations producing a wide array of goods, state buildings, palaces housing wealthy merchants and ‘ulama’ families, and countless religious edifices or shrines. Indigenous notables (a‘yan) preferred certain neighborhoods in the madina—the nahj basha quarter or the nearby Qasba district—as residences. Descendants of Turkish officials resided in these quarters, although intermarriage had caused the lines of demarcation to fade somewhat by this period; and because the city was not spatially segregated by class, the madina was home to ordinary people and their humble abodes. Nevertheless, the ribats were more popular in composition; less prestigious than the madina, Bab al-Suwayqa enjoyed more esteem than its sister suburb, Bab al-Jazira, since the former abutted the Dar al-Bey, government offices, and the Qasba. In the collective city consciousness, the inhabitants of Bab al-Suwayqa occupied a higher social rung than those unfortunates with an address in Bab al-Jazira, associated with rural, and thus imperfectly civilized, newcomers and reprehensible activities due to the presence of temporary shelters for poor or transient people. Increasingly these were inhabited by impoverished Mediterranean immigrants, first single Maltese male laborers, and later down-and-out families.47
An ancient, well-delimited Jewish quarter had been in existence for centuries. The hara’s origins lay in the late tenth or early eleventh century, when tradition had it that a powerful Muslim saint, Sidi Muhriz, gave the Jews permission to live within city walls in their own neighborhood. For the most part, Jews of the capital resided and worked in a separate neighborhood, the hara al-yahud, which corresponded to the Moroccan millah, although it was never surrounded by physical enclosures; some Jews resided in the hara but worked outside its precincts. In terms of city spaces, suq al-Grana (market of the Leghornese traders) was a major market as well as a thoroughfare cutting through the middle of the madina’s Jewish quarter adjacent to Bab al-Suwayqa. By the 1830s, the hara was appallingly overcrowded and suffered grievously during outbreaks of epidemics.48
City quarters had olive oil presses, communal ovens, fountains providing pure drinking water holding the status of habus (or waqf), and suqs as well as small mosques or prayer rooms. As was true in other Ottoman cities, the noblest professions—dealers in perfumes, silks, and shashiya—were grouped around the principal mosque, the Zaytuna, or the Dar al-Bey. Trades considered noxious or polluting, such as tanning or butchering, were located on city perimeters. Food from the countryside was sold in markets scattered about the madina and suburbs; the suq al-ghalla (principal food market) was not far from the Sea Gate where the present marché central of Tunis stands. The city’s monumental doors were situated to facilitate communication with the fertile Majarda plains, the Cap Bon, and the Sahil, regions producing the country’s prized crops, wheat and olives. Many families owned gardens outside Tunis proper, some as far away as the plain of Mornag (Murnaq) nine miles to the south, then renowned for its olive and fruit orchards. And the intricate, multiphased production of the most esteemed export item, the shashiya, took place in Tunis and in hinterland satellite villages.49
A critical issue revolves around how urban space was gendered. Ethnographic evidence comes mainly from European (mainly male) writers, who inevitably commented upon native women’s relative absence in the streets, although an account from the turn of the century described a women’s market (suq al-nisa’) in the madina, near the former slave market: “The souk. . . like many others is a white tunnel lined with shops. It is very crowded in the early morning, and is almost the only place where many women are seen together. Some sit on the ground and sell their handiwork, others are busy bargaining for veils and embroideries. All are of the poorer classes and are heavily veiled.”50 Aside from the women’s suq, about which little is known, Muslim women tended not to shop daily in the markets. Instead vendors visited regular clients in their homes, calling out to alert buyers that coal, water, sweets, fruit, and cloth were to be had. “Each vendor sang his own peculiar, but familiar melody; his established female clientele knew well the sound of his voice.”51 For the most part, urban women ventured out of households with family members to go to the baths, make social calls, or visit the cemetery; upper-class women left home under the cover of night or in special curtained carriages, guarded by eunuchs, concealing the occupants from strange gazes. “None but the most abandoned prostitute can venture to be seen in the streets, and even then it would be a crime to walk publicly with the face uncovered.”52 Jewish women moved more freely about the streets as did resident Christian women. Since streets were not paved until later in the century, torrential winter rains turned passages into mud-encumbered thoroughfares; when attempting to navigate flooded streets, some women fastened wooden and metal trampini (small stilts) to their shoes to protect them from the muck.
Until the mass arrival of largely Mediterranean Christians, the madina was a bustling commercial, administrative, and religious center by day under the supervision of the shaykh al-madina (city manager), one of city’s the most influential offices. By night it was a relatively quiet area whose shops closed at sunset, and inhabitants rarely left home after the authorities sounded the sundown alert when the gates were closed. European travelers often noted with approval that street idlers, beggars, and vagabonds were few compared to Naples or Marseilles and attributed urban calm to the absence of theaters, pubs, or concert halls.53 The most ubiquitous space for (male-only) sociability were the hundreds of cafés scattered around the city, owned either by Turks or by Tunis natives, although Maltese, Greeks, or Sicilians ran a few establishments serving alcohol in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As immigrants and others arrived from the Mediterranean, more taverns, hotels, and inns sprang up and newcomers began to compete with native café owners. In 1826, an Italian built the first standing theater, and after 1832 Italian comedies, operas, and ballets were performed. Street entertainment took place during religious feasts or annual festivals whose boisterous excesses the Husaynid state increasingly circumscribed as the century wore on. Nocturnal Ramadan celebrations offered amusement to all city inhabitants who wandered the gaily-lit, decorated streets during the holy month.54
The notion of twansa, the allegedly “authentic” inhabitants of Tunis, best translates figurations of “us and them.” Long-established residence in the capital city measured social worth, marking urbanites off from provincials, peasants, and small-town nobodies, and complicating the vaguer classical distinction between al-khassa (elite) and al-‘amma (commoners). To this first cut must be added a second, the baldis/baldiya, or haughty city notables, who disdained the rough denizens of the popular suburbs and scrupulously observed behavioral norms—a reserved demeanor, moderation, and circumspection in public. “A baldi did not sing, eat, or in any other way call attention to himself while walking through the streets of Tunis. The sure mark of a hayseed was a man who conversed in a loud voice which could be overhead by passers-by; among the leading notables it was even considered improper to be seen in public cafes.”55 For the Tunis aristocrats, status was safeguarded by marriage and residential preferences. A Maliki jurist’s kunnash fiqhi (notebook) from the late nineteenth century detailed a family dispute over whether a woman from Tunis could be obliged by her husband to reside outside her natal city. Drawing upon earlier opinions, the learned jurist responded that it would be a great inconvenience for such a woman to be forced to live in a provincial town, like nearby Sousse, but not in Alexandria or Fez.56 While this might seem curious, one need only think of the citizens of Manhattan who feel more at home in Paris or London than in Camden, New Jersey.
Insiders conjure up outsiders regarded as socially distant and thus inferior. Being one of the barrani/barraniya (outsiders), people from other parts of the country or the Maghrib, was often tied to livelihood, since many performed tasks considered menial, even repugnant or suspect. The shaykh al-barraniya administered the “outsiders,” who monopolized specific professions and belonged to certain ethnic or regional groups, such as workers from Gabes who were carters; many barraniya resided in the Bab al-Jazira ribat.57 Needless to say, these niches were permeable and far from stable. Over time, an ambitious “non-twansa” could move from the outside in through perseverance, cagey marriage strategies, the right kind of fortune, social recognition of insider status, loss of collective memory regarding origins, and the ability to observe subtle codes of conduct. Despite the tenacious myth of the “authentic” urbanites whose way of life, behavior, and superior culture were immutable, people from Tunisian or North African towns, villages, oases, or tents constantly nourished the capital city region, as did those from across the sea.
