Tunisia's history: the long argument over a written constitution

What Aristotle found to praise in Carthage

Stone tools found near Kelibia, dated to around 200,000 years ago, are the earliest evidence of people in the territory, and the Capsian culture of about 10,000 to 6,000 BC is named after Gafsa. The written record begins with traders from Tyre, who founded Carthage, Qart Hadesht or "new city" in Punic. Timaeus of Taormina, a Sicilian Greek of the third century BC, put the founding at a date that converts to 814 BC. Britannica notes that nothing found on the site is older than the last quarter of the eighth century BC, a full century later.

By the middle of the sixth century BC Carthage was an independent sea power, and in 509 BC it signed a treaty with the Roman Republic that defined their commercial zones. Greek writers took an interest in how it was governed. Aristotle's Politics, written in the fourth century BC, discusses Carthage as its only non-Greek example and describes a mixed constitution with elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Two suffetes, elected each year from the wealthiest families, held judicial and executive power and had no command over the army. Generals answered after each campaign to a tribunal Aristotle calls the One Hundred and Four, and where the suffetes and the council of elders disagreed, a popular assembly decided. Aristotle wrote that "the superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal".

The constitution was fought over inside the city too. After the Second Punic War, Hannibal was elected suffete in 196 BC and proposed one-year terms for the judges of the One Hundred and Four, who sat for life. His opponents went to Rome and accused him of plotting war, and Roman intervention forced him out of Carthage.

The wars with Rome ended the city. Hannibal had crossed the Alps and won at Cannae in 216 BC before his defeat at Zama in 202 BC, and in the third war, from 149 to 146 BC, Carthage was plundered and burned and its citizens enslaved. Of its literature Britannica names one survivor, Mago's 28 books on agriculture, known through a Greek translation.

How Rome ruled the province it called Africa

Rome annexed the land in 146 BC as the province of Africa, and the Arabs who came eight centuries later called it Ifriqiya, the Arabic form of the same name. Augustus moved the provincial administration to a rebuilt Carthage in 29 BC. The province was known for its wheat, and large estates worked by slaves for absentee owners spread over land small farmers had tilled.

At Thysdrus, the modern El Jem, an amphitheatre for up to 35,000 spectators was begun in 238, in UNESCO's description, and never finished. That year local landowners at Thysdrus killed a rapacious official and proclaimed the aged governor, Gordian I, emperor, and his grandson Gordian III ruled the empire from 238 to 244.

Christian Carthage produced Tertullian and educated Augustine. The African church split over the Donatists, who drew their following from rural Berbers and whose movement was declared a heresy in 405. The Vandals took Carthage in 439 and held it for 94 years, Belisarius recovered it for Byzantium in 534, and in 610 Heraclius, son of the exarch of Carthage, sailed east with an African fleet and became emperor.

Why Kairouan became the seat of Ifriqiya

An Arab army under Uqba ibn Nafi entered Ifriqiya in 670, passed the Byzantine forts along the coast and founded Kairouan as its base inland. Berber resistance held up the conquest for a generation. Kusaila killed Uqba in a revolt, and a woman the Arabs called al-Kahina, the prophetess, defeated Hassan ibn al-Nu'man before she was killed. In 705 Hassan destroyed Carthage and founded Tunis near its ruins as a naval base.

In 800 the caliph Harun al-Rashid granted Ifriqiya to Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as a hereditary amirate, and the Aghlabids ruled until 909, naming the Abbasid caliph in Friday prayers while governing on their own account. UNESCO describes Kairouan as the capital of Ifriqiya for five centuries. It was the legal centre of the Maghreb, where Sahnun wrote the Mudawanna, the "vulgate of North-African Malikism", and its Maliki jurists quarrelled with the amirs over their drinking and their taxes. The amirs enlarged the Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis, built ribats at Monastir and Sousse and dug the Basins of the Aghlabids at Kairouan, and an expedition under the qadi Asad ibn al-Furat conquered Sicily and made Palermo its capital.

In 909 the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shia movement raised among the Kotama Berbers, took Kairouan and built Mahdia on the coast. After conquering Egypt in 969 and founding Cairo they left, and in 1048 their Zirid deputies broke with them. The Fatimids sent the Banu Hilal, Bedouin tribes from Egypt, west in reprisal. They sacked Kairouan in 1057, farming on the plains gave way to pastoralism, and Arabic spread through the countryside as the Berber languages retreated. The political capital moved to Tunis in the twelfth century, after the Normans of Sicily had seized the coastal towns between 1134 and 1148 and the Almohads had driven them out by 1160.

