In 1850 an unusual event occurred in a city traumatized by the onset of a much-feared disease, cholera morbus. Ahmad Bey awarded the dynasty’s highest decoration to Fidèle Sutter (1796–1881), the Holy See’s vicaire apostolique de Tunisie, for invaluable medical assistance provided by female missionaries during the pandemic that reached the capital in December 1849 and wreaked havoc for years.1 This outbreak carried off a good percentage of the population, notably the poor, as well as several nuns from the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de l’Apparition (hereafter SSJ).2 A sort of Légion d’Honneur, the medal, called Nishan al-Iftikhar (the medal of glorious achievement), worth thousands of piasters, had only been bestowed upon one other missionary-Abbé François Bourgade in 1845—as it was normally reserved for court notables or visiting dignitaries. Indeed, the first foreigner to receive the nishan was King Louis Philippe’s son, the Duc de Montpensier, during his tour of Tunisia.3
Again in 1856, Muhammad Bey accorded the same honor to the Capuchin vicar Anselme des Arcs for medical care during another cholera episode that claimed several more SSJ sisters, as they tended the sick irrespective of religion.4 In the early years of the Protectorate, the nishan was directly conferred upon a female religious instead of through clerical intermediaries; it went to Sister Céleste Peyré for her years of teaching at the Sidi Saber School, the first girls’ school in Tunis. But the most spectacular ceremony was the double award for Joséphine Daffis (1812–1894). In 1890 the seventy-eight-year old Daffis received the Légion d’Honneur from the hands of the contrôleur civil of Sousse and also the nishan for her work as teacher, doctor, and pharmacist.5 This litany of awards to Catholic missionaries, some granted by a Muslim state, others by French consuls or colonial officials, invites reflection concerning why and how different kinds of states, societies, and local communities concluded pacts with missionaries, particularly with women in transnational orders.
FIGURE 14. Catholic missionary school for Tunisian children, c. 1900. This postcard shows a member of the order founded by Cardinal Lavigerie, the Soeurs Missionnaires de Notre-Dame d’Afrique, or White Sisters, with female pupils from a handicrafts school in Carthage. (Postcard, 1900; author’s private collection.)
Founded by Emilie de Vialar (1797–1856), the SSJ initially worked in Algeria but subsequently was forced to relocate to Tunis, where a Muslim prince welcomed them. This chapter looks at the order in both Algeria and Tunisia to address two sets of interrelated issues: first, to understand missionaries as migrants in larger currents of trans-Mediterranean population movements during the long nineteenth century; and second, to explore relations between missionaries and a Muslim society in the precolonial and early colonial periods. Indigenous Christian minorities did not exist in Tunisia, as was true in Egypt or in eastern Ottoman lands, and thus the appearance of religious women in public and private had no local cultural counterpart. By viewing members of the SSJ as simultaneously migrants or travelers and missionaries, we can better grasp how they were transformed by multiple displacements across political or cultural boundaries. For nearly forty years, the SSJ was the only female congregation in Tunisia; it eased the path for later Catholic missions by providing models for organizing social work and daily life, for seeking patronage and recruiting students. In addition, Protestant and Jewish missionaries are considered here, including the “secular” Alliance Israélite Universelle, since different missions fed into one another. But this story must be inserted into a grander narrative of migrations across the Mediterranean as well as population exchanges between colonial Algeria and precolonial Tunisia. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of how the decades-old relationship between the Husaynids and the Catholic teaching orders complicated the French Protectorate’s application of the laws of separation, beginning in 1903.
How did banishment by clerical and French officialdom in Algeria, combined with acculturation to a largely Arab Muslim society before colonialism, shape the SSJ’s work? Along these lines, how did missionary activity—Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish—influence migratory flows in the Mediterranean? On a broader level, how might an analysis of the local education that missionaries received in nineteenth-century Tunisia recast those missions as a decisive moment in North African history, not as yet another episode in European empire?
Modern empires and missions have long been close, if acrimonious, traveling companions. In consequence, scholarly literature on the interplay between imperialism and missionary societies has seen a number of phases. In its first stage, the official transcript on missionaries depicted them as heroic bearers of Western civilization and Christianity. Yet the unofficial transcript generated by colonial officers, settlers, speculators, and merchant-barons frequently disparaged, or even attacked, those “doing God’s work” as unwelcome troublemakers.6 As empires were dismantled, revisionist scholarship for the most part demonized Christian missionaries of various stripes for complicity in imperial conquests and the exploitation of colonized peoples. The third wave of research emphasized the agency of the colonized vis-à-vis those peddling the Gospel, salvation, and European middle-class values.7 The most recent work, often grounded in gender theory, argues that foreign missionaries were assimilated in varying degrees over time to the very cultures and societies targeted for sociocultural and spiritual transformation. And research on world regions where large-scale conversions occurred maintains that native converts suffered from a “false consciousness” when they embraced Western social norms, such as individualism or bourgeois family structures, yet remained racially inferior in new faith communities. Orwell’s 1934 novel, Burmese Days, with its devastating portrait of how the Anglo-Anglicans treated local converts, revealed the ways in which conversion complicated not only hybrid colonial societies but also the conduct of empire.8 Therefore, reading the vast archive generated by missions against the grain lays bare deep antagonisms between colonial powers and missions as well as fierce competition among missionary societies for followers, resources, and underwriters back in the métropoles.9
However, a distinction should be made between places like South Africa, with high conversion rates, and North Africa, where, with the exception of the Kabylia in eastern Algeria, conversions were relatively rare. Many missionaries operating in the nineteenth-century Maghrib did so with the knowledge that “saving” Muslims would not be easy, which determined how they went about their work and garnered support locally or back home. Another difference arises from the presence of Christian minorities in Muslim lands. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the ruler Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha received petitions from the Coptic Church hierarchy demanding that Anglo-Protestant missionaries be proscribed from proselytizing because the Coptics feared losing members—an apprehension shared by Eastern churches in the Levant for good reasons. Therefore, comparative studies of transnational missionary activity in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire must take into account regions with indigenous Christian communities.10
Because of the historically tortured relationship between church and state in postrevolutionary France, scholarship on missionaries in the French Empire lags behind work on British colonies. Currently, women’s history and gender theory have reinvigorated research into France’s empire and awakened interest in Catholicism d’outre-mer. One fact that has not received due attention in migration or missionary studies is a somewhat astonishing statistic. In the nineteenth century, thousands of women in French Catholic orders numbering over forty congregations fanned out across the continents; some, perhaps many, of these female religious were not French nationals, an important point.11 The relative weight of these female missions beckons us to think about the fact of women in motion, on journeys far from home frequently undertaken without male kin, guardians, or morality minders. Indeed, the substantial hagiographic literature reconstructing Vialar’s life reads like a logbook of trans-Mediterranean travels. Because of this, her detractors, of which there were many, portrayed her as a woman overly fond of traveling.12 But do the sources allow us to shift the perspective in order to view missions from the vantage point of Muslim North African societies?
Despite its potential contribution to the modern Maghrib’s history, research on missionaries is not abundant. Even the canonical narrative of British-French-Italian rivalry over precolonial Tunisia fails to see missionaries and their schools as significant political actors—aside from references to figures such as Charles-Martial Tavigerie (1825–1892), archbishop of Algiers in 1866, founder of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa (Missionnaires de Notre-Dame d’Afrique; colloquially known as Pères Blancs, or White Fathers, because of their dress) and the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa (Soeurs Missionnaires de Notre-Dame d’Afrique; Soeurs Blanches, or White Sisters), and later cardinal of Carthage. As was true for the Mediterranean subsistence migrants who came, settled for generations, and departed with independence, Christian missions appealed to few historians until recently, aside from several scholars who were granted unusual access to local records still in Tunisia. The copious primary sources are not easily available to researchers in Tunis (which was my experience with the SSJ archives) or are difficult to locate, since some records were repatriated helter-skelter to France or Rome; others remain in situ but uncatalogued.13 Predictably, mission accounts fall into the genre of highly stylized narratives of unparalleled virtue and spiritual heroism that elicited heartfelt appreciation for the orders’ selfless work among North Africans. Ordinary people would have encountered missionaries in medical, charitable, or educational institutions, or in the streets, but there is little archival material extant (or available) on the nature of these encounters, on what they meant. However, the Tunisian state maintained correspondence with churches, missionaries, and, in some cases, with ecclesiastical authorities in Europe, the Holy See being a case in point. Another paper trail exists because the impecunious sisters ceaselessly petitioned the beys, court officials, creole notables, and European consuls for assistance. Nevertheless, the sources remain silent on a number of critical issues. But material culture, including clothing, offers some clues, however elusive. The personalities and social origins of the founders of female orders were crucial to their historical evolution.
Emilie de Vialar was educated and of independent means, and her class and upbringing had much to do with the SSJ’s trajectory, although contingency played a not inconsiderable part. Born in Gaillac near Toulouse in 1797, Vialar descended from minor, somewhat suspect, provincial nobility; her maternal grandfather, Le Baron de Portal, had served as King Louis XVI’s personal physician and, when he died in 1832, he left her a small fortune, 300,000 gold francs. By then Vialar, educated in Paris by the Sacré Coeur (Society of the Sacred Heart), was in her midthirties, showed no inclination to marry, and lived in her father’s house in Gaillac. Extremely devout, and inspired by Catholic reform movements in Restoration France, Vialar had not intended to found an order of religious—and even less, a society of missionaries. Rather, she employed her inheritance to create a lay social welfare establishment (an “institute”) in her hometown in 1833, which attracted young women yearning to devote their lives to the poor and imprisoned. The next year, she sought official recognition from the archbishop of Albi for what was rapidly becoming a novel type of female congregation—one without walls or cloisters but with vows, habits, and a rule comprised of fourteen articles, composed by the founder herself.14
Saving “infidel souls” in foreign lands was not Vialar’s initial preoccupation; the turning point came when her younger brother, Augustin, sought adventure in Algeria soon after the conquest. In 1832 he organized an ambulance corps in Algiers, although whether he had previous medical training remains uncertain. After the July Monarchy resolved to retain Algeria in 1834, Augustin contacted his sister, imploring her to relocate temporarily to establish schools and hospitals in the capital, where a cholera epidemic raged as it did in some French ports. Vialar and three sisters—Heurette, Justine, and Julie—prepared to leave for Algiers via Marseilles in July 1835, but the disease had paralyzed the French city so they embarked from another port on the same ship as General Clauzel, which fortuitously provided an entrée to the highest military circles. Between 1835 and 1839, the SSJ created schools, hospitals, and orphanages in Algiers, Bône, and Constantine, largely financed by Vialar’s personal fortune. In a sense, the women followed in the wake of the French army as it conquered eastern Algeria, devastating the land and people. The sisters dispensed social services to Muslim and Jewish communities as well as to the increasingly numerous and largely impoverished European civilians for whom the French military was unable or unwilling to provide.15
In the capital, colonial authorities begged the SSJ to assume responsibility for the civil hospital that was overwhelmed by cholera victims; the sisters created clinics outside of Algiers, including one specifically for Jews. Until 1836, the congregation had resided with Augustin, but Vialar began searching for a building to purchase. A temporary mission had become permanent. Since the French army had seized numerous homes and structures, Vialar acquired an immense house in the Qasba district perched above the capital. This greatly aided the congregation’s expansion as more women came from France to work in the colony. The next year, the municipality turned the civil hospital over to the sisters, who numbered fourteen, and asked that they tend to the burgeoning prison population. In addition, home visits were organized for Muslim and Jewish families; before long, word of their activities spread to the ravaged countryside. From the Kabylia, a delegation of villagers arrived requesting medical assistance.16 By 1840 the SSJ numbered about forty women; that year Vialar and several sisters made a first exploratory visit to Tunisia. She had only been in Tunis for three weeks when alarming letters from Algiers implored her to return immediately.17
The SSJ’s work had not met with universal approval—far from it. Soon after 1830, Masonic lodges in Algiers spread rumors that the sisters were proselytizing among the Jews and Muslims. Yet reproach came from an unexpected quarter. In 1837, the new bishop of Algiers, Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch, took up his office. That spring Vialar, several sisters, and Dupuch traveled through the Constantine region, where Vialar cured a powerful tribal chieftain from Biskra, “the serpent of the desert,” who received daily medical treatments.18 Threatened by Vialar’s independent spirit and social class—not to mention her gender—Dupuch embarked on a campaign to undermine the SSJ’s founder as well as the order itself in Algeria, France, and Rome. A principal grievance was Vialar’s refusal to place her congregation directly under the bishop’s authority. Moreover, Dupuch suspected that the SSJ’s spiritual director, Abbé François Bourgade—on which more below—was advising Vialar to stand firm.19 After a series of public disagreements between Vialar and Dupuch, the sisters were expelled from Algeria—one of the most extreme examples of antagonisms between male and female religious. In 1842 all SSJ educational and charitable houses were closed and Dupuch recruited the more compliant Filles de la Charité (Daughters of Charity) to replace them. In January 1843, Vialar was back in Algiers in a vain attempt to recover some of the personal funds expended during eight years of work; most of the sisters had returned to Gaillac—for a while. In 1845 Dupuch lost the bishopric due to his untoward behavior.20
This event—a double expulsion by a Catholic cleric and complicit colonial officials—constitutes an irony in the annals of the French Empire; the order retained a long-term memory of being forced out by “Christian” authorities. As late as 1938, a biography of Emilie de Vialar evoked once again expulsion; in his preface, Cardinal Pignatelli de Belmonte bitterly noted that “Algeria had banished her.”21 The grievous experience of forced exile, and the traditions surrounding this defining moment in the order’s early history, played a significant part, I would argue, in its sense of identity once in Tunisia. Indeed the collective memory of banishment persisted for over a century, if not longer. In an interview conducted in 2006 with two SSJ members at the mother house in Tunis, the sisters remarked on several occasions that the Muslims had always shown more appreciation than the French state or colonial officials.22 Vialar’s forced expatriation forms a leitmotif in her life story narrated as a tale of divinely inspired resolution and triumph in the face of great adversity, qualities that bore witness to spiritual worthiness for elevation to sainthood in 1951. Nevertheless, the role of contingency arises. Had the SSJ remained in Algeria, with its insatiable demand for nurses, teachers, and social welfare institutions, would the order have expanded as rapidly as it did across North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman Empire? And if the founder’s ship from Tunis to Rome had not been blown off course in 1845, forcing Vialar to spend weeks in Valletta, would Malta have figured so prominently in the congregation’s movement eastward? Finally, that her personal finances were depleted by the time that she left Algeria proved critical to the order’s subsequent trajectory and assimilation into Tunisia.