What was the population of nineteenth-century Tunis? This question has provoked decades of scholarly debate, but it is safe to defer to Paul Sebag’s estimates of 100,000. Muslims numbered between 65,000 and 70,000, a figure including about 5,000 from other North African states or the Sahara. Jews numbered about 20,000 in the entire country, with some 15,000 residing in the Tunis region. Until the 1840s, an estimated 1,000 African slaves entered Tunisia each year but not all remained; after abolition in 1846, manumitted slaves and their descendants counted between 6,000 and 7,000 in the capital. If they tended over time to assimilate to local society, nevertheless names, professions, places of residence, and forms of religiosity signaled former servile status and roots in western Sudan. The most visible Ottoman subjects were the Orthodox Greeks, who, while never very numerous, benefitted from the largesse and patronage of Husaynid rulers as well as enjoying considerable autonomy in their religious and communal affairs. In 1830, resident European Christians numbered over 3,000, but all figures are controversial because the first systematic census was only conducted in 1906; moreover what “European” meant was a sort of floating benchmark.58 A credible account stated that “many Maltese of the greatest respectability. . . have been established here for 20 years with their families,” which suggests that labor migration began in the era just after Admiral Exmouth’s 1816 expedition.59
In 1848, the English vice-consul tallied 5,800 British subjects, of whom 35 men, women, and children were nationals; less than 200 were Greek protégés from the Ionian Islands under British rule and thus Maltese were the majority by far. Another report from 1847 put the “Christians” at 9,400 of whom the Maltese numbered 6,000. About 60 bourgeois French families called Tunisia home as well. Estimates of the Italo-Sicilian population, from a slightly later period, vary widely; by 1870, at least 9,000 Italians resided in the country permanently, to which another 2,000 seasonal fishermen and sailors should be added.60
Sunni Muslims of the Maliki madhhab (legal school) were overwhelmingly the most numerous. The most prestigious clans claimed ancestry with the Prophet Muhammad, thus sharifian status, and filled the upper ranks of the Islamic legal and teaching establishment, for example, the Zarruq and Ibn al-‘Ashur families. After the 1574 Ottoman conquest, a second Sunni legal school, the Hanafi, rivaled the Maliki and received preferential treatment until Ahmad Bey’s reforms.61 A distinctive group of Maliki Muslims were the Andalusians, distinguished by lifestyle, craft specialization, and shared memory of Iberian origins. During the long Reconquista, Spanish Muslims and Jews had sought refuge in North Africa; tens of thousands settled Tunisia in the early seventeenth century, many in villages in the northwest, notably Qal‘a-t al-Andalus (Galaat el Andeleus), characterized by special architectural and cultural forms. But the elite preferred Tunis, where they developed the art of shashiya manufacture, still monopolized by their descendants in the nineteenth century; those claiming Iberian ancestry officiated over the city’s most powerful merchant or guild councils.62 Some Muslim notables claimed Moroccan origins, as in the case of the Jallulis, whose ancestors settled in Sfax in the fifteenth century where they prospered in the corsair economy and later acquired powerful government posts and palatial residences in the capital. But Algerians, admittedly an anachronistic term, had always formed the largest North African community, in part because the Tunisian state had recruited Berber Zuwawa (Zouaves) tribesmen from the Kabylia for auxiliary troops. The French occupation of Algeria dramatically inflated the numbers of resident Algerians, particularly after major rebellions.63
Jewish communities were distinguished by origins, legal status, and, increasingly, social class; some were Husaynid subjects, others protégés or citizens of European nations, notably the Italian states. The majority lived in the capital city region or in coastal towns such as Nabeul, celebrated for its learned rabbis. But others resided in the far south near Jabal Matmata, the Gabes oases, or on the island of Djerba. Arab or Berber Jews regarded themselves as indigenous but evolved their own vernaculars and wrote in Judeo-Arabic. The synagogue was the center of communal life; boys were sent to rabbinic schools for primary education and to the yeshiva for advanced studies warranting entry into the rabbinical elite. However, customs, food, attitudes, and lifestyle hardly differed from those of Muslim neighbors; superstitions, such as the belief in the evil eye or in jinn (spirits), were shared by both.64 The veneration of holy persons or saints and collective pilgrimages honoring the “very special dead” were prominent features of Jewish and Muslim religiosity; the tombs of pious rabbis or Jewish sages reputed to possess miracle-working powers attracted Muslims followers.65
As Husaynid subjects, the Jews benefited from a large degree of autonomy and, while the bey nominated their qa’id, he respected communal consensus. Yet in accordance with Islamic and local practices, they held a markedly inferior status, paid special taxes, observed sumptuary laws, and could neither bear arms nor possess a mount. At times, native Jews were the targets of humiliation or violence perpetrated by the local Christian as well as Muslim population. Until the 1850s, during Holy Week in Tunis, it was customary for Catholic boys to deliver the bastonnade to Jewish youth unlucky enough to be found in the streets. Nevertheless, some Tunisian Jews, like the qa’id Nessim Samama (1805–1873), achieved influence and wealth through state service.66 Tunisian Jews remained deeply religious, clung to local beliefs, used amulets, and visited neighborhood Muslim sooth-sayers, which horrified bourgeois and educated coreligionists, especially recently settled European Jews.
In the late seventeenth century, Jews, mainly from northern Italy but of diverse origins, settled in Tunis, where they joined the older communities of North African and Spanish Jews. Known as Grana (from Leghorn), they assumed pivotal commercial and financial roles facilitating trade between Europe, particularly northern Italy, and Tunisia; they chartered ships to export grains, oils, wool, and leather and imported a range of commodities, notably New World products, such as sugar. Some of the Leghorn Jews worked in the redemption business by ransoming North African Muslims held captive in Italy. By the nineteenth century, many enjoyed middle-class status and some maintained patron-client ties with the Husaynid court because of international connections. The medical profession represented another entrée since the beys preferred Tuscan Jews as personal doctors; sometimes, physicians acted as translators for their princely patients, translating documents from Italian or French into Arabic, or even as diplomatic representatives. By this period, families, such as the Lumbrosos, Valensis, and Castelnuovos benefited from European legal protection, which conferred no small advantage. In 1871, the Italian consulate recognized over one thousand Jews under Italy’s jurisdiction.67
The Grana had their own synagogues, rabbinical courts, and councils, but, as they became increasingly European from the 1820s on, the cultural distance from Tunisian Jews grew. Since the Italians occupied high socioeconomic niches, while the Tunisians were among the least privileged strata working as small shopkeepers, artisans, or peddlers, intermarriage was rare, although not completely unknown. In the older urban cartography, the Grana had resided in or near the hara, but as the Jewish quarter burst at the seams the Leghornese took up residence in adjacent streets, such as Rue Zarkoun, which figures in Albert Memmi’s autobiographical novel, La statue de sel; bourgeois Tuscan Jews found housing in the Christian quarter, near Bab al-Bahr.68 Nothing symbolized more concretely the growing legal, social, and cultural distinctions between Arab and Italian Jews than the cemetery wall dividing the tombs of indigenous Jews from those with roots across the sea. However, after 1857, the situation of native Jews improved markedly as discriminatory legislation was lifted and they acquired the right to purchase land and property. Nevertheless, some indigenous Jews sought the formal legal protection of the various European powers as an insurance policy against future troubles.
