Abstract

Tunisian Tinder Box

This article focuses on Habib Bourguiba, nationalist leader of Tunis. Bourguiba's record is amazingly clean. The French cannot hurl at him the charges of corruption which stick so firmly to many Middle Eastern leaders. Born in Monastir forty-nine years ago, he has never known comfort. He lived the life of a poor Tunisian student in Paris while getting his law degree, and it was then that he met and married his French wife. Nor can he be accused of having collaborated with the Nazis or Fascists, although the Germans released him from a French prison in Marseilles in 1942 and the Italians also tried hard to win him over. Bourguiba is certainly the last man with whom the French should want to collide violently. Massive demonstrations have made it clear that he and his party command the loyalty of all politically conscious Tunisians except a thin Communist fringe and an even thinner tightest fringe organized in the feudal Vieux Destour Party.