While Vialar’s initial involvement in Algeria was serendipitous, deteriorating relations with Dupuch and the opening of a religious house in Tunis in 1840 were connected in her thinking; expansion across the border would intimidate her clerical adversary and serve as a backup for the precarious Algerian houses. Vialar characterized Tunisia as an “infidel land”—not least due to the alleged “irreligion” and moral laxity of its Mediterranean Catholic immigrants. But she also realized that its location was “as significant as Marseilles”—a port of entry to the eastern Mediterranean Basin.23 Expulsion and relocation strategically positioned the order within easy reach of Malta, the next site for SSJ establishments. Mapping out Vialar’s displacements, we find that she traveled extensively between Tunis and Malta, visited Rome in 1841, and journeyed as far east as Athens and Siros. While she never went to Jerusalem herself, a house was opened there in 1848.24 In 1852 the order opened a second house in Marseilles, placing the SSJ squarely in one of the Mediterranean’s busiest ports and the maritime center of the new French empire, which facilitated expansion east as well as to West Africa and the Americas.
Evolving into a primarily teaching and nursing congregation, the SSJ attracted numerous sisters, eventually ranking third in importance among French female orders. But this spiritual success story was part of larger processes at work in Europe and elsewhere. In the same period, lay Catholic organizations focused their energies upon the Ottoman Empire, particularly during the Crimean War, when a coterie of Parisian intellectuals founded in 1854 a society, Oeuvre des Écoles d’Orient, to promote schools and solicit funds to support French religious communities in the Near East. One of its ultimate objectives was to persuade Eastern Christians to return to Rome. By a singular happenstance, Lavigerie became involved with this movement while still in France, which aroused his interest in North Africa and induced him to accept the post of archbishop of Algiers in 1866.25 However, his work differed markedly from the Oeuvre’s mission in the Levant; in Algeria, the Church struggled to keep Catholics in the fold as well as to neutralize the ferocious anticlericalism of many colonial officials and European settlers.
The reception afforded the SSJ by Ahmad Bey was partially shaped by the Church’s historical status in Tunisia. One major reason for its presence was the Mediterranean-wide traffic in human beings that marked the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. During the heyday of corsairing, the thirteen bagnios in the Tunis region held as many as eleven thousand captives; some had chapels overseen by Redemptionist orders, such as the Spanish Trinitarians. These orders were less concerned with social welfare or reform than with ransoming and redemption, interrelated tasks, since purchasing Christian slaves in a timely fashion decreased the temptation to convert to Islam. If ransom and return to Europe could not be arranged, the presence of clergy in the bagnios might dissuade enslaved Christians not “to turn Turk,” or so it was reasoned. However, tensions colored relations among the principal orders in Tunis—Capuchins, Trinitarians, and Lazarists. The 1816 Exmouth expedition, France’s 1830 occupation of Algeria, and the growing Italian expatriate community in Tunisia rendered relationships among the leading Catholic powers increasingly rancorous.26
As seen in chapter 3, substantial numbers of European slaves were attached to the palace as military personnel, retainers, or servants. Christian slaves in service to the Husyanids enjoyed access to a chapel in the Bardo palace complex, where priests ministered to the faithful and baptized children on Sundays. The chapel remained open until 1845 when presumably the organization of a new parish in the capital city rendered it obsolete. While a number of small chapels, some very ancient, were scattered around the country, two churches dated from the seventeenth century. The oldest was the Greek Orthodox, established in 1645 when the Patriarch of Alexandria recognized the community in Tunis. As Ottoman subjects, they were protected by the Husaynid rulers and were the beneficiaries of state largesse, including the donations of buildings for religious worship. Clergy named by Alexandria ministered to the faithful, whose numbers never reached more than several hundred in the period before the new orthodox church was erected in 1847 in the European quarter of the madina (the present-day edifice is located on Rue de Rome in what was once the colonial city).27 In 1662, a Roman Catholic church, the Church of Sainte-Croix, was established in the “quartier franc.” Under France’s protection, it was administered by monks, who registered births, marriages, and deaths as well as caring for the Saint Antoine graveyard dating to the seventeenth century. In 1833, Husayn Bey authorized the new Parish of Sainte-Croix, perhaps in gratitude for assistance rendered during an attempted coup in 1829 that endeared local clergy to the dynasty.28 That year, Husayn Bey was taking the waters at his palace in Hammam Lif, serenely unaware of a seditious cabal hatched by some of his own soldiers. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the scheming soldiers frequented a tavern in the Qasba run by Luigi Sabetta, who overheard their plans to dethrone the bey by force. Sabetta immediately informed Père Alexandre di Massignano, who lived nearby, of the plot; the priest alerted the French consul, who in turn hurried to warn the ruler. After the rebels were executed or exiled, the bey not only handsomely rewarded Sabetta but also assumed a position of “great tolerance toward the Christian community.”29 In addition, saint veneration and miraculous cures accommodated spiritual traffic between Muslims and Christians—as for Muslims and Jews. When a statue of Saint Lucie in a chapel in Tunis cured a Husaynid family member of blindness sometime before 1816, the ruler ordered that oil lamps be kept burning night and day in front of the statue.30
At some point in the precolonial era, the pilgrimage of Notre Dame de Trapani became an annual event in La Goulette, attracting throngs of Sicilians and Maltese as well as Muslims, who sometimes participated out of reverence for the mother of Jesus. (Many Muslim women called upon Mary for succor and blessings during childbirth.)31 Among the cultural phenomena that scandalized northern Europeans was the spiritual promiscuity of the Maghrib’s religious communities—the fact that Jews and Muslims sought the blessings of powerful holy persons at shrines “belonging to” the other faith. That the baroque religiosity of Mediterranean Catholics offered a space for Muslims in popular street processions in the Virgin’s honor proved once more that Maltese or Sicilians were “de race Africaine.”
In 1833, the French consul, Deval, wrote to Husayn Bey regarding “daily increase in the Europeans who have come here to settle and whose numbers have for a long time now demonstrated the inadequacy of the building used for Catholic services which is in great need of enlargement.”32 The consul requested permission to build a new church either where the present establishment stood or within easy reach for the faithful. Given the number of petitions to repair or build Catholic buildings in Tunis or other towns, it seems that the civilizing mission was about keeping immigrants in the Church and ensuring that families acquired the rudiments of middle-class sobriety—all the more so because the temptation to embrace Islam was ever present. By 1850 six parishes were found throughout the country.33
The older orders had been exclusively male; the SSJ was the first female congregation active in North Africa. As was true of their predecessors, the sisters took a vow of poverty and, since Vialar’s personal fortune was largely exhausted, soliciting donations for charitable work became essential for survival and demanded extensive networking with local notables or benefactors. Finally, the sisters’ well-established practice of home visits, first developed in Algeria, was continued and thus they freely moved about the capital or in provincial cities and towns.
Of the nineteenth-century rulers, Ahmad Bey proved the most solicitous toward the Church, perhaps because of his mother’s influence. Catholic by birth, Francesca Rosso was captured as a young child, raised in the Husaynid inner circle, and married to Mustafa Bey, Ahmad’s father, to whom she gave a number of children. As the prince’s mother, Francesca was the most powerful woman in the realm. Referred to as the Sardinian by some members at court, Ahmad Bey frequently consulted his mother about affairs of state, sometimes before seeking the counsel of favorites. He even requested that she not veil when his ministers were present, since “she is my mother and yours.”34 On the eve of his departure for France in 1846, Ahmad sought his mother’s blessing. During his state trip, the Tunisian ruler specifically asked to visit several churches and posed questions about the religious iconography and statuary. He maintained correspondence with Pope Pius IX regarding the protection accorded to churches and missionaries.35 Nevertheless, Ahmad Bey’s benevolent attitude was probably motivated as much by the redoubtable French army and navy in Algeria as it was by his mother’s predilections—or those of favored courtiers, such as Count Raffo, a Catholic.
Yet the local clergy in Tunis did not hesitate to appeal to the bey for assistance. In January 1845, the “Christians of Tunis” petitioned the ruler through the intermediation of two priests about the shortage of city space to conduct Sunday services; and he received “two delegations of tujjar [merchants]” with a request for a more commodious building, which was granted.36 During the cholera epidemic and resulting famine of 1851, the bey ordered the wakil al-rabita (official responsible for the city’s food stores) to grant five-fifty qafiz of grain to the Catholic bishop for “disbursal among the [Christian] poor in Tunis” under his spiritual care.37 And in July 1849, a Catholic burial procession wound through the streets. Laid to rest was Jean Matteo, born in 1759, who for forty-six years had served as a priest-slave in the bagnios; manumitted in 1816, he had remained in Tunis to tend to the flock. While funeral processions from the European quarter to the burial grounds had always been permitted, this one departed from past custom because the cross was prominently displayed in front of the cortege, which had not been allowed previously.
