wooden plows, the Berbers are known as Kabyles; in the mountains they are the Shawiyas; in the desert, they are the Tuareg tribes. In addition, there are the "Moors" of mixed Berber, Arab and European blood, indolent but canny tradesmen of the towns, well able to compete with the traditional mercantile ability of the numerous Jews.

Though in Algeria there was room for colonists, Frenchmen. are notoriously loath to quit la belle patrie, and after many decades of official attempts to attract French settlers, Algeria to-day has but half a million French inhabitants; of these no inconsiderable number are descended from immigrants who forsook Alsace when that province was conquered by the Germans.1 French and other Europeans own the very fertile grainfields and vineyards and olive groves in the coast zone, and conduct the foreign trade and finance of the colony, leaving the natives to till the less fertile and more remote parts of the country, and to raise sheep and cattle for export.2 And as General Mangin observed, "Le coeur des Berbères reste à prendre.”3

Of all the French colonies, Algeria is now by far the most important from the viewpoint of economic imperialism. As a market for French goods it is three times as valuable as any other French possession; indeed, among all the customers of French industry Algeria ranks seventh (after Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, United States, Switzerland, and Italy).

It is not, however, very important as a source of raw materials, with the notable exception of phosphate; its chief exports to France are wine, grain and meat.

COUP DE FORTUNE OU DE BOURSE-TUNIS

From Algeria French imperialists naturally turned their eyes toward the neighboring land of Tunis, just to the east, much like Algeria in climate and race, but smaller. In ancient times, Tunis was the seat of the mighty Carthaginian empire, and later a prosperous Roman province of whose high civilization 1 From 1871 to 1895 some 13,300 French families (54,000 persons) were colonized on 640,000 hectares of land in Algeria.

Exposé de la Situation Générale de l'Algérie en 1924, présenté par M. Th. Steeg, gouverneur général de l'Algérie (Alger, 1925); V. Piquet, La Colonisation française dans l'Afrique du Nord (Paris, 1912), Chs. V. VIII; E. F. Gautier, L'Algérie et la Métropole (Paris, 1920).

3

Mangin, Regards sur la France d'Afrique, p. 72.

mute testimony is offered to-day by marble ruins of Roman temples and amphitheaters, half submerged by the sands of the desert. These remains, by the way, seem to indicate that the regions in the south and interior of Tunis, now parched by winds from the Sahara, were once fertile and populous. But when Tunis began, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to attract the attention of European imperialists, it was a "backward" country, thinly populated, and ruled by a Mohammedan Bey, nominally subject to Turkish suzerainty but actually swayed only by his own despotic caprice.

In the 1860's European speculators, money-lenders, traders and concession-hunters began to swarm into Tunis. The Bey found it easy to borrow money, difficult to repay it. When his debts reached what for him was the stupendous figure of 28 million francs, at an average of 13% interest, he welcomed an apparently brilliant proposal that these miscellaneous obligations be repaid by floating a consolidated loan of 35 million francs on the Paris Bourse at a more reasonable rate of interest. To his chagrin he received less than six millions cash from the sale of his bonds, and found himself saddled with the interest charges on the new 35 plus the original 28 millions. When he levied heavier taxes to carry the interest charges, his subjects rebelled; the cost of suppressing insurrection necessitated new loans; the additional interest burden meant higher taxes; and so the vicious circle went on-loans-taxes-rebellions-loans. It is said that in desperation the Bey at length took to poisoning rich subjects and confiscating their property. His French creditors, growing anxious as they received no payments on their coupons, insisted on the establishment of a financial commission to supervise, or curtail, his free-handed expenditures. Italian financiers, and Italian patriots, remembering that Carthage was once subject to Rome, protested, with the result that Italy and England were admitted to the commission in 1869 and the Tunisian debt was "consolidated" at 125 millions.1 Then ensued years of financial rivalry, French, English and Italian consuls at Tunis vying with each other in efforts to obtain influence at court and railway, telegraph or land concessions for their fellow-countrymen. It became increasingly apparent that, what with the disorderly condition of the country and the inseThe nominal amount before consolidation was 160 millions.

curity of its debt, and what with the awakening of European imperialism, one of the three powers would soon appropriate Tunis.

Though at the Bey's court the Italians enjoyed most favor, France was more fortunate in European chancelleries. The Disraeli-Salisbury government of England was glad, at the Berlin Congress of 1878, to inform the French diplomatist Waddington that England recognized the right of France, since she had occupied Algeria, to exercise decisive pressure on Tunis, and looked upon this result as inevitable. More plainly, Salisbury told Waddington France could take Tunis if she would offer no objection to the ambitions of Disraeli in Cyprus and the Near East.1 Bismarck likewise dropped a hint that Germany would not object to French intervention in Tunis; his motive, doubtless, was to involve France in colonial ventures and to sow seeds of discord between France and Italy.2 And France advised Italy that "Italy cannot cherish dreams of conquest in Tunis without clashing against the will of France and risking a conflict with her.”3

Not long afterward, an English company offered to sell the railway property it possessed in Tunis. This apparently innocent business affair was viewed in Paris and Rome as a crucial event, for though the value of the railway was paltry (perhaps a million francs), imperialists are quick to interpret the acquisition of any concession by foreign rivals as a national defeat and humiliation. French interests offered a million francs. An Italian concern (the Rubattino Co., which had acquired the first Italian foothold in Eritrea, on the Red Sea) offered two and a half. Finally the Italians bought the property for 4,125,000 francs, four times the original French bid It is significant that

'Lady Gwendolyn Cecil, Life of the Marquis of Salisbury, II, pp. 332 f.; Mangin, Regards sur la France d'Afrique, pp. 78 ff.; G. Hanotaux, Contemporary France, III, pp. 576 ff.; (P. H. X.) d'Estournelles de Constant, La Politique française en Tunisie. (Paris, 1891); Documents Diplomatiques, Affaires de Tunisie, 1870-1881 and supplement, 1881.

