Jellaz Affair

[6] Another zawiya, of Sidi Al Bashir, also stood in the cemetery, and many of the most illustrious families of Tunis had their dead relatives buried there.

[8] However a series of colonial laws since the 1880s had allowed the French in Tunisia to acquire the title or use of growing amounts of habous land.

[11] Just as changes to the ownership of habous eroded a long-established religious institution and advanced French property rights,[12] so changes to nationality law were divisive of the population.

[18] As France took effective control there, the other European powers demanded to be 'compensated' in regions they considered vital to their interests, and this led to an Italian declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire on 29 September 1911, followed by the invasion of Libya.

[22] Many Italians arrived in Tunisia poor[23] and they were banned from employment on public works or in the colonial government unless they adopted French citizenship.

[24][25] As a habous, the Jellaz cemetery was administered by a special agency, but the municipality of Tunis had, some twenty years previously, acquired the responsibility for protecting and maintaining it.

[26] However, in 1911, the cemetery was not well-managed and not clearly demarcated from other properties around it, so in various places the graves gave way to small quarries and skid-roads for felled trees.

[5] On 26 September, the people of the city learned that the municipality of Tunis was planning to remove the cemetery from the habous agency and register it as its own property.

[27] However, certain individual French members of the municipal council had also submitted applications to register parcels of cemetery land in their own names.

[29] Ghileb had not been consulted about the proposed registration of the Jellaz cemetery land, and the Deputy Mayor Jean-Baptiste Curtelin tried to keep the matter off the agenda when the municipal council met on 2 November.

[30] However by this time, Ghileb had ensured that posters were put up all across Tunis, urging people to attend the meeting on 7 November to make their objections known, as the law provided for.

[5] Having mobilised people to oppose the registration, insufficient efforts may have made to inform them that it was being abandoned, or perhaps this news was simply not sufficient to allay popular outrage.

[26] Soon, administrators of the agency which managed the habous arrived, along with various other Tunisian notables, and told the crowd that the municipality had decided to drop its application to register the land.

[32] A scuffle began, with the police trying to get Espiau and Ghileb safely away from the cemetery, striking protesters with their batons while the crowd threw pieces of rubble at them.

A detachment of sixty zouaves under Lieutenant Pinelli was attacked with stones, and responded by fixing bayonets and charging the crowd.

As fighting continued here and there across the city, the chasseurs d'Afrique charged with drawn sabres at eleven o'clock near Bab Jedid.

In the afternoon, more troops arrived from Bizerte and Hammam-Lif so that by evening, there were 1,000 soldiers deployed across the city maintaining an uneasy calm.

Given the anti-Italian character of much of the violence in Tunis, the Italian Consul-General, Bottesini, had taken refuge with his family at the home of the French Resident-General, Gabriel Alapetite on the night of 7 November.

[35] For the rest of the day, patrols of cavalry and infantry swept the streets, arresting anyone they found armed and sending any Tunisians bearing weapons to the summary justice of the traditional driba tribunal.

[5] Despite the efforts of the French authorities to link the Young Tunisians to the Jellaz events, none of the men found guilty of participating in the riots held leadership positions in the movement.

[41] The third trial was a civil matter arising from an accusation made on 26 November by Victor de Carnières in his newspaper Colon français, that Abdeljelil Zaouche, a leading member of the Young Tunisians, had led the riots and paid individuals to take part in them.

Nevertheless the court simply dismissed the case on the grounds that anything damaging Carnières had said about Zaouche was only of secondary importance, and that his primary aim had been to defend French interests.

The Algiers court found in Zaouche's favour and awarded him costs with interest against Carnières, taking into account his bad faith and his intention to defame.

[43] The French authorities found it appropriate to play up the importance of anti-Italian sentiment as a cause of the Jellaz Incident, such that, according to many official reports of the police and the administration, the disturbance was triggered not by the move to register the cemetery land, but by the shooting of the boy Rebah Degla by an Italian.

It described the protesters at the cemetery as 'fanaticised', stated that the 'real' cause of the problem was the 'overexcitement' of the Italian and Arab populations, and reassured its readers that the Jellaz incident was definitely not an anti-French riot.

They stressed that the misunderstanding over the cemetery land registration was unfortunate, but insufficient to explain what followed, and deplored the irrationality and religious fanaticism of the Tunisians.