Mr Bourguiba was demanding mass executions after bombings in the tourist resorts of Sousse and Monastir.
In the end, Mr Bourguiba was better treated than he had treated his rivals.
Mr Bourguiba divorced her in 1986, and he was looked after by his niece, Saida Sassi.
In 1961, Tunisian agents murdered a former comrade of Mr Bourguiba, Salah Ben Youssef, in Frankfurt.
Avenue Bourguiba, the main thoroughfare in Tunis, is now an all-day debating forum.
But Mr Bourguiba, who styled himself as the first independent leader of his country since Hannibal, was disinclined to share power.
In 1956 Tunisia was granted independence, with the Bey of Tunis as head of state and Mr Bourguiba as his prime minister.
Mr Bourguiba spat in public at ministers he sought to discipline.
The French knew a troublemaker when they saw one and Mr Bourguiba spent some 12 years in French jails, in the Sahara and on the Brittany island of Groix.
During the second world war, when most Tunisian nationalists supported the German-Italian axis, Mr Bourguiba declined to reject the French, even when in 1942 the Germans let him out of his French prison.
Tunisia, where the father of independence, Habib Bourguiba, granted women the right to divorce and encouraged them to get a higher education as far back as the 1960s, is a case in point.
Prior to joining the United Nations in 1981, Mr. Mahmoud worked as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, and as Chairman of the English Department of the Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages in Tunis.
Still, few Tunisians expected the president to go, even when as many as 40, 000 people gathered on January 14th at the headquarters of the Interior Ministry on Tunis's stately Avenue Bourguiba, braving torrents of tear gas and live fire.
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