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150 inventinG dynastic traditions: family Politics of french colonialism Chapter 6 The 1861 constitution formalized the structural dependence of the family on the paternal authority of the bey, structures that were extended by the subjugation of the entire family under French colonialism. In May of 1881, a minor incident along the border with Algeria provided an opportunity for French warships to dock outside the capital, from where they delivered a treaty to the bey demanding continued trade privileges and the recognition of French suzerainty. This document inaugurated colonial rule by creating an official protectorate over the province, severing the bey’s ties to the Ottoman center. Wary of the sultan’s response, the French policed all correspondence between Tunis and Istanbul, removed Tunisian diplomatic personnel from their posts throughout the empire, and closely monitored Ottoman activities in neighboring Tripoli. The Porte sent a formal protest against this act of aggression to the integrity of its territory and dispatched two warships with sixteen hundred troops. The convoy was intercepted in Tripoli, and despite French intelligence reports that the sultan planned to grant the investiture to one of the younger men in the family to circumvent the treaty, the threat of French retaliation prevented any further military action from Istanbul.1 The colonial authorities justified their intervention on numerous counts, from the initial premise of the bey’s inability to maintain security to the later moral imperative of educating, industrializing, and modernizing the country. Of interest here is the role accorded the bey and his family. In claiming to respect local sovereignty, protectorate authorities incorporated portions of the defunct constitution into the protectorate ’s legal edifice. These statutes confirmed the hereditary rights of the male line of descent and the bey’s control over the extended family in an abridged version of the laws. As they omitted entire chapters and individual articles, primarily those relating to ministerial organization and the council of ministers, they also significantly modified the authority of the bey.2 The bey became an agent of colonial domination, as matters of foreign relations were delegated to the highest French colonial official, inventinG dynastic traditions 151 the Resident General (by an accord dated 8 June 1881), as was the exercise of all judicial, administrative, and financial functions (the Convention of June 1883).3 Though his executive prerogative was reduced to confirming French decisions, the bey’s ceremonial role was expanded and developed in ways unique to the modern state. While the French had dabbled in overseas expansion under the Bourbons , engaging with the slave trade, establishing sugar colonies in the Caribbean, and setting up trading outposts in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the resurgence in colonial activities over the course of the nineteenth century made empire a decisive component in the formulation of a modern national identity. The colonial project touched diverse sectors of metropolitan society, particularly after the founding of France’s Third Republic in 1870.This era witnessed the flourishing of artistic and literary representations of empire, and geographical, anthropological, and scientific societies to classify the colonial world, and it was also one in which colonialism reached the masses. As the proliferation of exotic colonial products made them common consumer goods, information about the colonies was widely circulated in inexpensive and illustrated newspapers that targeted a broad readership.4 In fact, scholarly interests in colonial territories and their ability to provide popular entertainment often overlapped in international and universal expositions. These fairs were a quintessentially modern phenomenon , thanks to the emphasis on industrialization and a cataloguing of colonial exoticism in which the Middle East became an object on display. Instead of domination by force, colonial rule was envisioned as a form of guardianship in which civilizational terms overlapped with the familial. This relationship was depicted in images such as Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels in Cairo (1810). Despite the failure of the expedition, Guérin portrayed Egyptian insurgents as ashamed and beseeching, some on their knees, Napoleon stands over them in a position of moral and racial superiority, looking calm and paternal.5 If liberalism could make the modernization of the backwards peoples of the world a national duty, it could also make paternal responsibility part of a subtle hierarchical discourse.6 Since the conquest of Algiers in 1830, France had taken a utilitarian approach to the governors of Tunis, whom they viewed as easier to manipulate than the Ottoman sultan, a policy that circumvented imperial authority. It served a cost-conscientious approach to...

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