Tunisia had long made room for outsiders—indeed granting privileged places to some—although the meanings attached to “foreignness” must be calibrated according to the historical period. The origins of the Husaynid political class lay neither in Spain nor the Maghrib but for the most part in the Levant, western Asia, or the Black Sea region. Some arrived in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries as Ottoman military officers, administrative cadres, seamen, and soldiers. Others were Christian adventurers, corsairs, or captives from across the Mediterranean who entered into state service after “turning Turk,” converting to Islam. Some had been seized by slave traders or forcibly enrolled in the Ottoman military before being brought to North Africa. Yusuf Sahib al-Tabi‘, originally from Moldavia, had been taken from his home during one of the periodic levies, the so-called boy tax (devşirme), that the Porte imposed upon the Christian Balkans. Once in Tunis, Yusuf rapidly ascended the political ladder, becoming chief minister by the end of the eighteenth century.69 As elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, Georgia and Circassia furnished mamluks (military or state personnel)—young men seized during raids, or purchased by slavers, and sold throughout the empire, including the North African provinces. The few identifiable Georgian or Circassian lineages left today retain only the vaguest memories of their roots. According to Agha family lore, their ancestor Mustafa, was playing in a garden outside his home somewhere in Georgia around 1800 when horsemen seized him and his brother; they were taken to Istanbul, where Mustafa was given to an Ottoman family for education until being sold to the Husaynids for palace service as a mamluk. (The story of the horsemen slavers constitutes a recurring trope in these family histories.)70
The dynasty’s founder, Husayn ibn ‘Ali (r. 1705–1735), was the son of a soldier from Crete who had risen in the Ottoman military establishment that ruled Tunisia. After successfully defeating an Algerian invasion, which earned the gratitude and support of urban notables and tribal leaders, Husayn took the Turkish title of bey and concluded tactical marital alliances with local Arab families, including marriage with women from the provinces in Le Kef near the Algerian border. His descendants, however, pursued Mediterranean and western Asian marriage strategies by often marrying Christian slave women from Genoa, Sardinia, Georgia, and Circassia—unions that over time produced the distinctive Ottoman-Tunisian ruling establishment.71 In a society prizing kinship, where genealogy represented the principal social map, to come from “somewhere else,” bereft of kin, as was true of the mamluks, might have been a serious disadvantage. Yet through palace or household service and marriage, outsiders were absorbed into the ranks of the political class. What were the politics of marriage?
Mamluks who proved loyal, excelled in statecraft, and earned the ruler’s favor might be rewarded by marriage to a Husaynid princess—sister, daughter, or niece of the bey. Of Georgian origins, Mustafa Khuja married one of Hammuda Bey’s sisters and proved particularly useful because he spoke Turkish, Arabic, and Italian. Another Georgian, Mustafa Agha, held one of the highest military posts in Tunisia under Ahmad Bey and married the ruler’s sister. When he wed Lilla Sisiya in 1829, Mustafa built a summer palace, Dar Agha, near Carthage on the dunes overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, a verdant area with vineyards and fruit trees known as Kram (or karm, “orchard”). One of the last Circassian mamluks to enter state service was Khayr al-Din, who wed a princess in 1862; it appears that as long as marriage to a Husaynid woman endured, it was to remain monogamous.72
The baldis, especially religious notables, were loath to give daughters in marriage to the palace because of the Husaynid practice of taking many wives and concubines of diverse religious and ethnoracial origins, including unions with women of ordinary status from outside Tunis; leading ‘ulama’ families regarded the court’s sumptuous atmosphere with restrained opprobrium. The reverse—the wedding of women from the Husaynid family—was less distasteful; for example, Ahmad Bey married a sister to the aristocratic Mrabit family. At times, the beys acted as patriarchal matchmakers, involving court favorites and the city’s great lineages; refusing a marriage arrangement from the ruler himself was a delicate matter. High-ranking Hanafi lineages, such at the Bayrams, were less reluctant to wed daughters to the palace or court and thus claimed three sources of social esteem: kinship with the Husaynids, prestigious religious positions, and state office.73 Changing relationships between the palace and the capital’s aristocratic Arab Muslim families, the Maliki a‘yan, can be gauged by the willingness—or aversion—to exchange women in marriage, an aversion that lessened somewhat with the “Tunisification” of the political class in the nineteenth century.
By Hammuda Bey’s reign in 1782, the Husaynid dynasty and its ruling institutions enjoyed virtually unquestioned legitimacy. Until the later reforms, the state functioned as an elaborate household bureaucracy constantly fed by social elements that might have been judged “foreign” at one time but that were folded into local ways of doing things through service, marriage, fictive kinship, and patronage. After a bitter squabble over the throne in 1814, the principle of succession was definitively settled; rule passed to the oldest male. This political pact, largely unchallenged until the dynasty’s demise in the twentieth century, came to pass through the intervention of Amina, wife of Mahmud Bey. During her husband’s investiture in December 1814, Amina convoked her two sons, Husayn and Mustafa, and bade them take an oath on the Quran to respect each other’s rights to the throne.74 By then, the Husyanids had secured the kinds of political and religiomoral capital enjoyed by independent regimes, such as the ‘Alawis, although in contrast to the Moroccan dynasty, the Husaynids never claimed kinship in the Prophet’s family. Nevertheless, Husaynid governance played a primordial role in state formation, indelibly marking the country’s modern history.
Legitimacy sprang from intersecting sources, above all, assiduous observation of Islamic law and practice, public expressions of respect for the ‘ulama’, and the inclusion of subjects in the symbolically charged performance of investiture played out in two bay‘as (professions of allegiance), one private, the other public.75 Rulers presided over religious celebrations, the two ‘aids, and the ra’s al-‘am (first day of the New Year), events marked by acts of largesse from princes and princesses alike. Carefully orchestrated processions through the streets of Tunis represented public relations campaigns, since the reigning bey formally received the leading ‘ulama’, the heads of the guilds, and other corporate groups with great pomp. With Ahmad Bey’s reign in 1837, favored members of the European diplomatic corps were invited to attend religious or state festivals.76
The location and physical spaces associated with the exercise of power were significant. Under Husayn ibn ‘Ali, the court and government were transferred from the Qasba to abandoned palaces of the older Muradid dynasty (1628–1705) situated three miles outside city walls in a stretch of land surrounded by orchards. That palace complex, known as the Bardo, from the Spanish prado (field), became the Husaynids’ principal residence. With each bey’s ascension to the throne, a new palace was built so that the Bardo was in a state of continual construction well into the nineteenth century. After the main gate into the complex stood a vaulted corridor that served as a ceremonial vestibule (saqifa); behind it the palace guard stood watch before the entry to the harim, or women’s quarters. A library filled with rare manuscripts brought back from Istanbul and Cairo and a mosque graced the complex, as did numerous tiered marble fountains and luxurious gardens. Other buildings included military barracks, parade grounds, stables, vast kitchens, the zandala (prison), and the mahkama (tribunal), a spacious, lavishly appointed hall where the beys rendered justice.77 By the 1830s, the Bardo had the character of a small town, with high-end residences for court notables; modest lodgings for slaves, servants, and retainers; and workshops for producing needed commodities. A chapel to celebrate mass and the sacraments was located there for the small group of resident Catholics in service to the palace.
Thus the political elite resided and worked at a distance from the capital, although some court notables maintained residences in the Tunis madina. Smaller, but elegant, summer palaces were scattered along the coast from La Marsa to Hammam Lif, since both political and religious notables spent the sweltering summers there. With the reign of Muhammad Bey (r. 1855–1859), La Marsa became one of the principal beylical residences by the late 1850s. Surrounded by olive groves, vineyards, and luxuriant gardens, La Marsa had served as a princely pleasure capital since at least the Hafsid époque—indeed since pre-Islamic times.78 In the nineteenth century, European creoles and consular families resided in seaside villas often loaned by the palace or court dignitaries.
