'Cinq cents pas de promenade et l'on change de civilisation'. Tunis, ville cosmopolite et/ou coloniale

Manduchi, Patrizia

2022-01-01

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Abstract

The history of Tunis is a good example of a particular cosmopolitanism which anticipates the constraints derived from the Protectorate and the presence of a French community which was politically dominant between 1881 and 1956. Focusing on the concept of plural history and according to the analytical perspective of international relations known as social constructivism, we will examine a page in the history of Tunis, which, before and during the period of the Protectorate, was overall an Arab and Berber city, but also a Mediterranean city in a 'Braudelian' sense: open, vital, stratified, multiethnic, multilingual and plurireligious. Tunis's history seen as a history of relations in which identities and interests of social actors are built above all on their interrelationships and in which "identity" is intrinsically a question of relations between people and between groups.