Yet currents of reform in the heart of the Ottoman Empire were also at work. The Husaynid political class followed events in Istanbul closely, particularly after the 1839 imperial rescript, Hatt-i Sharif of Gülhane, expanded the rights of subject religious minorities, followed by the 1856 decree. What is striking from a comparative historical perspective is that the streets of Ottoman-Mediterranean ports increasingly served as stages for Christian pageantry. In 1842, one of the first celebrations of Corpus Christi took place in Izmir, with Ottoman dignitaries in attendance and the display of a large cross. Scholars attribute these increasingly public performances to the Tanzimat, but the growing clout of European nations was decisive as well.38 In contrast, after anticlerical officials seized control of the Algiers municipal council in the early 1870s, they banned Corpus Christi processions in the streets of the capital.39
The construction of the Chapel of Saint Louis signaled a departure from customary practice because the Husaynids conventionally granted already standing buildings for a modest rent or even gratis to churches or missionary orders for purposes of worship, education, or medical services.40 On the eve of France’s invasion of Algeria, Husayn Bey had bequeathed to the French monarch a piece of land in Carthage, where tradition held the crusader-king Saint Louis had died in 1270, to construct a memorial. Only in 1840 did the French consul, de Largau, reach agreement with the Bardo that the chapel would be built in La Malga, near Byrsa hill, with a commanding view of the ancient Punic ports and the sea. At the time, the area was almost deserted except for a few mud huts, tents belonging to bedouins, and a Muslim cemetery with the qubba, or shrine, of Sidi ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, a widely venerated holy man. With great fanfare, the chapel’s first stone was laid in August 1840 as a Maltese priest, Father Emmanuel, celebrated Mass outdoors on a makeshift altar.41
The ceremony’s military dimensions should have given pause, although it is not clear if any Tunisians were in attendance. Sailors in combat dress from France’s fleet docked in La Goulette formed an honor guard as the French flag was conspicuously planted near the altar and warships blasted out a twenty-one-gun salute. If the edifice was designed to resemble the royal chapel at Evreux, its building materials evoked several millennia of Ifriqiya’s history, the pagan and Christian: stones from Roman and Byzantine sites; marble from the quarries near Soliman; and brick vaults imported from Genoa. A year later, the chapel’s completion furnished the occasion for more militaristic rituals. It soon became a space of sociability for French residents, a shrine for sailors in port, and until abolition, a place of refuge for African slaves. However, without Ahmad Bey’s generous assistance, the chapel would have taken much longer to construct; since the nearest towns, La Marsa and La Goulette, were several miles distant, the ruler furnished much-needed workers, water, and supplies.42 This contrasts with the politics of sacred buildings in colonial Algeria, where the French army seized mosques and other Islamic structures, converting them into churches, military barracks, municipal centers, and even stables.43
Finally, the chapel was strategically located within reach of coastal watering spots, where the consuls spent the summer months so as to be in close proximity to the beys and their courts when they relocated to seaside palaces during the season. By a coincidence, Emilie de Vialar and several SSJ members participated in the chapel’s consecration in 1840 during their exploratory visit to Tunisia; it was no accident that Vialar’s confessor from Algeria, Abbé Bourgade, was named chaplain for the chapel in 1842.44 Finally, due to the chapel’s location among vast, although largely untouched, ruins of classical civilizations, it eventually served as the nucleus for archaeological excavations as well as for international conflicts over the site and its meanings.
Let’s turn to the question of Ahmad Bey’s relationship with the sisters. Diplomatic agreements between the Holy See and the Husaynid state stipulated that new Catholic establishments obtain the ruler’s explicit authorization, which explains why Vialar personally contacted the bey in 1840 about opening schools and clinics.45 The principal reason for the SSJ’s warm reception was immigration and the social origins of the newcomers, who included a large proportion of men without families. Given to public drunkenness, street violence, and vendettas—or so their detractors claimed—they had provoked diplomatic crises on a number of occasions. Moreover, by this period, a number of Spanish Catholics had settled in Tunisia; characterized as “spiritually and socially deprived,” the community counted “traders, unemployed soldiers, political refuges, and dishonest persons” in the eyes of their social betters.46 Therefore, the palace looked to the SSJ to minister to an unruly population over whom the beylical state enjoyed little formal legal jurisdiction, a situation made worse because the consulates lacked the personnel, the resources, or the will to deal with the growing problem. In short, the Husaynid prince and consuls viewed the SSJ as had the French military in Algeria—as unpaid social workers and guardians of moral order.47
Bourgeois residents also regarded the female missionaries favorably; private communications between the consuls and the palace voiced identical apprehensions about social disorder, which eased the way for the sisters. In his 1854 letter to Ahmad Bey, the French consul Béclard extolled the Sisters of Saint-Joseph “who have come to the Regency of Tunis in order to console the miserable and to heal the sick. In addition, the sisters teach young Christian girls the fear of God and work to instill morality in those girls seduced by the lure of vice.”48 The delicate references to vice and virtue betrayed widely shared concerns about female immigrants and sexual misconduct. What better moral beacon for vulnerable women than the chaste Catholic sisters?
Given these anxieties, it is not surprising that Ahmad Bey gave permission to Vialar and five sisters to set up schools for European children and to dispense public health care. The ruler provided state-owned buildings, loaned or rented, that over time turned into long-term leases or gifts, which proved instrumental in permanent settlement. This was the case of the first school located at Sidi Saber in the madina adjacent to the European quarter that was rented to the SSJ for a modest sum. (It is now the Catholic Diocesan Library in Tunis.) The establishment opened its doors to its first class in September 1842 with twenty-five students—ten Maltese and fifteen Italians; Vialar served as its first director. Four years later, 120 girls were enrolled, and most paid no tuition. Several Jewish and Muslim families native to Tunis inquired about sending their daughters to the school—if separate classes could be arranged, since the curriculum was grounded upon a thoroughly Catholic education. It is uncertain whether this request was acted upon at the time; only later in the century do a few Muslim and Jewish girls show up on enrollment lists. The significance of this school cannot be overemphasized, since it represented a landmark in terms of girls’ education outside of the household.49
In 1844, a small outpatient clinic with ten beds and a pharmacy was opened adjacent to the Sidi Saber school on today’s impasse des Moniquettes, a corruption of the original Italian monachetta, or “little sister”; the SSJ supported the clinic through constant appeals for donations. In La Marsa a novitiate was established whose earliest novices were largely drawn from Italian or Maltese families, which was significant. The novitiate signaled two trends: first, that the SSJ was localizing its mission by recruiting members either born in-country or recently arrived, instead of relying upon Europe for fresh recruits; and second, that the order intended to expand the scope of its activities through on-site religious vocations. The social backgrounds of the first novices also brought a range of benefactors, including the influential Count Raffo. Between 1842 and 1880, houses and educational, medical, and charitable establishments were created from Bizerte to Sousse, Munastir, Mahdiya, and Sfax. Once again in contrast to Algeria, where missionaries moved into the countryside in the wake of savage military expeditions, the SSJ in Tunisia followed the line of mainly Catholic immigrant settlement along the coast.50
As was true for schooling in Europe at the time, considerations of class deeply informed SSJ educational policies. In 1855 five SSJ members opened a girls’ school in La Goulette with “very meager resources and a small building,” which reflected the social origins of the pupils whose families were probably working class and employed in menial trades in the port.51 Bourgeois girls attended better-appointed institutions, such as the La Marsa school housed in a palace for the daughters of the Euro-Tunisian notability; for a while the French government supported it with an annual allocation of six thousand francs. It was expensive and thus rare for creole notables to send daughters to Europe for education; thus, this school and others like it filled a hitherto unmet demand, while paradoxically fixing these families more firmly in local society. Little is known about the tuition-free schools for girls of modest means, but here the SSJ may have combined elements from an older, indigenous urban institution, the dar mu‘allima (learning circles), which the sisters may have encountered during home visits to Muslim families, with French curriculum.
Many neighborhoods in Tunis or other North African cities boasted home-based learning circles where girls between five and twelve years old were taught by mu‘allimat (teachers), women recognized for skills in domestic arts, above all, needlework; pupils were instructed within the confines of the household for a modest fee. The SSJ adopted a two-track system that provided an academic curriculum, plus needlework, for middle-class girls and instruction in handicrafts, mainly needlework, for those from poorer families, although Catholic teaching formed the core of both tracks. The prominent place accorded to needlework in Tunisia reflected pedagogy in teaching congregations in France at the time. French laws made needlework an official part of the curriculum because of the unique moral values—“perseverance and calm”—that it imparted to girls. And an accomplished needle could earn income for a working-class girl and her family and serve as a moral shield against sin and vice. As Sarah Curtis has argued, Catholic girls’ schools in France provided the model for female primary education in general at the time.52
Vialar’s confessor and close associate, Abbé Bourgade, created one of the earliest boys’ schools around 1842. Previously, the sons of bourgeois creóles were educated in Europe—if the family could afford the expense, which often they could not. Under some circumstances, parents might importune consuls in Tunis for financial assistance, as occurred in 1825 when Ronzetti, a French protégé from Rome who was married to a French woman, sought aid to educate young Angelo in Paris.53 Sir Richard Wood’s two sons, Cecil and Dick, were sent from Tunis for schooling in France, England, and Germany but at his personal expense.54
With the arrival of the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (FEC) in 1855—a full decade and a half after the SSJ—some families enrolled sons in their institutions located near the Church of Sainte-Croix. The SSJ and the FEC were not competitors but rather complemented each other, since the brothers taught older boys and were not involved in medical work, while the SSJ enrolled only very young boys in some of their schools. In 1858, the FEC opened a primary school for boys with instruction in three languages—Arabic, French, and Italian—and provided free tuition. Of the sixty students enrolled in the FEC class of 1865, several were Muslim Tunisians and a number were from Jewish families, mainly Italian, but a few were Tunisians. To meet growing competition from other institutions, the brothers eventually added classes in music, voice, and instrument to the curriculum, reflecting a pedagogical trend in France that saw musical instruction as key to learning citizenship.55 Therefore, some transnational Catholic orders were attuned to new learning methods, implementing them in Tunisia long before colonialism.
Spatial analysis of the first FEC school shows that it was established in a structure previously serving as a bagnio and later a refuge for the Spanish Trinitarians after their expulsion from Spain during the French Revolution. Another FEC school was organized in a house leased from a Jewish family, the Raimondos, who rarely bothered to collect the rent. However, in the 1870s, the new owners of “Dar Raimondo” demanded payment with back interest. Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey intervened, granting the building to the FEC on condition that it be employed solely for educational purposes. The beylical decree, dated February 1874, provides clues about the neighborhood and how its denizens reckoned spatial relationships: “it [Dar Raimondo] is situated in the suq al-bramliya [the market of the coopers] near the Sea Gate . . . occupies the second storey above shops and store rooms . . . [some of which are] the shops of Cardoso; to the east is the house of the Maltese Farrugia . . . to the west is the house of the Greek, Basile, and after that a house belonging to the priests of the Catholic Church.”56 In addition to financial support, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey invited the FEC brothers to attend official state functions and receptions and requested that they furnish instructors to teach the children in his palace in La Marsa. In the same quarter, a building (or part of one) on Shari‘ al-Qasba owned by the wife of the Zaytuna’s Maliki mufti, was leased to the FEC for its school.57 As a severe housing shortage gripped the city, some Muslim families preferred to rent apartments or sections of domestic compounds to foreigners, since they could charge higher rents and could probably recover rental properties more easily when needed—which is how today’s rental market in Tunis operates.58 This FEC school remained in the same spot until quite recently, when it was forced to close its doors—nor for want of students but rather for lack of vocations and therefore of brothers to staff the institution.
