ABSTRACT
European settlers and Jews were granted French citizenship; émigrés from Alsace and Lorraine were given every encouragement to settle there; and the government sought to turn French colonists thither. The French invaded the country from Algeria in 1881, occupied Tunisia, and forced the bey to sign a treaty putting himself under French protection. The ambition of France in west and central Africa was to build up an empire from the Atlantic to the Nile and from the Mediterranean to the Congo. Tunisia has prospered under French rule, and the naval base at Bizerta has given France a stronghold in the Mediterranean midway between Marseilles and Beirut. During the conquest of Algeria most stubborn enemy of France, Abd-el-Kader, took refuge in Moroccan territory. The encouragement thus given to the Algerians, and the desire to draw their own western boundary, prompted the French to send an army against the sultan of Morocco, who signed the treaty of Tangier in 1845.
