The centre ville of Tunis looks like Jean Marie Le Pen's Paris seen through an apocalyptic lens: a French city flooded by Arabs, of chipped stucco and elderly North Africans wearing the suits and long-coats on sale before decolonisation, where peddlers exchange broken mobile phones for fruit on the steps of belle époque mansion flats. Tunis looks like a dilapidated European city. That is precisely what it is. 

Before independence in 1956, Europeans made up five per cent of the population of Tunisia; with Sephardic Jews the figure was almost nine per cent. French, Italians, Maltese and Spanish settler families had lived in the green hills around Carthage for over 150 years. In the 1950s, France proposed a deal for joint sovereignty with Tunisia, hoping projects like the "French Union" or the "French Community" could retain the single, social economic space that linked Paris to Tunis and Bamako. Albert Camus favoured such an arrangement, before the squalid Algerian campaign intensified, which might have looked something like the European Union. Neither side could admit the other's place in the Maghreb. The logical became impossible. 

The independence movement rejected the rights of Europeans to remain in North Africa and retain property. They rejected a link to Europe. Within a decade more than 170,000 Europeans had migrated to France from Tunisia, including the present French minister of foreign trade, Pierre Lellouche, and the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë. The victory of the anti-colonial struggle was a colossal defeat for Tunisia. France turned its back on the southern Mediterranean, preferring to cut deals with local sultans like Mohammed VI or Ben Ali, and kept its distance. 

Today France is institutionally merged more with Bulgaria than this partly Francophone country two hours from Charles de Gaulle airport. The door to the very things Tunisians dream of — a partnership of equals with Paris, massive structural funds, visa-free travel and the chance to play politics in a world city — closed in 1956. The most pervasive feeling in the Arab world before the uprisings was a deep disappointment. All those past 50 years of broken utopias and fascist or socialist experiments had brought so little.