The Husaynid family functioned as a real estate brokerage firm, handing out rental properties and acting as landlords for diverse missions in the same way that the rulers lent prime seaside villas to select members of the consular corps or creole class. From the reign of Ahmad Bey until the Protectorate, the dynasty’s generosity and tolerance transformed the practice of Christianity from largely private, house-based worship in towns, such as Sousse, into a public presence with large structures, bells, and processions.59 Later on, Catholic missions began purchasing buildings with funds provided by local families or consulates as well as by the Propaganda Fide in Rome. The residences occupied by religious women and men are of paramount importance because built space signaled modes of life as well as integration into a particular neighborhood, which in turn shaped sociocultural proximity or distance. In densely populated North African cities, the availability of housing constituted the critical element in successful or failed missionary implantation. In Morocco during the same period, the Alawi dynasty dealt with troublesome Anglo-American evangelicals by withholding permission to rent buildings outside of Tangier, which kept missionaries holed up in the port thus restricting contacts with subject Muslims or Jews and impeding proselytizing.60
A final dimension of the real estate relationship linking the palace with the missionaries was that the beys, as landlords to the Church, were called upon to mediate between Europeans in battles over property use. In 1854, Ahmad Bey acted to protect the enclosed Capuchin monastery in La Goulette from a residential structure built by a Dr. Castelnuovo that hovered over the monastery’s walls, violating its privacy.61 Indeed the constant solicitations made to the rulers for property titles or interventions in rental disputes—including reductions in the rent paid by the SSJ in Tunis for one of its leased buildings—are striking. In 1854 the French consul responded to yet another petition from the SSJ and Capuchins for more concessions by observing that “the bey has already done many things for the Catholics and I risk abusing his good will by requesting additional favors.”62
When Emilie de Vialar visited Tunisia for the last time in 1845, she had developed consummate diplomatic skills; she maintained relations and correspondence, however litigious, with military officers, the governor-general, and churchmen in Algeria as well as with Parisian bureaucrats and French clerics. She even made a pilgrimage to Rome for a personal interview with the Pope to promote her congregation (and denounce her nemesis, Dupuch). In addition, Vialar had acquired some familiarity with Islamic property law, most importantly with the legal category of habus that she had encountered in Algiers when purchasing the order’s first house.63 And she had also perfected strategies for enrolling increasing numbers of students in her schools. Opening houses in La Marsa, Carthage, and Sidi Bou Sa‘id brought additional supporters, funds, and pupils because city notables met and socialized in these resorts. In August 1843, as Vialar was recruiting pupils, she ran into Peloso, formerly the Roman consul to Algiers, whom she had met while still in Algeria; now residing in Tunis, Peloso agreed to send his two daughters to the SSJ school in La Marsa.64
Court dignitaries opened doors for the sisters as well. Among the most influential was Count Joseph Marie Raffo, whose advocacy of the SSJ proved decisive: “and tho [sic] he [Raffo] is very rich, his charities to the poor and benevolent institutions are very numerous.”65 Raffo used his influence to gain permission for a new church on the site of an ancient Trinitarian hospital in the madina; in 1852, he obtained the ruler’s consent for the Mission Apostolique to create religious establishments in coastal cities. But it was in the realm of girls’ education that Raffo made the largest contribution. In 1843 he offered the sisters a “superb palace with a magnificent garden” in La Marsa, complete with a private chapel (the palace may have belonged to the Husaynid family).66 However, his support eventually posed grave problems.
A widower, Raffo had previously sent his five daughters to Paris for schooling by the Sacré Coeur, but he withdrew his daughters from the French establishment and enrolled them, along with seven nieces resident in Tunisia, with the SSJ in La Marsa. Two years later, widower Raffo’s attentiveness caused distress to the school. Enamored of young, attractive Sister Emilie Julien, who oversaw education, the count courted her relentlessly and brought pressure to bear upon her father in France to persuade Emilie to abandon religious for marriage vows. Horrified, Vialar immediately removed the tempting Sister Emilie and another young Italian, Sister Elisabeth, from the establishment and dispatched them to the mother house in Gaillac.67
During the spring of 1871, the British traveler Lady Herbert made a point of visiting the SSJ establishments in the Tunis region, since she had visited the order’s house in Jerusalem before traveling to North Africa. “The Sisters of St. Joseph ‘of the Apparition’. . . have a large orphanage here, together with a hospital and day schools. They have nineteen sisters at work, but their convent is small and must be very hot in summer.”68 It was Easter week when Lady Herbert toured the city, which provided an opportunity to underscore differences in religiosity marking northern Europeans off from Mediterranean Catholics: “This being Holy Saturday, quantities of cannon were fired off when the bells were rung at the ‘Gloria in Excelsis,’ and some so near the church that it seemed as if they were about to bombard it. The devotion of Catholics here is very striking, but very demonstrative, as with most Southern nations.”69
As the Sisters of Saint-Joseph took root in Tunisia, Protestant societies for “saving heathens” were expanding across the British Empire. In 1834, the Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India, and the East was established in London.70 Soon after it became a British colony, Malta emerged as a Mediterranean center for evangelical expansion closely tied to international abolition movements; in 1815, the Church Missionary Society was established on the island. The first Protestant mission in Tunisia—as far as we know—was the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1819, which opened the way for others. The Christian Missions in Many Lands established some sort of presence in 1836, and a decade later in 1845 the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention sent a delegation. In the same period, the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews designated Mr. Ewald as its first missionary to Tunisia; the society handed out free copies of Hebrew bibles to Jews, most of whom were illiterate. Other societies distributed free English-language bibles in the markets of Tunis, whose pages usually served to wrap up meat or vegetables.71
Evangelical newcomers competed with the Church of England, which had long enjoyed British protection and for centuries represented the main Protestant presence in the country. The congregation remained small into the 1840s, consisting of about fifteen people, including the American consul general, Heap, the British Gibsons, and the Swedish Tulin family. Sunday services were held in the mission house presided over by Reverend Ewald.72 In 1834 clergy arrived from England to assume responsibility for the first Anglican church, Saint Augustine’s, built just outside the Tunis city walls where the central food market is found today. Only in 1901 was the Church of Saint George constructed near Bab Carthagena in the environs of the seventeenth-century Protestant cemetery, which for centuries had provided a resting place for French Huguenots who had relocated to Tunis to escape persecution in France and pursue commercial affairs. Eventually the Anglican Church of Tunisia was placed under the Bishop of Gibraltar’s authority and in the twentieth century under the Episcopal diocese of Egypt.73
Members of French or Swiss Reformed churches arrived in Tunisia, frequently after initially settling in Constantine; some were quickly disabused of the idea of permanent residency in Algeria, while others stayed on. Thus, the expanding Protestant presence in Tunisia and Algeria in the nineteenth century promoted systematic across-the-border exchanges; the Methodist Church of Tunis, for example, was integrated into the Algerian Methodist hierarchy. Tunisia’s growing attraction for migrants and missionaries meant that the country became home to an assortment of odd social types, the Reverend Nathan Davis being a case in point. Born a Polish Jew, he subsequently converted to the Church of England on whose behalf he engaged in missionary activities, as he later did for the Church of Scotland. Davis’s origins made him the perfect agent for Protestant societies seeking to convert North African Jews. But he also published accounts of Tunisia in Maltese newspapers, which may have encouraged emigration to the shores of Africa, and he cultivated a relationship with Ahmad Bey to whom he dedicated one of his books. As an eccentric man of the cloth, Davis parallels Abbé Bourgade but pales in comparison to the French cleric in terms of originality of thought and action.74
Emilie de Vialar kept curious company. In Tunis, Abbé François Bourgade (1806–1866) served as the SSJ order’s chaplain, confessor, and administrator of educational and health institutions but he also had an Algerian past. Bourgade had been Vialar’s spiritual director—her “providential friend,” as she put it—earlier in Algeria. The son of a peasant, Bourgade was ordained in 1826; like Vialar he was enticed to Algiers in 1835, where he assumed the position of vicar of the cathedral, which was a former mosque seized from the Muslim community.75 Involved in hospitals, sanatoria, and houses of refuge, he soon encountered Vialar, whose brand of spiritual and missionary fervor matched his. In 1840 he was declared persona non grata by Bishop Dupuch because of his unconventional behavior and close friendship with the rebellious Vialar. Bourgade next went to Rome, where he enjoyed the patronage of the Roman Curia, which won him the title of apostolic missionary as well as appointment as extraordinary confessor to Vialar’s order.76 When the SSJ relocated to Tunisia, Bourgade followed close behind and it appears that Vialar pressured the French consulate in Tunis to find the priest a paid post so he could remain. In 1842 Bourgade was named “directeur général de l’Oeuvre Aumônier de la Chapelle Imperiale de St.-Louis à Carthage,” the first French priest appointed to the post of apostolic prefecture long monopolized by Italian priests.77 Among the abbot’s stated objectives was “to expand knowledge of our language in the Regency,” and to this effect he created the first French college in the country.78
In a strange sort of way, Bourgade and those associated with him anticipated the resolutely secular Alliance Française, which established one of its first overseas centers in Tunis soon after the Protectorate expressly to promote the French language and thus combat “the Italian menace.” Bourgade’s and Vialar’s activities in Tunis not only reflected France’s growing clout in the country but also increased it, although not necessarily out of a sense of national commitment. Aiding their work immensely were the close relationships cultivated with the palace and political elite. Bourgade entertained amical ties with Ahmad Bey, to whom he dedicated one of his books, as well as with his successor, Muhammad Bey; Muslim scholars and consular officials counted among the cleric’s close acquaintances.79
Bourgade and Vialar arrived at a moment when remarkable educational experiments were already underway in Tunis; their own actions enriched the mix. An English primary school had been in operation since circa 1830 near today’s Rue des Maltais, but little is known about the effort; after the FEC opened their institutions catering largely to Catholic Maltese boys, the English establishment closed its doors. This was a pattern seen throughout the century in Tunisia and elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds; educators and families experimented with new teaching and learning environments that often foundered due to lack of funds or pupils or because of competition from more robust schools. The brother and sister Pompeo and Esther (b. 1815) Sulema, Jewish political refuges from Leghorn, deserve credit for one of the earliest primary schools for Italian boys in 1831, although apparently two Neapolitan refugees had founded the first Italian school in Tunis in 1821, which like its English counterpart did not last long. When Bourgade created the Collège Saint Louis in 1842, Esther and Pompeo became closely associated with this institution. Admitting Maltese, French, Italian, and Tunisian pupils, irrespective of social class, nationality, or religion, the college’s curriculum reflected the students’ diverse ethnoreligious backgrounds; lessons were given in Arabic and Italian, with foreign-language instruction in French, Latin, and Greek.80
The staff and teachers mirrored the Mediterranean diversity of the students and the capital city. Pompeo Sulema served as professor of calligraphy and collaborated with Bourgade in archeological research into Punic stele, drawing facsimiles of inscriptions for the abbot.81 A sort of early international school, the college trained the next generation of educators in the capital, for example, Eymon Zephirin, who later taught at Sadiqi College, founded by Khayr al-Din in 1873. An intriguing aspect of the long friendship between Esther Sulema and Bourgade is that she converted to Catholicism and was baptized in April 1843 taking the name Giulia Maria Giovanna. Love motivated her conversion since, immediately after the baptismal ceremony in the Sainte-Croix Parish Church, she married a French Catholic trader, David Ménard, established in Tunis.82
Schools like Bourgade’s college increasingly became lighting rods for internationalized struggles among local communities and the European states protecting them; the openly bitter animosity between France and Italy dates from this period. The Collège Saint Louis flourished until 1863, when it closed and the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes took over its pupils. That same year, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey bequeathed to the Italian state a piece of land for a new school; three years later the Collegio Italiano opened in 1866. Among its teaching staff was again Pompeo Sulema, whose career reveals another social pattern among expatriates residing in Tunis—instructors moved around from institution to institution. During the 1870s, this college served as an institutional core for increasingly strident Italian claims upon Tunisia; as a counterweight to French influence, the Italian state began subsidizing Italian primary schools in Tunisia. Until this time, prosperous Italian merchants, notably the Jews, sent sons to the University of Pisa for education, although Leghorn also attracted students from the Maghrib and Egypt. Under the Protectorate, the Italian college and institutions like it nurtured an Italian cultural and political identity among the large Sicilian community and promoted popular opposition to France’s dominance in a French possession whose foreign population remained overwhelmingly Italian.83 Italian schools and other educational, cultural, or social welfare institutions remained a thorn in the side of the French Protectorate well into the twentieth century and a major source of international animosity between Italy and France.