At the level of the territorial state, a sort of royal progress, the mahalla, both conferred and confirmed legitimacy. Long before the Ottoman conquest, indigenous Maghribi states had flexed their muscle and collected revenues through this mobile military-camp-cum-tax-collecting expedition, which dispensed justice as it laboriously made its way around the country in two annual forays timed for the harvests. During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman office of bey was combined with this reinvigorated local institution. Leadership of the multifunctional mahalla became the principal mechanism for transmitting sovereignty from ruler to designated heir, which the 1814 pact on succession further stabilized. If the reach of political elites in Tunis remained tenuous among pastoral societies at the state’s limits, still the mahalla endowed the dynasty with a remarkable longevity and an equally remarkable ability to expropriate the country’s resources and producers.79
The rulers carefully managed the intersections between the subsistence economy of the peasantry and Mediterranean commerce by naming agents to strategic centers of international trade, notably Malta, Gibraltar, and Marseilles. In addition, where Tunisian merchants resided in sufficient numbers, wakils were appointed, mainly in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Alexandria. Isaac Cardozo, a British subject and a Jew, served as Husaynid agent to Gibraltar in 1836; after 1810, Mahmud Jalluli, and then the Farrugia brothers, oversaw commercial interests in Malta, furnishing information on market prices for wheat as well as the military and political news so critical during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The voluminous correspondence from Malta attests to the Husaynids’ keen interest in the island fortress, with its commanding position in trans-Mediterranean and global affairs.80 Outbreaks of epidemics, for example, the news of yet another terrifying appearance of plague in Alexandria in April 1841, figured prominently as do health conditions and quarantines, since they negatively affected trade.81 The arrival of ships from Constantinople or Alexandria in Valletta, famine, or crop failures in key agricultural regions of the Ottoman Empire were systematically noted, as were the passages through Malta of Ottoman dignitaries or provincial rulers.82 Since the dynasty controlled most of the country’s resources through a system of state monopolies, its rulers conducted foreign affairs in the manner of quasi-independent sovereigns, concluding bilateral treaties with major trading partners among the European states. This dimension of Husaynid governance raises the question of Ottoman-Tunisian relations.
An Ottoman province from the late sixteenth century, the Regency of Tunis was both dependent upon, yet increasingly independent of, the Porte, particularly by the early nineteenth century. This is not to deny that the most powerful Muslim sovereign in Dar al-Islam, the sultan, did not hold sway—far from it.83 Ottoman influences shaped domains ranging from architecture, cuisine, and clothing to financial, administrative, and military institutions to religious and legal practices. And the Husaynid court imitated the Ottoman court but on a scaled-back level of luxury, so as not to offend sensibilities in Istanbul. The sultans always confirmed after the fact the ascension of a new ruler, with letters of investiture and emissaries bearing precious gifts that reaffirmed ties for which there was always a political price to pay. Soon after Husayn Bey came to the throne in 1824, the Tunisian representative to the Porte, Ahmad Qabtan al-Murali, returned with the anticipated firman of investiture as well as the ceremonial robe of honor. As always, this event was the cause for lavish celebrations in Tunis involving state officials, city notables, the ‘ulama’, and populace.84 Whenever Istanbul appeared determined to reestablish direct control over the regency, as in 1835 when the local rulers of Tripolitania, the Qaramanli dynasty, were deposed, the Husaynids made haste to proffer rich presents to their overlords.
The Sahib at-Tabi‘ takes with him [to Istanbul] presents to a very large amount-nearly two millions of Tunis piasters, consisting of Spanish douros, the conveyance of which from the Bardo to the Golita [La Goulette], occupied forty-two mules; a vessel loaded with upwards of thirty very fine horse with rich caparisons; another vessel with negro slaves; two hundred thousand red Tunisian caps; a great supply of the eau of jasmine and roses; a quantity of jewelry; swords, some of which were magnificently ornamented with large diamonds, guns and pistols and an enormous quantity of Tunis butter in jars which is much esteemed in Constantinople.85
Previous to the nineteenth century, the dynasty had relied upon Ottoman military or administrative cadres often recruited from the margins of the empire; but after 1820, supplying Tunis with mamluks from Georgia or Circassia became more difficult and increasingly mamluks hailed from Sicily, Sardinia, or the Italian peninsula. (Some Italian court mamluks maintained ties with birth families and may have convinced countrymen to try their luck in the regency.) At the same time, the native Tunisians entered into state service with Ahmad Bey’s reign, which, together with the gradual assimilation of previously identifiable Turkish groups to local society, changed the older Ottoman system of governance. When European states appeared less menacing, the Husaynids used the Porte as a sort of superfund of distant, if convenient, legitimation; but as international political conditions worsened, they petitioned the Porte for recognition of hereditary rights to rule, a pattern seen in Egypt. With Istanbul’s proclamation of the Tanzimat (reordering or restructuring of the Ottoman realm) starting in 1839, Tunisian political elites participated in a “three-cornered” conversation on state reform running from Istanbul to Cairo to Tunis. Nevertheless, Ahmad Bey and his successor declined until 1857 to implement these decrees, not from opposition to the principle of legal and social reordering per se, but rather from a desire for change on their own terms.86 Tunisian state reforms—the Fundamental Pact of 1857 and proclamation of a constitution in 1860—as well as the last-ditch efforts by Prime Minister Khayr al-Din to alter the legal and political configuration of government during the early 1870s, were intimately connected to “strangers in the city.” The steady influx of mainly Catholic Mediterranean subsistence migrants skewed older patterns of social insertion, positioning, and order not only for a Muslim dynasty, state, and society but also for European notables long-established in the country, a community aptly described as cultural creoles.87
The privileged heart of the resident Euro-Mediterranean expatriate community was made up of several hundred merchants, skilled craftsmen, and military personnel linked in divergent ways to the ruling family. Marriage patterns, Mediterranean travels and travails, employment in posts from Istanbul to Tangier meant that their identities lay as much in North Africa or the Ottoman Empire as in Europe. Families, like the Gasparys in La Goulette, tended to monopolize vice-consular posts over generations and shared a polyglot system of communication that marked them off from the newly arrived from Mediterranean islands or Europe. But the key element was their enduring, if labyrinthine, relationships with the Husaynid family and court dignitaries who acted as great patrons—indeed who had transformed captives or people of modest origins into high-ranking state officials. These Euro-Tunisian “old-timers” looked askance at the “uninvited guests” pouring into the country after the 1830s so that the very fact of rapid in-migration caused this small, but critical, interstitial community to close ranks, at least for a while.88 How can we talk about these people?
The notion of “creole” arising from New World encounters has spawned somewhat contradictory definitions. In racialized understandings, it designates persons of “mixed race” (as race was locally defined) in slave or former slave societies. In another scheme, “creole” names individuals born in slave colonies but considered “white” who assumed the behavioral traits characteristic of racially mixed societies and cultures.89 In short, creole is as difficult to pin down as Moor, hybrid, or cosmopolitan. One definition suits, to an extent, our case—individuals born in Tunisia of parents from somewhere else, mainly although not exclusively Europe, who sank roots in the country over generations of residence and came to see the place as home. Thinking about them as creoles distinguishes them from recently arrived people, or from those who came to Tunis but moved on, and operates as ballast to the idea that religion and/or “nationality” constituted the sole source of identity and belonging.90 This represents a major advance because it problematizes the notion of “European” and moves the discussion away from freighted constructs such as Islam, Europe, and the West. It beckons us to enter the in-between spaces forged by people in motion and to consider the range of displacements—spatial, social, mental, and cultural—that underlay continuous local adaptations.
What brought this assortment of people to North Africa? The original Christian community in Tunis went back to the twelfth century, when Venetian merchants set up shop and were later joined by traders from Genoa, Leghorn, Marseilles, and England. From the sixteenth century on, the heads of the Christian “nations” assumed the triple task of administering expatriates, assuring justice for nationals in an Islamic state, and attending to personal business interests. The core of the early French nation were Huguenot families, first and foremost the Chapeliés. Originally from Nîmes, the family spawned a “dynasty of traders” culled from Reformed Church members who, after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, created permanent commercial establishments in Tunis. This resonates with numerous cases of Europeans, including monarchs, who were afforded refuge in the Ottoman Empire.91 By 1814, a descendant of the Huguenots, Jacques-Henri Chapelié, fifty-two years old, had resided in the country for thirty years and served as the elected deputy of the French nation.92
Another dynamic nourished the ranks of the Tunis creoles. The Husaynids intervened on behalf of resident foreigners, offering protection in return for technical, military, or scientific expertise—a harbinger of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution sent waves of people to Tunisia (and elsewhere in the Mediterranean world), where some placed themselves under the protection of Hammuda Bey, who went so far as to attempt to arrange for one family’s sequestered possessions to be delivered from France to Tunis.93 In 1819, Mahmud Bey received a letter from Admiral Jurieu complaining that the ruler had extended his protection to French nationals too frequently and reiterating the principle that only “apostasy” transformed the Bourbon into beylical subjects.94 The real bone of contention revolved around the tangled, unresolved relationship between religious affiliation, allegiance to the monarch, and emerging forms of national identity; without conversion to Islam, an individual could not abandon France’s legal embrace. This question repeatedly arose in the nineteenth century as Christians under European protection converted, seeking to substitute beylical and Islamic jurisdictions for European consular jurisdiction. As vexing for French jurists and diplomats were the ambiguities implicit in the notion and exercise of nationalité. Complicating matters was the fact that some individuals switched legal protection because they were at odds with their own consuls or community.
