Background
Bourguiba was born on August 3, 1903 in Monastir into a modest family as the eighth and last child of his fraternity.
Bourguiba was born on August 3, 1903 in Monastir into a modest family as the eighth and last child of his fraternity.
He then moved to Tunis in 1907 in order to pursue his studies in Sadiki College then in Lycée Carnot, before obtaining his baccalaureate in 1924. In 1927, he graduated from the University of Paris and worked as a lawyer, after his return to Tunis, in the late 1920s.
After three years as a lawyer he turned to journalism in 1930. He worked with the Destour (Constitution) Party newspaper “Sawt-at-Tunisi” (Voice of the Tunisian) and soon saw the need for something more radical and founded his own newspaper “Ala Amal A1 Tunisi" (Tunisian Action) as the organ of Neo-Destour, a breakaway party established with himself as Secretary-General in September 1934. He was arrested soon afterwards and restricted to the Sahara border. Released after two years, Bourguiba organised demonstrations demanding the end of the French protectorate. Clashes with the police led to his arrest. He was imprisoned without trial in April 1938 and moved to Marseilles in early 1940.
The Germans released him in December 1942 and sent him to Rome in January 1943. Although he refused to cooperate with them, he persuaded the Italians to let him return to Tunis in April 1943 one month before the Allies entered the city. Again, the French arrested him. On March 26, 1945, he escaped and made his way across the desert disguised as a bedouin.
For the next four years Bourguiba kept up pressure from outside Tunisia for independence and then returned in September 1949. He published a seven-point independence plan on April 15, 1950,'but when negotiations with the French eventually collapsed he was arrested on January 18, 1952. After the Mendes-France government gave the go-ahead in July 1954 for an independence agreement Bourguiba was freed. He returned in triumph to Tunisia on June 1, 1955, and became the country’s first Prime Minister after independence on March 20, 1956. The Constituent Assembly ended the monarchy on June 25, 1957, by deposing Sidi Mohammed al Amin as Bey of Tunis and declared Bourguiba President.
Relations with France returned to crisis point on February 8, 1958, when the French Air Force bombed the Tunisian village of Sakiet with heavy casualties on the grounds that it was harbouring Algerian nationalists. Bourguiba’s nerve held and the French yielded. He won a second test of nerves in June 1961 when he demanded the French evacuation of the naval base of Bizerta. There was bitter fighting but after United Nations intervention the French withdrew.
He was often the odd-man-out in crises over Israel and Rhodesia. Arab neighbours were furious with him in April 1968 when he called for a negotiated settlement with Israel. In December 1965 he was arraigned for not breaking off relations with Britain as others did because of Rhodesia’s UDI. He countered by saying a break would achieve nothing. In each case he applied the test of realism regardless of whether it made him popular.
In his later years his domination of the Neo-Destour party caused some discontent especially when those wanting changes had to wait from 1964 until October 11, 1971, for a party congress. Only slowly did he recognise the need for liberalisation and greater powers for the National Assembly. Student agitation to end paternalism and usher in real démocratisation intensified from 1969 onwards when ill-health made Bourguiba less attentive to party and state affairs.
He was struck down by serious illness in January 1971 with a recurrence of the liver trouble which kept him in France for medical treatment for six months in 1970. He was flown to the Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, DC, for an operation, spent a long time convalescing in Switzerland, and returned looking very frail to Tunisia in June 1971.
His powers of recuperation have continually surprised friends and enemies alike. Confounding those who wrote him off as a "has been”, he showed his metal in an unexpected intervention at a rally addressed by Colonel Qadafi of Libya during a state visit on December 16, 1972. Cutting Colonel Qadafi down to size over his proposals for instant unity among Arab states he said: “It requires time to change the minds of men who have for centuries been accustomed to thinking of themselves as possessing one character and constituting one nation. This requires dozens even hundreds of years. Even now Qadafi has tried a union of Libya, Syria, Egypt and Sudan. Where is it now? God only knows.”
His westward-looking policies, his pragmatic attitude to the existence of Israel and his aloofness from extremist causes left him isolated at times from the mainstream of Arab nationalism. Yet his worldly westernised wisdom was often more than a match for the Arab firebrands as Colonel Qadafi of Libya realised on being outsmarted over the realities of revolution during a visit to Tunisia in December 1972 when Bourguiba addressed a rally in Tunis on his 50 years of experience as a revolutionary. At home his nationalist record which earned him the Berber title “The Supreme Fighter” kept him in an unassailable position. As he admitted on January 10, 1972: “It is not easy to replace a man like me.”
Mathilde Lorrain (m. 1927; divorce 1961), Wassila Ben Ammar (m. 1962; divorce 1986).