The French Mandate in Lebanon

Abstract

When France was awarded its mandate over Syria and Lebanon at the San Remo conference in April 1920, it was already in occupation of the Syrian coastal areas in accordance with wartime understandings with Great Britain that had carved the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence and control. Undismayed by the new terms of its mandatory mission, which enjoined it to provide “advice and assistance” to the countries under its tutelage and to “facilitate their progressive development” toward independence, France proceeded three months later to march on Damascus, dismantle the British-backed Arab government set up by King Faysal, and divide the country into two separate entities, the independent State of Greater Lebanon and a Syrian state that was further subdivided into several semi-autonomous statelets.

More than any other act, these opening moves shaped and defined the nearly twenty-five-year French mandate in Syria and Lebanon. They embroiled France in the developing confrontation between two local projects proposing to reorganize the former Arab Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire into a Greater Syria and a Greater Lebanon.¹ The rift between the proponents of these projects had deepened in the two years since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war in October 1918, galvanized by the changed international climate following U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s call for self-determination, and sustained by the intense rivalry between Britain and France. Positions on both sides had hardened, contributing to the crystallization of rival Lebanese and Arab Syrian nationalisms. The dismantlement of the Arab government in Damascus and the partition of the former Syrian and Lebanese provinces along sectarian, ethnic, and regional lines quashed the Syrian nationalists’ scheme for an independent and united Greater Syria and put France on a collision course with the Syrian nationalist camp. France’s establishment of a separate independent Lebanese entity to accommodate the claims of the Lebanists, and especially the Christian Maronites, with whom it had traditionally maintained a close relationship as part of its traditional protectorate of the Catholics, only exacerbated the situation. It isolated the rump Syrian state, which was hostile to its rule, in the interior, cutting off its access to the sea, and providing France a secure base along the coast from which it could control the mainland state. To ensure the viability of the new Lebanese entity, however, France had enlarged the borders of the autonomous province of Mount Lebanon, where Christians were 80 percent of the population, and attached to it outlying districts inhabited by predominantly recalcitrant Muslims, who rejected their inclusion in the new Lebanese entity and clamored to be integrated into Syria, thereby reducing the Christian presence to a slim majority. The inclusion of sizable irredentist Muslim communities, moreover, cleared the way for the Syrian nationalists, in conjunction with the separatist Lebanese Muslims, to undermine the stability of France’s prospective stronghold and linked Lebanon’s fortunes to those of Syria.

The assertive start to the French mandate only confirmed the distrust of France’s local and foreign opponents and helped establish an image of France as an archetypal colonial power, intent on foiling the Arab Syrians’ nationalist aspirations and unable or unwilling to live up to the letter and spirit of its mandate mission. France’s exploitation and manipulation of the ethnoreligious divisions in the Syrian and Lebanese societies was furthermore perceived as a paradigmatic example of imperial divide-and-rule policy, and the several entities it created to accommodate religious and ethnic minorities, including Greater Lebanon, were dismissed as spurious artificial entities. Finally, France’s mandate in Syria was compared unfavorably to that of Great Britain in Iraq, which, at least formally, managed within a few years to establish a functioning government, devolve power to it, and extricate itself from its mandate by means of a British-Iraqi treaty that secured its interests in the country. France, in contrast, plodded along for two decades and a half and had to be pushed out of Syria and Lebanon empty-handed in 1946. France thus faced sustained and determined opposition in the central Syrian provinces. Prospects in Lebanon, where it could rely on the support of the Christian communities, looked more promising, but only slightly so, as the country was deeply divided, and the shadow of Syria weighed heavily on its political scene. Yet France struggled throughout the mandate years to reverse or amend its initial course.