Cf. Bourgeois et Pagès, Origines de la Grande Guerre, p. 192; Die Grosse Politik, 3, nos. 655-7; London Times, April 4, 1881. On Bismarck's earlier suggestion to Italy, and on his later support of France, as well as on the whole complex of European diplomacy concerning Tunis, see the critical articles by W. L. Langer in Amer. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1925 and Jan. 1926.

A. Lebon, "Les Préliminaires du Traité de Bardo," in Annales des Sciences Politiques, 1893, p. 403, citing letter from M. Waddington to Marquis de Noailles, Oct. 13, 1878.

the Italian company made its extravagant offer only after receiving a promise of 600,000 lire a year from the Italian government.1

France, however, was not to be so easily balked. The sale of the railway occurred in July, 1880. In August, by one of the coincidences that abound in imperialist annals, Paris received most ominous reports of warlike unrest among the Tunisian tribes on the border of Algeria. Such reports accumulated rapidly, until in the spring of 1881 border raids provided the "incident" which is usually considered necessary to bring such matters to a head. In April Jules Ferry obtained from the Chamber of Deputies authority and six million francs to send a punitive expedition, for the purpose of guaranteeing “in a serious and lasting fashion the security and the future of African France (Algeria)"; conquest, he explained, was far from his mind. Thirty-five thousand French soldiers were then thrown across the Algerian border into Tunis, but instead of merely punishing the unruly border tribes, the French army compelled the Bey to sign the Treaty of Bardo, May 12, 1881, allowing the French to occupy any regions it considered necessary, promising not to act in international affairs without first consulting France, accepting a generous French promise to protect his person, dynasty and territories against attack, and, last but not least, authorizing France to make new financial arrangements in the interest of his creditors. French troops then overran the country and by the end of the month, in the words of a French historian, "pacification was complete." The conquest was complete.

Ferry, however, was furiously assailed in the French Parliament for what his opponent Clemenceau styled a "coup de Bourse"-a stroke of high finance. To such taunts Ferry retorted, it was a "coup de Fortune." Could any "bon Français" he asked the Chamber (Nov. 5, 1881) bear the thought of letting Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, IV, p. 538.

In the meantime the French had warned Italy that the French cabinet could not look with indifferent eye while Italian interests secured the control of the cables and railways of Tunis; and the French consul, Roustan, had persuaded or browbeaten the Bey to give the French Bône-Guelma Company railway concessions to compensate for the one the Italians had purchased. That the border raids were not the reason for French aggression in Tunis, but merely provided a reason or pretext for armed action, appears pretty clearly from any detailed narrative.

Journal Officiel, Chambre des députés, April 11, 1881.

some other power (Italy) have "a territory which is, in every sense, the key to our house"? Furthermore, he asserted, there had been in the last decade no fewer than 2365 violations of the Algerian frontier by Tunisian warriors: surely these were numerous enough to justify intervention! But particularly meaningful, in the light of the events we have described, was Ferry's guarded statement that the immediate cause of intervention was the hostility shown by the Bey toward "French influence." In the more candid words of the French foreign minister, Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, the Bey had become hostile to "all French enterprises in Tunis." He had, it is true, favored Italian as opposed to French, concessions for telegraphs, railways and ports; and the Italians were gaining the upper hand. Not border raids, but economic rivalry, and strategic interests brought French troops into Tunis.1

Though Ferry and his foreign minister were forced out of office by the criticism of the Tunis venture, and though M. Roustan, the French consul, who had been so active in Tunisian concession-hunting, was openly charged in the press with having been implicated in not altogether honorable financial schemes in Tunis, France nevertheless retained the fruits of Ferry's Coup de Bourse. Two years later, on June 8, 1883, the new Bey of Tunis was presented with a treaty which he could hardly do otherwise than sign, and which openly established the French "protectorat" and provided for a loan of 125 million francs and the enactment of reforms desired by France.2 Ferry, having returned to power, explained the advantages of a protectorate over annexation pure and simple. The protectorate was cheaper, since there would be fewer French officials to pay; it was easier, since the native administration would be responsible for details and petty difficulties; and it safeguarded "the dignity of the vanquished." The protectorate meant that the native Bey was retained (and his successors have been) as nominal ruler, with a staff of officials, but a French resident-general representing the French minister of foreign affairs presided over the Tunisian cabinet, conducted foreign relations, had veto power over the Bey's edicts and controlled the administration

'A strong statement to this effect is that in Woolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa, pp. 79 ff.

Archives diplomatiques, 73, p. 12.