CHAPTER 8
France long had coveted Greater Syria—that land mass embracing the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan—for its empire in the Arab world. Napoleon had invaded Syria from Egypt in 1799, though his progress was checked by stubborn resistance from the Ottoman defenders in Acre, and he was forced to withdraw. France gave its support to Muhammad ’Ali in his invasion of Syria in the 1830s, hoping to extend French influence over the region through their Egyptian ally. When Egypt withdrew from Syria in 1840, the French deepened their ties to the indigenous Catholic communities of Syria, particularly the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. When the Druzes massacred the Maronites of Mount Lebanon in 1860, France dispatched a campaign force of 6,000 men in a transparent bid to stake its claim to the Syrian coast. Again the French were frustrated, as the Ottoman government managed to reassert control over its Arab provinces for the next half century.
The First World War finally offered France the opportunity to secure its claim to Syria. At war with the Ottoman Empire, France and its Entente allies could openly discuss the division of Ottoman territories in the event of victory. The French government won Britain’s support for its ambitions through intense negotiations between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot over the years 1915–1916, culminating in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Having already colonized Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, France was confident it had the knowledge and experience to rule Arabs successfully. What worked in Morocco, the French maintained, would work in Syria. Moreover, France had earned the loyalty and support of the Maronite Christian community of Mount Lebanon over the decades. Indeed, by the end of the First World War, Lebanon was probably the only country in the world with a significant constituency actively lobbying for a French mandate.
Late-Ottoman Lebanon was a strangely truncated land. In the aftermath of the Christian massacres of 1860, the Ottomans and the European powers conferred to establish a special province of Mount Lebanon in the highlands overlooking the Mediterranean to the west, and the Bekaa Valley to the east. The Ottomans had kept the strategic coastline, with its port cities of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli, under their own direct administration. In 1888 the Syrian littoral was redesignated as the Province of Beirut. Mount Lebanon was for the most part cut off from the sea, and the Province of Beirut was at many points no more than a few miles wide.
One of the chief shortcomings of the autonomous province of Mount Lebanon was its geographic constraints. The territory was too small and infertile to support a large population, and many Lebanese were driven from their homeland in search of better economic opportunities in the last years of Ottoman rule. Between 1900 and 1914 an estimated 100,000 Lebanese—perhaps one-quarter the total population—left Mount Lebanon for Egypt, West Africa, and the Americas.1 This was a cause of growing concern to the twelve-member Administrative Council that ruled Mount Lebanon, whose members were drawn proportionately from the territory’s diverse communities. As the First World War came to an end, the members of the Administrative Council aspired to a larger country and looked to their long-time patron France to help achieve their ambitions.
The Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon met on December 9, 1918, and agreed on the terms it wished to present to the Paris Peace Conference. The council sought Lebanon’s complete independence, within its “natural boundaries,” under French tutelage. By “natural boundaries,” the council members envisaged the expansion of Mount Lebanon to include the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre as well as the eastern Bekaa Valley up to the western slopes of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. A Lebanon within its “natural boundaries” would be framed between rivers to the north and south, mountains to the east and the Mediterranean to the west.
The people of Mount Lebanon knew that France had advocated such a “Greater Lebanon” since the 1860s, and they hoped to achieve this critical land mass through a French mandate. Consequently, the Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon was formally invited by the French government to present its case to the Paris Peace Conference—unlike such inconvenient Arab states as Egypt or Syria, which were snubbed or excluded because their nationalist aspirations conflicted with imperial ambitions at the conference.
The Administrative Council dispatched a five-man delegation to Paris headed by Daoud Ammoun, a leading Maronite politician.2 Ammoun set out Mount Lebanon’s aspirations in his address to the Paris Peace Conference’s Council of Ten on February 15, 1919:
We want a Lebanon removed from all servitude, a Lebanon free to pursue its national destiny and reestablished in its natural frontiers—all indispensable conditions for it to live in its own freedom and to prosper in peace.
Yet we all know that it is not possible for us to develop economically and to organize our liberty without the support of a great power, as we lack the technicians trained in the workings of modern life and Western civilization. Always in the past, France has defended us, supported us, guided, instructed and secured us. We feel a constant friendship for her. We wish for her support to organize ourselves, and her guarantee of our independence.3
The Lebanese delegation was not seeking French colonialism in Lebanon but French assistance toward their ultimate goal of independence. However, the French seemed only to hear what they wanted to hear, and they were glad to use the Lebanese delegation to legitimate their own claims over Lebanon.
The Administrative Council, however, did not speak for all Lebanese. Over 100,000 Lebanese emigrants lived abroad—in Africa, Europe, and the Americas—and took a passionate interest in the political future of their homeland. Many of the Lebanese expatriate community had come to see themselves as members of a broader Syrian people that embraced émigrés from Palestine, inland Syria, and Transjordan. These “Syrians” included some of Lebanon’s most celebrated men of letters, including Khalil Gibran, author of the mystical masterpiece The Prophet. They saw Lebanon as an integral if distinct part of Greater Syria and lobbied for the independence of Syria as a whole, under French tutelage. Given their support for French rule, the Lebanese advocates of Greater Syria were also invited to present their case at the Paris Peace Conference.
One of the most prominent of the Lebanese expatriates was Shukri Ghanim. President of the Syrian Central Committee, a nationalist network with branches in Brazil, the United States, and Egypt, Ghanim appeared before the Council of Ten in February 1919, calling for a federation of Syrian states under French mandatory rule. “Syria must be divided into three parts,” he argued, “or four, if Palestine is not excluded. Greater Lebanon or Phoenicia, the region of Damascus, and that of Aleppo, [should be] constituted in independent, democratic states.” Yet Ghanim did not believe all Syrians were created equal, concluding ominously, “France is there to guide, advise and balance all things, and—we should not fear to say this to our compatriots, who are reasonable men—will dose our liberties according to our different states of moral health.”4 While we can only guess what Ghanim meant by “moral health,” it is clear he believed Lebanon was far more advanced than the other parts of Syria and better prepared to enjoy full political liberties under French protection than Damascus, Aleppo, and the like. In many ways, Ghanim’s appeal was more in line with French thought than Daoud Ammoun’s presentation on behalf of the Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon.
There was, however, a third trend in Lebanese politics that was overtly hostile to France’s position in the Levant. The Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians of coastal cities like Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre had no wish to be isolated from the mainstream of Syrian political society and find themselves reduced to a minority in a Christian-dominated Lebanese state. It was a clear divide between the French-oriented politics of Mount Lebanon and the Arabism of the coastal province of Beirut. Coming out of centuries of Ottoman rule, the nationalists in Beirut wished to be part of a larger Arab empire and threw their support behind Amir Faysal’s government in Damascus. Faysal, who had led the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule from the Hijaz to Damascus between 1916 and 1918, spoke on behalf of the political aspirations of the Lebanese of the coastal plain when he addressed the Council of Ten in Paris in February 1919. Lebanon, he argued, was an integral part of the Arab kingdom promised to his father, Sharif Husayn, by British High Commissioner Sir Henry McMahon and should come under Faysal’s Arab government in Damascus, without any mandate at all.
Amir Faysal’s plea to the great powers in Paris met with widespread support among Arab nationalists in Beirut. Muhammad Jamil Bayhum was a young intellectual who became one of Faysal’s ardent supporters. In July 1919, Bayhum was elected to represent Beirut in the Syrian Congress convened in Damascus in advance of the King-Crane Commission. “The French authorities tried everything to prevent the election from taking place, applying pressure on both the electors and the candidates,” Bayhum recalled. “However, their attempts to persuade and coerce were in vain.”5Lebanon was well-represented in the Syrian Congress, with twenty-two delegates from all parts of the country.
Bayhum joined the Syrian Congress, which opened on June 6, 1919, in a state of heightened excitement. The delegates firmly believed they had assembled to communicate the political wishes of the Syrian people, through the King-Crane Commission, to the great powers at the Paris Peace Conference. They aspired to an Arab state in all of Greater Syria under Faysal’s rule in Damascus, with little or no foreign interference. Bayhum described the political atmosphere in Damascus as charged with optimism and high ideals, comparing the city to the revolutionary Paris of 1789. “We participated in the Congress, with the representatives of Palestine, Jordan, Antioch, Alexandretta, and Damascus, all of us hoping that the allied states would hear our appeals, and deliver the freedom and independence that had been promised to us.”6
Bayhum remained in Damascus to attend all of the sessions of the Syrian Congress, well after the King-Crane Commission had come and gone in July 1919. He watched in dismay as Britain withdrew its troops from Syria in October 1919 and French forces began to take their place. Over the winter of 1919–1920, France began to impose increasingly stringent terms on the isolated Amir Faysal that fragmented Greater Syria and stripped Faysal’s government of its independence. In March 1920 the Congress declared the independence of Greater Syria, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the imposition of mandates by presenting the European powers with a fait accompli. The Syrian Congress staked its claim to Lebanon as an integral part of Syria, asserting in its declaration of independence: “We will take into consideration all patriotic wishes of the Lebanese with respect to the administration of their country, within its prewar limits, on condition that Lebanon distances itself from all foreign influences.”
The Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon was quick to protest the Syrian Congress’s declaration and insisted that Faysal’s government had no right “to speak on behalf of Lebanon, to set its frontiers, to limit its independence and to forbid it to call for the collaboration of France.”7 Yet political leaders in Mount Lebanon were growing increasingly concerned over France’s intentions. In April 1920, Britain and France confirmed the final distribution of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the San Remo conference. Lebanon and Syria were awarded to France, and Palestine and Iraq passed to British rule. Though many in the Maronite community had sought French technical assistance and political support, they somehow expected France to act out of altruism rather than imperial self-interest. As France began to prepare for its mandate over Lebanon, its military administrators started to impose their policies on the Administrative Council in Mount Lebanon. In turn, politicians in Mount Lebanon began to question the wisdom of seeking French assistance in state-building.
In July 1920, seven of the Administrative Council’s eleven members made a spectacular U-turn and sought an accommodation with King Faysal’s administration in Damascus. They drafted a memorandum calling for joint action between Syria and Lebanon to achieve complete independence for both countries, and a negotiated resolution of territorial and economic differences between the two sides. The dissident Lebanese councilors called for the formation of a Syro-Lebanese delegation to present their claims to the European powers still gathered in Paris. However, when the French got wind of the initiative they arrested the seven councilors on their way to Damascus.
The arrest of some of Lebanon’s most respected politicians sent shock waves throughout the region. Bishara al-Khoury (1890–1964) was a young Maronite lawyer who had worked closely with the French military administrators in Lebanon (he would later become independent Lebanon’s first president). Late in the night of July 10, 1920, the French high commissioner, General Henri Gouraud, asked al-Khoury to come to his residence to discuss an urgent matter. Al-Khoury found Gouraud among his officers, pacing anxiously. The high commissioner informed al-Khoury that the French had just arrested the seven dissident councilors.
“They were traitors who were trying to unite with Amir Faysal and append Lebanon to Syria,” Gouraud explained. “The Administrative Council has been dissolved.”
Al-Khoury was stunned. “On what basis did you undertake this violent act?”
Gouraud replied that they were found with a memorandum setting out their objectives. “You are a Lebanese before all else,” the Frenchman said to Khoury. “Do you agree with their actions?”
Al-Khoury, who had not been shown the text of the councilors’ memorandum, responded cautiously: “I agree with all who seek independence, though I would not turn to anyone from outside Lebanon.” “We are agreed,” replied one of the French officers. Gouraud informed al-Khoury that the seven councilors would be brought before a military tribunal for their crimes.
The trial of the dissident councilors alienated some of France’s strongest advocates in Lebanon. As a trained lawyer, al-Khoury was appalled that such an important trial could be concluded in just two days, and he described the proceedings taking place “in a climate of terrorism.” He was offended when Lebanese witnesses were forced to declare “their love of France” as part of their testimony. The defendants were fined, forbidden to work in Lebanon, and exiled to Corsica. Worse yet, when al-Khoury finally got to read the text of the councilors’ memorandum, he found himself in sympathy with most of their objectives.8 The French were seriously undermining their support base in Lebanon by these high-handed actions.
Nevertheless, French plans for the new Lebanese state proceeded apace. On August 31, 1920, the frontiers of Mount Lebanon were extended to the natural boundaries sought by Lebanese nationalists, and the “independent” state of Greater Lebanon was established the following day under French assistance. Yet the more France assisted, the less independence Lebanon enjoyed. The defunct Administrative Council was replaced by an Administrative Commission, headed by a French governor who answered directly to High Commissioner Gouraud.
By imposing a new administrative structure on Lebanon, France began to shape the political culture of the new state in line with its own views of Lebanese society. The French saw Lebanon as a volatile mix of communities rather than as a distinct national community, and they shaped the political institutions of the country accordingly. Positions within the new Administrative Commission were allocated by religious community in keeping with a system known as confessionalism. This meant that political office was distributed among the different Lebanese religious communities (or confessions, in French), ideally in proportion to their demographic weight. Given its long history as patron of Lebanon’s Catholics, France was determined to ensure that Lebanon would be a Christian state.
The challenge for France was to expand Lebanon’s boundaries without making the Christians a minority in their own country. Although Christians represented 76 percent of the population of Mount Lebanon, they were a distinct minority in the newly annexed coastal cities and the eastern territories in the Bekaa and Anti-Lebanon Mountains. The proportion of Christians in Greater Lebanon was thus only 58 percent of the total population and, given differences in fertility rates, declining.9 Ignoring the new demographic realities of Lebanon’s population, the French favored their Christian clients and gave them disproportionate representation in the governing Administrative Commission: ten Christians to four Sunni Muslims, two Shiite Muslims, and one Druze representative.
Though the French experts believed this archaic system of government best fit the political culture of the country, many Lebanese intellectuals were increasingly uncomfortable with confessionalism and aspired to a national identity. In the newspaper Le Réveil, one journalist wrote: “Do we wish to become a nation in the real and whole sense of the word? Or to conserve ourselves as a laughable mix of communities, always separate from each other like hostile tribes? We must furnish our selves a unique unifying symbol: a nationality. That flower can never thrive in the shadow of steeples and minarets, but only under a flag.”10 Yet the first flag that the French allowed independent Lebanon was the French Tricolour with a cedar tree at the center. France was beginning to show its true colors in Lebanon.
In March 1922, Gouraud announced that the Administrative Commission would be dissolved and replaced by an elected Representative Council. The measure angered Lebanese politicians both because the French had acted unilaterally and because the new elected assembly would have even fewer responsibilities than the former Administrative Commission. Far from being an elected legislature, the Representative Council was barred from discussing political matters and was to meet in session for only three months of the year. The decree gave legislative power to the French high commissioner, who could adjourn or dissolve the Representative Council at will. Even France’s most ardent Lebanese supporters were outraged. “This decree of enslavement now gives [France] the image of a conquering power casting treaty and friendship beneath the boot of its victorious soldiers,” wrote one disillusioned Francophile émigré.11
Undeterred by the growing Lebanese opposition to their rule, the French proceeded with elections for the Representative Council. They spared no effort to ensure that their supporters were elected and that their opponents were excluded.
Muhammad Jamil Bayhum, the Beirut delegate to the 1919 Syrian Congress, had opposed the mandate in principle and was outspoken in his criticism of French administrative measures in Lebanon. Though he had never considered running for office, close friends persuaded him to join an opposition slate. Bayhum met with the French administrator responsible for organizing the elections to see if the authorities would object to his candidacy. The official, Monsieur Gauthier, assured him that the elections would be free and that the French authorities would not intervene in the process at all. Encouraged by Gauthier’s response, Bayhum announced his candidacy on a strong nationalist slate, which quickly rose to the top of the polls.
Despite Gauthier’s assurances, it was soon clear that France had every intention of intervening in the electoral process. Once the French came to appreciate the electoral appeal of the nationalist list, they worked to undermine its candidates. Within weeks of their first meeting, Gauthier called Bayhum to his office and asked him to withdraw his candidacy, on “an order from the highest authority.” Bayhum was outraged, having spent an intense month on the campaign trail. Gauthier was direct: “We will oppose you in the elections, and if you are elected we will expel you from the Council by force.” When Bayhum refused to back down, he found himself in court facing charges of electoral fraud. During the court hearing, the judge called Gauthier himself as a witness.
“My good sir, do you not have many complaints against Monsieur Bayhum confirming that he bribed the secondary electors to buy their votes?” the judge asked.
“Indeed, indeed,” replied Gauthier.
The judge turned to Bayhum and said, “I have an enormous file [on you].” He pointed to a folder. “It is overflowing with complaints against you for buying votes, which is something the law forbids.”
Bayhum argued his case to no avail. The charges of electoral fraud were left hanging over Bayhum to pressure him to withdraw his candidacy for the council.
After his hearing, Bayhum retired to discuss strategy with the other members of the nationalist list. One of his friends was Gauthier’s personal physician, and the doctor offered to call upon the French administrator to try to persuade him to drop the charges against Bayhum. The doctor returned from his interview laughing, much to the surprise of Bayhum and his friends. Gauthier had dismissed the doctor’s efforts to speak on Bayhum’s behalf, replying: ‘You, my friend, have no experience in politics. I would say that it is Monsieur Bayhum himself who has obliged us to keep him out of the Assembly. What we want is this: if we place a glass on a window sill it will stay in its place, and not budge a hair’s breadth.”
The doctor understood Gauthier’s message all too well: the French would tolerate no challenge to the institutions they put in place. Someone like Bayhum threatened to knock the “glass” of French colonial rule right off the Lebanese window sill. Bayhum recalled: “We all laughed with the doctor at this ridiculous policy, imposed on our country by the mandatory power. This was the same country that had promised to help us attain our independence.” Bayhum withdrew his candidacy and chose not to stand for the council at all.12
The elections confirmed France’s intention to rule Lebanon as a colony rather than assist it in achieving independence. These measures convinced some of France’s strongest supporters to join the growing ranks of Lebanese nationalists struggling against French rule. It was an ominous beginning for the French Empire in the Middle East in the interwar years. If France couldn’t make things work in Lebanon, how would it manage in its other Arab territories?