In 1878, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) opened its first boys’ primary school in Tunis for both indigenous and Italian Jews; by the eve of the Protectorate, there were eight such schools, but schooling for Jewish girls had to wait until 1882.84 From AIU headquarters in Paris, teachers who were European, mainly French, and who were trained in modern pedagogy were dispatched to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire to teach French, mathematics, natural science, and geography, a curriculum patterned upon France’s system. The objective was to inculcate a new modern understanding of Judaism among North African and Middle Eastern Jewry—not to instruct pupils in Jewish religious learning per se.85 Even before 1881, French state protection was extended to the AIU schools to offset Italian initiatives—the Franco-Italian educational cold war was on. Schooling solely along religious or national lines—and in the case of Italy, irredentist claims—was contrary to the vision held by Vialar, Bourgade, and their circle of like-minded collaborators for educating Tunisia’s heterogeneous populations. Nevertheless, since most pupils could not pay tuition, the realization of their pedagogical vision suffered the vicissitudes of private and state funding.
For a period, Bourgade’s college received substantial financial backing from the French king, some six thousand francs annually, which increased enrollments to three hundred students. Not satisfied, the cleric embarked on money-raising drives in France, using the local press to appeal for donations. In November 1845, both La Presse and La Gazette du Midi noted the favorable teaching results achieved by the Collège de St. Louis.86 Bourgade petitioned the archbishop in Lyon for financial support but he declined to furnish funds, although later in the 1860s substantial sums were sent for the purchase of buildings in Tunis; the archbishop’s lack of enthusiasm was probably directed at Bourgade personally rather than his projects per se. In 1846 Bourgade published a two-page appeal in Paris, Au sujet du Collège et de l’Hôpital St. Louis à Tunis, whose objective was to “bring together these diverse populations of Tunis” through two principal means, education and charity. According to the cleric, the hospital cared for between sixty and eighty indigenous patients, some of whom came from distant corners of Tunisia for treatment of eye diseases or serious wounds. A touch of the exotic and pull at the heart—and hopefully purse—strings was his vivid evocation of the “Bedouin woman from the countryside with her dying child in her arms.” As for the school, “we admit young Tunisian boys in our establishments without ethnic or religious distinction, providing the benefits of education and an example of Christian morals. . . . In our eyes they are neither Muslim nor Jewish but dear children upon whom we lavish paternal care.”87
The fund-raising appeal was significant for several reasons. It introduced metropole Catholics to Tunisia by providing purportedly accurate population statistics, including the numbers of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It also extolled the missionary activities of the SSJ—the order’s girls’ schools, its infirmary, and home visits to the sick—as a compelling marketing device, an early example of what became boilerplate fund-raising discourse.
Bourgade voyaged frequently between Tunis and Marseilles to collect donations in Europe and constantly beseeched French consuls for travel subsidies. By 1851 the consul, having repeatedly been “reprimanded by the French government for giving free boat passages to clerics, especially to the Abbé Bourgade,” refused his request for yet another free ride. This stands in stark contrast to the Ministry of the Navy, which granted SSJ members free passage on French naval vessels from 1844 on, a decision that greatly advanced the order’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean.88 Under the July Monarchy, Bourgade’s work flourished. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and Louis Philippe’s wife, Queen Marie-Amélie, underwrote many of his charitable activities in Tunisia. But the 1848 revolution deprived Bourgade of royal patronage and financial support. Eventually, the abbot’s behavior got him in trouble with the French consulate and Italian Capuchins, particularly with Bishop de Rosalia. In 1858 Bourgade’s papal authorization was revoked, causing “a huge outcry in the Catholic community” in Tunisia. Deprived of salary and suffering from a serious liver disease, he went to Paris to continue missionary work there.89
Several years later, he resurfaced as the publisher-manager of a new newspaper, L’Aigle de Paris (Birjis al-Bariz) (The Eagle of Paris), which began as an Arabic bimonthly and subsequently went into an Arabic-French edition around September 1860. In the first bilingual issue, Bourgade launched a series for teaching Arabic to French speakers, “Leçon d’Arabe.” He collaborated with Sulayman al-Harairi, the Arabic notary and secretary at the French consulate in Tunis, for the Arabic editions, which were distributed by bookstores in France, Algeria, and the “Orient” by the well-known Parisian publisher, Challamel.90 In the December 1859 edition, Bourgade claimed that his journal “encountered sympathy everywhere . . . among those who subscribe are the Bey of Tunis and his court as well as the Hanafi grand mufti of Tunis.” Even Amir Abd al-Qadir, by then in exile in Damascus, allegedly was a regular subscriber and reader. But what to make of the newspaper’s following claim? “The paper’s success in the Levant has alarmed the British who convened a meeting in London to neutralize the journal’s influence. . . . To counteract Protestant England, we will run off a large number of copies and distribute the newspaper from India to the west coasts of Africa.”91 Was Bourgade attempting to shake the political money tree in Paris through the use of anti-English, anti-Protestant discourse focused specifically upon France’s age-old nemesis? The fund-raising aspirations of the newspaper were patent, since it carried a notice regarding how and where to make contributions. However earnest the pleas or shrewd the appeals, Bourgade, destitute and sick, died in misery in Paris in 1866.
Nevertheless, the originality of the cleric’s eclectic interpretation of the Catholic civilizing mission is beyond dispute. In his worldview, Islam was not a demonic belief but rather a “preface to the Gospel, which left to God’s providence, would eventually bear fruit in Christian truth.”92 Because of this vision of Muslims and Islam, Bourgade promoted a rapprochement through “formal dialogue in narrative and Socratic form,” which explains why he was so keen to publicly debate prestigious members of the Tunis ‘ulama’ in theological discussions held during the summer evenings in Carthage.93 At some time after 1858, Bourgade encountered Lavigerie in Paris and awakened his interest in the Chapel of Saint Louis; the future archbishop’s knowledge of Islam may have initially come from Bourgade’s writings on the subject. These works contained imaginary conversations between Muslim scholars and Bourgade during which the priest demonstrated contradictions in Islamic scriptures that naturally confirmed Christian dogma, a traditional dialogic genre dating back centuries. Lavigerie recommended Bourgade’s books to his missionaries, although his views of Islam differed substantially from those of the idiosyncratic cleric.94
What united Abbé Bourgade and Sister Vialar was a shared commitment not only to proselytizing in Muslim lands but also to a specific combination of spirituality and social activism inspired by the founder of the Redemptorist Congregation, the Neapolitan priest Alphonsus de Liguori (1696–1787), who labored to save the poor and outcast in Naples. In a very real sense, the abbot’s and sister’s social welfare campaigns in Tunisia among similar populations transplanted de Liguori’s work to the Mediterranean’s African rim and brought it into the nineteenth century. And, in contrast to Lavigerie, they believed that “mission was dialogue,” which led them to eschew muscular or confrontational tactics in favor of communication with Muslims instead.95 Bourgade appears to have been the first to publicly pose the problem of Muslim women in Tunisia in an essay published in French in 1847, then in Arabic two years later. This tract may have inspired the bey’s chief secretary, Bin Diyaf, to compose his unpublished treatise, “Risala fi-l-mar’a” (Essay on Woman) in 1856 as a riposte to European criticisms of the place of women in Islam.96
Bourgade, Vialar, and their diverse associates do not fit comfortably into conventional narratives of North African-European encounters in this period. This is what makes them so fascinating, and significant, as religious adventurers and entrepreneurs. Moreover, the abbot was “one of the most controversial figures in the French cultural presence in nineteenth-century Tunis.”97 He appears to have had Masonic links or at least to have frequented Italian expatriates who belonged to Masonic lodges, for example, the Tuscan Jew Pompeo Sulema. Bourgade set up a small Arabic printing press at his college—one of the first of its kind in Tunis—in order to “explain Christianity” to Muslims, although the Italian Jew Giulio Finzi had created a lithographic press in Tunis circa 1829. Bourgade’s printing operation was established with the assistance of two Prussian lithographers who employed their professional skills for other purposes—churning out high-quality, counterfeit Tunisian banknotes, which inundated the country with worthless currency and greatly undermined the state treasury.98
At the same time, Bourgade became enamored of archaeological artifacts unearthed from Christian and pagan sites whose promotional potential were not lost on him. He collected inscriptions from Punic stele scattered around Carthage, about which he published a short work dedicated to Ahmad Bey, Toison d’or de la langue Phénicienne.99 He appears to have been the first to organize a small museum at the Saint Louis Chapel where Roman and early Christian finds were housed. Bourgade’s fascination with archaeology was taken up several decades later by Lavigerie, who directed the White Fathers to undertake extensive excavations but who also wed fanatically religious and nationalist propaganda with ostensibly scientific research into the past. The role played by early amateur archeologists—well-heeled travelers steeped in the literature of classical antiquity or highly educated military officers in the Algerian army—in the discipline’s emergence has already been noted. Yet the part played by missionaries invites further scholarly investigation into the complex politics of archaeology: the intersections between missionary campaigns, excavations in Muslim lands containing large pre-Islamic Christian archeological sites, later French colonial claims to restore the Roman past, and the evolution of the museum then in a process of rapid institutionalization. Soon thereafter, some Tunis notables developed a keen interest in the field and organized a new historical, archeological, and geological society around (or even before?) the Protectorate; from 1885 on, Tunisians participated in the organization of the newly created Bardo museum.100 Nevertheless, the excavations in Carthage and elsewhere could not have taken place had not Husaynid rulers given missionaries like Bourgade and amateur enthusiasts such as Pompeo carte blanche to move about largely unfettered.
The outbreak of cholera morbus in Europe and the Mediterranean world constituted “the great disease drama of the nineteenth century” due to its novelty in that part of the globe. Its ravages elicited puzzlement, as much as panic, because doctors had rarely, if ever, encountered the affliction; since Arab and European medicine bore a close resemblance in the early part of the century, medical practitioners from both traditions were helpless.101 While Tunisia was spared until the 1849–1850 epidemic, reports of earlier outbreaks in Europe and the Mediterranean—in 1831 and 1832 cholera reached France and Great Britain—had deeply troubled Husaynid and consular authorities. In 1835 cholera appeared in Genoa, Leghorn, and Marseilles and subsequently reached Algeria due to the massive deployment of troops into the colony. Sir Thomas Reade rightfully observed during the 1835 scare that “the few medical persons who are here are little to be depended upon and I believe not one of them ever had an opportunity of seeing cholera cases.” As a precautionary measure, the consul recommended that London replace the current vice-consul, Cunningham, with a “half pay surgeon of the Navy or Army, with permission for him to practice his profession [here in Tunis].”102 But the proposal fell on deaf ears, not least because the European medical establishment was greatly divided about cholera’s causes. However, the main obstacle was the colossal sway of imperial mercantile interests advocating only a “‘gentle’ control of cholera” in the interests of international commerce.103
As dire predictions regarding cholera’s potential to wreak havoc were being debated in Tunisia during the 1830s, the SSJ sisters tended to cholera and typhus victims in Algeria and gained valuable hands-on training. Indeed, the congregation’s history is intertwined with the disease’s progression from Algeria to Tunisia.104 A few years later, the order opened the first public health clinic in Tunis and introduced something quite novel—home nursing visits for those too ill to visit clinics. The fact that the Tunis Board of Health had been organized in 1835 under Mustafa Bey explains the reception that Sister Vialar and Abbé Bourgade received because they arrived during a period of growing public fright over disease.