How Tunis became the capital under the Hafsids

Abu Zakariya, the Almohad governor of Tunis, declared his independence in 1229, and his descendants, the Hafsids, ruled from Tunis until 1574. For two years, from 1259 to 1261, after the Mongols had ended the Abbasid caliphate, Mecca recognised the Hafsid al-Mustansir as caliph. Abu Zakariya opened relations with Venice, Genoa, Sicily and Aragon, and at the customs ports imports waited in a sealed warehouse, the funduq, until duties of usually 5 or 10% had been paid.

UNESCO counts some 700 monuments in the medina of Tunis, palaces, mosques, mausoleums, madrasas and fountains among them, from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries under the Almohads and the Hafsids. Britannica puts at some 200,000 the Spanish Muslims who settled around Tunis and in the Majardah valley, in a migration that became an exodus in the early seventeenth century.

Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, served the Hafsids and other courts, then held several terms as chief Maliki judge in Egypt, and died in Cairo in 1406. His Muqaddimah explains the rise and fall of North African dynasties through asabiyyah, the cohesion of a ruling group, strong when it seizes power and spent within several generations.

Why the beys put their own power in writing

Spain and the Ottomans fought over the last Hafsids, and in 1574 the corsair Uluj Ali took Tunis for the Ottomans for good. Turkish became the language of the state, and in 1574 a garrison of 4,000 Janissaries held the capital. Power then moved down the ranks. Janissary officers imposed their own dey on the pasha in 1591, the beys who collected the rural taxes overtook the deys in the seventeenth century, and in 1705 Husayn ibn Ali, a cavalry officer of Cretan Greek origin, was proclaimed bey. His line held the title until 1957. Friday prayers were said in the sultan's name, but the Husaynids signed their own treaties, with France in 1710 and Britain in 1716 among them.

Ahmad Bey, who reigned from 1837 to 1855, refused to apply the Ottoman Tanzimat in Tunisia and issued reforms of his own, a way of showing that Tunisia could modernise without importing Ottoman law. He opened a military school and began conscripting Tunisians. The slave trade was abolished in 1841 and slavery in 1846, the statutes that kept Tunisian Jews legally inferior were removed, and in 1845 he stopped the regular tribute to Istanbul.

The two charters came under his successors. On 10 September 1857 Muhammad II Bey enacted the Fundamental Pact, the 'Ahd al-Aman or Security Covenant, modelled on the Tanzimat. In 1861 Muhammad III as-Sadiq promulgated a constitution that made Tunisia a constitutional monarchy with a legislative assembly and a clear division of ministerial powers. In practice, by the historian Wesseling's account, the prime minister Mustapha Khaznadar, who had "been pulling the strings ever since 1837", remained the absolute power.

Money undid the reform. Khaznadar doubled taxes in 1861 and by 1864 the countryside was in revolt. Crop failure, famine and epidemics of cholera and typhus killed some 20% of the population in 1867 and 1868, and in 1869 Tunisia declared itself bankrupt and an international financial commission of France, Britain and Italy took control of its finances. Britannica calls the constitution of 1861 short-lived. Its name came back in 1920.

How France ruled Tunisia through the bey

What the treaties of Bardo and La Marsa took

In 1870 some 15,000 Europeans lived in Tunisia, almost all of them Italian or Maltese, but at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Britain accepted French influence there in exchange for Cyprus. A Khroumir raid into Algeria in March 1881 gave France its pretext, and an army of about 36,000 invaded. On 12 May 1881 Muhammad III as-Sadiq signed the Treaty of Bardo at 7:11 in the evening, fearing he would otherwise be replaced by his brother. Italians called it the Schiaffo di Tunisi, the slap of Tunis.

Britannica notes that the bey remained officially an absolute monarch and that France did not confiscate land; the Wikipedia account of the protectorate describes land laws that allowed acquisition or confiscation for lots resold to French colonists. The Conventions of La Marsa, signed by Ali Bey in 1883, bound the bey to the reforms France dictated, and from then on he signed decrees the resident general had prepared. French colonists numbered 34,000 in 1906 and 144,000 in 1945, holding about a fifth of the cultivated land.

How the Destour made a lost constitution a cause

The Destour was founded in 1920 and named, Britannica records, for the short-lived constitution of 1861. Its programme of 1920 demanded constitutional government with the same rights for Tunisians as for Europeans, and its leader, Abd al-Aziz al-Thaalibi, was arrested. In 1922 the bey Muhammad al-Nasir asked for the programme to be adopted or he would abdicate, and the resident general surrounded his palace with troops until the demand was withdrawn.

