What a joy it would be to the Prince of Wales to have one [a harim].
CAROLINE, PRINCESS OF WALES (1816)
Strolling along the Corniche in La Marsa, one immediately notices a curious structure partially set in the water. Topped by a whitewashed dome, with balconies and verandas facing the Mediterranean, it is linked to the beach by a small walkway. To the right, another much smaller edifice sits abandoned and half in ruins; fishermen now use it to store nets. A stone’s throw away, the wholly submerged remains of a third structure are barely visible at low tide. Today the largest pavilion, built during the reign of Ahmad Bey, has been converted into a three-star restaurant, Qubbat al-Hawa’, which serves alcohol until the wee hours of the morning and attracts a high-end clientele. Whatever their present state, these buildings constitute the architectural remains of a seaside culture of sociability that combined politics and leisure, harim visits and diplomacy, business and water therapy.1
By the late nineteenth century, gracious neo-Moorish buildings known as bayt al-bahr (sea house) sprang up along the shore from La Marsa to the thermal station Hammam Lif and served as bathing pavilions for elite households as well as for the Husaynid princesses. While elevated rank imposed various degrees of seclusion, the women for whom these pavilions were constructed enjoyed sea bathing for its health-conferring benefits. Not far away stood elegant palaces that housed the capital city’s great families along with extended kin, clients, and servants during the hottest months of the year. Included in this culture of Mediterranean sociability, often in surprisingly intimate ways, were European notables who participated in the same social forms and seasonal rhythms as their Muslim peers, which brought them into the heart of Tunisian family life—the household, or dar, including the harim.
FIGURE 15. Women’s bathing pavilion, La Marsa beach, c. 1890. One of the many bathing houses that used to dot the shore, employed by women from the palace or notable families in order to take sea baths in privacy. (Charles Lallemand, Tunis au XIXe siècle [Paris: La Maison Quantin, 1890].)
This chapter salvages a social universe obscured by colonial narratives and subsequently buried by the triumphant nationalism of the postcolonial era. Anthropologists argue that in house-centered societies, like Tunisia, “the house and the domestic group are social units defining community organization, the forms of social exchange, the inheritance system, and the transmission of knowledge.”2 Moreover, recent work demonstrates that the household was a space where large-scale historical processes not only resonated but were incubated.3 If much of the physical evidence and archival materials for this seaside culture were deliberately destroyed after 1956, nevertheless, an ethnographic recreation of the forms, spaces, and meanings of this nearly vanished world is possible through an approach that is primarily household based. From this perspective, the household emerges as a critical site of sociability in this particular cultural and historical context, although conventional scholarly wisdom held otherwise.
Since the French scholar Maurice Agulhon first elaborated the notion of sociabilité in the 1960s, historians have probed the significance of diverse associational forms—from Masonic lodges and clubs to cafés and confraternities—that allegedly lay outside of family structures and thus operated as midwives of modernity.4 Juxtaposed, often implicitly, against these sites for extrafamilial modernities was “southern sociability,” assumed to be a distinguishing feature of kin-based Mediterranean societies where the clan’s ascendancy inhibited associational life, a defining feature of modernity itself. A second related assumption specific to Muslim societies held that households with harims were inaccessible to the outside world and thus excluded from wider networks or social processes transcending the boundaries of kinship.5 As we well know, in Orientalist discourse, “harim” conjured an imagined, eroticized border encircling domestic compounds and its “caged” members, and as such was impervious to the forces of modernity.6
This chapter argues that specific kinds of sociabilities were characteristic of Husaynid political culture and that the women of elite households, together with their kin, friends, and clients, were critical to the system’s smooth functioning. Not focusing solely upon harims moves the discussion forward—away from its current fixation on foreign representations of Muslim women and toward an appreciation of the myriad ways that elite households shaped, and were shaped by, various kinds of exchanges and circuits. A range of social practices implicated creoles and resident Europeans in the “palace-harim complex” and therefore in the capital city’s elite society. Thus, harim visits—highly ritualized social calls excluding most, but not all, men due to norms of sexual segregation—are recast as sites of diplomacy, gift giving, and information gathering. Ties of amity forged by these rituals resulted in handsome bonuses—not least in the form of long-term loans of princely seaside villas to select clients.
For our purposes, sociability is loosely defined as social networks, both homogenous and heterogeneous in nature, generated by households as they entertained guests, negotiated marriages, acted as patrons, conducted business, celebrated festivals, or indulged in therapeutic activities such as hydrotherapy, which also had religious associations.7 These are the major questions: How did diverse kinds of exchanges, mediated by households, structure the exercise of power? How did landlord politics, patronage, and seaside diplomacy implicate non-kin notables in the palace-harim complex? In what ways did ordinary people participate in local cultural and social forms attached to the sea? How did resident Europeans, and increasingly tourists and travelers, engage in local healing practices associated with thermal waters and sea bathing? And what historical processes folded these older practices and spaces into the emerging, quite lucrative business of transnational health travel? Finally, how might a close ethnographic look at different expressions of sociabilities force us to rethink conventional chronological markers or divides, such as precolonial and colonial?
Some of the most ubiquitous symbols employed in Tunisian folk art are inspired by the sea. Taxi-cab drivers hang fish medallions on their windshields as insurance policies to ward off the evil eye and (hopefully) prevent accidents. The small wooden vessels that ply the waters at night in search of an increasingly elusive catch are decorated with brightly colored symbolic motifs. Shopkeepers in the Tunis madina used to do a good business selling Mediterranean talismans—in the form of fish—for home use. And the greatest culinary honor bestowed upon dinner guests is still an extravagant seafood couscous. While disappearing under the onslaught of globalization, with its attendant cultural and economic maladies, this culture struggles to survive. It is most clearly perceived in the seasonal shift from the social life of the cold, wet winters to the tempo of June, when families begin to gather at the beach and the denizens of coastal villages ask neighbors if they have taken their first sea bath yet.
In the nineteenth century, during the torrid summer months, the palace and haute bourgeoisie performed tightly choreographed rites that entailed packing up entire households and relocating to residences on the sea, moving scores, if not hundreds, of people. To staff summer villas, wealthy families transported cohorts of relatives, retainers, hangers-on, and servants (and slaves before abolition). But it was not only the ruling family or court elite who fled to the beach during the summer. Powerful ‘ulama’ families, both Maliki and Hanafi, spent the winter season in palaces clustered in identifiable neighborhoods, or hawmat, in the madina; the areas around nahj al-basha (street of the pasha) or nahj al-hukkam (street of the judges) boasted high concentrations of religious notables. But in summer this all changed; when the first scorching winds burst upon Tunis, families—such as the Bayrams or Ben ‘Achours (or Ibn ‘Ashurs)—fled to villas situated on the shore, particularly to Sidi Bou Sa‘id. (Indeed, today many of these residences, formerly occupied only in summer months, are year-round family dwellings, the case of the Ben ‘Achour clan’s lovely compound in La Marsa.)8
Relocation to the coast allowed these families to forge or preserve bonds with other households, including the all-important matter of marriage alliances, in ways different from customary winter sociability in the capital. This summer princely progress so key to elite identity was reflected in local Islamic marriage contracts and prenuptial agreements designating where the bride would reside during specific seasons. The contract for a bride from Tunis wed to a Qayrawani (i.e., a man from the city of al-Qayrawan in the interior) “stipulated that the husband consent to bring his wife to Tunis every six months and rent a vacation house for her in one of the beach suburbs of the capital.”9
In short, “going to the beach” constituted one of the most visible signs of high social rank, a tradition that persisted well into the colonial period. The use of carriages by elite women was described in 1844: “the Moorish women always travel in close carriages (rather carts on springs, and so low that scarcely a boy of six years old can stand upright in them) generally covered with white canvass.”10 Four decades later, the Austrian traveler Baron Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, who spent considerable time in Tunisia, noted around 1880 that, “in spring, when the hot days begin, I have often seen long rows of hermetically-closed carriages with armed eunuchs on the boxes and guards on horseback, leave town [Tunis] to go to the watering-places or country seats of the neighborhood—these were the harims of the rich, changing domicile for some months.”11
The court’s seasonal mobility might be conceptualized as one symbolic performance of authority taken from a larger repertoire. As mentioned in chapter 1, two major manifestations of “power in motion” existed in Tunisia: The first was the mahalla, which tied populations of mountains, steppes, and oases to the dynasty and capital city through justice, taxation, and often brutal resource expropriation. The second displacement was the movement of the Husaynid family, the government—including scribes and ministers—and urban notables to seaside palaces where they resided for months. Well before the Protectorate, the summer relocation drew along in its wake increasing numbers of Europeans and other foreign residents. While women never accompanied the mahalla (as far as we know), they were intimately involved in the summer holiday royal progress.