Small acts of defiance by individuals refusing to obey expulsion orders swelled the members of the Tunis creole community. In 1723, a French national, Bernard, and his wife arrived without proper permission from the Chambre de Commerce in Marseilles. Threatened with forced repatriation, the couple placed themselves under English protection and took up residence in the English funduq. They made their living thanks to La Goulette’s kahiya, who granted the couple the right to operate a small tobacco fabrique in the port. Despite a legal ouster in 1743, the French hotel keeper, Guillaume, remained in Tunis by placing himself under Swedish protection. This practice, by no means restricted to North Africa, was frequent enough in Levantine Ottoman ports to move authorities to repeatedly forbid it.95
Yet another current feeding the creole community was the Husaynid practice of receiving a fortunate few of the Christian captives seized in raids into the heart of the palace bureaucracy, if they possessed special talents. The biography of Ahmad Bey’s minister of foreign affairs, Giuseppe Raffo (1795–1862), or Joseph Marie Raffo, offers an example of how the system worked.96 Raffo, like so many of his fellow “Europeans,” had climbed the social ladder thanks to intimate connections to the palace with its multifarious networks. Born at the Bardo, Raffo was the eleventh child of Marie Terrasson and a Genoese artisan, Gian-Battista, from Chiavari, captured by Tunisian corsairs in 1771 and later attached to the court in his capacity as a master watchmaker. Thus began his son Joseph’s engagement in palace service at a young age to Husayn Bey, for whom he served as first interpreter prior to being named minister of foreign affairs. Another critical tie was that one of Raffo’s sisters, Elena-Grazia (b. 1779), converted to Islam and wed Mustafa Bey, the father of Ahmad Bey.
FIGURE 5. Portrait of Count Giuseppe Raffo, 1795–1862. The son of a watchmaker taken captive by Tunisian corsairs, Raffo poses in military uniform and wears the era’s new headgear, the fez; he was ennobled in 1851 by the King of Sardinia. (Institut National de Patrimoine, Tunis.)
Raffo remained a devout Catholic as he served five Muslim rulers; he was even granted an audience with the Pope during one of his frequent visits to Italy. Raffo’s residence in the Bardo was adorned with Catholic iconography and he acted as a great patron for the Church as well as for the first female Catholic missionaries in Tunisia, the Sisters of Saint-Joseph. Through beylical largesse, Raffo amassed a personal fortune, including the right to exploit the rich tuna fishery at Sidi Dawad on the Cap Bon, a thriving business owned by the family until 1905. He assiduously courted marks of distinction and decorations from leading European states, including the British Crown, and was elevated to minor nobility by the Italian government, which also extended protection. For outside observers, the astonishing social mobility enjoyed by individuals such as Raffo was incomprehensible. Indeed, the American consul to Tunis, Nicholson, barely contained his amazement at Raffo’s good fortune in life, characterizing him condescendingly in 1860 as “originally a common servant.”97
The Cubisol family’s trajectory differs from the Raffos because the mechanism that landed them in Tunis was not capture on the high seas but rather the search for a better living. Joseph-François Cubisol (1752–1822) hailed from a family of architects originally from Nîmes, although he was born in La Ciotat in 1752. A master carpenter, Joseph-François had come to Tunisia voluntarily to serve the beys in his capacity as a skilled craftsman; he died and was buried in Tunis. Cubisol’s son, Charles (1817–1868), was born in La Goulette and served as French attaché in the port between 1843 and 1854, before being named vice-consul in 1855.98
The widow Gibson’s life story provides a contrast both with Raffo and with Cubisol. She was the wife of John Gibson, the British vice-consul who died in 1833 after “imprudently exposing himself to malaria on a shooting party among the marshes some distance from Tunis.”99 Burdened with eight children, Mrs. Gibson chose not to return to England, remaining in La Marsa in the family home until her death and burial at the age of seventy-three. Her eldest son, a reputed wastrel, served as the paterfamilias from 1833 on until he expired a decade later from “wounds received while defending himself against a gang of thieves who attacked his house.”100 Their tombstones remain in Saint George’s cemetery in Tunis today.
Another group of creoles were Franco-Italian traders, artisans, and workers originally attached to the coral and fishing industries around the small island of Tabarka in the north, from whence their name; others resided in Ghar al-Milh, or Porto Farina, until the port silted up. The Tabarkans were at times considered indigenous Christians because they had resided in the country for decades and were well-acculturated, but the English traveler James Richardson (1806–1851), had only harsh words to say about them: “Upon the whole I would rather trust a respectable Moor than a native Christian. There is a vulgar saying here: ‘God defend me from a Algerine Turk, a Tripolitan Jew, and a Tunisian Christian.’ The low character of the Tunisian Christians may be traced to their principally originating from the Genoese colonists of Tabarca [sic], for after this island was ceded to the Bey, all the Tabarchines settled in Tunis. Now the Tabarchines were little better than a convict settlement.”101 While the Tabarkans had practiced endogamy, which preserved their distinctiveness in earlier periods, by the mid-nineteenth century intermarriage with other Christians of Tunisia represented less of a mésalliance than previously.
Critical to the creole community were marriage patterns and the fact that family dynasties monopolized offices or vice-consular posts for generations. Where and how they lived, with whom they socialized, and the languages they employed operated as yardsticks of local and transnational connectedness. Also significant was where they educated children, the frequency and duration of visits to Europe or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and where they died and were buried—if fate offered the choice. Due to their command of Mediterranean languages and, as importantly, intimate knowledge of Tunisian as well as European ways of doing things, Raffo and others like him served as cultural mediators and political brokers for newly stationed diplomats, and for the steadily climbing number of speculators, investors, travelers, and tourists, by introducing them to the unwritten norms and codes of local society.102 Therefore, the concept of creole aligns with other categories of identity and belonging in port cities, such as the polyvalent designation “Moor.”
Property rights were central to relationships between creoles and the Husaynid political class. Theoretically, resident foreigners could not own immovable property until beylical decrees later in the century enshrined those rights in law, but in reality some palace insiders, as seen in the Raffos’ tuna fishery, gained various kinds of property, although whether rights devolved to descendants was subject to negotiation.103 One of the major processes at work throughout the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was the concerted effort by resident European traders, financiers, and speculators to establish secure property rights whether by treaty, force, or subterfuge. During the eighteenth century, the Husaynids had been relatively adept at managing the interface between the productive sectors of the economy and the outside world, but the political and fiscal challenges of the second half of the nineteenth century represented something wholly new.104 Growing insolvency was the consequence of expensive modernization programs, spectacular cases of treasury fraud, usurious European loans, the palace’s growing predilection for imported luxury goods, and relentless foreign pressures for commercial and other concessions, above all property rights.
