French Settlers, Familial Suffrage, and Citizenship in 1920s Tunisia

Abstract

After the First World War, many politicians sought, and ultimately failed, to replace universal suffrage with familial suffrage in French elections. This article analyzes how this new effort to think of French citizens in terms of gender and familial identities extended to the empire with the 1922 introduction of familial suffrage in Tunisia. This reform redefined the relationship between French settlers and their government. It also shows that Tunisia, which has thus far been absent from the developing literature on settler citizenship in the empire, represents a particularly compelling case study of the intersection of gender and familial status with definitions of citizenship.