Upper-class Muslim women eagerly welcomed the Mediterranean season because it conferred more liberty of movement.12 These months were marked by celebrations of joyful events in the life cycle of the family—births, circumcisions, betrothals, and marriages—often accompanied by performances of Andalusian music. The term khala‘a (pastoral pleasures), a specifically Tunisian glossing of a word that in classical Arabic usage has libertine associations, meant summertime festivities that frequently resounded with music.13 In addition to family gatherings often lasting into the night and visits to saints’ shrines, sea bathing was a favorite pastime for women. The bayt al-bahr translated gendered leisure and healing practices into concrete form. Wooden shelters—or, in the case of the aristocratic or princely families, splendid marble and stone structures—set into the water with trapdoors in the middle over the sea permitted women to bathe unseen. Some structures, such as Dar Mohsen in Sidi Bou Sa‘id, boasted two stories with a kitchen, library, and other amenities. Dar Agha, a nineteenth-century summer palace in a neighborhood of Carthage, eventually boasted several wooden sea houses; the extended family retreated to the pavilions to spend the day together enjoying sea baths or sailed across the Bay of Tunis in skiffs for the thermal waters at Korbous.14 The French artist Charles Lallemand painted the lovely colored image in 1890 of the bathing house in La Marsa now converted into a tourist restaurant: “The women of La Marsa and Sidi Bou Sa‘id take sea baths here far from inquiring eyes. They arrived in carriages with the shades pulled down. In the middle of the building is a swimming pool through which the sea water enters freely. The princesses of the bey’s family have a similar bathing house not far away from this one.”15
Ordinary Tunisians, both Muslim and Jewish, also practiced sea bathing and hydrotherapy or, in the desert oases, visited hot springs for healing a range of diseases, including infertility. In many cases, they frequented the same thermal stations as had the Romans. At La Goulette, women who could not afford seaside pavilions bathed at night on the sandy beach fully dressed in light apparel. The state decreed some spa towns, such as Kelibia, to be tax-free zones where onerous impositions on exchanges of goods and services, the mahsulat, did not apply, attracting sellers and buyers from all over.16 Therefore local and regional trade were linked to the business that water healing represented.
The three most ancient and important thermal stations in the Tunis region were Hammam Lif (or Hammam al-Nif), eleven miles from the capital; Korbous, thirty-four miles away; and Nabeul, on the eastern flank of the Cap Bon. However, distance was calculated differently than over land, since many cure seekers used small boats to reach hydrotherapy spots. Hammam Lif sits at the foot of Bu Qarnayn, or the two-horned mountain. Frequented since Punic times, the small village of Naro, as the Carthaginians called it, was renamed Aquae Persianae by the Romans. In the eighteenth century, ‘Ali Pasha, bey of Tunis, constructed a princely pavilion at Hammam Lif, which subsequently boasted a bathing pool and a caravansary for merchants and caravans traveling across the Maghrib as well as for hydrotherapy seekers; once again trade was combined with water cures. In 1756, a member of the Bayram family, Muhammad ibn Hassin, undertook a scientific study of Tunisia’s different thermal stations, classifying them according to their efficacy in healing.17
Beginning in 1826, Husayn Bey expanded the Hammam Lif palace and facilities in order to take cures for extended periods of time with the court in attendance. Completed several years later, the new ensemble included two-storey buildings, a monumental entrance, and gardens with a kiosk.18 Husayn Bey paid dearly for his thermal treatment, since early in 1829, while he was absent, some of his courtiers in Tunis robbed the state treasury and later that same year fomented a cabal to overthrow him. By the mid-nineteenth century, Hammam Lif boasted the beylical palace, an array of outbuildings, and “a grand bathing establishment situated near the Roman baths.”19 Both Tunisian and European cure seekers from the capital city brought along servants as well as provisions and rented out small houses or rooms in the neighborhood from the locals, often for extended periods of time.20 After his first stroke, Ahmad Bey spent much of his time residing in the Hammam Lif palace that belonged to a court favorite, Mustafa Sahib al-Tabi‘, or in his own palace in La Goulette, presumably taking the waters to speed recovery.21 The same bey also built another palace in La Marsa—which still exists today, although in a state of advanced ruin—and the bathing pavilion Qubbat al-Hawa’.22 This palace had a separate wing for the princesses, who could reach the bathing house from their private quarters in only minutes by carriage. While the architectural origins for the bayt al-bahr remain unknown, the La Marsa palace’s architecture is emblematic of the decorative, spatial, and structural features that marked the period, betraying an aesthetic sensibility composed of diverse cultural elements.
Located on the western edge of the Cap Bon, Korbous, or Aquae Calidae Carpitanae, had been the spa of choice for wealthy Romans from Carthage because its sulphur springs, averaging between 120 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, were believed highly efficacious. By the early nineteenth century, Korbous was a place of no great importance because it could only be reached with difficulty by land. Local people served as guides along the winding trails leading to the thermal waters and made a living by renting rooms to temporary visitors. Then Ahmad Bey constructed a palace bathing complex that provoked a moderate boom in the village’s fortunes as the ruler’s presence brought improvements in road transportation, making the springs more accessible. Tunisians and resident Europeans employed the waters of Korbous to treat rheumatism, arthritis, dermatitis, and digestive problems. While documentation on health seekers in the precolonial period is scarce, the well-known poet from Tunis, al-Baji al-Mas‘udi (1810–1880), sought a cure there, apparently staying for an extended period of time, which moved him to compose nostalgic verses lauding the capital city while in “exile” only a few miles away.23
But the sacred was never far removed from health-seeking behavior and social praxis. As was true of most springs in North Africa, the waters of Korbous enjoyed the protection of a renowned saint, Sidi Abu ‘Ammara, whose zawiya (tomb-shrine) was the object of veneration and pilgrimage; women in particular sought the saint’s blessings for infertility. While the tombs of the saintly lineage remain in Korbous, today the village serves a very restricted clientele of local cure seekers and the beylical palace is in sad disarray. Set on a hill overlooking the town with a splendid view of the Gulf of Tunis, the zawiya’s present tattered condition hints at serious erosion in spiritual reputation.
The third main hydrotherapy station is Nabeul, the most distant from the capital. While documentation on precolonial practices is not abundant, evidence from the early Protectorate demonstrates the persistence of older patterns of leisure. In his 1892 report to Justin Massicault, the French resident general (1886–1892), Louis Créput, an official with the Contrôle Civil de Nabeul, noted that “the climate of Nabeul is so temperate and so mild that the town serves as a summer resort for Jewish and Muslim families from elsewhere who come to take the waters. The trip between the town and the sea is done via a taxi service which has discount prices of 15 centimes per person. Several outdoor public establishments—both Jewish and Muslim—serve drinks and confer upon the beach an animated atmosphere that frequently lasts into the night.”24
In contrast to the sociospatial organization that colonial officials and resort promoters later imposed upon thermal spas like Korbous or Nabeul, hammam signified a number of interrelated things in the cultural vocabulary of the time. It could mean a steam bath, a bathing pool, a thermal spa, or simply a watering place. Weekly visits to public baths constituted religious duties that were tied to Islamic and Jewish purity and pollution taboos and were required for bodily health, spiritual well-being, and morality. But visiting urban bathhouses was also a social ritual, as were sea bathing and taking thermal waters. Thus the religious and social—and the purified and political—were enmeshed in complex ways. In addition, the fact that Europeans and others rented rooms or cottages from the local inhabitants of thermal sites, such as Hammam Lif and Korbous, indicates that a form of health tourism existed in Tunisia well before colonialism. The rentals of simple abodes near springs or the sea paralleled the exchanges of sumptuous pleasure properties among elites, suggesting that thermal stations represented places where religion or social class did not prevent seasonal mixing, as demonstrated by Créput’s 1892 report on Nabeul.
