In the fall of 1934, the Franco-Tunisian socialist Eva Fichet hid a clandestine envelope in the suitcase of a friend traveling home to France. Evading the censors who surveilled outgoing mail from Tunis, the letter eventually made it to its destination in Switzerland — the headquarters of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The letter was a long-overdue report from the organization’s Tunisian branch, describing the rapid collapse of political and civic freedoms in Tunisia. “We are in full fascism here,” Fichet wrote, detailing new laws that outlawed public meetings, banned newspapers and allowed for dissenting voices to be deported, including her own friends and family members.
To the league’s members in Europe, Fichet’s report would have sounded familiar. They, too, were watching with horror as fascist parties grew in strength across the continent. The Nazis had just consolidated power under Adolf Hitler, winning national elections in 1933; ultranationalist militias in France had ousted a center-left government; Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy would soon invade a sovereign Ethiopia; and Francisco Franco’s right-wing faction would pull Spain into a bloody civil war. As an international pacifist women’s organization founded in the crucible of World War I, the WILPF was in the midst of an impassioned debate over how to respond to this existential threat.
But the forms of fascism Fichet described in her report were not the ideologies emerging from Germany and Italy; they were the practices of her own French colonial government. Founded by French settler women living in Tunis, the Tunisian WILPF chapter was opposed to colonialism in theory, but its leaders tended to support a slower, reformist approach to repealing French imperial rule. Living under fascism changed their minds. From the vantage point of North Africa, the rising tide of right-wing authoritarianism was indistinguishable from the violence of a colonial bureaucracy abusing its unfettered power. In Tunisia, protesting fascism abroad and resisting repression at home created an unusual coalition that crossed political, racial, religious and national lines. Working alongside Tunisian nationalists, Jewish Zionist groups, Italian labor leaders and communist agitators in the messy solidarity of an anti-fascist front pushed Fichet and her French colleagues to recognize the oppression of colonialism, and become allies of the Tunisian independence movement.
When the Tunisian section of the WILPF was established in 1929, it was one of only three chapters outside Europe and North America, and the only one in a colonized country. The league had distinguished itself from other interwar women’s networks at its 1926 International Congress, declaring itself “opposed in principle” to colonialism because, it argued, the practice caused interstate rivalry between colonial powers and fomented armed uprisings.
In Tunisia, they had the opportunity to put this position into practice. Led by Fichet — a high school teacher and newspaper columnist who was part of Tunis’ privileged French “colon,” or settler, community — and a group of her French socialist colleagues, the WILPF chapter initially sought to mitigate community tensions that could lead to violence, and address the more egregious abuses experienced by the local population. In her columns, Fichet condemned the “daily indignities” that Tunisian Arabs experienced at the hands of racist settlers, and the widespread poverty that was a result of French economic policy, but her initial solution was to build stronger cross-community relationships and engage in public peace education campaigns, rather than overthrow the colonial system. She envisioned the league chapter as a platform for dialogue to reconcile the “diverse elements of the Tunisian population.”
North Africans challenged this conception of colonialism as merely a secondary cause of unrest and violence. As early as 1924, Egyptian nationalist Esther Fahmi Wissa asked the WILPF to intervene against British oppression. In a telegram to the league’s headquarters, she insisted that “imperialistic oppression [is a] great obstacle to world peace,” explaining that peace in Egypt was “dangerously threatened through present british policy actuated by barbaric brutal force.” That is, colonialism was not just a potential driver of conflict, but an inherently violent institution that transgressed the league’s pacifist ideals.
Tunisian lawyer Mohamed Nomane made a similar argument in an open letter to Fichet and the Tunisian WILPF chapter in 1930. He accused them of misdiagnosing the causes of war by focusing on disarmament, concluding that “the only remedy to make war disappear is the dispossession of colonialism.” The tumultuous events of the 1930s would eventually push the Tunisian WILPF closer to this view, at times out of step with its league colleagues in Europe.
The early years of the Tunisian league’s activity coincided with the rise of a new cohort of radical Tunisian nationalists who sparked a mass movement to end French rule. Its leaders included Habib Bourguiba, Mahmoud El Materi, Bahri Guiga and Tahar Sfar, who had all studied in Paris, where they met anti-colonial political theorists and agitators from Algeria, China and Vietnam. They returned to Tunis with new tactics to reinvigorate the weakened nationalist movement, founding the Neo Destour (“New Constitutional”) Party that would eventually carry the country to independence in the 1950s. Fichet and her league colleagues would have known these men from the mixed elite society in which they all participated. They were former students at the colonial schools where league members taught, they likely attended the cultural salon Fichet hosted or the socialist theater troupe her husband ran and they collaborated with French socialists on joint charitable endeavors. These circles included few Tunisian women, who largely lacked access to the educational opportunities that would have allowed them entrance. The school where Fichet taught, for instance, accepted only about 10 Muslim girls out of more than 500 students.
