In November 1887, some men paid by the Ottoman consul in Florence exhumed general Husayn Ibn Abdallah’s remains from the Muslim cemetery of Livorno. General Husayn was a former dignitary and minister in Tunis before France took over this former Ottoman province in 1881. His remains were then transferred to Istanbul and buried in the prestigious mausoleum of Mahmud II, that not only housed the sarcophagus of the reforming sultan, but also those of Sultans Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid. The displacement of Husayn’s remains is not anecdotal at all. At that time, by the 1880s, cemeteries and funerals started to be a source of contention in colonial Tunis. Moreover, the Muslim cemetery of Livorno where Husayn was firstly buried became under Ottoman administration a political resource for acting amongst Muslims living in this part of Europe. Studying closely the displacement of Husayn’s remains from Italy to Istanbul in such a context reveals a new and crucial dimension of the Ottoman policy towards its North African subjects. The Ottomans reasserted their authority over subjects through their “necro-policies”, their administration of their former subjects’ deaths and funerals across the Mediterranean, even though these North Africans subjects and their bodies were now colonized. In such a light, it appears then restrictive or even mistaken to view the Ottoman Empire as powerless in this region after the French colonial conquest of the former province of Tunis. North Africans including within Husayn Ibn Abdallah’s entourage supported explicitly such Ottoman “necro-policies”.