To appreciate the role played by seasonality in shaping relations between the Husaynid family, the court, and creole or foreign notables, we need to return to the three most important spatial coordinates in the capital city region: first, Tunis proper; second, the Mediterranean villages; and third, the small town and palace complex of Bardo.25 At the Bardo, European consuls made formal visits in the ruler’s audience chamber; but the presence of the mahkama, or hall of justice, which attracted hordes of subjects and supplicants, made getting the bey’s undivided attention somewhat daunting.26 Thus, a geographical element that heightened the political importance of summer residence was the fact that it was easier to gain access to, and coax favors from, rulers or palace retainers in the cozy atmosphere of the Mediterranean suburbs than during the winter court season.
What emerges from this mapping exercise are the residential strategies pursued by Europeans, who duplicated the summer rituals of the court and Tunis elites by clustering in close proximity to, or frequently in, villas owned by the palace. In 1831, Sir Thomas Reade, the British consul general, wrote, “The house which I reside in at present is in the country, in the midst of those occupied in the Hot months and in some instances even in the winter by the other consuls, and is only one hour and one half from the Bey’s palace, and not more than half the distance that Tunis is from the anchorage, which is certainly a great advantage.”27 A fellow Englishman, Sir Grenville Temple, who called upon the Reade family in their “spacious summer palace” in 1833, noted that their villa was “surrounded by a number of other country seats inhabited by the first Moorish families, or by European consuls; all these houses are connected with pretty and shady gardens.”28 Another visitor to the Reade household in the 1840s observed that “when Hussain Bey died 1835, he loved the English and heaped privileges upon them. The royal palace of the Abdellia [sic], situated in La Marsa . . . was ceded to Sir Thomas Reade as a country residence, for a moderate rent. . . . Once the bey honored Reade by dining with him at the Abdellia, an honor never before nor since accorded any European consul.”29 Other diplomats voiced identical sentiments about the desirability of summer lodgings in proximity to Husaynid households, since these were strategically situated for wheeling and dealing.
The dynasty held in one form or another much of the beachfront real estate, which was graced by magnificent palaces, villas, and pavilions ornamented with fountains, patios, and luxuriant gardens of bougainvillea, jasmine, and palmiers. The assortment of palaces resulted in part from a widely held local belief that, if a ruler died in a particular residence, it would bring misfortune upon his successor to inhabit the same space, which had become mshuma (dishonored).30 With palaces under continual construction, there were plenty to spare, so the beys or princes leased or more often simply loaned for extended periods the most elegant of these palaces to the most powerful Europeans. A similar practice, though under somewhat different circumstances, was already noted in the eighteenth century: rulers attempted to persuade foreign diplomats or military officers with needed skills to accept positions at court by offering tempting inducements. In 1793, Hammuda Bey proposed to take the French consul, Devioze, who had resided in Tunis some twenty years, under his “special protection [garde] and provide a residence either in my palace or in one of my seaside villas [maisons de plaisance].”31
Long- or short-term loans of palatial residences greased the wheels of diplomacy and may have, in at least one instance, averted military hostilities. Remember the Exmouth expedition that anchored off La Goulette in 1816 just after Caroline, Princess of Wales, and her Italian tutor had arrived for their tour of classical sites? In what can only be characterized as hospitality under fire, Muhammad Bey “feted [the princess] in accordance with her rank . . . even appointing his son to accompany her on visits around the country.”32 The ruler housed Caroline and her retinue at the Dar al-Bey in the madina, where a beautiful palace reserved for the most distinguished visitors had been decorated specifically for the royal visitors. Indeed, the Princess of Wales enjoyed a magnificent luncheon with the women of the bey’s harim, which she found greatly amusing. Dignitaries such as the Duc de Montpensier, the Prince de Joinville, and the Duc d’Aumale, who made official visits between 1845 and 1846, were housed in the same palace as Caroline.33 Indeed, even today, the most magnificent ambassadorial accommodations by far is the French residence La Camilla, a former beylical palace in La Marsa with a superb sea view that was “loaned” to France before 1881.
This gifting of housing was a shrewd policy because it created ties of indebtedness and social obligation; the beys were, in effect, landlords to the Europeans. Decades later as the Protectorate was being imposed, a visitor to the Husaynid court observed that, “besides the above-named palaces, there are in Tunis and its environs several others of colossal dimensions and great beauty. But on inquiry they turn out to be the palaces of former beys, given by their successors to the foreign consuls or to Tunisian favourites.”34 And, as seen in the preceding chapter, the Husaynids employed an identical strategy for Catholic missionaries from the 1840s on, providing them with preexisting buildings for schools and clinics. As was true for diplomats and diplomacy, the summer months in Mediterranean villages afforded opportunities to carry on theological debates, sort of interfaith dialogues. Throughout his years in Tunisia, Abbé François Bourgade “maintained amicable relations with the ‘ulama’ and highly placed officials from the bey’s court at their villages in La Marsa and Sidi Bou Sa‘id,” where he claimed to have participated in “theological discussions of which educated Muslims are so fond.”35 However, hospitality was not one-sided. From Ahmad Bey’s reign on, rulers and members of their entourage sometimes attended balls and other grand occasions organized by European associates. When the new French consulate located outside city walls was inaugurated with great pomp in December 1861, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey and the heir apparent took part in the festivities hosted by the French consul, Léon Roches.36 The practice of landlord diplomacy and the bestowal of high-end housing, an established Husaynid strategy for managing bigger, meaner foreign states and statesmen, persisted after 1881.
With improvements in the roads linking the capital with coastal suburbs, more Europeans acquired seaside residences. Far from the heat and hubbub of Tunis proper, consular families, members of court, and government officials routinely met. Combining diplomacy with entertaining in a manner reminiscent of tony spas, like Vichy, these gatherings functioned as informal salons.37 In her letters, Sir Richard Wood’s wife Christina portrays the summer season during the 1860s as a moment for intense socializing, which resulted in the circulation of critical information. In July 1861, she “dined at Marsa with the Raffos on Sunday,” obtaining insider news from Countess Raffo, whose husband was among the highest officials in the government. The latest political gossip from Europe and the Ottoman Empire, diplomatic postings, and the intimate doings of Tunis elites were reported over sumptuous dinners.38 Balls, costume parties, and musical evenings served as antidotes to the ennui of daily life.39
As might be expected in a semienclosed social universe, personal rivalries, petty bickering, and scandalous behavior—or accusations of such—marked relationships and may have influenced diplomacy as well. The best documented case in the genre of liaisons dangereuses was the salon overseen during the 1860s and 1870s by Madame Luigia Traverso Mussalli, the wife of Elias Mussalli and alleged mistress to two French consuls, Léon Roches (in post from 1855 to 1863) and Théodore Roustan (in post from 1874 to 1882). Emblematic of Euro-Tunisian society, Mussalli and his purportedly wayward wife merit a digression. As discussed in chapter 2, Mussalli, from a Syrian Christian family, had served Egyptian rulers before his engagement as a valued interpreter to Ahmad Bey from 1847 on, a position that soon catapulted him into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mussalli profited handsomely from his post by embezzling state funds until his dismissal in 1872. But his office was restored after his wife, Luigia, intervened on her cuckolded husband’s behalf with her lover, Roustan, who in turn importuned Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey’s personal physician, Francisco Mascaro, who had the ruler’s ear—and so the lines of patronage, intrigue, and behind-the-scenes lobbying went.40 Regarded as a great beauty, Luigia, the daughter of a Genoese merchant, was born in Tunis in 1835; her household served as a political club for one of two principal factions in the capital, the pro-French party whose ranks included numerous Italians loyal to France. Luigia presided over meetings, discussions, and soirées and appeared in public with Roustan at official diplomatic functions, apparently with her husband’s assent or studied indifference.41 Discussed in Luigia’s salon were ways of achieving France’s imperial designs on Tunisia through anti-Italian strategies that included marginalizing Italian Catholic missionaries.42
In addition to gossipy dinners, other attractions and distractions abounded, although the pursuit of leisure was deeply gendered as well as subject to class. Men from consular or mercantile families went on shooting parties, sometimes with members of the court, in marshlands near the shore rich in fowl and game. The British diplomat John Gibson, who caught malaria while on one such hunting expedition—from which he expired in 1833—was emblematic of upper-class male leisure-time activities: “no person entered more completely into all the Enjoyments or amusements this country affords than he did during the seven years that he lived here; he kept a large stud of horses, three carriages, innumerable dogs, and followed all the field sports with peculiar ardor.”43 At times, European women rode horseback in the countryside around Tunis; Princess Caroline, arguably the first modern female tourist in North Africa, mounted on horseback during her 1816 visit. And as seen in chapter 4, frequenting popular cafés and taverns was another gendered pastime beloved of those of modest social rank, while the more respectable establishments, such as Parisian-type hotels and dining rooms springing up near the Sea Gate, served as spaces of conviviality for the well-heeled.
