As missile and rocket fire between the Shiite militia Hezbollah and the IDF intensifies, Lebanon seems just as helpless as at the start of the civil war (1975-1990), forty years ago. Even further back in time, than at the time when the Ottomans and Europeans were too closely interested in the future “Land of the Cedar” (10,000 km2), from the 1830s.
The region, which then depended on the Ottoman Empire, found itself at the heart of English and French expansionist ambitions. On the one hand, Paris supports the viceroy of Egypt Mehmet Ali, who seeks to emancipate himself from the tutelage of the Sultan of Constantinople, by conquering Palestine and Syria, within which Mount Lebanon is located. , a grandiose limestone wall extending to the coast. On the other hand, London, which supported the sultan, bombed the ports of Beirut and Acre, forcing Mehmet Ali to reverse course.
The Lebanese, who did not have their say, on the other hand had to endure twenty years of unrest, which undermined the fragile community balance. In 1845, Maronite Christians and Druze were murdered by Muslims; in 1860, in Deïr el-Qamar, it was the turn of the Druze to massacre the Christians with the blessing of the Turkish governor. Certainly, France, claimed protector of Eastern Christians since the 16th century, dispatched an expeditionary force of more than 5,000 men. But gunboat policy was not enough, it was necessary to give way to diplomacy.
During the years 1860-1861, a conference bringing together Europeans and Ottomans, first in Beirut, then in Constantinople, resulted in a special regime of autonomy for Mount Lebanon. A governorate, the equivalent of a prefecture, was responsible for directing this new entity under the authority of the Sublime Porte, the other name for the door of honor of the sultan’s government. A dozen members, appointed based on representation proportional to the weight of the communities, were to control finances, public works and security, ensured by half a thousand gendarmes. At the time, Christians were in the majority (75%), with Shia and Sunni Muslims, as well as Druze, making up the remaining quarter of the population. This regime of autonomy and peace lasted fifty years. A near miracle. But in 1915, the entry into the war of the Ottomans, alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, changed the situation. From the outset, they removed Lebanon’s relatively liberal status.
The mirage of the great Hashemite kingdom
While the war raged, the fate of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire was already sealed in 1916 by the Englishman Mark Sykes and the Frenchman François Georges-Picot. Against the promise of a future independent Arab kingdom – which would include Mount Lebanon – the Allies had asked Sharif Hussein Hashemite, descendant of the Prophet (and great-grandfather of the current king of Jordan), guardian of the Holy Places of Mecca, to go to war on their side. The latter had accepted and appointed his son Faisal at the head of the “Arab revolt”, the epic tale of which Colonel TE Lawrence will recount in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In this division, the Allies did not fail to grant themselves three zones of influence: a “red zone” of direct administration for the British in Mesopotamia (roughly speaking, present-day Iraq); a French “blue zone”, from Cilicia (southern Anatolia) to the border of English Palestine, within which a “brown zone” was demarcated, with Jerusalem and the Holy Places under an international regime. In 1917, the British, through the Balfour Declaration, announced the creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, introducing a new actor in this already complicated Orient.
The Maronites – the majority Eastern Christians in Lebanon – did not remain inert. Gathered within the Mount Lebanon Nationalists movement, they openly campaigned for the independence of Lebanon and the extension of its territory, to the east, towards the Bekaa plain, rich in cereals, to the east. west, on the Mediterranean coast, where they expected to be granted at least one port. But pan-Arab nationalists, themselves divided among themselves, rejected such a project. Some, inspired by the Syrian-Lebanese movement of Nahda (Essor), certainly pleaded for the regained autonomy of Mount Lebanon, but within the famous Arab kingdom. Another nationalist movement envisaged the inclusion of Lebanon within, this time, a “Greater Syria”, which would more or less cover Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and for some even Iraq and Kuwait…
Greater Syria versus Greater Lebanon
Once peace had returned, the Franco-English rivalry was back in force. All shots were allowed. The British imposed the Arab government of Faisal on Damascus – although it was included in the French zone of influence – as compensation for the great stillborn kingdom. Clemenceau, anti-colonialist by temperament and obsessed with German reparations and the Rhine border, conceded the Mosul region to the English and gave discharge to Faysal, in return for assurances on France’s oil supply. He hardly seemed to pay any attention to the Lebanese delegations. The first of them, intentionally multi-confessional, appeared before the Peace Conference in Versailles on February 15, 1919. She demanded independence for Lebanon which had just experienced a terrible famine (between 100,000 and 250,000 victims according to sources, out of a population of less than 500,000 inhabitants) caused by the Turks. In the absence of a French response, the patriarch of the Maronites, Elie Hoyek, had to go in person to Paris. In the name of the “right of peoples to self-determination”, a principle which had just been decreed by the young League of Nations (SDN), he demanded the restoration of “natural borders” (corresponding to the current borders) and the independence of the country, under the mandate of France.
The San Remo Conference, on April 24, 1920, could give him hope. While London obtained a mandate on Iraq and Palestine, Paris received one on Syria and Lebanon. But Faysal questioned the clauses of the treaty, as his relations with General Gouraud, the high commissioner in the Levant, deteriorated. The dispute was finally settled on the battlefield of Mayssaloun, twenty-five kilometers from Damascus, on July 24. Defeated, the emir was eliminated, before the British drafted him to make him the first king of Iraq.
The French could enter Damascus triumphantly. Gouraud’s first decision was to divide Syria into several small entities: the three states of Damascus, Aleppo and the Druze in the south; the Territory of the Alawites, around Latakia; finally Greater Lebanon, officially constituted on September 1, 1920.
This new nation-state, which includes Mount Lebanon, the Bekaa and several ports, including Beirut and Tripoli, finally responded to the wishes of Lebanese nationalists, mainly Christians. But from the beginning, its existence shattered the dream of a Greater Syria, fueling tenacious hostility. The signing of the National Pact of 1943, a prelude to independence, which demanded that Christians renounce the protection of France in exchange for the adhesion of Sunnis, Shiites and Druze to the new Lebanese entity, could not change anything. ‘affair.
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