Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 7 ·
Tunisia under Bourguiba
Chapter 7 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Bourguiba’s Tunisia”
Tunisia became independent from France on 20 March 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, and on 13 August 1956 his government decreed the Personal Status Code, which banned polygamy, ended divorce by a husband’s declaration and required a bride’s consent. Women first voted in 1957, but rights came without the freedom to organise.
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The map above is the world of Tunisia, August 1956 — Family law: the Personal Status Code abolishes polygamy.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The second case study approaches the governing question from the opposite direction, because in Tunisia many women’s rights arrived before any feminist protest, decreed by the state from above. Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881, a country that kept its own ruler, the bey, while France controlled its government, rather as an outside administrator runs a company whose owner remains in name. It became independent on 20 March 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, the leader of the nationalist Neo-Destour party, who abolished the monarchy and became president in 1957. Five months after independence his government decreed the Personal Status Code (CSP), a family law that banned polygamy and abolished a husband’s right to divorce his wife by simple declaration. It also required the bride’s consent to marriage, set a minimum marriage age and allowed either spouse to seek divorce in court. On the map Tunisia is blue, alone in North Africa, where polygamy remained legal next door, which shows how far a determined state could move ahead of its neighbours.
Rights given from above came with control from above. Bourguiba ruled through a single party, banned the communists in 1963, had himself made president for life in 1975, and allowed only one women’s organisation, the party-controlled National Union of Tunisian Women. Development favoured the coast, especially the Sahel around his hometown of Monastir, so people from the interior migrated to Tunis and Sfax, as the two arrows show. When the state collectivised farms in the 1960s, villagers resisted at Ouardanine in 1969. When it doubled the price of bread at the end of 1983, riots began in the southern oases and reached Tunis within five days, as the red arrow shows, before Bourguiba cancelled the increase. Tunisia acquired the Arab world’s most liberal family law and a pattern of revolt that started in its neglected interior, and both would shape what happened in 2010–11.
The full story
The Personal Status Code was possible because Bourguiba’s state depended less on traditional authorities than any of its neighbours. It was decreed on 13 August 1956 and took effect on 1 January 1957, before Tunisia even had a constitution. The sociologist Mounira Charrad explains why Tunisia went further than Morocco or Algeria. The Neo-Destour was a party of urban professionals and townsmen of the Sahel, the coastal plain around Sousse and Monastir, and it had defeated a rival nationalist faction backed by rural notables and conservative clergy. It therefore did not need the support of tribal kin groups, whose power rested on family law that kept property and marriages within the lineage. Bourguiba presented the Code as a modern reading of Islamic law, drawing on reformers such as Tahar Haddad, whose 1930 book on women in the Sharia had been condemned by the religious establishment. On the map Tunisia is blue while Algeria, then a French colony at war, and Libya remain parchment, because their family law still allowed polygamy, a contrast that came from the structure of each state more than from its religion.
The Code was the first of a series of reforms that made Tunisian women citizens of a modernising state. Women voted for the first time in the municipal elections of May 1957 and in national elections from 1959. The state built girls’ schools, opened a national family-planning programme in the 1960s, legalised abortion for mothers of five children in 1965 and on request in the first three months of pregnancy in 1973, two years before France. Yet women had no independent way to defend or extend these rights. The National Union of Tunisian Women, founded in 1956, was an arm of the ruling party, and independent feminist groups, such as the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, were licensed only in 1989. Rights handed down by a state can be extended by that state, but they can also be frozen or traded away by it, since nobody outside the state has the power to defend them.
The same state that reformed the family built an economy centred on the coast, and the interior paid for it. In the 1960s the planning minister Ahmed Ben Salah forced farmers into state cooperatives; when the scheme reached the olive groves of the Sahel, villagers at Ouardanine resisted in January 1969 and police opened fire, and Bourguiba abandoned the policy and jailed its architect. In the 1970s Prime Minister Hédi Nouira opened the economy to tourism and export factories, which clustered along the coast, while families from Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Siliana migrated towards Tunis and Sfax. The tensions erupted twice. On “Black Thursday”, 26 January 1978, the army crushed a general strike called by the UGTT trade-union federation, killing 46 people by the official count, while independent estimates ran as high as about 200. In the bread riots of 1983–84 between about 90 and 150 people died. Tunisia’s pattern of revolt, interior first and coast last, was established long before 2010.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
State feminism: a gift, a strategy or a conquest?