How did gender shape social life for women? As discussed in chapter 3, resident European women regularly called upon the Husaynid women at the Bardo or summer palaces. However, entertaining visitors constituted one social duty among a constellation of obligations incumbent upon the dynasty’s women. Among the most essential functions were charity and patronage.44 When Husayn Bey’s favorite wife, Lalla Fatima, died tragically in 1827 after childbirth, she was mourned by all classes of people in the regency, including foreigners and, above all, the poor upon whom she had showered gifts. A eulogy for Baya Fatima reveals that women of beylical households were taught the art of protocol so important to state functions. In addition to devoting herself to benevolent work, Baya Fatima knew the intricate ranking system for the city’s notables and involved herself directly in the socially critical matter of banquets (walima).45 Wealthy women invested in land, real estate, or commercial enterprises, such as urban coffee-houses, so entrepreneurial pursuits occupied their time, as did family, household, and religious duties. But little is known with certainty about the inner workings of the palace or the daily lives of harim women. Episodic panegyrics for Husaynid women are scattered throughout Bin Diyaf’s chronicle, for example, Ahmad Bey’s sister is briefly described as “the chaste, revered Lady Fatuma” but that is all.46
Let’s return to Mme. Berner’s narrative of 1835 (see chapter 3), the year she and a bevy of friends called upon the princesses at the Bardo palace. Despite the obvious problems inherent in records of harim socializing, this kind of evidence offers a rich, ethnographic view of the material aspects of life in princely residences—details of clothing, dress, food, furniture, and furnishings—which supply clues about taste, aesthetics, and the critical matter of gift giving. In addition, the protocols and cultural norms governing visiting emerge from these accounts. Of course, standard Orientalist tropes are invoked, the notion of the “caged ladies” first and foremost. Another leitmotif is the corpulence of upper-class women, a cultural commentary found in French accounts of “Eastern” women during the 1798 Egyptian occupation, as in most European travel literature of the period.47
Upon arrival at the Bardo, Mme. Berner’s cohort of ladies was first greeted by one of the Husayn Bey’s chief ministers who conducted them as far as the harim’s second interior court, where he took leave. In Berner’s words, “The wife of the Bey, richly but not tastefully dressed, sat opposite to us on the Ottoman, but rose on our entrance and requested us to take places near her, with the words, ‘May your entrance be blessed and may you remain as long as it pleases you.’ ” The marriage of the bey’s second daughter to a high-ranking court official was then being celebrated and the European ladies were invited to attend some of the weeklong festivities. According to Mme. Berner, “The constant entertainment consisted again only of sweetmeats and pastry, coffee, chocolate, lemonade but the Bey was this time far more talkative, and played the host in the most affable manner—saying frequently that we were here in our own house, and might do whatever we pleased. He himself took the light, to show us the bridal bed, which was of white satin, tastefully embroidered with gold.”48
Of note is something that Berner mentions in passing—that the ruler was “this time far more talkative,” which indicates that she had entered into conversation with Husayn Bey in the course of an earlier visit, a likely occurrence since her husband had served for years as Danish consul—until his untimely death incurred while sea bathing. Thus, other social calls must have been paid by resident European women to Husaynid harims but were not recorded. Moreover, that these accounts were not published is significant; it suggests that palace visits were seen at the time, by the social actors involved, as mundane, not worthy of committing to print. This may lend more credence to these earlier as opposed to later narratives composed with European audiences, avid for titillating details of the Orient, in mind.
Around the same time, Lady Temple, who had taken residence with her husband in Tunis, was invited to the Bardo in 1833, where she was presented to “her Highness the Lillah Kabira [the ruler’s chief wife] in a patio, adorned in the usual oriental style with fountains.”
The Lillah herself, though much larger than we should in Europe consider becoming, was however amongst the least of the set. She was not pretty, but the expression of her face was most agreeable and good-humoured, and I felt quite sorry for her when I heard shortly afterward that she had been put aside by the Bey to make way for a young girl of thirteen. The Lillah asked if I had no children, when hearing that I had a little boy, inquired why I had not brought him and seemed really sorry. When we had finished our luscious repast, she ordered all the remaining cakes to be put into a basket and desired that I would take them for my child. She had her own little boy of about two years old in her arms.49
These visits were followed with another social call sometime in 1844 by the women and children from Sir Thomas Reade’s family, including a Miss Smith, probably the governess, who provided the account of their visit. This time, however, the European ladies went to the summer palace in La Marsa, belonging to the heir apparent, Sidi Muhammad, whose harim was guarded by black eunuchs often supplied from Egypt.