While the French faced electoral battles in Lebanon, colonial administrators in Morocco were confronted with a major armed uprising that targeted both Spanish and French rule. Between 1921 and 1926, the Rif War posed the greatest challenge yet to European colonialism in the Arab world.
France was given the green light by the European powers to add Morocco to its North African possessions in 1912. The Moroccan sultan, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz (r. 1907–1912), signed the Treaty of Fez in March 1912, preserving his family’s rule in Morocco but conceding most of his country’s sovereignty to France under a colonial arrangement known as a protectorate. In principle this meant that France would protect the government of Morocco from outside threats, though in practice France ruled absolutely, if indirectly, through the sultan and his ministers.
The first thing the French failed to protect was Morocco’s territorial integrity. Spain had imperial interests in Morocco dating back to the sixteenth century, its coastal fortresses having long since evolved into colonial enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla remain under Spanish rule to the present day, fossils of an extinct empire). France had to negotiate a treaty with Spain setting out their respective “rights” in Morocco, a process concluded in November 1912 with the signing of the Treaty of Madrid. Under the terms of the treaty, Spain claimed a protectorate over the northern and southern extremities of Morocco. The northern zone comprised some 20,000 square kilometers (8,000 square miles) of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coastline and hinterlands, and the southern zone covered 23,000 square kilometers (9,200 square miles) of desert that came to be known as Spanish Sahara or Western Sahara. In addition, the port city of Tangier in the Strait of Gibraltar was placed under international control. After 1912 the Moroccan sultan ruled a very truncated state.
Though Morocco had enjoyed centuries of independent statehood before becoming a protectorate, its rulers had never succeeded in extending their authority over the whole of their national territory. The sultan’s control had always been strongest in the cities and weakest in the countryside. This situation was only exacerbated when Morocco came under imperial rule. Soldiers mutinied, many returning to their tribes to foment rural rebellion. The Moroccan countryside was in turmoil when the first French governor arrived to take up his post in May 1912.
During his thirteen-year tenure in Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) would prove to be one of the great innovators of imperial administration. He arrived in Fez the day before a massive attack on the city by mutinous soldiers and their tribal supporters. He saw firsthand the limits of what French diplomats had achieved in securing European consent for French rule in Morocco.
Though trained as a military man, Lyautey did not wish to repeat the mistakes made in Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of Algerians and Frenchmen had perished in the decades it took to “pacify” the country by force. Instead of imposing European forms of administration, Lyautey hoped to win the Moroccans over by preserving local institutions and working through native leaders, starting with the sultan.
The French sought to control the cities of Morocco through the institutions surrounding the sultan’s government, known as the Makhzan (literally, the land of the treasury). Lyautey made a great show of respect for the symbols of the sultan’s sovereignty, playing the Moroccan anthem at state occasions and flying the Moroccan flag over public buildings. But such respect for the office of the sultan did not always extend to the office-holder. One of Lyautey’s first acts was to force the abdication of the reigning sultan, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, whom he found unreliable, and his replacement with a more compliant ruler, Moulay Youssef (r. 1912–1927).
Lyautey built his control over the countryside on three indigenous pillars: the “big qa’ids,” or tribal leaders; the tariqas, or mystical Islamic brotherhoods whose network of lodges spanned the country; and the indigenous Berber people. The big qa’ids commanded the loyalty of their fellow tribesmen and were capable of raising hundreds of armed men. Having witnessed a tribal attack on Fez immediately after his arrival, Lyautey recognized the importance of securing their support for French rule. The tariqas represented a network of faith that transcended tribal ties whose lodges had served to shelter dissidents and mobilize religious opposition to repel non-Muslim invaders. Lyautey knew that the Algerian tariqas had played an important role in Abdel Kader’s resistance to the French in the 1830s and 1840s and was determined to co-opt their support for his government. The Berbers are a non-Arab minority community with a distinct language and culture. The French sought to play the Berbers of North Africa against their Arab neighbors in a classic divide-and-rule strategy. A law of September 1914 decreed that Morocco’s Berber tribes henceforth would be governed in accordance with their own laws and customs under French supervision as a sort of protectorate within a protectorate.
This Lyautey system was no less imperial for preserving indigenous institutions. French administrators ruled in all departments of “modern” government: finance, public works, health, education, and justice, among others. Religious affairs, pious endowments, Islamic courts, and the like came under Moroccan authority. Yet Lyautey’s system provided local leaders incentives to collaborate with, rather than subvert, the French colonial administration. The more Moroccan notables implicated in French rule, the fewer Lyautey had to “pacify” on the battlefield. Lyautey was feted as a great innovator, whose concern for preserving indigenous customs and traditions was seen by his contemporaries as a compassionate colonialism.
Even under the Lyautey system, however, a great deal of Morocco remained to be conquered. To reduce the drain on the French army, Lyautey recruited and trained Moroccan soldiers willing to deliver their own country to French rule. Though he aspired to total conquest, Lyautey focused on the economic heartland of Morocco, which he dubbed le Maroc utile, or “Useful Morocco,” comprising those regions with greatest agricultural, mining, and water resources.
The conquest of Useful Morocco proceeded slowly against sustained resistance from the countryside. Between the establishment of the protectorate in 1912 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, French control stretched from Fez to Marrakesh, including the coastal cities of Rabat, Casablanca, and the new port of Kéni-tra, which was renamed Port Lyautey. There matters were left to stand for the duration of the war years, when 34,000 Moroccan soldiers were called to fight France’s war with Germany, suffering high casualties for their imperial overlord. Lyautey himself was recalled between 1916 and 1917 to serve as the French minister of war. Even so, the system held, with the big qa’ids proving France’s greatest supporters in Morocco. The rural notables met in Marrakesh in August 1914 and acknowledged their dependence on France. “We are the friends of France,” one of the leading notables declared, “and to the very end we shall share her fortunes be it good or bad.”13
In the aftermath of the war and the Paris Peace Conference, Lyautey resumed the conquest of Morocco—and faced stronger opposition than ever. In 1923, over 21,000 French troops were fighting an estimated 7,000 Moroccan insurgents. Yet his biggest challenge would come from outside the territory of the French protectorate, from the Berber people of the Rif Mountains of the northern Spanish zone. His nemesis would be a small-town judge named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, better known as Abd el-Krim. From his native Rif Mountains, overlooking the Mediterranean coastline, Abd el-Krim mounted a five-year rebellion between 1921–1926 that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers in what has been called the worst defeat of a colonial army in Africa in the twentieth century.14
Conflict between the people of the Rif (known as Rifis) and the Spanish broke out in the summer of 1921. Inspired by debates about Islamic social and religious reform, Abd el-Krim rejected French and Spanish rule alike and aspired to an independent state in the Rif quite separate from the Kingdom of Morocco. “I wanted to make the Rif an independent country like France and Spain, and to found a free state with full sovereignty,” he explained. “Independence which assured us complete freedom of self-determination and the running of our affairs, and to conclude such treaties and alliances as we saw fit.”15
A charismatic leader, Abd el-Krim recruited thousands of Rifis into a disciplined and motivated army. The Rifis had the double advantage of fighting to protect their homes and families from foreign invaders and doing so on their own treacherous mountain terrain. Between July and August 1921, Abd el-Krim’s forces decimated the Spanish army in Morocco, killing some 10,000 soldiers and taking hundreds prisoner. Spain sent reinforcements and, in the course of 1922, managed to reoccupy territory that had fallen to Abd el-Krim’s forces. However, the Rifis continued to score victories against Spanish troops and managed to capture more than 20,000 rifles, 400 mountain guns, and 125 cannon, which were quickly distributed among their fighting men.
The Rifi leader ransomed his prisoners to get the Spanish to subsidize his war effort. In January 1923, Abd el-Krim secured over four million pesetas from the Spanish government for the release of soldiers taken prisoner by the Rifis since the start of the war. This enormous sum funded Abd el-Krim’s ambitious plans to build on his revolt to establish an independent state.
In February 1923, Abd el-Krim laid the foundations of an independent state in the Rif. He accepted the Rifi tribes’ pledges of allegiance and assumed political leadership as amir (commander or ruler) of the mountain region. The Spanish responded by mobilizing another campaign force to reconquer the Rif. Between 1923 and 1924 the Rifis dealt the Spaniards a number of defeats, crowned by the conquest of the mountain town of Chaouen in the autumn of 1924. The Spanish lost another 10,000 soldiers in the battle. Such victories gave Abd el-Krim and his Rifi legions more confidence than prudence. If the Spanish could be defeated so easily, why not the French?
The Rif War provoked grave concern in France. On a tour of his northern front in June 1924, Lyautey was alarmed to see how the defeat of Spanish forces left French positions vulnerable to attack by the Rifis. The Rif was a poor, mountainous land that was heavily reliant on food imports from the fertile valleys of the French zone. Lyautey needed to reinforce the region between Fez and the Spanish Zone to prevent the Rifis from invading to secure their food needs.
Lyautey returned to Paris in August to brief the premier, Edouard Herriot, and his government on the threat posed by Abd el-Krim’s insurrectionary state. Yet the French were overstretched, in occupation of the Rhineland and setting up their administration in Syria and Lebanon, and could not spare the men and material Lyautey believed the absolute minimum to preserve his position in Morocco. Whereas he requested the immediate dispatch of four infantry battalions, the government could muster only two. A life-long conservative, Lyautey sensed that he did not have the support of Herriot’s Radical government. Seventy years old, and in poor health, he returned to Morocco with neither the physical nor the political strength to contain the Rifis.