Historians agree that the Personal Status Code transformed Tunisian law and disagree about whom to credit. Charrad’s comparative study argues that the decisive factor was the structure of the state: where rulers depended on tribal kin groups, as the Moroccan monarchy did, family law stayed conservative, and where a party had broken their power, as in Tunisia, it could be reformed. Critics of “state feminism”, a term for women’s rights designed and controlled by a government, point out that Bourguiba used the Code to weaken the religious establishment, to win approval in the West and to present one-party rule as progressive. Women’s rights served the regime’s legitimacy as much as they served women. Other scholars stress Tunisian women’s own earlier activism, such as the Muslim Women’s Union founded by Bchira Ben Mrad in 1936, and the intellectual groundwork of reformers. A further uncertainty concerns how quickly the law changed rural women’s lives, since polygamy was already rare and many marriages and divorces remained governed by custom for years. The fairest conclusion is that the Code was a genuine conquest of rights produced by an authoritarian state for its own reasons, a combination that explains both its durability and the fear, in 2012, that a new government might reverse it.
The coast and the interior
Tunisians often speak of two countries: a prosperous littoral running from Bizerte through Tunis and the Sahel to Sfax, outlined on the map, and an interior of highland towns, mining basins and desert oases. The division predates independence, since French settlers took the best farmland of the north and the coast already held the ports, but independent governments deepened it. The ruling elite came disproportionately from the Sahel, public investment and tourism concentrated on the coast, and the export factories of the 1970s were built where the ports and roads were. Hard figures from before the 1980s are scarce, which is a real limit on the evidence, but later official data show the result. In 2010 the national statistics institute measured poverty at 32 per cent in the Centre-West, the region of Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, against 8 per cent in the coastal Centre-East and 9 per cent in Greater Tunis. Béatrice Hibou and Kenneth Perkins both describe regional inequality as a structural feature of the post-colonial state, which is why the dashed outline on the map matters: almost every major revolt in this atlas begins outside it.
The bread riots as a rehearsal
The riots of 29 December 1983 to 6 January 1984 began when the government, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut food subsidies, announced that the price of bread and semolina would roughly double. Contemporary reports compiled by the Middle East Research and Information Project trace the sequence that the red arrow shows. Trouble began in the oases of the Nefzaoua around Douz and Kebili, reached Kasserine on 1 January, Gafsa, Gabès and Sfax on 2 January, and Tunis and Le Kef on 3 January, when a nationwide state of emergency was declared. An official inquiry counted 89 dead, the Tunisian Human Rights League 110, and other independent counts 150 or more. On 6 January Bourguiba appeared on television and cancelled the increases, and crowds celebrated in the streets. The parallels with 2010–11 are striking: the protest moved from the marginal south and interior to the capital in under a week, and the regime blamed its own ministers. The difference is equally instructive, since in 1984 the grievance was a price that the president could restore, and the army held, whereas in 2011 the grievance was the regime itself. The rehearsal showed that the interior could set the country alight, and that a ruler could survive only by giving way.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A nationalist party that owed little to tradition. Tunisia’s family law was reformed quickly because the party that won independence had little attachment to religious tradition. The Neo-Destour (“New Constitution”) party, founded in 1934 at Ksar Hellal in the Sahel, Tunisia’s coastal heartland, was led by French-educated lawyers and teachers who wanted a modern nation-state. In 1955–56 Bourguiba defeated his rival Salah Ben Youssef, whose pan-Arab nationalism, the hope of uniting all Arabic-speaking peoples, attracted conservative clergy and rural notables. Victory left Bourguiba free of the groups most opposed to changing family law, which explains why reform came so fast. Ben Youssef himself was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961, a reminder of how ruthlessly the victors guarded their position.
A reformist tradition within Islam. Tunisian reformers had argued for decades that Islamic law could be reinterpreted for modern life, a practice known as ijtihad, the independent reasoning of a qualified scholar. Tahar Haddad’s 1930 book called for women’s education and an end to polygamy. The Code drew on this tradition and was presented as faithful to Islam, which made it harder for religious opponents to reject it outright. Haddad had died poor and isolated in 1935, and the Code turned a condemned dissident into a national prophet.
