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Independent Tunisia

An agreement between France and Morocco early in 1956 indicated that Morocco, which had been a French protectorate since 1912, would soon gain complete independence, and it was hoped that the forthcoming election of the Constituent Assembly would provide a means for pressing Tunisia's case for independence. On March 20, 1956, the patience of the Neo-Destour Party leaders was rewarded by the signing of a protocol that abrogated the Bardo Treaty of 1881 and recognized Tunisia as an independent state. The portfolios of the two ministries vacated by French officials- foreign affairs and defense - were taken by Bourguiba.

With independence the Neo-Destour Party, which had been jarred by the dissent from Ben Youssef's faction, faced the problem of consolidating its leadership and replacing the struggle for national independence with the building of national consensus as the party's primary goal. Expelled from the party for his opposition to Bourguiba, Ben Youssef organized a leftist opposition party that continued the guerrilla war against the Neo-Destour government. The crisis ended only when a French military operation forced the Youssefists to lay down their arms in June, three months after independence. Ben Youssef, who had earlier been condemned to death in absentia for having plotted against Bourguiba's life, was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961.

On March 25, 1956, some 84 percent of the registered voters went to the poils to elect candidates of the National Front, who were for the most part members of the Neo-Destour Party, to the Constituent Assembly. Bourguiba was elected president of the assembly by acclamation at its first session held two weeks later, and Ahmed Ben Salah was elected vice president. The assembly then divided its 98 members into a number of committees, each charged with drafting a part of the new constitution. Within a week Article I had been unanimously adopted. It declared Tunisia to be a free, independent, sovereign state, with Islam its official religion and Arabic its official language. On April 15 the hey called on Bourguiba to form the new government.

Independence and the election of the Constituent Assembly left the constitutional base of the Tunisian government as it had been at the time of the decree of September 1955: The bey pro. mulgated laws as decrees with the unanimous consent of his Council of Ministers. The Western-educated leaders of the Neo-Destour Party were instinctive republicans who had little affection for the beylicate, and they were far from satisfied with this arrangement.

The aged Al Amin Bey himself did not command much respect. He had increasingly withdrawn from public activity as the nationalists took charge of Tunisian politics after the 1955 conventions so that he counted little as a political force, and the ostentatious living of members of his family further detracted from his reputation. In July 1957 the Constituent Assembly, which had authority to determine

the form of government, unanimously voted to depose the bey and abolish the monarchy, declaring Tunisia a republic. Bourguiba was named president of the republic and given the bey's full executive and legislative powers as head of state until the assembly could produce a constitution.

During the two years of his provisional presidency, Bourguiba promulgated by executive decree a number of far-reaching reforms that fulfilled-and went beyond-the promises made by the Neo-Destour Party before independence The Party had been a secular nationalist movement, and, although it had not rejected traditional Islam, its program had not invited the participation of religious leaders. Once in power Bourguiba set about to eliminate religious regulations and customs that were considered "obsolete" in a modern Country. Religious courts were abolished, even though this meant the forced retirement of many socially prominent judges. Laws governing marriage and the status of women were revised, giving Tunisian women legal rights comparable to those pertaining in France. At a later date, abortion and birth control were legalized.

The Zituna Mosque school was absorbed into the new University of Tunis, which was to be the showplace of Tunisia's modernization. The habus system of landholding was abolished and agrarian reform instituted. A personal status law required all births and deaths to be registered and required each Tunisian national to adopt a surname, a rationalization that even the French had not proposed, thus reducing the confusion of names common in traditional Arab society. In his zeal for reform, however, Bourguiba occasionally appeared to overstep the bounds of propriety in a Muslim society. He was compelled by popular resistance, for instance, to relax his public effort to push a 1961 recommendation that Tunisians abandon fasting during Ramadan, a practice that is one of the traditional five pillars of Islam.

Meanwhile, the Constituent Assembly committees bad revised the draft of the constitution along lines that would make Tunisia a presidential republic. The crisis generated by the French bombardment of Algerian rebel positions inside Tunisia in 1958 interrupted plenary discussions in the assembly, providing Bourguiba with the necessary time to consolidate his power and shape an answer to the crucial constitutional question-that of the relationship between the executive powers of the president and the legislative powers of the new National Assembly. When the Constitution was finally promulgated on June 1, 1959, its most striking feature was the strong position accorded the president of the republic, an office that critics charged had been tailored expressly for Bourguiba.