In April 1925, Abd el-Krim’s forces turned south and invaded the French zone. They sought the support of the local tribes that claimed the agricultural lands to the south of the Rif. Abd el-Krim’s commanders met with the tribal leaders to explain the situation as they saw it. “Holy war had been proclaimed by Abd el-Krim, the true Sultan of Morocco, to throw out the infidels, and particularly the French, in the name of the greater glory of regenerated Islam.” The occupation of all of Morocco by Abd el-Krim’s forces, they explained, “was no more than a question of days.”16 Abd el-Krim increasingly saw his movement as a religious war against non-Muslims who were occupying Muslim land, and he staked a claim to the sultanate of Morocco as a whole, and not just the smaller Rif Republic.
As Lyautey had feared, the Rifis swept rapidly through his poorly defended northern agricultural lands. The French were forced to evacuate all European citizens and to withdraw their troops from the countryside to the city of Fez, with heavy casualties. In just two months, the French had lost forty-three army posts and suffered 1,500 dead and 4,700 wounded or missing in action against the Rifis.
In June, with his forces encamped just 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from Fez, Abd el-Krim wrote to the Islamic scholars of the city’s famous Qarawiyyin mosque-university to win them over to his cause. “We tell you and your colleagues . . . who are men of good faith and have no relations with hypocrites or infidels, of the state of servitude into which the disunited nation of Morocco is sunk,” he wrote. He accused the reigning sultan, Moulay Youssef, of having betrayed his nation to the French and of surrounding himself with corrupt officials. Abd el-Krim asked the religious leaders of Fez for their support as a matter of religious duty.17
It was a persuasive argument, put forward in sound, theological terms supported by many quotes from the Qur’an on the necessity of jihad. But the Arab religious scholars of Fez did not throw their support behind the Berber Rifis. When it reached the outskirts of Fez, Abd el-Krim’s army came up against the solidly French-controlled “Useful Morocco” created by the Lyautey system. Faced with a choice between the aspiring national liberation movement from the Rif and the solidly established instruments of French imperial rule, the Muslim scholars of Fez clearly believed the Lyautey system was the stronger of the two.
Abd el-Krim’s movement came to a halt at the walls of Fez in June 1925. If the three pillars of French rule in the countryside were the mystical Muslim brotherhoods, the leading tribal notables, and the Berbers, then Lyautey had secured two out of the three. “The greatest reason for my failure,” Abd el-Krim later reflected, “was religious fanaticism.” The claim is incongruous in light of Abd el-Krim’s own use of Islam to rally support for a holy war against the imperial powers. But the Rifi leader was actually referring to the mystical Muslim brotherhoods. “The shaykhs of the tariqas were my bitterest enemies and the enemies of my country as it progressed,” he believed. He had no more success with the big qa’ids. “At first I tried to win over the masses to my point of view by argument and demonstration,” Abd el-Krim wrote, “but I met with great opposition from the main families with powerful influence.” With one exception, he claimed, “the rest were all my enemies.”18 In their opposition to Abd el-Krim, the big qa’ids and the shaykhs of the brotherhoods had all upheld French rule in Morocco as Lyautey intended. As for the Berbers—Abd al-Krim and his Rifi fighters were themselves Berbers. They took Lyautey’s policy of Berber separatism further than Lyautey himself ever intended. It is of no doubt that the Rifis’ Berber identity played a role in discouraging Moroccan Arabs from joining their campaign against the French.
Though his system of colonial government held, Lyautey himself fell to the Rifi challenge. To his critics in Paris, the overflow of the Rif War into the French protectorate proved the failure of Lyautey’s efforts to achieve the total submission of Morocco. As major reinforcements from France flooded Morocco in July 1925, Lyautey—exhausted by months of campaigning against the Rifis compounded by ill health—asked for another commander to assist him. The French government dispatched Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of the World War I battle of Verdun, to assist. In August, Pétain took control of French military operations in Morocco. The following month, Lyautey tendered his resignation. He left Morocco for good in October 1925.
Abd el-Krim did not long survive Lyautey. The French and Spanish combined forces to crush the Rifi insurgency. The Rifi army had already withdrawn back to its mountain homeland in northern Morocco, where it came under a two-front siege by massive French and Spanish armies in September 1925. By October, the European armies had completely surrounded the Rif Mountains and imposed a complete blockade to starve the Rifis into submission. Abd el-Krim’s efforts to negotiate a resolution were rebuffed, and in May 1926, the Rif Mountains were overrun by a joint European force of some 123,000 soldiers. Rifi resistance crumbled, and Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French on May 26. He was later exiled to the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where he remained until 1947.
With the collapse of the Rif War, France and Spain resumed their colonial administration of Morocco unencumbered by further domestic opposition. Though the Rif War did not engender sustained resistance to the French or Spanish in Morocco, Abd el-Krim and his movement sparked the imagination of nationalists across the Arab world. They saw the Rifis as an Arab people (not as Berbers) who had led a heroic resistance to European rule and had inflicted numerous defeats on modern armies in defense of their land and faith. Their five-year insurgency (1921–1926) against Spain and France inspired some Syrian nationalists to mount their own revolt against the French in 1925.
One young Syrian officer avidly followed newspaper accounts on the Rif War from the central town of Hama. Fawzi al-Qawuqji had once fought the French himself. A native of the city of Tripoli, in what would become Greater Lebanon, he had rallied to King Faysal’s cause and joined the disorganized band that confronted the French colonial army at Khan Maysalun in July 1920. The magnitude of that defeat left al-Qawuqji convinced that the Syrians could not expel the French—for the moment.
Within weeks of Maysalun, al-Qawuqji chose pragmatism over idealism and accepted a commission in the new Syrian army the French were establishing, called the Troupes Spéciales, or the Syrian Legion. Yet he wasn’t comfortable in his French uniform, collaborating with a foreign imperial power to run his country. Reading the newspaper in the barracks of Hama, al-Qawuqji and his fellow nationalists were inspired by the Rif War and took Abd el-Krim for their role model. “What we saw in the heroism of their fight convinced us that the distinct character of the Arabs had survived,” al-Qawuqji wrote in his memoirs, “and a love of sacrifice spread among us. I obsessively followed events in Morocco, and found maps of the field of conflict.”19
If the Rif War inspired nationalists in Syria, the imperial administrators took their inspiration from Lyautey’s methods of imperial rule in Morocco. The French officials appointed to rule Syria were in large part graduates of the Lyautey “school”: General Henri Gouraud, the first high commissioner in Syria, had been Lyautey’s assistant in Morocco. Other prominent colonial officials appointed to Syria had served under Lyautey, including Colonel Catroux, Gouraud’s delegate to Damascus; General de Lamothe, the delegate to Aleppo; and the two colonels who served as delegates to the Alawite territories. Many lower-ranking officials came to Syria from Morocco as well. Predictably, they sought to reproduce a modified Lyautey system in Syria.20
The French faced nationalist opposition in town and country alike from the outset of their occupation of Syria. In 1919, an anti-French uprising broke out in the Alawite Mountains in western Syria and took two years to quell. The Alawites, a religious community that trace their origins to Shiite Islam, only wanted to preserve their autonomy; they made no pretense of fighting for national independence. The French were able to satisfy Alawite wishes for local autonomy by creating a ministate based in the port city of Latakia and the Alawite highlands, in which local notables ruled in collaboration with French administrators.
A more serious nationalist revolt broke out in the countryside around the northern city of Aleppo in 1919, headed by a local notable named Ibrahim Hananu. A landowner who had served in the Ottoman bureaucracy before the First World War, Hananu was disenchanted with Ottoman wartime repression. He volunteered for Amir Faysal’s army in the 1916–1918 Arab Revolt and took part in the Syrian General Congress of 1919. A man of action, Hananu viewed the Syrian Congress as little more than a talking shop and returned north to Aleppo to mobilize a guerrilla force to mount an effective deterrent against the French. He initiated a rural uprising against the threat of French rule that quickly turned into a nationalist insurgency after the French occupied Aleppo in 1920. The number of insurgents expanded rapidly between the summer and autumn of 1920, from 800 to nearly 5,000 volunteers. 21 The Syrian nationalists received arms and funding from the neighboring Turks, who were fighting their own war against a short-lived French occupation in the southern coastal region of Anatolia. The French moved quickly to deploy troops and reassert their control over Aleppo, lest Hananu’s revolt provoke a broader nationalist uprising across Syria. In the autumn of 1921 Hananu fled to Jordan, where he was captured by the British and delivered to French justice. The French put Hananu on trial but had the wisdom to acquit the nationalist rather than turn him into a martyr. For Fawzi al-Qawuqji, who was already enrolled in the Syrian Legion, the collapse of Hananu’s revolt only confirmed his view that the Syrians were not yet ready to withstand the French.