This headstrong approach masked underlying weaknesses and contradictions that limited France’s room to maneuver. French expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean had not been planned and emerged only during World War I. Until that time, France had been content to support the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and to defend its influence and interests in the empire as a whole. This had allowed it to secure considerable financial interests in the Ottoman public debt and vast investments in infrastructure and utilities in the Syrian provinces, while at the same time bolstering its moral influence and cultural clout by means of its traditional protectorate of the Catholics. Plans to partition the Ottoman Empire evolved after Russia laid claim to Istanbul in 1915, leading Britain and France to conclude the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which they divided up between them the Arab provinces of the empire. However, by the end of the war, these agreements were rapidly overtaken by events. Wilson’s new declarations in favor of self-determination compelled France and Britain to adapt, if only formally, their imperialist designs to the new zeitgeist. Britain, which had shouldered military operations in the Middle East and dominated the scene in Syria and Lebanon at the end of the war, contemplated a radical revision of its previous agreements with France. It had installed an Arab government in Damascus headed by Faysal and hoped to convince France to relinquish its claim to Syria, and if that proved unfeasible, to limit France’s presence there to areas where it enjoyed some popular support, namely Lebanon and Beirut. This only hardened the French stance and strengthened France’s determination to establish its control over all of Syria, mainly for considerations of national prestige. Wounded and weakened, France found it intolerable that the war should result in the elimination of its interests and traditional influence in the Levant, all the more so since Britain was carving out a large empire for itself in the region. This led to the bitter confrontation between Faysal and Britain, on the one hand, and France, on the other hand, and the eventual occupation of Damascus.

France, however, never managed to develop a consistent policy for governing its new mandated territories. Its traditional protectorate of the Christian Catholic communities and its adoption of a minorities policy safeguarding the rights of Christian and non-orthodox Muslim communities increased the hostility of the Sunni Muslim majority in Syria and Lebanon and prevented France from establishing a working relationship with the Syrian nationalists in keeping with the spirit of the mandate. Furthermore, the establishment of a heavy-handed and cumbersome administration tightly controlled by French officials alienated opponents and allies alike. France thus faced a series of local rural rebellions during the first mandate years that culminated in a nationwide revolt between 1925 and 1927, which it eventually managed to quash at great cost to all involved. Thereafter, France sought to adopt a more liberal policy to accommodate the concerns of the Syrian nationalists and their Lebanese allies, aimed at granting more autonomy to local governments and eventually replacing the mandates with bilateral treaties. For their part, the Syrian nationalists forsook armed resistance to the French mandate and opted instead to pursue their twin goals of independence and territorial unity through a more gradualist political approach of “honorable cooperation” with the French authorities. The positions of the two sides remained far apart, however, and repeated attempts to reach an understanding between them stumbled on the determined opposition from Lebanist circles and French officials in the mandated territories and related parties in the metropole, as well as sustained instability in France, which saw a succession of thirty-three governments between 1920 and 1940. These governments, for whom the mandates in Syria and Lebanon were never a priority, shunned direct confrontation with the powerful lobbies that opposed a liberal reorientation of the French approach, including most notably the colonialists, the army, and the Catholic Church. French policy in Syria hence continued to fluctuate between an unstable status quo and more liberal pretensions.

The reorientation of French mandatory policy apparently proceeded more smoothly in Lebanon. There, France, drawing on the cooperation of Christian and some Muslim notables and professionals, introduced a constitution in 1926, three years after the formal implementation of the mandate, as required by its charter. The constitution, which established the institutional foundation of the Lebanese political system, formally marked the transition from direct French rule to limited indirect rule. It provided for a strong presidency and a parliament in which the different religious communities were represented, each according to its size. The constitution also granted vast powers to the French high commissioner, who retained control over the military forces and the common interests that oversaw some shared Lebanese-Syrian financial and economic services, allowing continued French interference in Lebanese affairs, including the suspension of the constitution twice, in 1932 and 1939. Nevertheless, the new institutions of the Lebanese Republic created an arena where political life could develop and where Lebanese politicians played a central role in shaping the political system. The establishment of the country, which brought together disparate regions with differing sociopolitical structures and traditions, generated new alignments among the various elites and constantly shifting coalitions that cut across confessional lines, giving the Lebanese political scene a somewhat chaotic feel. With time, however, more stable political blocs emerged, partly based on differing political programs and visions for the country.

