(2 of 3)
Much of this was about Tunisia, where the population is 2,400,000 natives, 94,000 Italians and 108,000 French. Mussolini promised to agitate no more over Tunisia. The gist of what Laval promised Mussolini about Tunisia was that certain special rights enjoyed by Italians for many years in this French protectorate, will be guaranteed at least until 1965. As soon as the Cabinet of Premier Leon ("French New Deal") Blum was formed, Italians began receiving ever stronger impressions that these rights would be taken away.
Tunisia, less than 70 years ago, was a region over which the Turkish Sultans ruled through a viceroy. It went bankrupt, was refinanced by the Great Powers, who installed British, French and Italian "comptrollers." In 1881 a French force invaded Tunisia to chastise the independent Khmir tribes. In the Bardo Palace at Tunis the Turkish viceroy signed over to Paris acknowledgement that Tunisia was a protectorate of France. This protectorate Italy did not "recognize" until 1896, and Turkey did not recognize it until 1920. Italians in 1881, were more numerous in Tunisia than were the French, and if nose-counting, or race is the standard of justice, then Italy has almost as good a claim as France. That Italy would like to press that claim was evident last week when Count Ciano told the French Ambassador that as far as Italy was concerned the 1935 Laval-Mussolini agreement was dead.
Whatever stir Dictator Mussolini thought was going to result from this latest of dictator-manufactured crises, French citizenry in Tunisia and Corsica and French officialdom in Paris responded by getting good and mad. In Tunis an angry mob, forming spontaneously, serpentined through the narrow streets shouting "Down with Italy!" and "Long Live France!" Forcing stray Italians caught in the crowd to remove their Fascist insignia, the paraders wrecked an Italian bookstore, flinging newspapers and books into the streets, raided the offices of the Italian Line, broke into the plant of the Italian newsorgan Fascista Unione. Reinforced police squads narrowly prevented a mob attack on the Italian Consulate, while an Arab anti-Italian demonstration before the Consulate was averted only by strong, official, French persuasion.
In Ajaccio, capital of Corsica, 30,000 demonstrators cried "Long Live France, Kill the Duce!" also before the Italian Consulate. Singing the Marseillaise as they paraded in an organized demonstration, war veterans massed in front of Corsica's imposing monument at Bastia to World War soldiers while their chief read to veterans and citizens alike an oath of allegiance to France: "With all our soul, we swear, on our glories and on the graves of our dead, to live and die French!" As one man they echoed back: "We swear it!"
The wrath with which all France denounced what Frenchmen considered an outlandish Italian campaign suggested that 40,000,000 Frenchmen, almost hopelessly torn between Left and Right on internal questions, could really unite again when it came to defending La Patrie. Between Left, Right and Centre there is no outstanding difference of opinion about one thing—the incomparable French Army.