The Tunisian league chapter took advantage of its personal connections to engage Tunisian nationalists in the league’s work, with the hope of recruiting more of what Fichet called “the Tunisian Arab element.” The group’s founding members were mostly leftist French women and men who had settled in Tunis as teachers, journalists and government employees. They represented a tiny minority in a city where working-class Italians and Maltese — the result of a century of migration across the Mediterranean — outnumbered the more recently arrived French population, and where Europeans were dwarfed by the Tunisian majority. In order to reach beyond the French demographic, the group established relationships with nationalist newspapers, which agreed to print the group’s announcements, had league petitions translated into Arabic and hosted public debates that gave a platform to Tunisian thinkers and Muslim religious leaders. Men like Guiga, Sfar, and El Materi acted as their primary interlocutors, participating in the group’s events and coordinating on calls for action.
Their contributions directly challenged Fichet’s convictions that cross-community harmony and socialist reforms would solve Tunisia’s problems. At a 1932 meeting that Fichet brokered between nationalist leaders and visiting French socialist politicians, Sfar objected to their reformist promises. He doubted socialism would bring “a true regime of freedom,” pointing out that it was not only a capitalist regime that oppressed Tunisia, but a racist one as well. At another WILPF-sponsored debate in 1931, Bourguiba and Guiga rejected the colonial education system that many league members worked for, critiquing French indifference to Tunisian children’s learning. These criticisms prompted debate among French members, some of whom responded in anger, while others asked serious questions about the colonial status quo and their own privilege. Fichet wrote a column about the quarrels within the group, reminding her readers that the French lifestyle in Tunisia rested on inequality; government employees and teachers like herself were paid by Tunisian’s taxes to do a job that, she admitted, “mainly brings profit to the French.”
The success of the burgeoning nationalist movement would soon attract a new wave of repression by the French government. Just as the league members’ compatriots in Europe began sounding the alarm about rising fascism on the continent, the Tunisian chapter was watching as its closest collaborators were exiled and silenced. Increasingly, the league could not ignore the parallels with the fascism they were opposing abroad. The Tunisian section participated in international advocacy against antisemitism in Germany and imperial invasion by Italy, but as it protested arbitrary detentions, censorship and racism elsewhere, it drew inevitable parallels with these same trends at home. By 1934, the league had begun to speak about the everyday authoritarianism of colonial rule as a form of fascism itself.
Tunisia felt the effects of creeping European fascism early. First, it arrived in the form of refugees fleeing neighboring Libya. Italy had fought the Ottoman Empire for Libya in 1911, but it was not until the early 1930s that Mussolini, the Italian prime minister, successfully wrested control of the colonial province. The Italian army waged a relentless counterinsurgency campaign against Libyan resistance, using its colonial backyard to test out new military tactics, like using airplanes to drop bombs that killed combatants and civilians alike — tactics that would shock the world when they were deployed again in the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. As Libyan survivors fled across the border into Tunisia, their stories of destruction circulated through the streets of Tunis and led to outraged protests, including retaliatory attacks against Italian dockworkers.
An Arab journalist, likely Chedly Khairallah, editor of the nationalist paper La Voix du Tunisien, alerted the Tunisian league to the rumors that were spreading about massacres over the border, and asked the group to get involved. A league delegation presented thousands of signatures at the Italian Consulate, demanding an end to its brutal tactics. Fichet reported that the Italian consul “refused to take note of the petition and protested the purity of the Italian conscience.” She wrote to the league’s headquarters asking that they conduct a fact-finding mission to the city of Koufra — a village that refugees said had been “completely annihilated” — to set the record straight. Though the league’s HQ demurred, it did write to the Italian delegation to the League of Nations in protest, noting that despite the lack of international attention to the events in Libya, the WILPF was aware of the situation, and of the strong indignation it bred “throughout the Arab world.”
