AM5 - CriseS : regards croisés 1

Have the crisis or crises been sufficiently clarified and conceptualized in the light of the social sciences and the hard sciences and in the face of social upheavals, natural disasters, economic disasters and increasingly threatening ecological challenges?

Our approach is based on a reexamination of the notions and concepts created or recreated over the last decades and to verify their efficiency and resilience. But this revisiting of the concepts around crisis is intimately linked to the concept of transition, i.e. the real or thought process that is likely to overcome the crisis or mitigate its effects. On the other hand, the historical approach would allow us to consider these concepts in relation to historical time, actors and specific contingencies.

We seek to understand the question of the socio-economic crises of the Maghreb countries in the nineteenth century (known as the late nineteenth century crises) in correlation with the establishment of colonial domination. French historiography has built up a certain stereotype in this respect, which has been transformed, in the eyes of most Maghrebian historians, into a sort of truism: political authoritarianism, "devouring taxation", state bankruptcy, external loans, control of the country's finances by foreign institutions and, in the end, military conquest and political domination. This is the pattern attributed to the three Maghreb countries conquered by France at three different times. This "law" or "historical truth" seems to be in the forefront of people's minds these days, at a time when both internal and external "dangers" are lurking in some Maghreb countries. It seems that the history of the region is punctuated by a series of crises: that of the 16th century leading to a Spanish conquest and then an Ottoman conquest, that of the 19th century leading to a French occupation, and the current stalemate in a country like Tunisia, the outcome of which is not yet known. In this context, corruption, bankruptcy and the International Financial Commission resurface in the discourse of Tunisians.

The historian is then challenged: Are we witnessing today the same scenario as at the end of the nineteenth century, that is to say, a reproduction of history?

We will develop, by way of an answer, three main ideas:

- The crisis is above all an invention made by the actors to legitimize a given strategy. If we study the history of the three Maghreb countries in the 19th century, we can see that the situation in Algeria in 1830 and in reformist Tunisia was far from being disastrous enough to justify a French conquest. On the contrary, the France of Charles X was in the grip of a socio-political crisis and the young French capitalism began a recession in 1873 that reached its climax in 1881.
- Countries such as the Ottoman Empire or Russia at the end of the nineteenth century experienced financial crises similar to those in Tunisia or Egypt, and they were not subject to external conquest.
- The context of the XXI century is different from that of the XIX and the same causes do not often give the same effects.