ABSTRACT
The armed forces in Tunisia in the first decade of sovereignty were a government agency in neglect, attributable to the pre-protectorate legacy, to the later changes introduced by the French, and above all to the decisive leadership of Habib Bourguiba and the powerful one-party rule that he instituted. Tunisia was loosely attached to the Ottoman Empire in 1881 under an autonomous arrangement that originated soon after the Ottomans had seized the territory late in the sixteenth century. The Husayni dynasty that the French found in Tunisia, and later preserved, was thus a provincial dynasty, established in 1705 by Husayn ben ‘Ali Turki. The chance existence of Sadiqi College, where French was the instructional language, benefited the French administration, for it enabled the protecting power to recruit literate native personnel for the lower echelons of the burgeoning administrative service. The protectorate regime therefore placed the college under its patronage.