Consuls tended to remain in the post for extended periods, particularly in the early part of the century when transportation was slow and dangerous. Lengthy stays acculturated them and facilitated the transmission of customary ways of doing things so critical to the administration of justice. Until at least midcentury, the consular elite shared a common culture forged by years in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, or in the Mediterranean world. Success in managing daily relations between protégés and local Muslim society depended upon several factors. The more culturally attuned to North Africa’s Arabo-Islamic-Ottoman civilization, the more effective a consul was in calming troubled waters—or stirring them up. Most were conversant with the principal languages, first and foremost Arabic, followed by Italian, and later French, employing them regularly in official and personal communication. As important was the balance of power within the bey’s ruling circle at any given moment and the play of forces among states with a stake in Tunisia.105
Sir Thomas Reade served for nearly a quarter of a century as British consul, from 1824 until his death in Tunis in 1849. Reade’s son Richard, born in La Marsa in 1829, later assumed his father’s functions in 1879, after earlier postings in Morocco, Egypt, Spain, and Smyrna. Not all British officials were as upright as Reade, who won guarded praise from the period’s principal Arabic chronicler, Ahmad b. Abi al-Diyaf, who was a contemporary of Reade. Another English agent had incurred the bey’s wrath on a number of occasions for his outrageous public behavior before succumbing to a fatal illness, leaving substantial debts unpaid. But most consuls were quite chummy with the ruling family. Reade’s successor, Louis Ferriere, did an oil portrait of one of the rulers that hung in the Bardo’s interior apartments; he must have spent considerable time at the palace to execute the painting.106
Ferriere’s successor, Sir Richard Wood (1806–1900), had a rather different background from his two predecessors. Consul general to Tunis from 1856 to 1879, he not only mastered Arabic, Italian, and French but also Turkish and Greek, the felicitous result of birth and upbringing in Istanbul, where Wood’s father, George, had served as a high-ranking dragoman to the British embassy. Educated in Exeter, young Wood was sent to Syria in 1831, ostensibly to learn Arabic and garner support for British policies among Lebanese chieftains, but he may well have been a spy. Appointed in 1834 as dragoman in Istanbul, by 1841 Wood held the important post of consul in Damascus, where he became a local za‘im (local big man, boss) as well as personally acquiring local properties under shady circumstances. His linguistic prowess, together with generations of familiarity with Islamic-Ottoman culture, made him the perfect diplomat, although at times he tended to identify too closely with Ottoman or Tunisian interests. When Wood retired in 1879, he left for Nice, where he died and was buried in 1900; but he spent summers in La Goulette with his eldest daughter, Farida, who had married into the Raffo family.107 In short, he was both a transimperial actor and a not-quite-creole whose offspring joined the ranks of the Tunis creoles.
Wood’s French counterpart, Léon Roches (1809–1901), held the office of consul general to Tunis from July 1855 to October 1863 and boasted an adventuresome life as well. After a time in Morocco, Roches went to Algeria, where he served as Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir’s secretary in 1837; his perfect command of Arabic rendered him an invaluable interpreter and double agent. Subsequently he was named to Trieste, Tripoli, and then Tunis. (Some sources claim that Roches converted to Islam.)108 The life trajectories of Wood, Roches, and many others render the label “European” problematic; perhaps “Crypto-European” (as suggested by Edmund Burke III) is more appropriate. Monopolizing diplomatic postings over generations in the Levant, Malta, Greece, and North Africa, these clans forged other networks through shared commercial interests, the patronage of local Muslim elites, and intermarriage. The degree of endogamy within the Tunis consular corps was noteworthy, although Protestants and Catholics did not marry; for example, the Dutch vice-consul wed his daughter to an English Protestant but Wood, a Roman Catholic, gave his eldest daughter in marriage to the Catholic Raffos.109
As steamships and other forms of modern communication became widely available and the exercise of diplomacy was bureaucratized, the consular corps remained in-country for shorter periods of time and were less integrated into local society. Unlike the Raffos and other Christian families residing in the Bardo palace complex, creoles and diplomats mainly lived in Tunis (a few in La Goulette), but they shared in the summer rituals of the palace as the Husaynid family and court relocated to the sea.
Until the early nineteenth century, city spaces and buildings allocated to foreign residents were regulated by local interpretations of the Capitulations, bilateral treaties, and custom. The droit de résidence (right of residence) was one of the fundamental concessions that the Ottoman Empire conceded to European states under the imtiyazat (or Capitulations). The Ottoman governors of Tunisia, and their successors, the Muradid and Husaynid dynasties, granted buildings within city walls and land for cemeteries extra muros, such as Saint George’s Anglican cemetery constructed around 1640 but now in a different location.
In 1660 a French funduq was constructed adjacent to the English complex at the edge of the madina on Rue de l’Ancienne Douane near the Sea Gate, where Europeans and other foreign Christians, whether resident or de passage, were concentrated in the “quarter of the Francs.”110 Until 1760, the largely Italian Capuchins lived in the French funduq, where they conducted Catholic services in the consular chapel dedicated to Saint Louis. However, in 1767 the Husaynid ruler constructed another building nearby, which became the Church of Sainte-Croix.111 Placed under France’s protection, the church was administered by French and Italian Capuchin monks, who registered births, marriages, and deaths as well as caring for the Saint-Antoine graveyard dating to the early seventeenth century. Other consulates had chapels within their extensive compounds for resident nationals, travelers, merchants, or sailors. From 1769 on, the Maltese Capuchins administered a chapel in La Goulette whose placement proved advantageous in the following century when the port came to be heavily populated by Sicilians and Maltese. During the nineteenth century, Italian Capuchins and French diplomats were often at odds as were different Catholic missionary orders; local tensions reflected struggles in Europe and poisoned the well of interfaith communal relations.112
Paradoxically, the presence of cemeteries is most revealing of the attitudes of a Muslim state toward nonsubject Christians, since the existence of visible non-Muslim religious and residential edifices in Ottoman cities signaled the “willingness on the part of Muslim society to ensure an architecturally-appealing residence for European traders, diplomats, and visitors.”113 The relative absence in European cities, such as Marseilles, of commensurate spaces for Muslim, Jewish, or Ottoman Christian traders and travelers to live, store goods, conduct business, worship, and lay to rest those whom death found far from home, stands in stark contrast. The swell in the urban population of Tunis due to trans-Mediterranean immigration rendered buildings and city space a scare resource and contentious issue. Already in 1831, Reade, by then in-country for more than six years, decried the housing shortage:
With respect to the Consulate House in Tunis, I beg to inform you that it is absolutely uninhabitable. It has been built upwards of one hundred and fifty years ago, and has not been kept in this state of repair which I conceive it ought to have been. The rain penetrates into every room, and the foundation has in some places given way, endangering the upper walks so much that if it is not very soon taken down there is every apprehension of some part giving way. It has been held from this [Husaynid] government by the British government . . . from the period the Consular establishment was formed here . . . I was obliged to hire one [house] in the country [on the La Marsa road] upon my arrival, not being enabled by any means whatever to procure one in the Town, at least in that part where the Christians live.114
Two decades later, a full-blown crisis had developed: “In Tunis there is a [residence] called ‘Arisha’ that shelters about thirty Maltese families and is too small. . . . This is because it is difficult to find habitation in the city.”115 The movement of people out of the funduqs’ confines and into adjacent neighborhoods, or later to the newly reclaimed land between the walled city and lake, held momentous consequences for social life in the capital as did the installation of impoverished Maltese and Sicilian families in wakala in the madina or its suburbs. For the fortunate newcomer, family contacts, neighbors, communal networks, or informal associations provided a place to stay and work. The poorer Europeans lived crowded together, eking out livelihoods as casual laborers, bakers, butchers, carpenters, peddlers, carters, prostitutes, and beggars. Gradually hotels, cafés, and boisterous taverns were established; small shops sometimes illegally sold spirits, kif, tobacco, and gunpowder in the emerging “underground” economy. Neighborhoods associated with particular immigrant communities became the favored haunt for clandestine, often nocturnal, wheeling and dealing in contraband goods, in which many city inhabitants actively participated. Certain types of work, whether in Tunis proper or the port, allowed some actors to organize black market exchanges. In La Goulette, Sicilians increasingly worked as dockers unloading vessels, porters hauling merchandise to the customs house, and boatmen transporting goods and human cargo across the lake to the Sea Gate. The Maltese moved into carting and the carriage trade, shuttling people around city streets in small wooden vehicles and, in the process, became messengers and purveyors of information and rumors as well as forbidden items. Since local, regional, and trans-Mediterranean smuggling operations were combined with family-run trades, it was difficult to discern where legal and illicit exchanges began and ended.116
Small wonder that the city’s bourgeois inhabitants, above all the baldi, viewed quarters like Malta Saghira (Little Malta) as inherently disorderly, unsafe, and morally blameworthy. Not far away from the “street of the Maltese,” Italians and Sicilians settled on Rue de la Commission, which followed the lower madina’s outer walls and gradually came to be lined by coffeehouses, taverns, and a bit later ice-cream parlors. By the eve of the Protectorate, these two streets, plus Rue des Glacières (street of the ice makers), formed the nucleus of Maltese and Italian neighborhoods still perceptible by their distinctive architecture, though now in a state of disrepair.117
How did city natives “name” old-timers and newcomers, whether labor migrants, traders, travelers, tourists, and adventurers? State records and chronicles drew upon a range of descriptors: al-ra‘iya (subjects, literally “flock”), nasara (Christians), or ajnabi/ajanib (foreign, foreigners). Ahmad Bey’s response in 1845 to resident Christians regarding the shortage of urban space referred to petitioners as al-afranij (Franks), ahl uruba (people of Europe), and al-millat al-masihiya (Christian millets); Church leaders were designated a‘yan. Another term used by the populace was rumis (Christians), which had negative connotations. But geographical markers, such as ahl Malta (people of Malta) or ahl Sisilya (people of Sicily), were employed as well. Tunis natives probably placed northern Italians and French at the top of the social hierarchy; at the bottom were Maltese and Sicilians whose work, lack of education, and behavior conspired in inferior positioning.118 Depending upon the observer and context, social designations might be fluid based upon (assumed) place of origin, rank, profession, and, of course, religion.
