French North Africa

French North Africa consisted of the Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, and the colony of Algeria in Northern Africa.

History

The French capture of Algiers in 1830, followed by the Ottoman reoccupation of Tripoli in 1835, rudely interrupted the attempts of North Africa’s rulers to follow the example of Muḥammad ʿAlī, the pasha of Egypt, and increase their power along European lines. Of the four powers in North Africa at the beginning of the 19th century, only Tunis and Morocco survived as independent states into the second half of the century to encounter the heavy pressures that Europe then brought to bear on the region for free trade and legal reform, measures originally leveled against the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Between the death of Tunisia’s ambitious reformer, Aḥmad Bey, in 1855, and the dismissal of its talented, reform-minded prime minister, Khayr al-Dīn, in 1877, Tunis responded to these pressures with the Ahd al-Amān, or Fundamental Pact, in 1856 and the short-lived constitution of 1860, the first in the Arab world. The Fundamental Pact guaranteed the equality before the law of all subjects—Muslim, Christian, and Jew—while the constitution provided for a consultative assembly and the administration of justice. The constitution was suspended in 1864, but its chief proponent, Khayr al-Dīn, came to power in 1869 as the president of the International Financial Commission, a group appointed to handle the country’s foreign debt, and as prime minister in 1873. At Khayr al-Dīn’s departure in 1877, Tunisia was internally strong but internationally weak. [...] A French protectorate was eventually imposed on Tunisia in 1881–83, after the British withdrew their objections to French expansion in North Africa at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The French preserved the administration of the bey of Tunis, although under French supervision, an indirect form of rule they later applied to Morocco as well. The Moroccan protectorate itself was established only in 1912, after the Entente Cordiale—a treaty concluded between France and Britain in 1904, which settled a number of hostilities between the two countries—and the Cameroons had been ceded to Germany in 1911.

See also

• Operation Torch (de) – Allied invasion of French North Africa during the Second World War