Still, until the mid-1930s, political life remained hobbled by the refusal of the majority of Sunni Muslims to endorse the separate existence of Lebanon and their selective boycott of state institutions. Lebanese Sunni leaders reintegrated the political fold only after 1936, when Syrian nationalists dropped their claim to Lebanon. Their change of heart coincided with a parallel evolution among some political, financial, and economic segments of the Christian communities who were alienated by France’s inconsistent policies, allowing the two sides to reach a compromise known as the National Pact, which formed the basis for the independence of the country. Recent studies, however, have tempered this conventional narrative of a sharp Christian-Muslim polarization as the main factor driving political developments in favor of a more fluid and complex account highlighting various other intersecting issues, such as intracommunal divisions, the pull of the emerging state, and the emergence of a unified political field, as well as changing socioeconomic interests and dynamics.² They have pointed to multifarious divisions and rivalries within each community that allowed for varied and fluid political stances and alignments within and across communal lines, thus tempering and at times overshadowing communal polarization. Not only did such intracommunal splits affect the Sunni community, which was divided by differing interests, outlooks, and strategies, but similar splits affected the Maronite community even more deeply. The Maronites have often been portrayed as staunch and steadfast French supporters, but while the two sides’ interests coincided at first, they never fully aligned. The Maronites had for the most part welcomed French support for the establishment of an enlarged Lebanon, but they saw themselves as equal partners capable of governing the new country with only minimal French assistance, and from the start they chafed at the heavy-handedness of French mandatory authorities. As long as the existence of the country was threatened by their Syrian neighbors, the Maronites continued to countenance the French presence, though rarely pliantly so. Such considerations, however, have tended to obscure sharp divisions within the Maronite camp regarding the future of the country, relationships with the Muslim communities, and links to France and the region, which tore the community apart, and at times the country as well. At the same time, the emergence of central state and administrative structures and a unified political field that brought together elites of different communal, political, and socioeconomic backgrounds promoted their inclusion and gradual acceptance of the new entity, while socioeconomic changes and popular mobilizations integrated new social groups into the political sphere.

The National Pact of 1943 addressed two fundamental issues: the existence of the country and its independence, and the sharing of power among its diverse religious communities. Muslim leaders recognized the separate existence of the Republic of Lebanon in return for the Christians’ renunciation of French protection and the independence of the country. The pact also extended the representation of the different religious communities in state institutions to all top state positions, allocating the dominant office of the president to the Maronite community. The pact laid the groundwork for the independence of the country, the unilateral termination of the French mandate by the Lebanese government, and, with the support of the British forces that had occupied the country with the Free French forces in 1941, the inglorious withdrawal of the French in 1946 from Syria and Lebanon, without any treaty to secure their interests.

The history of the French mandate in Lebanon has long been overshadowed by controversies over the establishment of a separate Lebanese entity, generating conflicting narratives that sought to vindicate or contest the legitimacy of the new country. As a result, it has been conventionally recounted in terms that generally mirror classic colonial and nationalist approaches as a series of opposite binaries between French colonial power and fledgling Syrian and Lebanese nationalisms, Christians and Muslims, collaboration and resistance. Such accounts have, however, recently been challenged on several counts by scholars dissatisfied with their dogmatism and rigidity. While these new studies continue to emphasize France’s stubborn adherence to old colonial practices and its inability to adapt to its mandatory mission, they point to several limitations and contradictions that in the end thwarted its attempts to impose its own schemes or to uphold its own interests in the country. Most of all, these new studies have focused on local elites and dynamics, highlighting the central role they played in shaping the political system and the course of the mandate, and the different ways in which they have negotiated the mandates system and French inconsistency to further their own agendas, shedding some light on the ambiguity and instability of local dynamics of collaboration and resistance. The result has been more textured and multifaceted narratives that address and blend diverse intersecting issues and levels of analysis and that reflect more closely the complex dynamics of the period of the French mandate in Lebanon.

Carol Hakim is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught since 2005. She is the author of The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea, 1840–1920 (University of California Press, 2014). She is currently working on a history of the Cold War in the Middle East.

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