The French Mandate and the creation of the Lebanese state

Author: C.R. Pennell, former Al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle East, University of Melbourne, Australia

Edited by: Erik Prins

During the First World War, the allied powers, Britain, France and, until 1917, Russia, made a series of secret agreements about the division of the Ottoman Empire once the war was over. These included arrangements with the Arab state headed by Sharif Hussayn in the Hejaz, the Zionist organisation (the Balfour Declaration) and with each other.

One of the most important was the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. This agreement divided Greater Syria and assigned the northern part (modern Syria and Lebanon) to France and gave Britain control over the southern part (modern Palestine and Jordan, forming a corridor between Egypt and Iraq).

At the end of the war, the Arab army loyal to Sharif Hussayn moved up from the Hejaz and took Damascus on 1 October 1918, before French forces arrived. Hussayn’s son Faysal, helped by T.E. Lawrence (the famous ‘Lawrence of Arabia’) took charge and declared an Arab State of Greater Syria, including both the areas assigned to the British and those earmarked for the French.

By 1920, British pressure had removed Faysal from Damascus and put him on the throne of the newly established Kingdom of Iraq. His grandson, Faysal II, died in July 1958 at the hands of the men who overthrew him in the coup that turned Iraq into a republic.

In the French zone of Greater Syria, the French established a mandate administration that was based on avoiding opposition by incorporating local allies into French rule. They set up two separate Sunni states (in Aleppo and Damascus), an Alawi state in Latakia and a Druze state in the south of Syria.

On the Mediterranean coast, Lebanon was separated from Greater Syria as a separate state but as a mandate under French supervision. It was the only one of the French-created statelets that survived the re-unification of Syria in 1930.

French-designed Lebanon had boundaries that were much wider than the pre-war structure of Ottoman Lebanon. The old Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon, the heartland of Maronites and Druze, became the core of the new state, but on its own that area was too small to be economically viable as it even excluded Beirut and Tripoli.

The French also sought for a Maronite-controlled Lebanon that would depend on them. In this way, they would dominate a wider area that included other sectarian groups.

The new borders included the main cities on the coast, the Bekaa valley to the east of the mountains and an area in the south, including Saida and Sur (Sidon and Tyre), up to the border with British-controlled Palestine. This brought in substantial Greek Orthodox, Sunni and Shi’a populations.

In this patchwork of different religious identities, Christians remained the majority, the Maronites among them being the largest group. However, as they were only the largest community and did not form an absolute majority of the population, it made them even more dependent on the French. They became supposedly reliable allies in the new independent state that would emerge from the Mandate.

In addition, there were economic disparities. The Shi’a, who dominated the south, were generally poor and politically sidelined from the power structure. All this made the enlarged Lebanon, with its redefined borders and built around sectarian identities, fundamentally unstable.

In 1920, Lebanon became formally independent, although a constitution was only issued in 1926. This constitution was revised the following year and again in 1930. It culminated in a republican system with a single-chamber parliament that elected the president for a non-renewable term of six years. Those stipulations still apply today.

There was no overt mention of confessionalism in the constitution, but it did give informal weight to what were termed ‘communal differences’. But whatever the formal provisions of the constitution, in reality the new Lebanese state was based on sectarianism, as it had been on a smaller scale before the First World War.

But now these sectarian identifications were attached to nationalist identities, such as Christian or European for the Maronites and Arab for the Sunnis. There were more rivalries for influence and power.

With its redefined boundaries, the demographic balance of Lebanon had changed. The Greek Orthodox resented the growth of Maronite power and the Druze community now constituted a much smaller proportion of the population. The Maronites themselves were split. Some Maronites wanted Lebanon to remain simply a small Maronite state.

Emile Eddé, who became Prime Minister in 1929, argued that Lebanon was in essence a western country because of its Christian identity, so Christian rule should be unchallenged. For him, this meant making Lebanon smaller. In 1932, he proposed that Tripoli and Akkar in the north should be handed back to Syria to strengthen the Maronite majority: he wanted a state that was 80% Christian.

On the other hand, another prominent Maronite, Bishara al-Khoury, called for an Arab Lebanon. He had links with Arab nationalist Sunnis like Abd al-Hamid al-Karami of Tripoli and Saib Salam of Beirut who were both prepared to cooperate with France with the view to eventually uniting with Syria.

Fellow prominent Sunni, Riyadh al-Sulh, who would later become Lebanon’s first prime minister after independence, was totally opposed to the new Lebanese state. Instead, he sought immediate unification.

To balance the tensions between (and within) these different communities, an understanding emerged that high state positions should be distributed in accordance with the size of the different communities. Thus the president would be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shi’a.

This system of power distribution has been the foundation of the Lebanese political system until today.