By 1849 it was apparent that Tunisia would not be spared. Bin Diyaf’s chronicle devotes long passages to cholera, whose “origins lie among the diseases of India” and that causes “those infected to turn yellow and then black in color and death occurs within hours or after a few days.”105 As the century’s imperial disease par excellence, cholera came overland from Algeria, spread by tribes and French military units on campaign. Ahmad Bey insisted that the quarantine on all ships coming from Europe be rigorously observed and ordered that three military barracks in the capital be transformed into hospitals, one for each religious community. After military units dispatched to the provinces failed to erect a cordon sanitaire around infected regions and stem the flow of diseased or panicked people, the muftis, qa’ids, and other officials abandoned Tunis, leaving an administrative vacuum. Ahmad Bey fled to Carthage, then to his new palace in Muhammadiya, and finally Porto Farina in the north. Since the hara was one of the least salubrious quarters, cholera struck impoverished Tunisian Jews with deadly force. Another notoriously foul neighborhood was the environs of the Saint-Antoine cemetery, where Christians had long buried their dead on a plot of land freely bestowed by the Tunisian state; the practice of common graves and shallow burials had produced a serious health menace.106 Imprecise mortality statistics suggest that at least 7,600 people died of cholera, out of 16,675 stricken in Tunis, a city whose population counted no more than 100,000 inhabitants. European physicians, some employed by the palace, were accused by the terrified populace of deliberately introducing the disease, a reaction duplicating popular responses to medical practitioners in Europe and elsewhere at the time.107
While those with the means took flight, the SSJ remained, closed its schools, and sent teaching staff to tend to the ill and bury the dead, which resulted in the death of several sisters. It was for this medical valor that Ahmad Bey bestowed the “medal of glorious achievement” upon the SSJ and showed great largesse toward the wider Christian community of Tunis during the famine following the epidemic. Soon after the outbreak, the Board of Health expanded its powers and scope, which may have encouraged the founding of additional SSJ hospitals and clinics in the capital region and the provinces.108
The clinic adjacent to the Sidi Saber School counted eight beds and two nursing sisters. Other sisters made home visits that were initially restricted to Europeans with certificates (or passports?) attesting to national status; although this soon changed, it may have meant that the poorest and thus most vulnerable populations were the least served. The clinic’s first physician was a Maltese named Laferla, and medical assistance was free; an administrative council oversaw its work. Expenses were met through public subscriptions and the organization of balls, fetes, and raffles. Adept at fund-raising, Abbé Bourgade collected nearly three thousand piasters in an appeal addressed to the inhabitants of Tunis. In this 1843 drive, the largest donors were members of the consular corps and wealthy merchants. But a number of individuals in service to Ahmad Bey, for example, Borsani, the bey’s chief jeweler, and the Italian Austrian Antonio Bogo, one of his closest ministers, made donations, as did the ruler himself.109 The part that fund-raising drives played in creating a sense of collective, civic identity cutting across national and, to an extent, religious boundaries among certain social classes merits further investigation.
In 1848 one of the SSJ medical establishments was transferred to a more spacious building—a former military barracks—donated by the ruler. In addition to providing a home for orphans, the institution counted twenty-five beds and provided free medical care to all, although most patients were from Europe or Algeria. In view of the opprobrium associated with hospitals, it served the needs of the most desperate—Maltese, Sicilians, and Spanish. Anne-Marie Planel’s meticulous analysis of scanty hospital records opens a small window onto the lives of the poor and afflicted who ended their days in the facilities for lack of alternatives. Single, male immigrants employed as unskilled laborers predominated on patient lists, but after 1860 women of humble station—servants, laundresses, or those suspected of prostitution—figured in the registers, as did illegitimate infants and children.110
Although a separate beylical hospital exclusively for Muslims and Jews existed in the Qasba quarter, by the 1870s, the SSJ outpatient facility attracted a large Tunisian clientele, perhaps as many as eighty patients per day. However rudimentary or insufficient to the task, public health services attempted to deal with recurrent cholera outbreaks, the devastating 1868 typhus epidemic, and famines that carried off many, including SSJ nursing staff.111 In the original cohort of sisters relocating to Tunisia with Vialar in 1840, Rosalie Lagrange (d. 1868) worked as a nurse for thirty-six years in the SSJ dispensary and in the Saint Louis Hospital. In addition, she made home visits to the sick irrespective of class or religion, going from miserable abodes in the city’s poorer neighborhoods to the palaces of the bey or ministers. During the 1867–1868 epidemics, directly tied to the 1864 rebellion, Sister Rosalie was called to Bizerte to treat afflicted Muslim families there.112 A description of medical practices in Sousse, where Sister Joséphine ran a public health dispensary for decades, provides some ethnographic details about a typical clinic. It was “a simple white-washed room with benches and a small armoire. Sister Joséphine went from patient to patient, administering eye drops or lancing boils, with the sure hands of a practiced surgeon, she fixed dislocated arms and legs, bandaged an arm or put a cast on a broken leg . . . and oversaw the nursery which admitted sickly infants deprived of nourishment for whom she miraculously found milk.”113
One of Tunisia’s principal attractions for Sister Vialar was precisely the scarcity of modern clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals. As she organized services and institutions, the SSJ founder mobilized a three-pronged program that integrated physical well-being, intellectual and moral health through schooling, and spiritual redemption. She paired schools with clinics throughout the country and, significantly, pioneered home medical visits that probably reached more Tunisians than hospitals or clinics. And she dug into her own private fortune, or what was left of it, to finance projects; although in addition to local fund-raising in Tunisia, she turned to the Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi in Lyon for subsidies. Medical assistance and schooling were, however, directly tied to the danger of conversion. For the Christian children in their primary schools, the SSJ’s education acted as armor against the ever-present perils of conversion to Islam, as it was “not rare to see a certain number of young people abandon the title of Christian to become Muslims.”114 And as Abbé Bourgade’s newspapers aimed to explain Christianity to Muslims and Jews, SSJ clinics promoted more than public health.
As always, there was a spiritual price to pay for medical assistance. The sisters performed secret baptisms for Muslims or Jews judged in danger of imminent death, a condition that would most often apply to infants or children, given their exceptionally high mortality rates. The SSJ carefully, if discreetly, recorded the exact number of baptisms in reports sent back to Rome or Lyon. Clandestine baptisms must not have been that secret since Cardinal Lavigerie later issued a confidential memorandum in 1880, “Circulaire sur le baptême des Musulmans,” addressed to diocesan clergy and especially missionaries in Tunis. In it, Lavigerie reminded priests and sisters alike that the Holy See’s decree of 1763 regarding infidel children was still in effect. Jewish or Muslim “children remaining under parental authority cannot be baptized.” Moreover, the “Diocesan Statutes” of Tunisia explicitly stated that “no Jewish or Muslim child can be baptized without the express permission of its parents. . . . Only abandoned infants in clear danger of death or those completely deprived of family can be baptized.” As for adults, “Protestant, Jewish or Muslim adults can only be baptized with our special authorization.”115 It is unclear from the documentation whether Muslims and Jews were aware of the baptisms performed by the sisters. Bourgade inventoried 115 baptisms of children in danger of death during six months in 1842 in his report to the Propaganda Fide but cautioned against making them public knowledge; the majority of the children were Muslim, the rest Jewish. In the 1850s, Vialar claimed that one sister alone had baptized hundreds of children, although she too added the caveat about the need for absolute confidentiality so as not to disaffect the Muslims and Jews who flocked to the clinics.116
The circumstances that might have prompted Lavigerie to later reissue regulations governing conversion are suggested by an 1845 incident that caused a public outcry. A Muslim boy in Sousse “took it into his head to turn Christian” and went to Malta (or was taken?), where he was baptized by Capuchin friars who publicized the case. Subsequently, the young man returned to his hometown onboard a Maltese vessel whose master, Paulo di Busuttil, had adopted him. News of his presence in Sousse triggered efforts to seize the lad and restore him to his family but he carried a British passport, which prompted the British agent to intervene on his behalf. In an apparently emotional reunion with his mother, the boy informed her that he would not change his mind, that “ ‘he should die a Christian.’ ” Ahmad Bey and local officials in Sousse calmed offended Muslim sensibilities but still recognized the validity of his British passport, despite the fact that “the boy is no more a British subject than a Chinese.”117 How this shaped local Muslim opinion is unknown, but one wonders if any connection could be established between this notorious event and the following incident. In 1848, the French consul Rousseau contacted Ahmad Bey regarding unspecified assaults upon a Catholic establishment: “As your Highness knows from a verbal communication, violent attacks and outrages have been committed against one of the fathers belonging to the Capuchin convent. I trust that you will see that justice is done and reparations made.”118
Hostility toward the men of God also came from within the Catholic fold. In chapter 6 we encountered the inebriated Nicola Malinghoussy who had a run-in with Catholic sisters and priests in 1870. Two sisters from the Tunis convent, Germaine Audouard, the mother superior, and Jeanne Loudet, were convoked by the French vice-consul in La Goulette to testify regarding Nicola’s threats to murder Père Félix and Père Lecteur for reasons unknown.119 Apparently the sisters had earlier taken Nicola in, perhaps due to his penchant for alcohol. But Nicola stormed from the convent armed with a dagger stolen “from the home of Giorgio the Greek,” informing the horrified women that he was headed for the port to murder the priests and flee on a ship. Sister Germaine wrested the dagger from Nicola and hurried out to the port to warn the priests. Who appeared shortly thereafter at the convent in La Goulette? Nicola, “slightly excited due to drink.” As the mother superior attempted to soothe him, Nicola declared that he “would consume enough alcohol to kill the priests and walk around La Goulette with the heads of each carried in his hands.”120 The murder came to naught and, as we know, Nicola was incarcerated in a ship-prison and eventually transported. Yet the drama, however sensational, demonstrates that enmity toward missionaries did not only come from nonbelievers and provides a glimpse into the social realities with which female religious had to contend in the course of daily life.
Recent scholarship on the British Empire stresses that Asian and African peoples defined and thus limited the spheres in which European Christian missionaries carried out their work. One major element in negotiations over boundaries consisted of local gender systems, particularly normatively gendered spaces that shaped how and where healing, instruction, and other activities would transpire. In light of this, physicality and appearance were crucial to the practices of everyday life and to the success or failure of missions. How missionaries dressed, what they ate, and how they organized residential spaces and behaved in public fundamentally influenced how they were received across the globe.121 As discussed in chapter 1, the primary marker of identity in the streets of Tunis was first and foremost dress, which provided immediate information on the religion, social class, profession, and ethnic belonging of individuals sharing different kinds of spaces. The SSJ chose a habit that did not differ markedly from what middle-class provincial French women wore; the sisters later added a sort of veil worn underneath their white bonnets. In dark blue robes and head coverings, they were not out of place in Tunisia where Muslim women wore a dark or white ha’ik (cloak) over their garments when outside the home. One male observer remarked that “one sees [Tunisian Muslim women] in the streets, especially toward evening, when they go together to the Moorish bath which is their greatest distraction; they are veiled and covered in haiks of somber colors—grey, black, and brown—which makes them appear from afar like penitents in a European religious order.”122 Maltese Catholic women dressed in black habbarahs, long robes covering their bodies. At the Capuchin Church in Tunis on Good Friday, Lady Herbert noted in 1871 that “the church was crammed to suffocation with Maltese women in their black ‘habbarahs,’ as at Cairo.”123 Because of its potent moral signifying value, clothing might integrate, if only partially, the religious migrants cum missionaries into a community or set them apart.
