page_title: Jellaz Affair
section_title: Abortive registration of Jellaz land
hierarchical_section_title: Jellaz Affair / Abortive registration of Jellaz land
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the politician Sadok Ghileb
context_page_description: The Jellaz Affair was a violent confrontation in November 1911 between Tunisian protesters and the authorities of the French Protectorate of Tunisia which began at the Jellaz Cemetery. Over the course of two days, it became a series of fights and attacks in the streets, primarily involving Tunisians and Italian settlers. It was the most serious outbreak of violence in Tunis, and the first time French soldiers fired on the civilian population, since the establishment of the Protectorate in 1881. It was therefore a critical juncture in the development of the Tunisian nationalist movement.
context_section_description: As a habous, the Jellaz cemetery was administered by a special agency, but the municipality of Tunis had, some twenty years previously, acquired the responsibility for protecting and maintaining it. However, in 1911, the cemetery was not well-managed and not clearly demarcated from other properties around it, so in various places the graves gave way to small quarries and skid-roads for felled trees. In addition, builders routinely pilfered materials from the cemetery for use in construction projects elsewhere.
  On 26 September, the people of the city learned that the municipality of Tunis was planning to remove the cemetery from the habous agency and register it as its own property.  This was being done with the stated intention of protecting it against the encroachments it was suffering. However, certain individual French members of the municipal council had also submitted applications to register parcels of cemetery land in their own names. The municipality was a mixed institution - the mayor was a Tunisian Muslim, Sadok Ghileb, but his two deputies were French, and eight of the seventeen seats on the municipal council were reserved for French people. Ghileb had not been consulted about the proposed registration of the Jellaz cemetery land, and the Deputy Mayor Jean-Baptiste Curtelin tried to keep the matter off the agenda when the municipal council met on 2 November. Nevertheless Abdeljelil Zaouche spoke vehemently against the registration and in the end, the council agreed to abandon the idea.  The plan had been to finalise the application for registration on 7 November, but the council voted, instead, to withdraw the application altogether. This decision was relayed to the public at a large meeting at the Zaytuna Mosque.
  However by this time, Ghileb had ensured that posters were put up all across Tunis, urging people to attend the meeting on 7 November to make their objections known, as the law provided for. While the council was at odds over what to do, rumours were spreading in Tunis.  It was widely believed that the municipality intended to demolish part of the cemetery to build a tramway - perhaps based on the fact that a few years previously, in Casablanca,  the French authorities had indeed built a tramway through a Muslim cemetery. Having mobilised people to oppose the registration, insufficient efforts may have made to inform them that it was being abandoned, or perhaps this news was simply not sufficient to allay popular outrage.  While all this as going on, anger was spreading in Tunis about the Italian invasion of Libya.  Italy's ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire was issued just a few days after the news broke of the registration plans, and Italy proclaimed its annexation of Libya on 5 November, two days before the registration had been scheduled.
caption: Sadok Ghileb, Mayor of Tunis
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