Divide et Impera: Public health and urban reform in Protectorate-era Tunis

Abstract

By the late nineteenth century, Jews and Muslims increasingly shared the neighbourhoods of Tunis; however, the enforcement of colonial segregationist practices under the guise of public health and urban reforms halted and reversed this trend between the First and Second World Wars. French officials stymied what they perceived as the two greatest threats to their supremacy in Tunisia: inferior numbers and indigenous unity. As a direct result of policies to combat these threats, French urban reforms erased the continuities of multi-cultural Tunis and rehoused the population into discrete zones based on ethnic, religious, and class distinctions. While Tunisian Jews were recast as French subjects and their former neighbourhoods destroyed, Muslim neighbourhoods were preserved as representative of indigenous Maghribi tradition.