The French were more concerned about their vulnerability to nationalist agitation than Fawzi al-Qawuqji realized. To counter the threat of a unified nationalist movement, the French chose to employ a divide-and-rule scheme, splitting Syria into four mini-states. Aleppo and Damascus were made the seats of two separate administrations to keep the urban nationalists in Syria’s principal cities from making common cause. The French also envisaged separate states for the two religious communities with long histories of territorial autonomy—the Alawites in western Syria, and the Druzes to the south. On the model of Lyautey’s Berber policies, France hoped by these means to give the Alawites and Druzes a vested interest in the mandate that would insulate them from urban nationalism. High Commissioner Gouraud justified this division of Syria into autonomous regions with local men appointed to serve as governors with reference to the doctrine he had learned at the school of Marshal Lyautey.22
While working to assure the goodwill of Syria’s Druze and Alawite communities, the French authorities made no concessions to nationalist leaders in Damascus. The most influential Syrian nationalist in the early 1920s was Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar (1882–1940), a medical doctor who had trained at the American University of Beirut. Fluent in English after his medical training, Shahbandar had served as guide and translator to the King-Crane Commission in 1919 and had struck a personal friendship with Charles Crane. He briefly served as foreign minister in King Faysal’s last cabinet in May 1920, taking refuge in Egypt following the fall of Faysal’s government in July of that year. He returned to Damascus one year later when the French announced a general amnesty in the summer of 1921.
On his return to Syria, Dr. Shahbandar resumed his nationalist activities and founded a clandestine organization called the Iron Hand Society. The Iron Hand assembled veterans of the Ottoman-era secret Arabist societies and the supporters of Faysal’s Arab government in Damascus with a common agenda to expel the French from Syria. The activities of the Iron Hand were held in check by strict French surveillance. On April 7, 1922, the French arrested Shahbandar and four other leaders of the movement on suspicion of fomenting rebellion.
The French arrests only fanned the flames of Syrian dissent. The following day a group of nationalists used Friday prayers in the central Umayyad Mosque to rouse the 8,000 congregants to a mass demonstration. Iron Hand members led a diverse crowd of religious leaders, neighborhood bosses, merchants, and students. They marched through the central markets of Damascus toward the citadel, where they were dispersed by French security forces, who wounded dozens and arrested forty-six Damascenes.
French repressive measures failed to stem the protests, as ever more Damascenes responded to the nationalists’ call. On April 11 a group of forty women headed by Shahbandar’s wife led a massive demonstration. French soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three and wounding many more, including several women. A general strike was called, and shopkeepers in Damascus kept their shutters down for two weeks while the French tried Shahbandar and the other opposition leaders. Severe sentences were passed against all the men, with Shahbandar receiving twenty years and the others between five and fifteen years. The Iron Hand was broken, the nationalists were silenced, and calm prevailed—though only for the next three years.
By 1925, after three years of relative calm, the French began to reconsider their political arrangements in Syria. Running a number of mini-states was proving expensive. High Commissioner Gouraud had completed his tour of duty, and his successors decreed the union of Aleppo and Damascus into a single state, scheduling elections for a new Representative Assembly to be held in October 1925.
After three years of political tranquility, the French relaxed their grip on Syrian politics. General Maurice Sarrail, the new high commissioner, gave pardons to political prisoners and allowed the nationalists in Damascus to form a party in advance of the elections for the Representative Assembly. Shahbandar, who served two years of his sentence before being released as part of the general amnesty, formed a new nationalist organ called the People’s Party in June 1925. Shahbandar recruited some of the most prominent Damascenes to his party. The mandate authorities responded by sponsoring a pro-French party—the Syrian Union Party. The Syrians feared France would rig the results of the elections, just as they had in Lebanon. However, the disruption to the political process came from the Druze Mountain rather than the high commissioner’s office.
Trouble had been brewing between the French and the Druzes since 1921. General Georges Catroux, another product of the Lyautey school, had drafted the French treaty with the Druzes in 1921 on the model of French Berber policy in Morocco. According to the treaty, the Druze Mountain would constitute a special administrative unit independent of Damascus with an elected native governor and a representative council. In other words, the administration of the mountain ostensibly was to be under Druze control. In return, the Druzes had to accept the terms of the French mandate, the posting of French advisors to the mountain, and a garrison of French soldiers. Many of the Druzes had deep misgivings about the terms of the treaty and feared it gave the French far too much scope to interfere in their affairs. Most took a wait-and-see approach, to judge the French by their practices. They were not reassured by what they experienced over the years that followed.
To begin, France made the mistake of alienating the most powerful Druze leader, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash. In a transparent bid to undermine the authority of the most powerful person in the Druze Mountain, the French authorities named one of Sultan Pasha’s subordinate relations, Salim al-Atrash, as governor over the mountain in 1921. This placed the French and Sultan Pasha on a collision course. When Sultan Pasha’s men released a captive taken by the French in July 1922, the imperial authorities responded by sending troops and aircraft to destroy Sultan Pasha’s house. Undaunted, Sultan Pasha led a guerrilla campaign against French positions in the mountain that lasted for nine months, until the Druze warlord was forced to surrender in April 1923. The French secured a truce with the Druze leader and avoided the dangers of putting such a powerful local leader on trial. Yet Salim Pasha, the nominal governor of the Druze Mountain, had already tendered his submission, and no other Druze leader would accept the poisoned chalice of becoming governor of the mountain over Sultan Pasha’s opposition.
Left without any other suitable Druze candidates, the French broke one of the cardinal rules of the Lyautey system, as well as the terms of their own treaty with the Druzes, by naming a French officer as governor of the mountain in 1923. If that wasn’t bad enough, the man they named as governor, Captain Gabriel Carbillet, was a zealous reformer who made it his mission to destroy what he referred to as the “ancient feudal system” of the Druze Mountain, which he considered “retrograde.” Druze complaints against Carbillet multiplied. Shahbandar noted ironically that many of his fellow nationalists credited the French officer with promoting Syrian nationalism by driving the Druzes to the brink of revolt.23
The Druze leaders refused to accept French violations of their 1921 treaty and decided to put their complaints directly to the mandate authorities. In spring 1925 the leaders of the mountain assembled a delegation and set off to Beirut to meet the high commissioner and lodge a complaint against Carbillet. Rather than seize the opportunity to placate the disgruntled Druzes, High Commissioner Sarrail openly humiliated the great men of the mountain by refusing even to meet with them. The Druze leaders returned to the mountain in a fury, determined to revolt against the French, and looking for partners. They turned to the urban nationalists as natural allies.
Nationalist activity was gaining ground across the towns of Syria in 1925. In Damascus, Abd al-Rahman Shahbander gathered the leading nationalists in his new People’s Party. In Hama, Fawzi al-Qawuqji had created a political party with an overtly religious orientation, which he called the Hizb Allah, or “the Party of God.” In this, al-Qawuqji proved one of the first to appreciate the political power of Islam to mobilize people against foreign rule. He grew a beard and visited the different mosques of Hama each night to gain support for an uprising. He established good relations with the Muslim preachers of the town and encouraged them to pepper their Friday sermons with Qur’anic references to jihad. He also gained financial support from some of the wealthy landowning families of Hama. Hizb Allah grew in manpower and financial resources. Early in 1925 al-Qawuqji sent emissaries to meet with Shahbandar in Damascus to encourage better coordination between Shahbandar’s People’s Party and Hizb Allah in Hama. Shahbandar had discouraged the emissaries from Hama, warning them “that the idea of a revolt in present circumstances was a clear danger harmful to the interests of the Nation.”24 With the Druzes entering the nationalist cause in May 1925, Shahbandar believed the movement had reached the critical mass to stand a chance of success.
That month the Druze leadership made contact with Shahbandar and the Damascus nationalists. The first meeting was convened in the home of a veteran journalist, where the conversation revolved around the means to launch a revolt. Shahbandar briefed the Druzes on Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s activities in Hama and discussed opening several fronts against the French in a nationwide Syrian revolt. Subsequent meetings were held in Shahbandar’s house, attended by leading members of the Atrash clan. Oaths were sworn and pacts concluded in secret, and all of the participants vowed to work toward national unity and independence.25 It was an alliance of convenience for both sides. Shahbandar and his colleagues were only too happy to see the Druzes launch armed action in their own region, where they enjoyed far greater mobility than nationalists in Damascus and were heavily armed; in return, the Druzes would not have to face the French on their own. The Damascus nationalists promised to spread revolt nationwide, giving the Druzes the support they needed to make the first move.
The Druzes launched the revolt against French rule in July 1925. Sultan Pasha al-Atrash led a force of several thousand fighters against the French in Salkhad, the second largest town in the mountain, which they occupied on July 20. The next day, his band laid siege to Suwayda’, the administrative capital of the Druze Mountain, pinning down a large contingent of French administrators and soldiers.