The Tunisian chapter of the WILPF also organized against the forms of fascism that were consuming the league’s European branches. The group joined mass demonstrations at the German Consulate in Tunis, organized by European and Tunisian Jews after the March 1933 elections in Germany saw Hitler consolidate a majority and then seize the power to rule by decree. After a series of boycotts and street protests, the groups involved decided to pursue a collective strategy, and the league served as mediator for a new “Coalition Against Fascism and Hitlerism.” The coalition united the usual suspects on the French left — the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), the main socialist party; the Human Rights League; and the General Confederation of Labor, a trade union federation — with Italian leftists and two local Jewish groups — the Party of Jewish Action and Emancipation and the Tunisian branch of the socialist Zionist youth league Hashomer Hatzair — but not yet any representatives of the Muslim majority.
After a run of secret organizing sessions chaired by Fichet, the coalition hosted a public meeting at the downtown Bourse du Travail. Three thousand people crowded into the hall to protest the recently announced Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. The group soon expanded its focus from antisemitism to the Nazi persecution of political minorities, and in doing so attracted new partners. In October 1933, Fichet presided over another mass meeting to protest the Leipzig Trial, a show trial that baselessly blamed the German Communist Party for an arson attempt on the Reichstag building. By now, the coalition had expanded to include the Tunisian Communist Party, the Tunisian-led union the General Confederation of Tunisian Workers, and the nationalist newspaper L’Action Tunisienne, founded by the young cohort of nationalists who worked with the league: Bourguiba, El Materi, Guiga, Sfar and their colleagues. At the Leipzig rally, M’Hamed Bourguiba — whose brother, Habib, would later become prime minister — spoke on behalf of the group. He condemned the trial of four innocents in Germany and noted that the injustice reminded him of “the administrative arbitrariness that reigns in Tunisia.” This link would become ever more obvious as local repression grew.
European fascisms were soon imported to Tunis by the city’s large French and Italian communities, bringing violence in their wake. An Italian Armistice Day parade in 1933 turned into a skirmish, as marchers with fascist insignia hurled insults and projectiles at counterprotesters. French ultranationalist brigades threw paint on the Italian Consulate to remind them who was really in charge. Violent clashes between fascists and anti-fascists erupted in a series of bombings.
Soon, this violence came not just from organized mobs, but from the governing powers. Fascism manifested as a new cycle of colonial repression targeting anyone who challenged French impunity, starting with the league’s Tunisian allies. Bourguiba and his comrades had successfully organized tens of thousands of Tunisian men and women in strikes, boycotts of French merchandise, and blockades of cemeteries to protest laws that encouraged educated Tunisians to become French citizens. When colonial police responded with violence, the concerns quickly grew to encompass broader anger over French colonial abuses, and attracted even more Tunisian support. The French colonial government redoubled its efforts to quash the movement, banning Arab nationalist newspapers and decreeing that any Tunisian could be placed under surveillance for “hostile acts” or “propaganda” against the French administration.
In 1934, a new resident-general, Marcel Peyrouton, supercharged political repression, arresting Tunisian nationalist leaders one after the other and exiling them to a desert prison in the Sahara. Then he turned to European anti-fascists. Jean Loubet, a member of the Tunisian league’s executive board, was fired from his job as a teacher and deported to France. The league’s public meetings — along with all civic demonstrations — were banned. Then the newspaper Fichet wrote for was forcibly closed, and her brother and son-in-law were dragged through the courts and fined for “having damaged the prestige of France.” This was the “full fascism” that Fichet reported to Geneva, and the situation was only deteriorating.
In the face of growing repression, the Tunisian league chapter got to work. It protested violations of free speech and “the clandestine and tyrannical character” of the arrests of Tunisian nationalists. It sent letters urging newspaper publishers to dial back inflammatory language and “inexact news.” And it called on the international WILPF to spread the word about the Tunisian situation, providing regular political reporting that was published in French newspapers, challenging the official government narrative.
But splits soon appeared beyond this seemingly united front, even within the league chapter itself. Fichet herself wanted to write a strongly worded letter to the resident-general, using the league’s reputation as “women of peace” to appeal to his better angels. The rest of the group refused. Half of the members thought the idea of trying to change such a brutal man “absolutely vain and ridiculous,” and the other half feared “the wrath of the administration.”
The Tunisian league chapter also found itself politically at odds with its European counterparts, a direct result of the colonial oppression that the leadership was now observing and linking to fascist techniques of control. Comrades in Europe, especially the French WILPF leaders, had taken a central role in anti-fascist organizing, headlining conferences in 1932 and 1933 that launched the anti-fascist Amsterdam-Pleyel movement and founding the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism. These groups based in Europe used the language of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism interchangeably, but anti-imperialism meant something very different for those in the colonized world, as historians Giuliana Chamedes and Tom Buchanan have detailed. Chamedes has shown that colonial subjects recognized fascism not only as a political threat but as “at core imperial, and based on racial hierarchies.” On the other hand, European anti-fascism, as Buchanan has noted, “not only did nothing in the short term to address the grievances of the colonial peoples, it also perpetrated them.”