They [the princesses] generally reside at the Bardo, except two or three months in the summer when Sidi Mohammed takes his family to his country-house, situated near the sea at Marsa, from whence they have beautiful views of the sea, the coast, Cape Bon, the isle of Zembra, etc., for although the ladies’ windows or jalousies are so constructed, that it is impossible for them to be seen by people outside, yet they can themselves see from within very tolerably all that passes. . . . It was at this marine villa that we saw the Lillah [chief wife]. . . . We entered by a great arched door . . . into a square courtyard, in which we were pleased with the sight of peacocks, turkeys, Barbary doves and other birds. . . . We entered a marble patio, or upper court open to both the serene face of the dark court blue heavens, in which played refreshingly two or three marble fountains, the noise of the falling water gracefully enchanting the ear, and the scattered spray diffusing a delightful coolness through the place. When the heat is very great this place is covered with an awning of silk and other stuff. From an apartment opposite to this window, at the door of which hung a curtain, the Lillah met us, and, kissing us on each cheek, ushered us into the room, where we found several ladies, relatives and visitors sitting in the Oriental fashion, on a couch or divan, placed around the room, and its only furniture. . . . All the Lillahs behaved in a quite lady-like manner, a sister of Sidi Mohammed particularly so, although of course they were very inquisitive, examining our dresses and asking us a thousand questions, more particularly on the article of marriage.50
On this occasion, the European and Tunisian women ventured outside where tents were pitched near the beach so that they could promenade together, “passing through the olive groves and vineyards to the seaside.” During warm summer evenings, palace women were at liberty to walk in the gardens “when everybody [was] sent out of the way, their black guards in the meanwhile surrounding the walks to prevent any person approaching.”51
Miss Smith’s description of the chief wife’s private apartment contains invaluable descriptions of materiality, which can be verified by comparing her account with those of other visitors. According to Smith,
The Lillah … then arose inviting us to go up stairs into her gallery, which we found was a very long narrow room paved with marble and splendidly furnished. One side was formed of a continuation of latticed windows with a divan, or ottoman, running the whole length of the apartment, on the other side was a recess; the walls were partly covered with a few pictures, mirrors and several clocks, for the Moors are fond of having a great number of clocks and watches hanging up together; there were also marble tables, on which were thickly strewn rich ornaments and other fantastic nicknackery; besides there were European sofas and chairs, chandeliers and lamps, for at most of the respectable Moorish houses as also at the Bardo, European furniture is now fashionable, and will undoubtedly continue so.52
Thus, even before the mid-nineteenth century, the ruling family and state elites partially furnished their palaces in Louis XVI style—much to the disappointment of first-time callers who, needless to say, eagerly anticipated the exotic or outlandish. And costly presents from European monarchs—gilt mirrors, oil paintings, gold watches, bejeweled clocks, rich textiles—graced interior apartments, including the women’s quarters. As James Richardson noted after visiting Ahmad Bey’s private apartments in 1844,
In the new suites of rooms added to the Bardo, particularly those belonging to his highness, the Bey has followed as much as possible European taste and imitated the Royal apartments of European sovereigns. One spacious hall, commonly called the Saloon, is especially deserving of notice being superbly garnished with sofas, chairs, tables, curtains, looking-glasses, and pictures, oil-paintings and prints in immense profusion…. A number of the portraits of foreign princes hang up in these state-rooms. There is also a very good likeness of the Bey himself drawn by Mr. Ferriere, British vice-consul. The Bey’s bedroom—in which there is a regular European bed and bedstand—is also adorned with various portraits, and amongst the rest there is a portrait of Sir Thomas Reade, one of the Bey’s principle supporters and counselor in any difficulties with foreign governments which arise.53
These were not mere decoration since their display translated into concrete expression the strength of diplomatic amities between the Husaynids and other powers from the early years of the century.54
In 1825, Sidi Mahmud Kahiya, who had represented Husayn Bey in Paris during Charles X’s coronation, returned to Tunis on a French frigate bearing gifts from the new monarch: “French manufactures in silk, brocade, broad clothes, cashmere, cambric, porcelain, besides some vases and plateaux in silver gilt and eight superb lace dresses for the ladies of the Harem.”55 But rare commodities flowed both ways. When Sidi Mahmud had first arrived in France, he brought coffers and cages overflowing with gifts, among them horses, lions, ostriches, gazelles, racing camels, perfume essences, tiger and lion skins, silk textiles, and a saddle richly ornamented in gold. Included in diplomatic exchanges of pricey material objects were female attire, some intended for the Husaynid princesses—the lace dresses referred to above—and others for the queen of France. Among the gifts sent in 1825 to the French king was “a Moorish costume” made from silk and gold material and worn by elite Tunisian women. Court attendants in Paris were charmed but admitted that “it is difficult to imagine the august Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France … dressed in pants ornamented with silk and gold.”56 (The pants, or culottes, were the sirwal worn by Tunisian women under tunics.)
Gendered gift giving reinforced ties of friendship between heads of state and, in one case in 1828, defused a diplomatic crisis over the use of carriages in Tunis. In this period, only the Husaynid ruler enjoyed the right of traveling about in a four-wheeled carriage, a visible sign of sovereignty. When Sir Thomas Reade imported a four-wheeler in a deliberate challenge to older protocol, the stage was set for a confrontation. Husayn Bey saved face and avoided a showdown by decreeing that use of the contentious vehicle was a mark of favor bestowed upon Lady Reade, an act of munificence. Quick to take umbrage at his rival’s success, the French consul, de Lesseps, immediately demanded the right to this kind of conveyance. Husayn Bey soothingly informed him that as soon as Lady de Lesseps arrived, she would be allowed to drive about in a wheeled carriage as well.57
While seaside socializing was part of the normal summer routine for palace women and their intimates, the Husaynid court also organized a well-oiled and orchestrated performance of harim tours crafted for important visitors from across the sea. (As seen in chapter 3, the Bardo palace employed an unnamed Italian woman to act as guide and interpreter for female callers during the 1830s and 1840s.) Lady Herbert’s 1871 tour, however, more or less constituted palace or harim hopping, as she visited princesses or notables, such as the Bin ‘Ayyad, at their residences—five or six palace households—from the Bardo to the Mediterranean suburbs. At each stop, hospitality was lavished upon Lady Herbert and the British consul’s wife, Christina Wood, who conducted the tour since she was a close friend of Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey’s female relatives and spoke some Tunisian Arabic. Correspondence between women in this milieu demonstrates true affection. A letter sent in 1860 by Camille Roches, wife of the French consul, to one of the bey’s wives reveals strong emotional attachments. Abruptly called back to France due to a family tragedy, Mme. Roches wrote from Bordeaux: “Dear Princess: the hastiness of my departure from Tunis prevented me from calling to bid you farewell in the manner that I would have desired… my sorrow is rendered less bitter because of the sympathy of friends … I thank you profoundly.”58
Being male did not necessarily exclude the curious from the harim’s sacrosanct space. When Baron von Hesse-Wartegg was received at the Bardo in the summer of 1881, he too was ushered into the private women’s quarters to admire the beautifully wrought decor—all of the ladies were then absent at the beach palaces. Allowing foreign dignitaries into the women’s apartments may have been a way of bestowing particular favor.59 When Ahmad Bey visited France in 1846, he had marveled at the wonders of the Versailles palace and had been admitted into the domestic intimacy of the king’s family apartments—why wouldn’t the Husaynids return the compliment and display the luxuries of their private dwellings, observing, of course, the dictates of gender segregation?60
As a system, ritualized visiting had implicitly political dimensions. For, as historians of British India have demonstrated, elite households and harims represented critical funds of insider information because of the large number of servants and retainers, the case in European courts as well.61 In 1835 the British consul alleged that several mamluks “in the bey’s seraglio” were being secretly paid by the French government to pass along classified rumors about what transpired in the heart of the palace.62 Moreover, since the ruling bey’s mother was the most powerful female figure in the Husaynid household, establishing friendships with her could result in considerable advantage—recall that Ahmad Bey regularly consulted his mother. The 1844 visit to the heir to the throne’s harim at the seashore was more than a casual event; Miss Smith stated that “we promised to give them [i.e., consular officials] a faithful report of all that we saw and heard.” Her concluding remark says it all: “I am sorry that my account of the harem of Sidi Mohammed is so uninteresting, but I have made the best I could of the few incidents.”63 Palace socializing facilitated covert intelligence gathering. Hesse-Wartegg admitted to collecting information on Husaynid households by interrogating women living in Tunis: “Though I cannot boast of having penetrated during my stay in Tunis into a harem while it was inhabited by its tenants, I was fortunate enough to hear everything worth knowing from European ladies who, by a long residence in Tunis, as well as through their intimate relations with the established feminine world, were better entitled than anybody else to give me the necessary particulars.”64
But intelligence gathering flowed in both directions. If the beys opened up their harims to visitors, who subsequently passed along what they had seen and heard, the fact that the beylical family lodged foreigners for long periods of time in upscale housing rewarded the ruling class with information about what their “tenants” were up to. Moreover, many Europeans engaged local servants, Tunisian subjects or Maltese expatriates, who must have relished, and profited from, their position as gossip brokers.
As tourism to French Algeria greatly expanded, precolonial Tunisia was added to the list of attractions on the circuit for bourgeois travelers. Since she enjoyed uncommon access to domestic residences during her 1871 tour, Lady Herbert inventoried the rental housing market in Tunis for upper-class associates back in London who were considering “taking houses there for the winter.” Well-traveled—by this time she had visited Egypt and Palestine—and well-heeled, Lady Herbert knew a prime tourist spot when she saw it:
Between this spot [Carthage] and Goletta were a number of villas and country houses, or rather sea-side watering-places of the Bey’s family or his ministers; and I can conceive no more enjoyable spot in the summer-time that this sea-shore with its big shady rocks, beautiful sands, lovely shells, and glorious blue sky…. Mrs. Wood told me that it was her children’s greatest delight to come here for the day from their country house at Marsa which is only a few miles off, and I did not wonder at their taste.65
Lady Herbert had not only come to hobnob with princesses; her trip was motivated by the search for relief from rheumatism. “Being anxious to judge for myself as to this country and especially to test the efficacy of certain warm springs, which had been strongly recommended to me by a Paris doctor for rheumatism, I started last January [1871] with my eldest daughter.”66 That Lady Herbert ventured across the sea to take thermal waters on the recommendation of a French physician indicates that aristocratic grand tours of the Mediterranean were on the cusp of becoming middle-class health tourism.