Caught by surprise, the French lacked the forces and the strategy to combat the Druze revolt. Over the next few weeks, the Druze army of between eight and ten thousand volunteers defeated every French force dispatched against them. High Commissioner Sarrail was determined to suppress the revolt in its infancy so as to prevent the nightmare scenario of a nationwide uprising. He redeployed French troops and Syrian Legion forces from northern and central Syria to confront the uprising in the southern Druze Mountain. The authorities cracked down on all the usual nationalist suspects in Damascus in August, arresting and deporting men without trial. Shahbandar and his closest collaborators fled Damascus to take refuge with the Atrash clan in the Druze Mountain. And despite France’s best efforts, the revolt began to spread. The next outbreak came in Hama.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji had prepared the ground for revolt in Hama, waiting for the right moment to strike. Having watched as previous Syrian revolts against the French had surged and faltered, he believed the situation was different in 1925. There was a new degree of coordination among the opponents of French rule, between the Druzes, the Damascenes, and his own party in Hama. The Druzes had launched their revolt with devastating effect on the French. Al-Qawuqji still followed the news of the Rif War in Morocco and knew that France’s position there was deteriorating: “The French army had gotten entangled in the fighting with the tribes of the Rif under Abd el-Krim’s leadership. News of his victories began to reach us. We also began to receive news of French reinforcements sent to Marrakesh.” Al-Qawuqji realized that with the French dispatching troops to Morocco, there would be no reinforcements available for the French army in Syria. “My preparations were complete,” he concluded. “All that remained was to implement them.”26
In September 1925, al-Qawuqji sent emissaries to Sultan Pasha al-Atrash in the Druze Mountain. Al-Qawuqji suggested that the Druzes escalate their attacks to draw all available French soldiers to the south. He would then launch an attack in Hama in early October. The Druze leader was willing to expose his fighters to heavy fighting against the French to secure a second front against the French in Hama, and he agreed to al-Qawuqji’s plan.
On October 4 al-Qawuqji led a mutiny of the Syrian Legion, assisted by fighters from the surrounding Bedouin tribes, with the support of the town’s population. They captured a number of French soldiers and laid siege to the town’s administrators in the government palace. By midnight the town was in the hands of the insurgents.
The French were quick to respond. Though most of their soldiers were in the Druze Mountain, as al-Qawuqji had anticipated, the French still had their air force. The French began an aerial bombardment that struck residential quarters and leveled parts of the town’s central markets, killing nearly 400 civilians, many of them women and children. The town’s notables, who had initially pledged their support to al-Qawuqji’s movement, were the first to break ranks and strike a deal with the French to bring both the revolt and the bombardment to a close. Within three days of launching their revolt, al-Qawuqji and his men had to withdraw to the countryside, leaving the French to reclaim Hama.
Undaunted by their failure in Hama, al-Qawuqji and his men carried the revolt to other towns and cities across Syria. “The gates of Syria’s fields were opened before us for revolt. By these manoeuvres,” al-Qawuqji boasted, “the intelligence and cunning of the French collapsed before the intelligence of the Arabs and their cunning.”27
Within a matter of days, the revolt had spread to the villages surrounding Damascus. The French tried to stifle the movement with displays of extreme violence. Whole villages were destroyed by artillery or aerial bombardment. Nearly one hundred villagers in the hinterlands of the capital were executed. Corpses were brought back to Damascus as grisly trophies to deter others from supporting the insurgents. Predictably, violence begat violence. Twelve mutilated corpses of local soldiers serving the French were left outside the city gates of Damascus as a warning against collaboration with the colonial authorities.
By October 18, the insurgency had reached the Syrian capital, where men and women alike joined the resistance. The men who fought were reliant on their wives and sisters to smuggle food and arms to them in their hiding places. Beneath the watchful gaze of a French soldier, one Damascene wife carried food and weapons to her fugitive husband and his rebel friends. “It never occurred to [the French sentry] that women were helping the rebels to escape over the rooftops or that they were delivering weapons to them under the cloaks and plates of food to contribute their part to the revolution,” Damascene journalist Siham Tergeman recalled in her memoirs.28
For the nationalist leaders in Damascus, the revolt had become a sacred jihad, and the combatants holy warriors. Some four hundred volunteers entered Damascus and managed to secure the Shaghur and Maydan quarters, driving the French administrators to seek refuge in the citadel. One detachment of insurgents made their way to the Azm Palace, the eighteenth-century vanity project of As’ad Pasha al-Azm that had been taken over by the French as a governor’s mansion, in an attempt to capture the high commissioner, General Maurice Sarrail. Though Sarrail had in fact already left his quarters, a fierce gun battle ensued, which left the old palace in flames. It was but the beginning.
The French used force majeure to defeat the revolt in Damascus. They shelled the quarters of Damascus indiscriminately with artillery from the citadel. “At the appointed time,” the Damascene nationalist leader Dr. Shahbandar wrote, “those hellish instruments opened their mouths and belched their ashes upon the finest quarters of the city. Over the next twenty-four hours, the shells of destruction and fire consumed more than six hundred of the finest homes.” This was followed by days of aerial bombardment. “The bombardment lasted from midday Sunday until Tuesday evening. We will never know the precise number of those who died under the rubble,” Shahbandar recorded in his memoirs.29 Subsequent estimates put the number of dead at 1,500 in three days’ violence.
The impact on the civilian population made the insurgents bring their operations in Damascus to a close. “When the rebels saw the terror that gripped the women and children from the continuous shelling of the quarters, and the circling of aircraft dropping bombs indiscriminately on houses, they left the city,” Shahbandar recounted. Though they had been driven from Hama and Damascus, the insurgents had succeeded in relieving the Druze Mountain, which for three months had borne the brunt of French repression. If the French had hoped to discourage the spread of the revolt through the use of indiscriminate violence against Hama and Damascus, they were to be disappointed. French troops had to be dispatched to all corners of Syria as the revolt spread across the country in the winter of 1925–1926.
Only after they had quelled revolts in northern and central Syria were the French able to return to the Druze Mountain, where Sultan Pasha al-Atrash still led an active resistance movement. In April 1926 the French retook Suwayda’, the Druze regional capital. After May 1926, when Abd el-Krim finally surrendered in Morocco, the French were able to divert a large number of soldiers to Syria, bringing the total French force up to 95,000 men, according to Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The Syrian resistance was overwhelmed by the French, and their leaders went into exile. On October 1, 1926, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash and Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar crossed the border into neighboring Transjordan.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji tried to continue the struggle long after the other nationalist leaders had given up. Between October 1926 and March 1927 he campaigned tirelessly to resume the revolt, but the fight had gone out of the Syrian people, who had grown cautious in the face of violent French retaliation. In his last campaign, in March 1927, al-Qawuqji managed to raise a band of seventy-four fighters, of which only twenty-seven had horses. They skirted Damascus, taking to the desert, only to be betrayed by desert tribes that formerly had supported the movement. Through guile and deception they managed to retreat to Transjordan, eluding capture but leaving their country secure in French hands.30
The Syrian Revolt failed to deliver independence from French rule. The nationalist movement passed to a new leadership of urban elites who eschewed armed struggle to pursue their aims through a political process of negotiation and nonviolent protest. Until 1936 the Syrian nationalists would have little to show for their efforts.
Even though French colonial authorities from Morocco to Syria spent much of the 1920s suppressing rebellions, they at least had a party in Algeria to look forward to.
A century had passed since the dey of Algiers sealed the fate of his country with an ill-tempered swish of the fly whisk in 1827. Since landing their first troops at Sidi Ferrush in June 1830, the French had ousted the Ottomans, defeated Amir Abd al-Qadir, and suppressed a number of major rebellions—the last in 1871–1872. By the early twentieth century they had completed their conquest from the Mediterranean to the Sahara.
By the 1920s, over 800,000 settlers had moved from France to Algeria.31 The French in Algeria were no longer on foreign soil; since 1848, when Algeria had been declared French territory, the three provinces of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine had been converted into départements of France, with elected representatives in the French Chamber in Paris. The “Algerian” deputies—or more precisely, the French Algerian deputies, as native Algerians were allowed neither to vote nor to stand for election to national office—enjoyed disproportionate influence in the Chamber and worked as a bloc to protect settler interests.
With the approach of the 1930 centenary, the French Algerians took the opportunity to impress on both the Metropolitan French and the native Algerians the triumph and permanence of the French presence in Algeria. The planning for the celebrations began years in advance. The first step was taken by the governor-general of Algeria in December 1923, when he decreed the creation of a commission “to prepare a program celebrating the centenary of the French seizure of Algiers in 1830.” The French parliament authorized a budget of 40 million francs and the convening of a commission charged with the task of organizing events. In the end, the celebrations cost more than 100 million francs.
Algeria was transformed for the year. Artists were commissioned to create monuments celebrating major milestones in the history of French Algeria, to decorate the towns and countryside. Museums were built in the great cities—Algiers, Constantine, Oran. Public works were constructed across the country—schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses, agricultural colleges and professional schools, and the world’s most powerful broadcasting station to ensure news of the centenary events reached across all Algeria. A major exposition was organized in the western coastal city of Oran, with all the fanfare of a world’s fair. Well over fifty international conferences and congresses were held on virtually every subject under the sun. Sporting events, trans-Saharan auto rallies, and yacht races marked the calendar. Cities were lit at night, with prominent buildings outlined in strands of electric lights and exquisite firework displays.