The French league chapter was no exception. Its publications regularly used imperialism as a synonym for Italian and German expansion, but almost never discussed France’s own colonial holdings. This exacerbated already tense relations between the French and Tunisian chapters of the league. For instance, when communist French member Léo Wanner was arrested on a visit to Tunisia in 1935, she asked Fichet to organize a public protest. But repression of Tunisian civic organizing was at its height, and what might work in Paris was perilous in the colonies. Fichet explained to Wanner that Tunis was full of colonial regiments ready to put down any sign of rebellion, and any Arabs who joined a rally would be “mowed down by riflemen.” The incident proved to her that the French league had no real understanding of colonial realities.
Eventually, it became impossible for the league to continue its political organizing and educational work due to restrictions on convening, publications and public expressions of dissent. The group was forced to request an “official authorization” in order to continue its work, and it anticipated being refused such authorization. Its sections in Sfax and Sousse were shuttered, and according to a letter from Fichet to the WILPF headquarters, the Tunis chapter survived “only by the loyal will of a small core.”
In the final years of the 1930s, Tunisia experienced a whiplash of political reversals. In 1936, the WILPF and its allies won a brief reprieve after elections in the metropole were swept by the Popular Front coalition, ushering in a new socialist government in France and a kinder, gentler resident-general in Tunisia. Fichet became a figurehead in the Tunisian Popular Front, presiding over a 10,000-person rally that promised to restore political freedoms. Bourguiba, Guiga, Sfar and their compatriots were freed and immediately set about recruiting and organizing for the Neo Destour Party, building the foundations of the organization that would carry them to independence in the postwar era. Tunisian women also took advantage of the new political space to create Tunisia’s first Muslim women’s organization in 1936, the Muslim Women’s Union of Tunisia (UMFT), which collaborated closely with the Neo Destour Party both before and after the war. But within a year, this window of opportunity closed again. After nationwide protests in 1938 drew thousands of Tunisians to the streets to demand a national parliament, law enforcement opened fire on protesters in Tunis. The Neo Destour Party was dissolved and virtually all its leaders rearrested, and the colonial authorities worked to drive a wedge between the nationalists and their erstwhile allies in the European left by accusing Neo Destour Party members of collaborating with fascists.
Fichet was not convinced by such charges. Notes from SFIO meetings indicate that she voted to maintain support for the Neo Destour Party, though many other French socialists fell in line in accusing the party of collusion, and fought to keep the issue of Tunisian political prisoners on the party agenda. The Tunisian chapter of the league drafted a public appeal denouncing police violence and called on the government to “carry out the reforms to which [Tunisians] legitimately aspire.” Fichet used her newspaper column to advocate for the nationalist cause, and a police surveillance file complains that she “always took the defense of the natives, in particular against the government.” And the group internationalized the movement by raising the issue of Tunisian oppression through its global networks, publishing articles, open letters and reports via the league’s channels. Its work alongside Tunisians during dark periods of oppression had succeeded in changing the views of the group’s French leadership, realigning it as an ally for Tunisian nationalism.
Soon, however, all was to change. Tunisia braced for war, and a new round of political decrees and censorship forced the Tunisian league to end its political work for good in 1939. Its anti-fascist activism put a target on its members’ backs, and several high-profile league members, including Fichet, were blacklisted and deported during World War II. But the relationships it had built under fascism had ripple effects. The hard-won periods of openness in the 1930s provided a critical window for organizing that laid the groundwork for the revival of the Neo Destour Party and Muslim women’s organizing after the war. Records indicate that, after 1943, a handful of league members joined the Union of Tunisian Women (UFT), which took over the baton from the league in promoting peace and women’s rights in Tunisia, this time led by Tunisian women themselves. Women’s groups like the UFT and UMFT became critical partners in the nationalist struggle, and their advocacy demanding social and political rights for women in an independent Tunisia helped make possible the far-reaching legal reforms that were eventually guaranteed in the progressive 1956 Tunisian Constitution and Personal Status Code. The period of solidarity under fascism supported political alliances, and also established a precedent for women’s involvement — both crucial developments in the struggle for independence.
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