Tahar Sfar

Tahar Sfar (November 15, 1903 – August 9, 1942) was a Tunisian lawyer and politician. Sfar studied brilliantly in College Sadiki before enrolling himself in Lycée Carnot of Tunis. After obtaining his baccalaureate, he was proposed the management and reform of the school of El Arfania, in Tunis. He went to Paris in October 1925 to study law, Literature and political science. There, he found his friends from Sadiki such as Habib Bourguiba, Mahmoud El Materi, Bahri Guiga, Mustapha Baffoun and Sadok Boussofara. Among his French classmates in Law school was the future French Prime Minister Edgar Faure. Indeed, Faure testified in his memoirs that during the first meeting he had with Habib Bourguiba in April 1955, he started recalling his student memories in Paris and wrote: "I told him about his compatriot Tahar Sfar who collected awards in the end of year contest where I collected honorable accessits...". Furthermore, Sfar also created, in the end of 1927, with a group of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan student fellows, the Muslim Students Association of North Africa, in which he became the first vice-president. He returned to Tunis in 1928 to start working as a lawyer in parallel with numerous other activities: Political economy lessons in El-Khaldounia and writing newspaper articles in Arabic or French, such as La Voix du Tunisien and L'Action Tunisienne, which he founded with Bourguiba, El Materi and Guiga, in 1932. He also was active in struggling for independence, among the Destour party then created the Neo Destour with L'Action team, during the Ksar Hellal Congress of March 2, 1932.