Early life of Habib Bourguiba married Moufida and searched for a job as a lawyer, to provide the needs of family. He quickly started a journalistic career in order to defend the Tunisian personality. Bourguiba's paternal family originated from the Ottoman Empire nobility. In Albanian, Bourguiba meant "prisoner". The family lived in Istanbul before leaving the city for the Sirte coast in Libya. In 1795, the great-grandfather of Habib Bourguiba, Hadj Mohamed Bourguiba Al Kebir, left Tripolitania to settle in Tunisia, because of the eruption of troubles between Libya and the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, he moved to Monastir, in the "Tripolitanian quarter" with his family,
Early life of Habib Bourguiba see him once again, and, in the upcoming months, invited him to move in with her. Since then, he gave his room in the campus away and settled with Mathilde. With this new way of life, Bourguiba distanced from the other students, even with the Zouitens, supposed to be his future family-in-law and sightseeing in Paris. It was Habib, the brother of Chadlia Zouiten, who discovered his affair with Mathilde and wrote him a letter: "I do not hide that I find this attitude a bit coward [...] you, who was supposed to marry my sister". But even in the