The War Years

Most Tunisians took satisfaction in France’s defeat by Germany in June 1940, but the nationalist parties derived no more substantive dividend from the colonial power’s humiliation. Following the Franco-German armistice, the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain sent to Tunis as resident general Admiral Jean Esteva (1940–3), who had no intention of permitting a revival of Tunisian political activity. The arrests of Habib Thameur and Taieb Slim, key figures in the Neo-Dustur political bureau and partisans of collaboration with Germany, weakened the party. As had become customary when the Neo-Dustur operated clandestinely, their replacements had been named in advance, but the available cadre consisted primarily of youthful militants with little experience and little chance of eluding the authorities for very long. Sporadic acts of sabotage and terror carried out during 1941 by the Main Noire, a shadowy underground organization, symbolized the nationalists’ despair.

The stimulus for renewed opposition to the protectorate came from an improbable source: the palace, where Moncef Bey (1942–3) acceded to the throne in June. The sixty-one-year-old Moncef had cut his political teeth in the 1922 confrontation between Resident General Saint and his father, Nasir Bey, whose streak of defiance toward the French authorities he shared. Rejecting the role of a figurehead, Moncef served notice on Esteva that he expected his subjects and French citizens to enjoy equal treatment. Accordingly, he ordered the extension of the “colonial third” to Tunisian administrators. Moncef toured the country during 1942, dispensing with protocol and making himself accessible to his people in a way that no previous monarch ever had. Well aware that the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Vichy government had triggered clashes between Tunisian Muslims and Jews prior to his accession, the new ruler made a point of expressing his solicitude for the welfare of his Jewish subjects. In a matter of only a few months, Moncef strode into the political space vacated by the enfeebled parties, supplanting them as the rallying point for the nation and assuming their leaders’ mission of articulating grievances to the French. Emboldened by his popularity and success, Moncef called for Esteva’s dismissal in October. So straightforward a challenge might have proven his undoing, had not the war impinged directly on Tunisia shortly afterward, altering the political situation in a way that, initially at least, worked to the bey’s advantage.