The nature and tenor of daily relations among religious communities are dealt with in subsequent chapters. Suffice it to say that street conflict or communal quarrels tend to be better documented than mundane quotidian social exchanges, which should give us pause; and perceived religious and/or national differences, when invoked as the root of social strife, need to be carefully scrutinized. Nevertheless, tensions or clashes along confessional lines were most likely to erupt in two instances. Transgressions of laws or implicit codes forbidding sexual contact between Muslim women and non-Muslim men provoked uproar, as did some instances of “love with the wrong person” within different Catholic communities; even prostitution theoretically was to obey sexual boundaries based upon religion.119 In addition, hostilities between European states and Tunisia, for example, the Sardinian crisis of 1832–1833, or between the Ottomans and European nations, such as the Greek wars of the 1820s, triggered confessionalism. The 1830 invasion of Algiers stirred up animosity toward resident Christians, as did the relentless flow of news detailing atrocities suffered by the Algerians, which inevitably reached Tunisia with refugees. The proclamation of the 1861 constitution, ostensibly erasing legal distinctions based upon religion and nationality, sparked street demonstrations suffused with anti-Christian sentiment. During the 1864 revolt, lines of demarcation followed confessional and national lines; many European residents fled their homes to take refuge onboard ships anchored at sea.120 Predictably, the French invasion and occupation of 1881 provoked attacks upon Europeans and native allies in the city and countryside.
In the press of the crowd on busy streets, how did city inhabitants, whether “authentic” baldi, creoles, or recent arrivals, identify one another? Here the old saw that “clothes make the man or woman” rings true, because clothing situated individuals precisely in the urban order of things by visually communicating social distinctions and hierarchy. Clothing has always operated as marker and symbol of profession, ethnicity, class, religion, and gender: “as both material and metaphor for the social question.”121 Differences might be subtle, suggested by the quality of cloth in a jibba, qaftan, ha’ik, or burnus: “a man’s rank was judged by the shape, the folds, the color, and the material of his turban.”122 Or, since certain colors were permitted for some but forbidden to others, clothing could be visually resonant, in some respects alarmingly so. Pascal Gandolphe made the mistake of leaving the French funduq in 1781 sporting a bright green cravat, which attracted the wrath of an unidentified, perhaps deranged, assailant who stabbed him to death for blaspheming Islam by wearing a color reserved for descendants of the Prophet.123 But dress came to represent a sort of legal garment because it translated in concrete form the jurisdictional place of an individual and the legal regime that he or she was under. Another designation used by beylical subjects, whether Muslim or Jewish, as well as by other communities, was inspired neither by religion nor by ethnicity but rather by legal protections; for example “Dimitri L‘Inglizi” was a shorthand reference frequently employed by city folk to identify a Greek (or anyone else) who claimed English protégé status.
As was true in the Ottoman Empire, clothing was subject to state regulation modified by local custom and interpretation. The political messages driving “sartorial politics” was best illustrated by the apparel of religious minorities.124 In the first decades of the nineteenth century, headgear assumed new meanings, since it communicated the status of those under foreign protection. By the 1820s, sumptuary laws for Jews were not always heeded; some had adopted European apparel. In response perhaps to the political humiliations of the 1816 Exmouth expedition, Mahmud Bey ordered all Jews, irrespective of nationality, to remove their European headgear; the “war of the hats” was in full swing. An English Jew from Gibraltar under British protection was arrested for refusing to conform to the dress code, unleashing a diplomatic crisis. The affair resulted in a compromise: European Jews could wear European hats; Leghorn Jews, an intermediate group and commercial aristocracy, were authorized to don white headgear; and Tunisian Jews had to return to their dark calotte (cap wrapped in a blue or black turban), setting them off from Muslims wearing the red shashiya.125 But the clothing wars were not confined to Tunisia.
In his travels across the Maghrib and Mediterranean in the 1840s, Richardson observed sartorial shifts among Moroccan Jews in ports open to foreign trade that resonated with Tunis and elsewhere:
When I was lately at Mogador, the European coat was an object of great distinction for a Barbary Jew to obtain and most surprisingly dazzled the eyes of the native Jewish ladies, and always had the effect of accelerating a matrimonial arrangement the delicate sensibilities of the Maroquine [Moroccan] Jewess being keenly alive to the distinction and protection which her husband acquired by putting on the dress of the Christians. I was told when at Tangier so many Barbary Jews had been over to Gibraltar and had adopted European dress that the [Moroccan] Emperor alarmed at such an innovation, which clothed and coated every one of his subjects with the protection of Europeans and put them almost beyond his power sent down an imperial order from Meknes to make them undress.126
After 1857, sumptuary laws for native Jews were abolished or slowly disappeared. However, as late as the 1920s, Tunisian Jews born before the Protectorate, including the grand rabbis, wore the shashiya and “traditional Arab” clothing; those born after 1881 tended to don European apparel.127 But in the period that concerns us, city residents wore their “national costume.” Maltese male laborers wore a distinctive garb as did Sicilian fishermen; Greeks were distinguished by the “distinctive shade of red” in their dress that identified them to passers-by. However, sartorial fashions in the precolonial era were far from stable and read in various ways: “dressed like a European” referred to social peers who had discarded “traditional” clothing for the somber costume of middle-class Europeans.128
Indigenous women’s clothing signaled belonging to a religious community as well as to a specific village, region, or tribal group, although, when outside, urban women covered up under dark cloaks and veils. Tunisian Jewish women went about in the streets veiled in roughly the same manner as their Muslim counterparts, although they did not cover the entire face but only their mouths (true for urban Jewish women in Algiers at the time). Other nationalities, such as the Maltese women, donned long black cloaks when in public; their dark, unadorned bonnets, known as faldettas, were described as “immense,” with long, attached veils reaching to the waist.129 However, in the privacy of the home, or during social visits between households, sartorial codes were relaxed. When English ladies visited the bey’s chief wife and her entourage at the palace in 1844, the Husaynid princesses initially appeared cross because their female guests wore drab, black garments inside the harim—the color and simplicity of their clothing was interpreted as a social affront. Once it was explained that these women had recently lost family members and were in mourning, the Tunisian princesses proved most welcoming. The clothing worn by bourgeois European women or their Tunisian hosts during ritualized palace visits functioned as a form of communication and amusement; the princesses found bonnets and corsets to be particularly curious.130
Location in the central Mediterranean corridor means that Tunisia has always been a polyglot place, although languages constantly relocated and words moved about with dizzying speed at times.