In the 1840s, Ahmad Bey directed the Capuchins to don the red cap, or shashiya, the Tunisian equivalent of the fez, as their clerical headgear in order to deflect undue attention, something that they obligingly did. “The Bey requested that they wear the chéchia so that they could mix with the crowds with more discretion.”124 As parishes were opened outside the capital—Sousse in 1836, La Goulette in 1838, Sfax in 1841, Bizerte in 1851, and Munastir in 1862—the Capuchins traveled widely and frequently to tend to the faithful. One wonders if the adoption of Tunisian headgear was in response to periodic outbreaks of animosity directed toward some friars. It is significant that the bey urged the Capuchins to “go native” so that they could move about in public more or less undetected. This seemingly trivial piece of evidence suggests that the ruler of the Husaynid state wanted the order to remain in the country—otherwise, why urge a change in dress code? On the other hand, as the French fleet frequented La Goulette on a regular basis, it was incumbent that the beys protect missionaries from harm. Ordinary people may have incorporated missionaries into their own cultural universe, seeing them as holy men and woman—as part of the North African tradition of veneration for living saints, or murabit, particularly for individuals blessed with healing abilities. In Algerian Saharan missions of Metlili, the White Fathers were regarded as “Christian marabouts” by the members of the nomadic Chamba tribe.125 Sister Joséphine Daffis, who spent fifty-four years in her clinic in Sousse, was referred to by city inhabitants as tabiba (female doctor) or ummi (my mother). Little did her patients’ families know that she had secretly baptized so many Muslim and Jewish children. When Lavigerie created the Society of Missionaries in Algeria, he took the matter of dress seriously. By adopting local society’s material way of life, food, language, and apparel, missionaries would overcome the Muslim Algerians’ contempt for Christianity, at least in his thinking. The White Fathers clung to their “traditional Muslim dress” long after male North Africans had given up the gandura and burnus and by so doing ironically increased their physical difference from the local populace.126
Of signal importance, too, were the spaces in which missionaries dwelled. The earliest missionaries resided in buildings, most often houses, lent or rented to them by the palace or Tunis notables. In 1868, the French consul gave the SSJ a grand residence for another school in the madina, Dar Chamama, which had belonged to the Jewish courtier Nassim who fled for Paris that year, taking a sizeable portion of the treasury with him. Outside the capital, members of the SSJ at first lived in the homes of vice-consuls or local merchants until they could purchase properties later in the century, although how interior domestic life was organized is not fully known. As Tunis extended beyond the Bab al-Bahr, other types of housing became available on reclaimed land between the city and the buhaira. When the Carmélites d’Alger were established in Carthage in 1885, the order elected to inhabit “une maison Mauresque” (a Moorish house), which had become the residential norm for missionaries, despite the fact that other kinds of housing—more “European” in nature—existed by then, a pattern that persisted into the early twentieth century.127
A fundamental element in “going native” was learning the Arabic of the Tunis region or provincial variants. Apparently Abbé Bourgade had acquired enough Arabic to read the Quran, to communicate, and undertake translations. It seems unlikely that Sister Vialar knew Arabic, although some SSJ sisters must have had some familiarity with the spoken language. The La Marsa novitiate was important because some of its earliest novices were from communities speaking some Arabic, in addition to Italian or Maltese. This stands in contrast to the situation in Algeria that Lavigerie encountered when he was named archbishop in 1866. Only a handful of clergy were conversant with Arabic, which is why the White Fathers and White Sisters subsequently placed great emphasis upon mastering the language.
The speed with which the SSJ attracted pupils can perhaps be attributed to language policy. For decades, Italian predominated in classrooms, since “the bad Italian of Barbary” had long served as Tunisia’s diplomatic lingua franca and by the 1870s was the language spoken by most immigrants. It is uncertain if Maltese or Arabic were employed for teaching; although in primary schools, depending upon the mix of pupils, various languages would have been necessary to communicate. However, catechism classes were taught in Maltese at times and only later did French become another language of instruction. Forms of Italo-Sicilian were used in the classroom until late in the century and did not go unnoticed by the Alliance Française or colonial officials. In 1885 Paul Mellon, among the founders of the alliance, remarked, “The truth is that the Brothers and the Sisters employ both Italian and French as language of instruction, even giving Italian more emphasis in order to retain in our schools Sicilians and Italians who are the object of anti-French campaigns,” campaigns that increasingly commingled nation and empire with Catholicism’s diverse representatives in North Africa.128
The Church in Tunisia reflected larger struggles between church and state in France, between the French Catholic Church and Rome, and among Catholic nations with imperial ambitions in the Maghrib. In 1843 the Holy See named an Italian Capuchin, Fidèle Sutter, as apostolic vicar, which appeared to erode France’s long-standing role as protector of the Roman Catholic Church in Ottoman lands. The dramatic upsurge in new French congregations devoted to overseas work only complicated things. It was not clear if French national law regulating education applied in missions; for example, the Loi Falloux of 1850 stated that primary-school teachers had to have a teaching certificate—brevet de capacité—although Catholic congregations were not necessarily subject to this requirement.129 For most of the century, Italian clergy and missions were at odds with other Catholic groups, particularly the French. This mare’s nest of Catholic enmity may partially explain why the SSJ carried on its work in a Muslim state without too much interference at first—much in contrast, once again, with French Algeria, where the order had been expelled because of Sister Vialar’s refusal to submit to the will of the Catholic hierarchy. In Tunisia, a single hierarchy did not exist. And unlike Algeria, Maltese pastors were recruited to tend to the faithful in Tunisia because it was reasoned that “Maltese priests alone could dampen their lawlessness.”130
In 1846 Maltese residents sought permission for a “national” church in Tunis separate both from Rome and from France. In a long petition addressed to the British consulate in Italian and signed (or x-ed by illiterates) by several hundred Maltese, the petitioners stated that “because our numbers increase on a daily basis, it is necessary to create a second parish church specifically for the Maltese . . . since the vast majority of the Maltese do not know the Italian language which is used for preaching and daily instruction.”131 The petition’s proposals are revealing: first, that the new church be placed under the protection of the British sovereign and the local consulate; second, that the church be dedicated to San Paolo Naufrago, a saint greatly venerated by the Maltese; and third, that the church be governed by a committee of five elected deputies with permission from Ahmad Bey. While the petition failed and a uniquely Maltese church never saw the light of day, it is significant that the bey and British consul were seen as patrons for a parish organized along the lines of Maltese language, identity, and religiosity. Faced with the impossibility of establishing their own church, the Maltese faithful aided SSJ expansion by petitioning the mother house to send sisters and by organizing communal fund-raising.
In Sfax, local families made such a request in 1852; six SSJ sisters arrived to set up a primary school and create an outpatient health clinic for the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The same process was at work in Djerba, which despite its relatively small Catholic population—only 300 Maltese and Italian out of 40,000 inhabitants—asked for three sisters to run a girls school. While the SSJ did not arrive in Mahdiya until 1882, the history of the town’s first church building illustrates patterns discussed earlier. Originally an olive oil refinery, the structure was given to Sutter by the bey in 1861. The Capuchin priest from Calabria, Père Vitaliano da Tiriolo, initiated the custom of public processions outside church walls. Not only did “Muslims and Jews take part with respect” in the pageantry to honor the Virgin but sailors and fishermen, the port’s most marginal and socially suspect groups, were incorporated into the ceremonies. Until the early twentieth century, long-distance fishermen from villages in the Apulia, notably Trani and Barletta, left home in autumn for six- to nine-month sojourns in Tunisian waters. Their inclusion in religious feasts suggests that the parish aimed to integrate potential troublemakers into town life, if only seasonally.132
As critical to the creation of new schools or parishes were lay women, such as Annetta Muniglia in Sousse, who acted as benefactors by donating money or providing church furnishings with their own labor: “the women of Sousse paid for the drapes for the windows and great doors of the church.”133 Another campaign produced sufficient funds to purchase land for a Catholic cemetery in Sousse. These activities invested newly arrived Maltese and Sicilian families in the local community by drawing upon collective, freely given, although gendered, labor to construct schools, clinics, cemeteries, or churches and to furnish the interiors of religious buildings. Philanthropic campaigns in foreign Catholic parishes implicated Tunisia in transnational charitable networks, since diaspora members urged relatives “back home” to contribute. These activities transformed small, isolated groups from population islands into nodes attached to larger transversal and trans-sea networks and may have encouraged additional immigration.
In Sousse, the town’s sole priest, Père Agostino, took the initiative and begged Emilie de Vialar to send teaching and nursing sisters for a school and clinic. Three SSJ members arrived, among them Joséphine Daffis. Daffis, from a noble family of Toulouse, entered the congregation in 1830 and accompanied Vialar first to Algeria and then Tunisia in 1844; by the time that she settled in Sousse, she had acquired substantial hands-on medical experience. Yet the Catholic community in Sousse was small and poor; after three years of paying rent for the school, its financial backers withdrew. Sister Joséphine set out to purchase a building and here her reputation for healing proved decisive. The French consul supported her appeals to the bey, who granted the sisters habus properties—three storage buildings and a small house—through a legal mechanism known as inzal, a perpetual lease. In 1858 Joséphine became the mother superior in Sousse as well as administrator of the school and hospital. A visitor to the school in 1860 found five religious instructing fifty girls from wealthy as well as poor families, the latter admitted free, with the usual mix of mainly Maltese or Italian pupils and a smattering of French.134
Characterized by a priest in Sousse as a femme-apôtre (female apostle), Joséphine was revered as a physician by city inhabitants. And small wonder. For years she practiced pharmacology and medicine, including surgery, and successfully amputated the gangrenous arm of a Tunisian patient, saving his life. During the 1864 insurrection, she refused to abandon her clinic and patients to flee Sousse with the rest of the Europeans. After the 1881 invasion and occupation, a gendered division of labor was immediately reimposed. When Joséphine attempted to pursue medical practice at the French military hospital in Sousse, she found herself demoted; the male physicians condescendingly described her as “a mother, a strong mother” but proscribed her from practicing.135 As for the 1890 ceremony honoring her, it was symbolically significant that the French decoration was bestowed first; only afterward was the beylical medal making Daffis commandeur du Nishan al-Iftikhar awarded. When Monsieur Tauchon, the contrôleur civil, conferred the Légion d’Honneur, he revealed another motive for the award—the Italian menace. “Worthy of the highest esteem because of all she has done for the honor of her country and her religious order,” the official opined that Joséphine deserved special commendation because she had instructed children of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds without distinguishing among them; that she had instructed Italian pupils was deemed especially meritorious. Her funeral several years later in 1894 offered the occasion for another magnificent public event, with flags flying at half mast.136 Mercifully, Sister Joséphine departed this earth when she did. Only nine years later, Protectorate officials began seizing Church properties, closing schools and clinics, and even banned the popular celebration of Corpus Christi from the streets in conformance with church-state disestablishment laws; significantly, the processions in honor of the Virgin of Trapani were not banned by colonial officials, who feared further antagonizing the large Sicilian community in Tunisia.