Women as citizens of a new nation. Bourguiba saw the patriarchal extended family as an obstacle to national unity and economic development. Educated women workers and smaller families would, in his view, make Tunisia modern, so the Code was part of a wider programme of schooling, family planning and secular courts. Rapid population growth also made family planning an economic priority for the new state. Women’s rights were a means to the state’s ends as well as an end in themselves, which shaped their limits.
A state without counterweights. Because the party controlled the Constituent Assembly, the press and, from 1963, all legal political life, the government could decree reforms without negotiating with parliament, clergy or the public. The UGTT, the one mass organisation with an independent base, was purged whenever its leaders defied the party, as in 1978. The same concentration of power that made rapid reform possible also prevented independent organisations, including women’s groups and unions, from acting freely, which left the interior with no voice when development passed it by.
THE TURNING POINT
The Personal Status Code, 13 August 1956. The Code is the hinge of this chapter because it defined the relationship between the Tunisian state and women for the next sixty years. By abolishing polygamy and repudiation and making divorce a matter for the courts, it gave Tunisian women legal rights that women in most of the Arab world would wait decades for, and 13 August became National Women’s Day. It also established the bargain at the centre of this case study: rights granted by an authoritarian state in exchange for political silence. Every later ruler, Ben Ali and the Islamist-led government of 2012 alike, had to define himself in relation to the Code, which shows how a reform from above can become a red line defended from below.
What it changed
The most liberal family law in the Arab world. The Code was extended under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, for example in 1993, when mothers gained new rights over their children. It became part of Tunisian national identity, so that when a draft constitution of 2012 described women as “complementary” to men, thousands marched to defend the rights the Code had created. Ben Ali presented himself as the Code’s guardian, which helped him win Western support while he repressed Islamists.
Rights without the freedom to organise. Because the only legal women’s organisation belonged to the ruling party, Tunisian women had rights on paper and little independent means to use or extend them. Independent feminist associations appeared only in the late 1980s and spent two decades under police surveillance, though many of the women who led protests in 2011 and 2012 came from them. Rights granted by a state can be defended only by citizens free to organise, which is why women’s groups emerged as organised actors only after 2011.
A country divided between coast and interior. Regional inequality became a lasting feature of the state Bourguiba built. Young people from the interior migrated to the coast or abroad, and those who stayed faced fewer jobs, schools and hospitals. In 2010 poverty in the Centre-West was four times that of the coastal Centre-East. Their resentment, voiced in the bread riots of 1984 and the mining-basin revolt of 2008, exploded in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, so the development model that favoured the coast built the grievance that would bring down Bourguiba’s successor.
A succession crisis waiting to happen. By the mid-1980s Bourguiba was in his eighties and erratic, dismissing prime ministers and divorcing his influential wife in 1986. Islamist activists of the new Islamic Tendency Movement were tried in 1987, and Bourguiba demanded death sentences. His prime minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, used the crisis to have him declared medically unfit in November 1987, a bloodless coup that was at first widely welcomed. A president for life could be removed only by declaring him unfit, so the succession came through a medical coup dressed in constitutional form.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Personal Status Code a victory for Tunisian women, or a tool of Bourguiba’s state?
The case for victory is strong. The Code abolished polygamy and repudiation, made divorce a judicial right for both spouses and set the foundation for votes, schooling, contraception and legal abortion, giving Tunisian women rights that most women in the region would wait decades to win. Its durability shows that many Tunisian women came to treat it as their own. Yet the evidence also shows a tool of the state. It was decreed without public debate, used to weaken the religious establishment, and accompanied by a ban on independent women’s organisations, so women could not defend or extend their rights except through the party. Its benefits also reached urban, educated women faster than rural women of the interior. Charrad’s structural argument suggests that the question is partly false, since a state that needed no support from kin groups could afford to give women rights for its own reasons. The most persuasive judgement is that the Code was both, a real gain delivered as an instrument of power. The transferable insight is that rights granted from above are only secure once people below are free to defend them, which is exactly what Tunisian women became after 2011.
An interesting fact
Bourguiba’s own marriages follow the arc of his reforms. His first wife was a Frenchwoman, Mathilde Lorrain, whom he met while studying law in Paris in the 1920s and who later took the Arabic name Moufida. In 1962 he married Wassila Ben Ammar, who became one of the most powerful figures at his court for over two decades. When the ageing president ended that marriage in 1986, he did so through a court, because the Personal Status Code he had decreed thirty years earlier had made a judge’s ruling the only legal way for any Tunisian man to divorce his wife.
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