The cult of seaside holidays, a largely English social and cultural invention, merged with the growing awareness of the benefits of salt or mineral waters by the European, particularly German, scientific world in the very late eighteenth century.67 Malta became popular among English health seekers when the Dowager Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, journeyed to the island to spend the winter of 1836 there, “with decided advantage to her physical condition.”68 As beach resorts and bathing caught on among European middle classes during the nineteenth century, regulations governing behavior mushroomed across the Mediterranean world and Europe. For example, the British-controlled Ionian Islands enacted statutes in 1836 regulating hours and places of public bathing. Some provisions were inspired by safety concerns but the final clause aimed at public morality—“bathing by men is forbidden anytime that women are present”—which reflected the situation in Great Britain at the time, where bathing was also sexually segregated by law.69 In France, sea bathing became the rage by the 1860s, driven by the social imperative of summer holidays away from Paris that turned quiet villages on the Normandy coast, such as Deauville and Trouville, into elegant watering spots.
Sea bathing was a well-established practice among creoles and resident Europeans, as it was for Tunisians. During his 1835 stay, Sir Grenville Temple toured Sidi Bou Sa‘id, where he found “many good houses, to which the Moors resort in summer for the advantages of sea bathing. The Bey has also a palace here.”70 In 1834, the English vice-consul, William Carleton, stated that he frequently went to La Marsa beach to bathe and had been so doing for years.71 Expanded immigrant settlement after the 1830s transformed small, sleepy suburbs into bustling towns. When Sister Emilie de Vialar returned to Tunisia in 1843, she went to La Marsa to visit her order’s house and school where a conflict over sea bathing had erupted. Some sisters were scandalized by the fact that the town’s inhabitants took sea baths, while other sisters wanted to partake of the healing waters, which raised the issue of modesty. Vialar resolved the problem by declaring that bathing could only take place in “a completely enclosed tent in the form of a pavilion that reached all the way to the water’s edge which [the sisters] should only use when La Marsa’s bathers were absent.”72 The school’s female pupils must have been allowed to swim, since later a member of the order lost her life attempting to save a drowning girl. Vialar’s solution to the issue of decorum calls to mind the princesses’ bathing houses set right in the water, although on a much less glorious scale.
In July 1858, Charles Cubisol, French vice-consul in La Goulette, investigated disagreements over proper beach comportment in a report called “Établissement des bains de mer sur la plage” (Bathing Establishments on the Beach). Important here is that the port, whose population included thousands of “Europeans, Moors, Maltese or Jews, of which many were fishermen or boatmen,” was rapidly being peopled by indigent Mediterranean islanders.73 As we have seen, immigration partially transformed the older system of aligning residential neighborhoods with religious affiliation or legal jurisdiction. As occurred in Tunis when the older coffeehouse merged with the tavern, creating a novel social space where forms of leisure and sociability became a source of discord because codes of conduct had yet to be worked out, so too at the beach. After midcentury, the question of appropriate use of these spaces increasingly prompted conflict—in one case over different ways of dressing and behaving at the beach while bathing.
In the “La Goulette affair,” some bathers had placed tents—the precursor to the bathing machine—on the sand in such a way as to impede others from direct access to the water, provoking alarm over privacy. (A popular device first developed in late eighteenth-century England, the bathing machine was a covered wooden cart in which bathers changed into beach attire without offending public morals. The cart was then hauled down to the water’s edge, where sexually segregated bathing for health purposes took place.) Muhammad Bey had bequeathed this beach property to La Goulette’s mainly foreign inhabitants, and the port’s governor, Khayr al-Din, was called upon to mediate. In his letter to the feuding bathers, Khayr al-Din stipulated that individuals could not encroach upon places designated as public in accordance with the recognized principle of “communal rights of access.” What is fascinating about this seemingly trivial matter is that, while Tunisians also bathed there, it appears none were involved in the dispute. In effect, the Husaynid state, through Khayr al-Din’s arbitration, spelled out beach-use regulations for Europeans, who held different notions of decency, as well as about what constituted public and private spaces.74
As was true in Europe at the time, those at the top of the social pyramid sought water therapies in more exclusive circumstances than public beaches—from the privacy of villas. Christina Wood’s 1861 letters to her husband, Richard, while he was on mission in Syria, demonstrate the extent to which Tunisian and Europeans of the same class socialized together, maintaining, of course, gender segregation. In the summer of 1861, Mrs. Wood wrote that “we have been all as well as possible … profiting by the baths.” A few days later she states, “We are all quite flourishing since we are installed here. The children are very much improved and live in the open air…. Baby is quite well and lively again, she takes her salt water baths . . . I go every morning [to the beach] but have only taken a few baths.”75 Christina provided details on dinner parties and visits with Tunisian and European neighbors, including the Husaynid princesses. The seaside residence that the Woods occupied in the summer months belonged to the ruling family but had been put at their disposition.
The increased time at the beach had repercussions in the realm of justice. As consuls dallied for longer periods at summer villas, they were less involved in daily administrative minutiae. Upon his arrival from Damascus in 1856, Wood expanded the consular staff, and presumably its reach into the lives of protégés, but paradoxically created more distance between the consul and his most numerous charges, the Maltese. Somewhat of an operator, Wood cajoled the bey into paying—out of the ruler’s own pocket—for a new wing of the consul’s country estate in La Marsa, then under construction, when funds were predictably not forthcoming from London. This did not go unnoticed by Anglo-Maltese protégés, if the vitriolic tract written in 1868 by the Maltese physician Dr. Luigi Demech is credible: “[Wood] spends a portion of the year in the enjoyment of the amenities of his country-house at the Marsa, a gift due to the munificence of his friend, the Bey. That delightful country-house, about 15 miles distant from town, keeps him away for six months from this office, in which he appears but once a week, and for a few hours in order to transact some business with the Bey, whose minister and advocate he has become.”76 While Demech’s denunciations of Wood should be interpreted with caution, prolonged absences from Tunis must have compromised the consul’s ability to stay attuned to the needs, activities, and whereabouts of protégés, a task left to subalterns.
In addition to saltwater baths, thermal cures were popular, especially at the Hammam Lif springs readily accessible by rowboats. Again in 1861, Christina Wood described one typical outing in a skiff with the Cubisol family, including “all the children.” When the party returned home, news of their excursion reached Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey, then in his nearby residence. The ruler sent a note to the Wood family, which Christina recorded as saying “that the next time [we go to Hammam Lif] we must go in his boat.”77 The bey also offered the use of his carriages and horses for transport to the La Marsa beach and at the same time offered the wife of a French dignitary a fine diamond necklace. In the same period, the Swiss humanitarian and founder of the Red Cross, Henri Dunant, took the waters at Hammam Lif, which “fortified the nervous system” and was particularly beneficial for stomach illnesses as well as for “melancholy, hypochondria, heart palpitations, sciatica, paralysis, gall stones, skin problems, and weakness of the spine.”78 Tunisians and Europeans apparently had great faith in Hammam Lif, since prodigious cures were attributed to its springs. By 1882, a French national operated a bains de mer at Hammam Lif, although the record does not indicate if he was only the manager or the proprietor nor does it tell us whether he acquired the sea-bathing establishment by virtue of ties to the palace or the French consulate or both.79
Finally, Mrs. Wood commented to her absent husband upon the kinds of intimate social exchanges possible during the summer months: “Our neighbors, the Caid’s [qa’id] family are too kind and good-natured and very quite good people…. Si Hussein called to see me today and left me a letter to enclose for you. He really is a great friend of yours and a first-rate fellow worked to death in his new office, he complains that he has not a moment for exercise.” Mrs. Wood reported that she had “made great friends with the ladies [of the qa’id’s family] and am making great progress in Arabic,” which the “ladies” were teaching her.80 This represents a nice reversal of the conventional nineteenth-century practice of foreign governesses teaching European languages to the members of elite Ottoman households.81
Despite its relative inaccessibility, Korbous too became increasingly attractive for hydrotherapy. From the 1820s, if not earlier, members of the diplomatic and creole community utilized its hot mineral waters for medicinal purposes, and locals had always looked to the site for physical and spiritual healing. Louis Gaspary, a member of the large Gaspary clan in La Goulette, noted in April 1824 that “my mother-in-law is counting on going to Korbous at the beginning of May and she would be very happy if Madame Guys [the French consul’s wife] would honor her by going there with her.” Transport was by small craft because this was considerably quicker and safer than by land; yet bad sailing weather in April and May delayed the trip. However, by late May, Gaspary reported having “just arrived back from Korbous where I left Mme. Guys ‘bien portante’. Our trip there was short and happy; she is with her daughter; they went by a little boat.”82 Two months later, in June 1824, the ladies were still at the station whose waters had very much improved Mme. Guys’ health. They were provided for by Gaspary’s brother, who went back and forth by skiff from La Goulette, carrying messages, food, and provisions.