The missionary archive casting the SSJ and other congregations as the object of universal appreciation in fact needs to be tempered by other sources, however sparse. There existed deeply felt religious antagonisms. One of the most evocative ethnographic accounts comes from Sister Joséphine’s town, Sousse, which still suffered several years later from the fallout of the 1864 rebellion and the fierce state repression that followed. One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1867, as European families promenaded around the Place du Commerce near the port and Christian quarter, a wandering holy man (who was no doubt mad) arrived in the square. Removing his clothes, the naked man began washing himself with soap and water in public, much to horror of the assembled crowd. This spectacle endured for nearly two hours, during which the dervish took delight in washing his private parts. Addressing the Muslim men in the throng, he shouted: “Do as I do [and] wash thoroughly your women; the French are going to come and take over the country; the French like to have your women clean in order to sleep with them; the French always have the upper hand.”137 The same report noted that a French national had been incarcerated, probably by the vice-consul, for a grave affront to the Muslim community—he had ripped the face veil off of a Tunisian woman in the streets, a deliberately provocative gesture of cultural disrespect. In crowded popular quarters of the capital or provincial ports where diverse classes of Europeans rubbed shoulders with Tunisians, incidents such as these betrayed growing resentment against the increasingly numerous, powerful, and visible Christians.138
By 1881, the SSJ boasted a network of clinics and schools. In La Goulette, the order’s schools counted, among its 148 female pupils, 1 Tunisian Muslim girl and 16 Jewish girls. By 1890, enrollments had risen dramatically to 236 pupils whose backgrounds reflected decades of trans-Mediterranean settlement. Italians outnumbered French students by 2 to 1; most numerous were the Maltese, with 177 girls.139 The graduates’ social destinies are important but little is known about what life held—whether in the pre-1881 era or later. It seems that girls of working-class backgrounds became dressmakers and seamstresses, reputable professions guaranteeing stable income; until recently, many Maltese women in Tunis earned their living this way. Others returned home to aid families until suitable marriages could be arranged. The poorest found positions as household servants, although domestic service was not highly regarded as a profession due to the attendant sexual dangers.140
While it would be somewhat of a stretch to characterize La Goulette as the Alexandria of the Barbary Coast, the port was home to over 4,000 inhabitants, of which 1,500 were Catholics, making the proportion of Christian newcomers to natives one of the highest in the larger region. By the early Protectorate, the humble Capuchin chapel had given way to a large and elegant church and the Catholic mission owned—instead of merely renting—several buildings. Judging by enrollments, the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes ran successful boys’ schools in La Goulette, Tunis, and elsewhere. The pupils, who lined up daily for class or squirmed uncomfortably on the hard, wooden benches, came from backgrounds that revealed once more the social geography of population movements in the central Mediterranean. During the early Protectorate, admission to public schools was restricted by a new criterion, race, which glossed religion and ethnicity and severely limited native and some non-French children’s access to academic institutions; vocational training was proposed instead. Nevertheless, the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools for girls in Tunis after 1892 offered academic schooling for both Jewish and non-Jewish girls.141
But the Protectorate brought with it more than the French army or metropole bureaucrats. Appointed archbishop of Algiers in 1866, Lavigerie’s unbridled zeal for proselytizing to Muslims had set him against civilian and military officials alike. Seeking a more congenial environment, he moved to Tunis in 1881 and was elevated the next year to the position of cardinal of the See of Carthage; but he soon provoked more controversy by publicly attacking Islam. His main opponents were not only Muslims but also fellow Catholics because, true to his character, the cardinal administered churches, religious orders, and educational institutions in imperious fashion. As France’s army was invading, the cardinal labored furiously, along with the French consul, to prevent Italian nuns of the Salesian order from establishing a house and school in La Goulette. These machinations nearly triggered serious diplomatic crises, since jurisdictional issues immediately arose—were the Italian Salesian sisters under France’s protection, as was the case for Italian nuns in Cairo and elsewhere in the Levant? Or were they protected by the Italian consulate in Tunis?142 Lavigerie’s actions and inflammatory rhetoric caused relations with the Italian clergy, mainly the Capuchins, to deteriorate and in consequence a large contingent of brothers and priests departed for Italy.
Embittered relations with Italian congregations dated back to the 1870s and came to roost on the Chapel of Saint Louis, which had fallen into disrepair. Lavigerie relentlessly pursued chapel politics to wrest guardianship from the Capuchins through accusations to the Holy See that the Italian clerics had neglected the edifice. In a trompe l’oeil diplomatic maneuver, Lavigerie petitioned Rome for permission to restore, expand, and not coincidentally, to assert uncontested authority over the chapel by staffing it with members of his newly created order. Soon the first White Fathers arrived in Tunis to care for the Chapel of Saint Louis, which was greatly enlarged. The politically motivated drive to create a monumental chapel came at a cost. The elaborate church that eventually replaced the older, modest edifice symbolized French-Christian aggression, departing from earlier missionary traditions of a shared built environment. The French consul, Roustan, was acutely aware of how Muslim notables interpreted this immense structure: “St. Louis on Byrsa hill dominates the palace of the bey and the summer villas of his chief ministers; they do not appreciate the fact that the French flag planted on top of the chapel waves above their heads. The chapel resembles much too much a citadel. Foreigners always use it as a means to stir up anti-French sentiment.”143 In 1892 Lavigerie ended his days in Algiers while on a visit; his remains were laboriously transported back to Carthage for sumptuous burial in the fortresslike cathedral towering over Husaynid residences below. After North Africa’s independence, his body was transported once again, this time to Rome for reburial.144
Nearly four decades after first finding refuge in Tunisia, the SSJ was joined by other female orders and, by the turn of the twentieth century, at least twelve Catholic female and five male congregations had been established. At Lavigerie’s insistence, the White Sisters had opened a school for girls of all nationalities in La Marsa in 1883. Two years later, the cardinal directed them to open Le Refuge Saint Augustin, exclusively devoted to the care of “fallen or abandoned girls older than fifteen years.” The institution, strategically hidden in a corner of La Marsa on a hill near the sea, limited social contact between its inmates and the fashionable summer resort, which itself enjoyed a reputation for light morals. Equally important, La Marsa was far enough from La Goulette, which as a port operated as a turnstile for imported vice, and distant from Tunis, with its own morally suspect neighborhoods and their secrets. In its first year, the refuge sheltered a handful of Italian and Maltese girls as well as one Tunisian Muslim, but six years later ninety-five girls lived and worked together in the institution, which then became an orphanage. To support themselves, the young female inmates labored as laundresses for male clerics, teachers, and the boarders at the Collège Charles in Tunis.145
The refuge raises intriguing questions—was this the first institution specifically for “fallen” girls? Although available documentation is sparse, the SSJ had cared for girls in precarious situations in earlier decades, as indicated by elliptical allusions in consular correspondence and in notes exchanged between Tunisian and European officials. Did Lavigerie borrow this idea from the SSJ? And why did Lavigerie instruct the White Sisters to create a primary school in La Marsa that competed with the long-established SSJ institution? Was the imperial prelate promoting the work of nuns whom he considered “his own” to the detriment of the SSJ? While answers to these questions await their historian, it is irrefutable that the first female missionaries to take root in the land of Saint Augustine and Saint Louis did so thanks to the patronage of Muslim princes.
Religious women were a force to be reckoned with, not least because the presence of celibate, single women in French colonies vastly complicated the play of local politics. If Catholic female religious were lauded for their hard work and devotion in overseas missions, they often antagonized the Church hierarchy, local male officials, and the French state. The combustive mixture of the SSJ founder’s gender, education, and social class explains not only Emilie de Vialar’s tumultuous relations with the bishop of Algiers but also how her congregation came to Tunisia. Essential to local assimilation, however incomplete, was the nature of the Husaynid state, a diverse household bureaucracy whose patronage furnished the resources required for mission work—buildings, land, funding—as well as freedom of movement and action. And the fact that many missionaries—both female and male—spent most of their adult lives in Tunisia—in some cases, like Sister Joséphine, over six decades—assured at least partial “Tunisification.”
Another critical factor was timing. When the SSJ order arrived, Tunisia was soon to suffer the visitations of a terrible disease. In addition, the Husaynid state urgently needed agents and institutions to maintain social harmony among expatriate communities, mainly Catholics, who by midcentury numbered at least 9,000—all the more so because this was precisely the period when state reorganization, combined with uncontrolled immigration, introduced instabilities into the system. That Ahmad Bey occupied the throne when the congregation was expelled from Algeria constituted one of the most fortuitous elements in this female missionary saga. But the entrée that powerful creoles, such as the Raffo family, enjoyed with the palace proved immensely beneficial to the sisters, as did the fact that European notables looked to the missionaries to tame the lumpen proletariat that disembarked with each arriving ship. Finally, the strategy of recruiting local women for the novitiate embedded the SSJ more firmly into certain social circles.
Another set of questions revolves around the circulation of knowledge about North Africa, Islam, and Tunisian society. Did the SSJ contribute to the fund of negative stereotypes held by Europeans at the time about the “Arab family” or Muslim sexual deviance? Unfortunately, there is not much evidence concerning the order’s contribution to Orientalist literary or artistic production about the “East.” But the SSJ might have contributed to another strand in that tradition—what Jane Schneider calls “Orientalism in one place.”146 Most of the congregation’s early labors focused upon impoverished Sicilian and Maltese families universally scorned by northern Europeans as “barbarous.” Perhaps the sisters’ work, mission reports, and fund-raising in Europe helped to disseminate the idea that southern Mediterranean Christians, regarded as “not-quite-Europeans,” were in need of redemption. Finally, Abbé Bourgade’s influence upon thinking in the metropole or in colonial circles across France’s empire, particularly his views of and writings on Islam, merits further research.147
What can be concluded about the missionaries’ long-term importance to North Africa’s history? While highly speculative due to the archive and current state of secondary scholarship, questions can be raised concerning the social impact that female missionaries exerted upon a society organized around the principle of male-female segregation, which restricted many (particularly urban) women’s access to certain kinds of spaces and placed limits on specific types of physical mobility. Women without men, the sisters resided alone, without family or protectors; they worked in public arenas and traveled unaccompanied by male kin. As lifelong celibates and desexed females, the Catholic sisters enjoyed a liberty of movement not available to other women as well as intimate contacts with families and households that male missionaries or colonial officials never claimed. Because of this, Catholic missionary women established girls’ schools, clinics, and orphanages and made home visits; frequently they were the only Europeans with whom indigenous women interacted. Did the SSJ and later congregations suggest, however tentatively, novel spheres of female action? Directly related, the existence of girls’ schools segregated by sex and run by all-female staff in the era before colonialism might have rendered female schooling more acceptable during the Protectorate, or less problematic, for certain segments of Tunis society, all the more so since the missionaries were not associated with a brutal military invasion and occupation. However, by promoting conversion among minority groups in Algeria, the missionaries introduced cultural alienation and deep communal divisions, as tragically manifest in the Kabylia.
This story also points to the imperative of interrogating temporal boundaries, such as the notion of “precolonial,” which often serves as the chronological antechamber to modern, imperial European history. Despite what colonial cheerleaders such as Jules Ferry and Paul Cambon claimed, the French Protectorate was hemmed in by webs of alliances, bargains, and deals concluded between the Husaynid state, creole residents, missionaries of various stripes, and the highly diverse communities that regarded Tunisia as home long before 1881. The ultimate irony came with the disestablishment laws separating church and state in France and in French colonies from 1905 on. Much church property in Tunisia—land and structures—had been bestowed as gifts, loans, or rentals by the palace or notables to various Catholic missions. When Third Republic anticlerical colonial bureaucrats set out to seize Church properties, they faced a daunting legal challenge because property titles were frequently held, in one way or another, by the dynasty.148 Interpreted differently and applied unevenly in various parts of the empire, the disestablishment laws demonstrated more than anything the force of precolonial pacts between a Muslim state and Catholic congregations. By 1914, French missionary education had been more or less reinstated in Tunisia expressly to offset the dangers posed by the large Italian community; the Italian threat was judged even more perilous than the dangers posed by Catholic missionaries, especially in the realm of education.149
North Africa’s highly diverse missionary encounters should make us wary of tidy mappings or facile generalizations. In Algeria, relationships between missionaries, local indigenous notables, colonial officials, and settler populations ranged from resolutely hostile to cozy to indifferent. For Tunisia, the wild card was the bruising political tug-of-war over the country’s destiny, which only worsened with formal colonial rule and which resonated among the men and women of God, sometimes negatively affecting their work, at others reinforcing it.150 Another layer of complication resulted from the sometimes bitter competition among missionary societies in the field as well as conflict among ecclesiastical authorities in Europe. In sum, interpreting the SSJ’s work, reception, and social insertion into a precolonial Muslim state through a binary optique fails to translate the multiple registers of local assimilation or how the sisters’ actions resonated among Muslims, Jews, fellow missionaries, or immigrants. Daily social commerce between the heterogeneous segments of society demonstrates the fallacy of formulations such as “Christian versus Muslim.” Last but not least, the tale of a Muslim dynasty that afforded refuge to Catholic sisters expelled from a purportedly Christian and European colony whose grand mission was to civilize is frankly a story for our times.
The next chapter takes us away from the clinic and schoolroom, missions and missionaries, cholera and conversion, to visit the beach and hydrotherapy stations against the backdrop of growing health tourism to North Africa. It employs a household-based approach to examine forms of mainly elite sociability associated with the sea and healing waters. Households were not only economic and procreative units but also managed leisure, health-seeking activities, and social communication in ways that implicated members in transversal alliances stretching beyond the limits of kin-defined networks. Women’s quarters were important spaces of materiality and of display, where gifts from foreign diplomats or monarchs might be on view; and households were far from immobile but moved about according to the season, which held political consequences.
