In 1869, the Kingdom of Tunis was placed under the control of an international financial commission chaired by France. In 1878, a diplomatic conference in Berlin launched Tunisia into France's orbit. In 1881, an offensive by the French army from Algeria accelerated the country's placement under French protection from 12 May. From then on, Tunisia became a territory that the new occupier set out to discover by sending soldiers about due to the land, but also due to the increased presence of the Church, which expanded with the installation of settlers.
North Africa is not exactly a province nor a satellite of Paris. However, France settled at the end of the 19th century, very lively, full of scientific advances, teeming with new ideas and a vector of utopias. Colonization then seems like a natural fact and finds no real criticism.
Roudaire, David-Néel, Eberhardt and Jossot
For some, expansion allows us to import a civilizational point of view and compete with other empires that, ironically, collapsed one after the other from the beginning of the 20th century. Others, sensitive to the orientalist tendency – this “Orient created by the West”, according to Edward Said – imagine that these new spaces are not just to be discovered, but specifically an Eldorado, a kind of promised land for the disenchanted, the marginalized or the renegades. of the Old Continent.
North Africa becomes the door of possibilities: travelers, writers, painters with their easels and then photographers cross it. Everyone will complete a unique journey. In Tunisia, Chateaubriand and Alexandre Dumas are just precursors. They paved the way for illustrative figures such as Jules Verne or numerous painters and thousands of anonymous ones.
young Africa he painted portraits of four of them: François Élie Roudaire, Alexandra David-Néel, Isabelle Eberhardt and Henri Gustave Jossot. Four adventurers, intrigued by these new territories, their inhabitants, their customs, their religion, came to try a species in the southern Mediterranean. With varying fortunes and encountering many problems. Also with ingenuity and sometimes without understanding what placing these African lands under surveillance entailed. But with empathy and sincerity.