This early, rare account raises some questions, particularly when compared to later practices under the colonial regime.83 One wonders where Mesdames Gaspary and Guys resided—they were absent from home for weeks. Moreover, their two-month stay occurred prior to Ahmad Bey’s building program and well before Europeans could own property. While the sources do not state it explicitly, the women must have lived in Tunisian houses because, at the time, there were neither hotels nor other amenities in Korbous; leasing domestic space to cure-seekers was a major source of livelihood for villagers—as it still is today. The Gasparys had been going to Korbous on a regular basis, evidenced by the vice-consul’s mention of his mother-in-law “counting on going” there. Whether they took their baths with Tunisian women remains uncertain, although it seems likely, and they must have been treated by local female healers.
Beylical decrees issued in 1787, and reconfirmed periodically, affirmed the rights of Shaykh Ammara’s descendants over the baths, springs, and bathing pool at Korbous; some specifically mention female members of the saintly lineage. In 1835, Mustafa Bey’s decree names the shaykh’s sister, Mas‘uda, in the list of family members “responsible for the administration and surveillance of the zawiya at Hammam Kurbus as well as the buildings and baths.” Another woman, Khadija, is mentioned in 1840 as a part of the saintly clan. What precise role women from the holy lineage played in the management of the springs or in water treatments—intimately linked to spiritual healing and the sacred—remains uncertain; but their presence in the documents is suggestive. A later decree from 1875 mentions a café at the site for the first time.84
Richard Wood frequented Korbous for healing, an appreciation surely acquired in Istanbul where he was raised. In November 1858, Wood wrote from the Cap Bon to his French colleague, Léon Roches, to apologize for his absence from Tunis. Suffering grievously from rheumatism, Wood had felt obliged to go off “to the Baths of Korbous” due to worsening health problems.85 In January 1874, Cubisol went to Hammam Lif for a winter thermal session, leaving his post to “take the waters” while a huge political crisis erupted in Tunis.86 This shows that seeking a cure was regarded as a credible reason for not being on duty or perhaps a convenient excuse. That both Cubisol and Wood repeatedly took the waters at local thermal stations suggests faith in the curative potency of springs and in indigenous caregivers. As early as 1858 a French national, Leprieur, had undertaken scientific analyses of the waters at Korbous; and the publication of Dr. Guyon’s work on Tunisian thermal stations in 1864 sparked great interest in the medical community, although most studies came after 1881.87
Travel to ameliorate failing health has an ancient pedigree in the Mediterranean, as elsewhere. As mentioned above, Husayn Bey expanded the Hammam Lif bathing facilities in order to spend more time there. Was he influenced by his European physicians in a period when doctors increasingly prescribed hydrotherapy? Research on late-eighteenth-century German states has shown that the personal physicians of many princes promoted systematic use of spas for healing therapies.88 Did Wood, Cubisol, and other cure seekers follow a twenty-one-day cure at the Korbous spa, as was customary in Tunisian and Mediterranean healing? This had become the standard treatment cycle in Europe, one whose origins apparently dated back to antiquity.89 In addition, the temporalities of hydrotherapy is intriguing, although evidence is thin. A medical guide published in 1912 stated that the season in Korbous “runs from November to the end of May.” However, this had a European clientele in mind; it was hoped that spa-goers would frequent French stations during the summer and then be lured across the sea to Tunisia.90 Did the increased use of Hammam Lif and Korbous for winter cures indicate that the purely therapeutic nature of thermal springs was progressively being disentangled from the larger social and religious matrix in which older practices had traditionally been enmeshed?
As ever greater numbers of Europeans traveled to North Africa, a reverse current of health-seeking tourism moved in the opposite direction. High-ranking state officials and even religious notables began frequenting European spas on a regular basis. The religious scholar and Hanafi shaykh Muhammad Bayram V, who suffered from a serious “nervous affliction,” consulted physicians in Paris and sought cures in prestigious European centers.91 However, the political and therapeutic were never far apart. After Khayr al-Din’s fall from grace in 1876, he received the ruler’s permission to go to France in 1877 and 1878—even though he was theoretically under “palace arrest” in Tunis—for cures at Vichy and Saint-Nectaire.92 Thus health offered an expedient rationale for quitting the country, only a few years before French troops invaded and colonial officials forced the newly enthroned ‘Ali Bey to sign away his kingdom at the beachside palace where the La Marsa Convention was signed in June 1883.
In the 1990s, Dane Kennedy demonstrated that, after the 1857 Mutiny in South Asia, Indian hill stations became increasingly critical to the practices of the British Empire and as such suffered profound cultural permutations. Originally mountains sacred to both Muslims and Hindus, then playgrounds for Britons on tour, these whimsical high-altitude outposts were ultimately transformed into the administrative-political heart of the empire; here officials, soldiers, and families enjoyed hygienic isolation and cultural quarantine from the “natives” below.93 Scholars are now tracing similar processes in the French Empire, whereby indigenous healing practices were appropriated to promote health tourism, which drew sociospatial boundaries grounded in racial hygiene between science and superstition, colonizer and colonized. Yet the “colonial situation” can only be fully intelligible if earlier social arrangements are reconstructed, however daunting due to problems of documentation.94
In 1905 the Protectorate compelled the Tunisian state to cede the springs at Korbous to a French company, the Compagnie des Eaux Thermales, which eventually “acquired” ownership of the bathing pools as well as huge shares of the villagers’ houses, land, and water. But this did not happen without a bitter, protracted struggle waged by the Korbous saintly lineage and local property holders, which delayed the takeover for years. Significantly, even as pressures mounted on the palace and the Idarat al-Ahbas (Administration of Muslim Foundations) to hand over land titles to Eaux Thermales, other French officials at the Direction de Santé held that “indigent Muslims at Korbous should be able to get care for free because Korbous is important to all of the country’s Muslims”—which hinted that the fight over the healing water would not be an easy battle to win.95
Spatially segregated hydrotherapy by “race” envisioned by spa promoters had origins not in the early colonial period but came later, after 1900. While the Korbous company attempted to insulate middle-class European patients from resident spa users through the scare tactic of “syphilis-infected natives,” it failed to completely banish Muslims or Jews—or even indigent Europeans—from the station’s small confines. In part this was because the capital city’s inhabitants, of whatever background, had frequented local beaches and thermal springs together for nearly a century prior to the creation of what Eric Jennings so aptly terms “recompression chambers” for ailing French nationals returning home from the empire’s enervating tropics. And in the colonial era, upper- and middle-class Tunisians continued to seek cures in Korbous, even if they “kept their distance from [foreign Europeans].”96 Until 1903, when the church-state disestablishment laws were enacted, Catholic missionaries were allowed entry to spas free of charge. Colonial spas did, however, sever the sacral dimensions of thermal cures from the purely therapeutic, while also partially erasing the contributions of age-old Tunisian healing arts associated with water.97
Social historians have demonstrated that regular bathing only caught on in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although hydrotherapy had been prescribed for nervous disorders for over a hundred years.98 While rarely, if ever, acknowledged, colonial spas drew inspiration from older North African and Mediterranean practices and beliefs tied to the sea and its health-conferring benefits for body, spirit, and society. One wonders if Europeans who frequented Tunisia, with its ancient culture of weekly hammam visits, sea baths, and thermal cures, introduced more modern notions of hygiene when they returned to Europe—or at least eased the acceptance of novel ideas regarding water and the body.99 Clearly, health tourism appropriated local forms of knowledge and the traditional built environment; the Korbous Company drew heavily upon Tunisian and Islamic architectural forms when expanding the site’s buildings, probably with an eye toward the promotional lure of the exotic.100
