• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Bourguiba's Tunisia

When it was dissolved for the second time in 1938, the Neo-Destour Party had an active membership of approximately 100,000. Its underground activities were directed after Bourguiba's imprisonment by an executive committee, the Political Bureau. Some nationalists at the lower level of party echelons urged support for Germany in 1939, contending that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," but their enthusiasm for the Axis waned when Italy, which had annexationist designs on Tunisia, entered the war shortly before the fall of France. More significant, Bourguiba had spoken from prison in favor of cooperation with France from the outset of the war. He continued to oppose collaboration after the French defeat in 1940, when he was transferred to a more secure prison facility in Marseilles by the Vichy regime. The Germans freed Bourguiba after the Allied landings in North Africa, lionized him and other nationalist leaders in Rome, where they were brought for talks, and then repatriated him to Axis-occupied Tunisia.

Bourguiba anticipated the Allied victory in the European war and swung his support behind the Free French. An instinctive liberal, he expressed confidence that "the whole of France, once liberated from the Nazi yoke, would not forget . . . her true friends, those who stood by her in the days of trial." Once the Free French were established in Tunisia, Bourguiba, together with Musif Bey (1926-43), proposed a gradual evolution toward internal autonomy for the country. Ignored by French authorities, Bourguiba appealed to the British and Americans to bring influence to bear on Free French leader Charles de Gaulle to grant political reform in Tunisia.

Through the United States consul in Tunis, Hooker Doolittle, who had advocated United States support for Tunisian independence, Bourguiba made direct contact with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Late in 1943 Musif Bey was deposed by the French on the pretext that he had collaborated with the enemy. Fearing that similar charges would be leveled against him, Bourguiba spent the years until 1950 pleading the case of Tunisian independence in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

Agitation for political reform continued to mount in Bourguiba's absence as Tahar Ben Ammar, moderate president of the Tunisian section of the Grand Council, joined a group of 80 "notables" to petition the French government for internal autonomy. In 1946 an autonomous trade union, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (Union Gnral des Travailleurs Tunisiens-UGTT), backed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), broke away from the communist-dominated French labor organization. Led by a onetime trolley driver, Ferhat Hached, the UGTT cooperated closely with the Neo-Destour Party in efforts to redefine Tunisia's relationship with France.