The symbolism of the centenary was best captured in the monuments commissioned to mark the event. In Boufarik, a few miles south of Algiers, a massive stone plinth 45 meters wide and 9 meters high (about 148 feet by 30 feet) celebrated “the glory of the colonising genius of France.” The sculptor Henri Bouchard (who designed the Protestant Reformation memorial in Geneva) placed at the center of the monument a cluster of French “pioneering heroes of civilization” headed by General Bugeaud and General de Lamoricière, the military commanders who scorched Algeria to defeat the Amir Abd al-Qadir in the 1830s and 1840s. A group of French nobles, mayors, and “model settlers” stood in proud ranks behind the military men. To the rear, looking over the shoulders of the French men in uniforms and suits, the sculptor included a few Arabs in national dress, representatives of “the first natives whose active fidelity made the task [of French colonization] possible.”32
The French even managed to insinuate a sympathetic Algerian presence into the 1830 military memorial. The French press had heatedly debated whether the monument proposed to celebrate the landing of French troops at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1830, would “upset the natives.” “All those who know Algeria,” wrote Mercier, the official historian of the centenary, “and who live in daily contact with its Arabo-Berber population, had no apprehensions in this respect.” The true feelings of all native Algerians, Mercier insisted, were captured in the remarks of the tribal leader Bouaziz Ben Gana, who claimed: “If the natives had known the French in 1830, they would have loaded their rifles with flowers rather than bullets to greet them.” These sentiments were captured in the inscription on the 10-meter-high monument, picturing a cockaded Marianne gazing down into the eyes of a dutiful Arab son: “One hundred years later, the French Republic having given to this country prosperity, civilization and justice, a grateful Algeria pays homage of undying attachment to the Motherland.” It was as though the French wished to cast the Algerians in a supporting role in the colonization of their own country.33
The centenary celebrations reached their climax at Sidi Ferrush on June 14, 1930. Here again, the organizers sought to present colonial Algeria as a Franco-Arab joint production, officially known as “the celebration of the union of the French and indigenous populations.” A massive crowd gathered around the new monument of Sidi Ferrush to watch the military parade and hear the speeches. The governor-general headed a phalanx of colonial officials. The air force made a flyover and dropped flower petals on the crowd surrounding the memorial. Torch bearers, following Olympic example, set off running from the monument to Algiers, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) to the east.
The speeches given by the French were predictably triumphalist, but far more astonishing were the comments that came from the Algerian dignitaries who took to the podium. Hadj Hamou, a religious scholar speaking on behalf of the teaching staff of the mosque schools, expressed his gratitude for the freedom he enjoyed to teach Islam without interference. All mosque-goers, he claimed, followed the lead of their imams in “the common love of the secular holy French Republic” (la sainte République Française laïque)—a wonderful oxymoron. M. Belhadj, speaking on behalf of Muslim intellectuals, remarked on the day’s celebration of “the profound union of the French and indigenous people” who had transformed into “a single, unique people, living in peace and concord, in the shadow of the same flag and in the same love of the Mother land.” M. Ourabah, a leading Arab notable, supplicated: “Instruct us, raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level. And let us join in one voice as in one heart to cry: Long live France, ever greater! Long live Algeria, ever French!”34
In an age of burgeoning Arab nationalism, Algeria seemed to be embracing imperialism. Yet the Algerians were not satisfied with their lot. Many of the educated elite recognized they could not beat the French, and so they sought to join them—with the full rights of French citizenship that, down to 1930, had been denied them. Accepting French rule as inevitable, these Algerians opted for a civil rights movement instead of nationalism. Their spokesman was a student of pharmacology at the University of Algiers named Ferhat Abbas.
Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985) was born in a small town in eastern Algeria to a family of provincial administrators and landholders. He was trained in French schools and came to share in French values. What he wanted more than anything else was to enjoy the full privileges of any Frenchman. Yet the laws of France put severe limits on the legal and political rights of Algerian Muslims. These laws divided Algeria geographically, between areas with relatively high European populations, where French common law applied; rural communes with European minorities, where a combination of military and civilian rule applied; and Arab territories, which were under full military administration.
The laws also clearly distinguished between Europeans and Muslims in Algeria. In 1865 the French Senate decreed that all Algerian Muslims were French subjects. Although they could serve in the military and civil service, they were not actually citizens of France. To be considered for French citizenship, native Algerians would have to renounce their Muslim civil status and agree to live under French personal status laws. Given that marriage, family law, and the distribution of inheritance is all precisely regulated in Islamic law, this was tantamount to asking Muslims to abandon their faith. Not surprisingly, only 2,000 Algerians applied for citizenship during the eighty years in which this law remained in force.
Unprotected under French law, Algerian Muslims actually came under a host of discriminatory legislation known as the Code de l’Indigénat [“Indigenous People’s Law Code”]. Like the Jim Crow laws passed after the American Civil War to keep African Americans in a segregated, subordinate status, the code, drafted in the aftermath of the last major Algerian revolt against French rule in 1871, allowed native Algerians to be prosecuted for acts that Europeans could legally perform, such as criticizing the French Republic and its officials. Most of the crimes set out in the code were petty, and the punishments were light—no more than five days in prison, or a fine of fifteen francs. Yet the code was applied all the more regularly because its consequences were so trivial. And, more than any other legal distinction, the code reminded Algerians they were second-class citizens in their own land. To someone like Ferhat Abbas, who had been schooled in French republican thinking, the indignity was unbearable.
Abbas responded to the centenary celebrations with a sharply critical essay, written in French, that captured the disillusionment of a young Algerian after a century of French rule. Entitled The Young Algerian: From Colony to Province, Abbas’s book was an eloquent plea to replace French colonialism in Algeria with the more enlightened aspects of French republicanism.
The century which has passed away was the century of tears and blood. And it is we the indigenous people in particular who have cried and bled.... The celebrations of the Centenary were but a clumsy reminder of a painful past, an exhibition of the wealth of some before the poverty of others.... Understanding between the races will remain but empty words if the new century does not place the different elements of this country on the same social rank and give the weak the means to raise their standing.35
We hear in Abbas’s writing the echoes of the Muslim notables who spoke at the centenary celebrations in Sidi Ferrush—“raise us yet higher, raise us up to your level.” Yet Abbas was more assertive in his demands.
Abbas claimed that the Algerians had earned their rights of citizenship by virtue of their wartime service. France had placed a heavy burden on indigenous Algerians since conscription was first introduced to Algeria in 1913. Over 200,000 Algerian Muslims had been drafted during the First World War, and many never returned. Estimates of Algerian war dead range from 25,000 to 80,000. Many more were wounded.36
Even after the war, Algerians were conscripted into the French army. Abbas maintained that he had earned his rights of citizenship through his own military service in 1922. France did not distinguish between soldiers by race and religion in military service, he argued, and should not do so in law. “We are Muslims and we are French,” he continued. “We are indigenous and we are French. Here in Algeria there are Europeans and indigenous people, but there are only Frenchmen.”37 Yet native Algerians had been reduced to an underclass in their own country through colonial society and its laws. “What more can be said about the daily insults which the indigenous man suffers in his native land, in the street, in the cafés, in the slightest transaction of daily life? The barber closes the door in his face, the hotel refuses him a room.”38
Abbas was particularly critical of French naturalization laws that required Muslims to renounce their personal status. “Why should an Algerian seek to be naturalized? To be French? He already is, as his country has been declared French soil.” Writing of Algeria’s French rulers, he asked rhetorically: “Do they wish to raise this country to a higher level or do they wish to divide and rule?” For Abbas, the answer was self-evident. “What is needed is for the same law to be applied to all, if truly we wish to guide Muslim Algeria towards a higher civilization.”39 Even so, he clung to the cultural rights of Algerians to preserve their religion and to be taught in their own language—Arabic—without prejudice to their rights as French citizens.
Abbas was not the first to set out a claim for full citizenship rights; the Young Algeria movement had pressed for such reforms since the early 1900s. Nor did he speak for all Algerians. The Islamic reform movement, headed by Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), rejected Abbas’s idea of assimilation out of hand. The differences between Abbas and Ben Badis were captured in an exchange of editorials in 1936, when Ferhat Abbas famously declared there was no such thing as the Algerian nation: “Algeria as a fatherland is a myth. I have not discovered it. I have questioned history; I have questioned the dead and the living; I have visited the cemeteries: no one has spoken to me of it.” Algeria, he claimed, was France and Algerians were French. Indeed, carried away by his rhetoric, Abbas went on to say that he was France (“La France, c’est moi”).40
“No, sirs!” Ben Badis retorted:
We have scrutinized the pages of history and the current situation. And we have found the Algerian Muslim nation.... This community has its history, full of great feats. It has its religious and linguistic unity. It has its own culture, its habits and customs, good or bad, like all nations. Moreover, this Algerian and Muslim nation is not France. It would not know how to be France. It does not want to become France. It could not become France, even if it wanted to.
Yet Ben Badis made no more claim for Algerian independence than did Abbas. Whereas Abbas sought equality with the French, Ben Badis wanted Algerian Muslims to be “separate but equal” to the French. He asked the French to grant indigenous Algerians liberty, justice, and equality while respecting their distinctive culture, their Arabic language, and Muslim faith. Ben Badis concluded his essay by insisting that “this Algerian Muslim father land is a faithful friend to France.”41 The differences between the secular assimilationists and the Islamic reformers were hardly insurmountable.