This was just one dimension of projected colonial investment in seaside tourism. Louis Créput’s 1892 report on Nabeul, mentioned earlier in the chapter, suggests that, as the contrôleur civil, Créput was reconnoitering the village for the resident general with a view to establish not only a hydrotherapy station but also a tourist complex that would “revive” local handicrafts by imposing European aesthetic and technical standards upon indigenous artisans.101 Yet, travel for cures differed significantly from other kinds of travel because the former required long-term, seasonal residency, which necessitated clinics and, frequently, rental agreements with North African landlords; also needed were cemeteries in case the treatment failed to work. The medical treatises extolling the benefits of North African waters that appeared from the mid-nineteenth century on were initially guidebooks of a sort and merged with full-blown tourist guides by Hachette, Cook, or Baedeker by the century’s end.102
Another blurring of genres folded older travel accounts into the emergent mass tourist guides, a trend detected around the time of Lady Herbert’s narrative of harim visits and cures. While emblematic of the older class-bound genre, Lady Herbert’s work anticipated the modern guidebook because it contained practical suggestions, notably how to rent suitable houses for the season from local families as well as the location of especially potent thermal springs. In Algiers at the same time, British ladies, whose class did not get them invited into elite households, were instead offered sightseeing options not available to men—visiting “native” women and Muslim families at home in the intimacy of the household. Was the growth of gendered travel packages a variation on the older harim visit but aimed at the middle classes?103 Not too long after Lady Herbert’s excursion, a few elite Tunis women began traveling to Europe. Le Petit Tunisien Indépendent reported in 1886 that the family of Mustafa ibn Isma‘il, a high-ranking court notable, had returned from an extended stay in Paris where he too may have consulted doctors. The traveling household included several princesses and “six Mauresques” in service to the family while in Paris. The ladies wore “French clothes”—at least while boarding ship in Marseilles for La Goulette—and were under the close guard of a eunuch.104
This chapter has attempted to salvage a social universe whose only visible expression today consists of the crumbling bathing pavilions and palaces that once adorned coastal villages. Visits between households, whether in Tunis or at the beach, created webs of obligation that structured the precolonial order of things. The dynasty and court notables employed seaside diplomacy, harim tours, and other expressions of hospitality to introduce resident foreigners or visiting dignitaries into the prevailing culture, one ultimately grounded in Islamic norms regarding purity and pollution. In this analysis, the Mediterranean villa, dismissed as a mere space of frivolous entertainment, emerges as a site for nurturing strategic alliances, which in turn constituted a delicate exercise in relations between states. The older literature on the governing class characterized that class as passive and thus ineffective when confronted with increasingly aggressive demands by European statesmen after 1830.105 Yet, the palace adroitly monitored chosen European families through the loan of palatial residences and a dramatic repertoire of well-rehearsed social calls, gifts, and favors. Thus, as disseminators of scarce resources and catchment basins for information, elite households, especially at the seaside, were critical to the conduct of foreign affairs.
Revisiting the gendered sociabilities associated with households and harims from an ethnographic perspective suggests the existence of widely variant local expressions and meanings that only close historical contextualization can call forth. The large Reade family resided in Tunis for nearly twenty-five years—from 1825 to 1849—and their house in La Marsa was a gift from the palace; but equally important was the fact that they resided in domestic spaces identical to those called home by Tunisians, as did the Wood family. Periodic social calls paid by women and children from resident European households to the Husaynid princesses did not have the same valence as the slightly later harim encounters, which fall into a distinctive category of short-term travel tours, often with a view to publication. After all, Christina Wood never published accounts of her social rapports with harim women.106 Directly related, one unanticipated finding is the existence of a seasonality of sociability, including diplomatic exchanges governed by winter-summer rhythms, each associated with particular spaces and varying intensities of interaction—and of course, quarrels and backstabbing. One needs to speculate, however, on the politics of the court’s extended stays in seaside villages from the mid-1850s on, separated from Tunis and the Bardo. Did the fact that the beys were surrounded, indeed beleaguered, by diplomats and concession hunters mean that Mediterranean palaces had become a sort of gilded cage?
One implicit question revolves around periodicity and the assumed rupture between the precolonial and colonial periods. Scholars arguing for the durability of “the precolonial” after, even long after, the advent of full-scale imperial rule in Asia or Africa rely upon political and economic institutions to buttress their positions. Forms of sociability such as visiting, leisure, and health-seeking practices offer novel points of entry to rethink these issues. The notion that the precolonial and the premodern were more or less equivalent because kin-based systems of sociability impeded wider social contacts and the flow of ideas seems inadmissible for nineteenth-century Tunisia.107 The staying power of these arrangements and alliances during the two decades following 1881 allowed Tunisian reformers, however embattled, to continue their program of judicious modernization initiated by Khayr al-Din in the 1870s. However in 1900, a right-wing colonial lobby intent upon spoliation through legal manipulations and land seizures came to power and looked to Algeria as a model for how to best exploit Tunisia and the Tunisians. Two years later, the new “lslamophobe” resident general, Stephen Pichon, secretly attempted to subvert traditional succession to the Husaynid throne, something never attempted during the previous decades of colonial rule.108
Nevertheless, the persistence of much older social practices hampered the colonial project of creating racially segregated spaces of leisure and health for an exclusively bourgeois European clientele in Tunisia’s watering spots. We have already seen that the Korbous hydrotherapy scheme was partially thwarted because of fierce local opposition and the fact that people of ordinary status and indeterminate nationality had long sought cures there. As importantly, the continued presence of the large Italian community, some of whose ancestors hailed from the ranks of the nineteenth-century creole class and enjoyed ties to the palace, imposed some limits after 1881 on the more brutal types of colonial oppression wrought upon Algeria.
Even after 1900, beachside socializing between Tunisian and European notables endured and took place in the once-elegant Hotel Zephyr in La Marsa, a stone’s throw from the shore and situated so as to catch light breezes off the sea. My neighbor and friend, Naila Rostom, from the old Tunisian-Turkish aristocracy, recalled the nightly gatherings at the hotel. According to Naila, whose family memory stretched back to the early twentieth century, “during balls and soirées at the Zephyr, the champagne flowed in torrents.” Fresh fish plucked from waters nearby and prepared for midnight suppers were “immense”—not like they are now, or so memory would have us believe.109
Independence brought the partial demise of this society. Habib Bourguiba, president of the new republic, personally oversaw the destruction of many palaces and pavilions, unleashing bulldozers and crews armed with dynamite upon ornate neo-Moorish structures and lush gardens. According to the last bey’s chief gardener, Bourguiba “ran around like a happy child and said ‘here! destroy! blow this up.’”110 That the president did not demolish such blatantly colonial monuments as the Tunis train station or central post office was noteworthy. The palaces were visible reminders of the Husyanid dynasty, which had endured for two and a half centuries, and of the great families of Tunis, including Naila Rostom’s lineage. Nationalist fervor and personal vendetta conspired to bury much of a princely seaside culture under its own ruins. In 2001, Tunisia’s ruling family seized the Hotel Zephyr, leveled it, and constructed an American-style shopping mall in its place.
From the seaside we move to the final chapter, which reconstructs the life story of a major figure in the Husaynid court, Khayr al-Din, and grapples with the question of thinkers, intellectuals, educators, and reformers against the backdrop of population displacements. It asks how transnational communities of thought came to be, within the larger crucible of mobilities and modernities. Using a biographical approach, the chapter returns full circle to the critical shifts in multiple axes of communication across the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world.
