Gray, Christopher John. – Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa : Southern Gabon, ca. 1850-1940

Abstract

Reviews of Books cultural and social history in which Christian Windler grounds his analysis of Franco-Tunisian diplomacy. The first third of the book is biographical. In fleshing out the context in which Devoize functioned, it illuminates the individual and collective interactions that occurred between Tunisians and the French and that established the framework for their diplomatic relations. It also offers valuable insight to the formulation of European knowledge about the Other. The remainder of the study focuses on the evolution of diplomatic culture over a century and a half of sustained peaceful contacts. To illustrate this process, Windler derives detailed examples from such topics as language, court ritual and other ceremonies, and the concept of tribute and gifts. Despite the broader geographical and chronological time frame of the book's subtitle, its emphasis falls on what might be called the "Devoize Era in Tunis," much of which, as it happened, coincided with a period when revolutionary Europe was forging a new international order that would ultimately replace the plural system of Mediterranean diplomacy that De-voize knew with one of European preponderance. On the basis of Devoize's career, it is evident that conceptualizing Franco-Tunisian relations primarily in terms of legal and official definitions produces a wholly inadequate picture. An understanding of the concrete circumstances in which interactions between the French and the Tunisians (neither, of course, a mono-lithic bloc) transpired reveals considerable latitude and flexibility, for the consuls knew that successful collaboration depended above all else on reciprocal confidence. Despite vast differences across the Medi-terranean, cross-cultural misunderstanding was by no means inevitable, but rather an accident that experienced consuls avoided through their mediation of situations in which participants operated with different norms. In their daily practice, men like Devoize constantly devised structures to define the parameters of relations between the European and the Other, and then to facilitate them. This process involved not the confrontation of two cultures but their interpenetra-tion, creating a kind of hybrid space. For all parties involved, norms existed, but they were malleable and left room for distinctions between formal legalities and the realities of life in a foreign environment. The true measure of any consul's success lay not in his conformity to a system of con…