In 1934 a young lawyer, Habib Bourguiba, and his colleagues broke away to found the Neo-Destour, which built a mass following and was dissolved by the French in 1938. Moncef Bey, who had formed a ministry sympathetic to the Destour, was deposed by a Free French decree on 13 May 1943, the day the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. After the war the French answered a nationalist government's plan for a Tunisian parliament by exiling Bourguiba and arresting its ministers, and guerrillas took to the mountains. The French premier Pierre Mendès-France promised complete autonomy in July 1954, and on 20 March 1956 France recognised Tunisia's independence.

What the Neo-Destour state did with independence

Independence came as a monarchy, with Bourguiba as prime minister. On 13 August 1956 a beylical decree promulgated the Code of Personal Status, in force from 1 January 1957, which outlawed polygamy, set minimum ages for marriage, required the consent of both spouses and replaced the husband's repudiation with divorce before a court. Women gained the vote on 14 March 1957. On 25 July 1957 Bourguiba deposed the Husaynid dynasty and Tunisia was declared a republic, with him as president.

From then until 2011 the government and the party were, in the Wikipedia account, effectively one. In July 1961 a Tunisian blockade of the French naval base at Bizerte led to a three-day battle that left some 630 Tunisians and 24 French dead, and France ceded the base in 1963. The party kept the word for constitution through every renaming. It became the Destourian Socialist Party in 1964, the year of Ahmad Ben Salah's state-led plan for agricultural cooperatives, a plan that ended with his expulsion from the party and imprisonment in 1969. In 1975 the Chamber of Deputies unanimously made Bourguiba president for life.

On 7 November 1987 doctors declared the 84-year-old Bourguiba unfit to rule, and his prime minister of one month, General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, took the presidency under Article 57 of the constitution. In 1988 the party was renamed the Constitutional Democratic Rally, or RCD. In the elections of 1989 Ben Ali took more than 99% of the vote and the RCD all 141 seats. Ennahda, the Islamist party, was banned in 1991, and Ben Ali was re-elected in 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009.

How the Dignity Revolution ended in a constitution

On 17 December 2010 a city employee in Sidi Bouzid confiscated the produce cart of Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, and within the hour, refused a hearing, he set himself on fire. Protests spread across the country. Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011, the General Labour Union called a general strike for 14 January, and that day Ben Ali left for Saudi Arabia after 23 years in power. Tunisians call it the Dignity Revolution; the name Jasmine Revolution came from foreign media. A court banned the RCD, and on 23 October 2011 voters elected a 217-member Constituent Assembly, in which Ennahda won 89 seats by Wikipedia's count and 90 by Britannica's.

The drafting nearly failed. Two opposition leaders were assassinated in 2013, Chokri Belaid on 6 February and Mohamed Brahmi on 25 July, and on 6 August the assembly's president halted its work. Four organisations, the General Labour Union, the employers' confederation UTICA, the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Order of Lawyers, formed the National Dialogue Quartet, and on 25 October 2013, 21 of the 24 parties invited signed its roadmap. The assembly adopted the constitution on 26 January 2014. The Wilson Center notes that it declared women and men equal citizens. On 9 October 2015 the Quartet received the Nobel Peace Prize for "its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia". In October and November 2019, by Britannica's account, Tunisia completed its first peaceful transfer of power from one democratically elected government to another.

Why the constitution of the revolution was replaced

On 25 July 2021, after violent protests over the economy and the pandemic, the president elected in 2019 dismissed the prime minister and suspended parliament, invoking the emergency powers of Article 80. The House of Commons Library reported that his supporters celebrated and that others called it a power grab, and Wikipedia's history of Tunisia notes that the article did not permit parliament to be suspended. The head of the constitutional committee, Sadok Belaid, said the president's draft did not reflect the committee's text and could pave the way for "a disgraceful dictatorial regime". The referendum was held on 25 July 2022, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the republic, and approved the new constitution on a turnout of 30%.

Set side by side, the charters Tunisia has lived under or campaigned for describe very different states.

The 2022 text returned Tunisia to a presidential system, in Britannica's description, with a second legislative house, the National Council for Regions and Provinces, beside the Assembly of the People's Representatives. Political parties were barred from the legislative elections that followed, according to the BTI 2026 report, and the presidential election of 6 October 2024 returned the incumbent with more than 90% of the vote on a turnout of 28.8%.

The word Destour outlived the RCD. The Free Destourian Party, which emerged from it, drew a surge of support in 2019, and in October 2023 its leader, Abir Moussi, joined the opponents of the president who had been detained or imprisoned.