With regard to the prevalence of European languages in North Africa, the Spanish is spoken by Moors and Jews . . . in the south of Morocco, running up and along the coast as far as Oran, in Algeria; then from Algiers or Bona, begins the Italian, passing through all Tunis and Tripoli, and makes the tour of the whole of the Levant. Of course, these European languages are very imperfectly and corruptly spoken, and form the chief ingredients of the celebrated Lingua Franca now so universally known as to need no illustration: at the same time, in every part of the coast of North Africa are persons and a great many who speak the Spanish and Italian languages with purity, whilst in Tunis may be found professors of European languages, especially Italian and French.131
For our purposes, the critical question is how language, identity, and power were intermeshed. And heightened population displacements render the issue of communication central, although for the precolonial period it has hardly been studied. David Prochaska’s work on popular street dialects of colonial Algiers has no counterpart for Tunis, and the languages of daily intercourse remain uncertain. The first systematic effort to commit the various patois to writing or later recording only began in the post–World War I era.132 From the reign of Hammuda Bey, Arabic became the first language of the governing elite, although documents directed to the Porte continued to be written in Ottoman Turkish. The progressive decline of Turkish was largely due to the fact that the Husaynids no longer recruited troops from Anatolia after the 1811 janissary revolt. Kabyle forms of Berber (Amazigh) were spoken by the redoubtable Zuwawa (or Zouaves, in French) tribesmen from the mountains in eastern Algeria enlisted by the Tunisian state as military auxiliaries for their martial skills and inability to communicate with the local populace. Garrisoned around the country, and above all, in the capital city region, the Kabyles numbered between ten and twenty thousand in the early nineteenth century, but the formation of Ahmad Bey’s modern army rendered them obsolete. The Zuwawa married local women, took up professions as artisans or cultivators, and gradually became more or less indistinguishable from local society, although names, dress, and language gave them away for a while.133
The slave trade was another major source of linguistic pluralism about which there is little evidence. Clearly a number of languages were spoken at the Bardo, in other palaces, and in the great households with large cohorts of domestic slaves and servants; the women’s quarters housed people from Africa, the Mediterranean, Georgia, or Circassia, making for a linguistic stew. After the murder of ‘Uthman Bey (r. 1813–1814) during a dynastic quarrel in 1814, his wife, Lalla Manana, then with child, was imprisoned. After she gave birth, the infant was placed in the care of an African woman, who raised him in isolation from the rest of the court for years. However, her language differed so from local Arabic that, when the hapless prince was finally released from prison, “he could barely make himself understood to fellow Tunisians.”134
Until late in the nineteenth century, a kind of Italian, referred to as the “Italian of Barbary,” constituted the regency’s diplomatic language and lingua franca, although what it looked like in earlier periods remains uncertain. In Voyage dans les Régences, first published in the late eighteenth century, Jean-André Peyssonnel characterized the Italian employed at the Husaynid court thus: “The reigning bey speaks Italian or petit moresque a corrupted Italian mixed with French and Spanish.” If the rulers spoke some form of Italian, they did not necessarily read it. “Bad Italian”—in the eyes of purists—was employed by the Husaynids for diplomatic and commercial exchanges with Europe until Italian was gradually, although not completely, replaced by French at the end of the nineteenth century. Christian Windler advances an important argument concerning Italian’s wide currency, a fundamental difference marking Tunis off from Istanbul or Cairo: because petit moresque served for communication, it made Tunisia appear less foreign, strangely near, to Europeans.135
The mothers or wives of several Husaynid rulers were of Italian origins, from Genoa or micro-islands, such as San Pietro, off the southwest coast of Sardinia. And the practice of incorporating captives from the central Mediterranean corridor into the palace meant that some retainers and servants spoke various forms of Italian. Finally, the geographical shift in the recruitment of mamluks, away from Anatolia, the Balkans, or Circassia, to adjacent regions reinforced Sicilo-Italian linguistic and cultural sway. The significance of the “Italian of Barbary” for intercommunal communication may have meant that Corsicans—who spoke a form of ancient Tuscan and did not understand French until late in the nineteenth century—felt linguistically more at home, or at least less depaysé, than they might have elsewhere in diaspora.136 In the longue durée, the prevalence of exchanges with Italianate regions should come as no surprise; from at least the Hafsid era (1229–1574), Tunis was peopled by traders and merchants from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, but Catalonians and Italians always predominated.
In the multilingual street, hints of how people in Tunis communicated with each other on a daily basis, despite linguistic variability, are found in legal proceedings and travel accounts. When Joseph Greaves of the British Church Missionary Society arrived from Malta in October 1824, he brought five hundred copies of the Bible in Arabic, Italian, Greek, and Hebrew as well as antislavery tracts for distribution. During his tour of the Tunis slave market, Greaves was accompanied by a Maltese interpreter who spoke Italian to a “Moor,” who in turn questioned the African female slaves in their own language about the conditions of enslavement.137 The presence of large communities of North Africans from Algeria (the most numerous), Morocco, Tripolitania, and Egypt meant that many types of Arabic or Berber would have been heard in the streets, as well as Maltese and forms of Greek and Spanish to name only the most important. And as the “Italians” grew in numbers, a Sicilian dialect enriched with Neapolitan, Maltese, and Arabic expressions became the idiom of choice for denizens of the “quarter of the Franks.”
During heated encounters in certain milieus, cursing and cussing drew upon Arabic, Maltese, and Sicilian, irrespective of the disputants’ ethnic origins. The polyglot nature of invective in Mediterranean ports, such as La Goulette, is illustrated by an incident from 1837 in which a traveler arrived from Malta bearing a British passport identifying him as a Spaniard. A huge row broke out with the French vice-consul, Gaspary, who claimed that the Spaniard called “me a dog and a swine and insulted me in Arabic, Spanish, and Italian.”138 Finally, maritime dialects (sabir) were spoken on the North African littoral. Of varying mélanges of Arabic, Provençal, Italian, and Spanish, sabir was understood in ports or on the high seas but served only the most basic communication needs because of its restricted vocabulary.139 While the Tunisian Arabic of the capital city was the most widely used medium of communication, as one approached Halq al-Wad or other ports, sabir became more prevalent.
Ability to navigate the linguistic pluralism of Tunis marked the individual as a player in the local culture—or the reverse, as not in tune with communicative complexities. Some were better armed to play the language game—the Maltese first and foremost, as they frequently commanded some form of Italian or English. Moreover, Maltese is a Semitic language with affinities to Tunisian Arabic; thus learning the local Arabic was relatively easy for the Maltese. Yet operating across linguistic fault lines was not always viewed positively; the Maltese were castigated by northern Europeans as “untrustworthy” precisely because they acted as communication brokers, as was true in other port cities. Polyglot intermediaries mobilizing local languages, however critical in a city of Babel, were suspect due to the presumed alignment of language with identity and political allegiance.140
But how and why had these “new” newcomers come in the first place? What choices or plans had gone awry and brought them to North Africa, and not somewhere else? What role did sheer chance play? And as importantly, why had they decided to leave home? What macrolevel forces lured—or forced—them from homes and villages across the water? At one level, elements such as class or social rank, profession, age, and gender predisposed certain groups to strike out for North Africa or elsewhere and others to stay put. At another level, cataclysmic events, such as the 1830 French invasion and the decision to make Algeria into a settler colony proved decisive in convincing people to search for work and fortune in Barbary. In the process, the older axis of mobilities in Mediterranean North Africa was reoriented; traditional currents of population movements that had long privileged exchanges with other Maghribi states, the Ottoman Empire, or sub-Saharan Africa shifted under the weight of people on the move. The next chapter assumes a hang-glider perspective of the central Mediterranean corridor as well as the rest of the sea to answer these questions, to the extent that sources permit.
