Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · French Protectorate

French Tunisia - September 1, 1939

French Tunisia in 1939 is a protectorate held for Paris but governed in the name of a prince who no longer rules. The Bey of Tunis reigns from the Bardo as a Muslim sovereign; the actual power is the French Resident-General, who signs the decrees, commands the troops and runs a modern administration grafted onto the old Husainid state. The country is a strip of the North African coast wedged between Italian Libya and French Algeria, and its position is its whole strategic problem: Mussolini's Italy has spent the decade printing maps that colour Tunis Italian, pointing to the large community of Italian settlers - larger, in places, than the French one - as proof that the protectorate belongs on the wrong side of the frontier. The identity is the exposed protectorate: French sovereignty resting on a borrowed throne, a settler population divided against itself, and a land border with a hostile great power that has publicly said it wants the ground the player is standing on.

Starting position

The starting board is a protectorate administered through indirect rule and defended as the soft eastern flank of French North Africa. The Bey's government provides the legitimacy; the Residence provides the decisions. Order is kept by French colonial troops, the Garde beylicale and a gendarmerie, with the tirailleurs and spahis recruited across the Maghreb forming the field strength that Algeria and Tunisia raise together. The economy is agricultural and extractive - the wheat and olive estates of the Tell worked increasingly by French and Italian colons, the phosphate mines of Gafsa, the port trade through Tunis, Bizerte and Sfax. Bizerte itself is the prize the map does not show: a first-class naval harbour that makes Tunisia a strategic asset out of proportion to its size. Society is layered and tense - a Muslim Tunisian majority with a rising nationalist current in the Neo-Destour, a French settler class holding the administration, and an Italian settler community whose loyalties Rome is actively cultivating. The pieces are the frontier garrison, the naval base, the phosphate revenue and a population pulled three ways.

What turns the campaign

What Paris wants is the protectorate held quiet and intact: the Bey compliant, the Neo-Destour contained, the Italian community policed rather than provoked, and the Libyan frontier fortified enough to deter the claim Rome keeps advancing. What the coming war forces is a defence of the indefensible geography. When Italy enters the war in June 1940 the Tunisian border becomes a live front, and when France falls the protectorate passes to Vichy - neutral in name, exposed in fact, its Italian settlers now nationals of an enemy state and its ports coveted by both sides. The campaign turns on whether Tunisia can be defended from the east at all, on whether Bizerte stays out of Axis hands, and on whether the Tunisian nationalists read the war as France's weakness or France's necessity. The frontier the player garrisons in 1939 is the exact ground the Mareth Line will be dug across, and the harbour the player holds is the one the Axis will fight to reach in 1942. Every choice about the border, the base and the Bey is a choice made in the shadow of a neighbour who has already declared his intent.

Signature challenge