Ironically, the only activists to demand full independence for Algeria came from the expatriate worker community in France. A handful of politically engaged men in the 100,000-strong Algerian workforce in France came to nationalism through the Communist Party. Their leader was Messali Hadj (1898–1974), who founded the workers’ nationalist association L’Étoile Nord-Africaine (the North African Star) in 1926. Messali presented the new organization’s program to the Congress of the League against Colonial Oppression in Brussels in February 1927. Among the points called for were independence for Algeria, the withdrawal of the French occupation forces, the formation of a national army, confiscation of settler plantations and a redistribution of farmlands to native farmers, and a host of social and economic reforms for independent Algeria.42 The association’s demands were as just as they were unrealistic at that time, and they attracted little support among Algerians at home or abroad.
Of all the Algerian political activists in the 1930s, Ferhat Abbas was the most influential. His writings were widely read by educated Algerians and French policy makers alike. “I read your book with great interest,” Maurice Violette, former governor-general of Algeria, wrote to Abbas in 1931. “I would not have written it in the same way. I regret certain pages in it, but faced with some veritable provocations . . . I recognize that it is difficult for you to retain your composure and I understand.” The tone was condescending, but Abbas clearly did not mind (he used the quote as encomia on the dust jacket of his book). He knew that, through Violette, his arguments would be discussed in the upper echelons of the French administration.
Maurice Violette had grown yet more influential since the end of his term as governor-general of Algeria and his return to Paris. He was named to the French Senate, where in March 1935 he opened a debate on granting citizenship rights to a select group of Algerians on the basis of their assimilation of French culture and values—referred to in French as évolués. The expression, meaning “more highly evolved,” was pure Social Darwinism that conceived of Algerians as advancing from a lower to a higher state of civilization as they shed Arab culture in favor of “superior” French values. This “civilizing mission” was one of the principles by which the French justified their imperial project. While playing to the ideals of the “civilizing mission,” Violette argued before the Senate that the enfranchisement of progressive Muslim Algerians would forestall nationalism and encourage assimilation.
The French colonial lobby (comprising settler representatives and their supporters in Paris) was too powerful, however, and defeated Violette’s 1935 motion. They feared that granting full citizenship rights even to a select group of Algerians would only lead to a broader enfranchisement that ultimately would undermine European dominance in Algeria.
Violette found a more sympathetic hearing for his controversial views in 1936, when he was appointed to a cabinet post in the socialist Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The Popular Front spoke of a whole new relationship between France and its colonies, and Algeria’s political elites knew Violette to be an ally to their cause. The Islamic reformers led by Ben Badis decided to unite forces with Ferhat Abbas’s assimilationists. They met in the first Algerian Muslim Congress in Algiers in June 1936 and endorsed Maurice Violette’s proposal to grant full citizenship to a select group of Francophile Algerians without requiring them to renounce their Muslim civil status. The Congress then dispatched a delegation to Paris to present its political demands to the government. The delegates were received by Blum and Violette, who promised to satisfy many of the Algerians’ demands.
By the end of December 1936, Blum and Violette had drafted a bill on Algeria and submitted it to parliament. The Blum-Violette bill, they believed, was enlightened legislation that would secure France’s position in Algeria once and for all, through the cooperation of the country’s political and economic elites. “It is truly impossible, after so many solemn promises made by so many governments, notably at the time of the centenary (1930), that we should not realize the urgency of this necessary task of assimilation that affects in the highest degree the moral health of Algeria,” they wrote in the bill’s preamble.43
The bill set out the categories of indigenous Algerian Muslims who would be eligible for citizenship. Nine different groups were defined, beginning with those Algerians who served as officers or career master-sergeants in the French army or were soldiers decorated for valor. Those Algerians who had attained diplomas of higher education from either French or Muslim academies, as well as civil servants recruited through competitive examination, were also eligible. Natives elected to chambers of commerce or agriculture, or to administrative positions in the financial, municipal, or regional councils, were named, as were notables holding traditional office such as aghas and qa’ids. Finally, any Algerian awarded such French honors as the Legion of Honor or the Labor Medal would be eligible for full enfranchisement. In all, no more than 25,000 Algerians from a total population of 4.5 million would have qualified for citizenship under the terms of the Blum-Violette bill.
Given the bill’s very limited aims, and its authors’ clear intention to perpetuate French rule in Algeria, it is amazing how much opposition the Blum-Violette reforms encountered. Once again, the colonial lobby went into action to ensure the bill was not even debated, let alone put to a vote. The colonial press savaged the bill as opening the flood gates to the Islamization of France and the end of French Algeria.
The debates in the French Chamber set off disturbances in the streets of Algeria between proponents and opponents of the bill. Indigenous Algerians took to the streets in mass protests and demonstrations to assert their demands for civil rights. The unrest in Algeria only reinforced the arguments of the conservatives and the colonial lobby, who claimed that the troubles were caused by the disastrous policies of the Blum government. French mayors in Algeria went on strike in protest, as did elected Algerian politicians, as the bill passed from one parliamentary committee to another without ever coming to the floor for debate. In the end, the colonial lobby prevailed. The Blum-Violette bill was abandoned in 1938 without ever having been discussed in the Chamber of the National Assembly.
The centenary was over. In spite of the many solemn promises made, the French government would not concede the urgent task of assimilation. It is hard to capture the depth of disillusionment that set in among Algerian elites, whose expectations had been raised to new heights only to be dashed by the failure of the Blum government to deliver on its promises. Henceforth, the dominant trend in the Algerian opposition movement would be nationalist. France would not get another century in Algeria. Within sixteen years the two countries would be at war.
Leon Blum’s Popular Front government had also hoped to resolve differences between France and its mandates in Syria and Lebanon. After years of opposition interspersed with fruitless negotiations, nationalists in Beirut and Damascus responded to the change of government in Paris with a new optimism. The year 1936 seemed to herald a new age of broader Arab independence and reduced imperial controls. Britain, which had conceded independence to Iraq in 1930, was on the verge of concluding a similar agreement with Egypt in 1936. Nationalists in Syria and Lebanon had every reason to believe the Popular Front government, with its enlightened views on empire, would follow suit and conclude treaties that would allow them to follow Egypt and Iraq into the League of Nations as nominally sovereign states.
In the aftermath of the 1925–1927 revolt, Syrian nationalists had pursued the politics of national liberation through nonviolence and negotiation, in a policy known as “honorable cooperation.” The National Bloc, headed by wealthy urban notables, became the dominant coalition of parties and factions working toward the common aim of securing Syria’s independence. They redoubled their efforts after Iraq secured its nominal independence in 1930. However, faced with the persistent opposition of the conservative French colonial lobby, the National Bloc had made no gains through cooperation. The first treaty the French offered, in November 1933, fell far short of granting independence and was rejected by the Syrian Chamber. Honorable cooperation began to give way to systematic resistance, culminating in a fifty-day general strike called by Syrian nationalists at the start of 1936.
The Popular Front government of Leon Blum seemed both to sympathize with the demands of Syrian nationalists and to place a high priority on restoring peace and stability to their troubled mandate. Shortly after coming to power, the Blum government entered into fresh negotiations with the Syrian National Bloc, in June 1936. The two sides made rapid progress as the French negotiators conceded many of the nationalists’ demands. A draft treaty of preferential alliance was concluded between the French and Syrian negotiators in September 1936 and submitted to their respective parliaments for ratification. Syria believed itself on the verge of independence.
In light of Syria’s success, the Lebanese pressed the French to draft a similar treaty granting Lebanon its independence. Negotiations were opened in October 1936. Following the model of the Syrian document, a draft Franco-Lebanese treaty was concluded in just twenty-five days and sent on for parliamentary approval in Paris and Beirut.
Nationalists in Syria and Lebanon were very satisfied with the terms of the new treaties with France, as demonstrated by the ease of the ratification process in Beirut and Damascus. The Lebanese Chamber approved its treaty in November, and the Syrian Chamber approved its own at the end of December 1936, by unanimous vote in both countries. However, as with the Blum-Violette bill, the colonial lobby in France succeeded in blocking any debate or vote on the 1936 treaties with Syria and Lebanon in the French National Assembly until the fall of the Blum government in June 1937. Lebanese and Syrian hopes for independence crashed with Blum’s government.
In 1939, with war looming in Europe, the French Assembly refused to ratify the treaties. Adding injury to insult, French colonial authorities took the further step of ceding the northwestern Syrian territory of Alexandretta to Turkey, which had long claimed the region for its 38 percent Turkish minority, in order to secure Turkey’s neutrality in the impending war in Europe. Outraged Syrian nationalists organized huge rallies and demonstrations, provoking massive repression by the French authorities, who suspended Syria’s constitution and dissolved its parliament.
France was on the verge of a major confrontation with its two Levantine mandates when Nazi Germany occupied the country and overthrew its government in May 1940. A collaborationist French government—the Vichy Regime—was set up under Marshal Philippe Pétain, the same “hero of Verdun” who had displaced Lyautey in Morocco at the height of the Rif War. Under the new regime Syria and Lebanon were to be ruled by a Vichy high commissioner, General Henri Dentz.
The British, already troubled by the pro-Axis leanings of Arab nationalists in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine, saw the Vichy administration in Syria and Lebanon as a hostile entity. When Commissioner Dentz offered Germany the use of Syrian airbases in May 1941, Britain was quick to intervene. United with the anti-Vichy Free French forces, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, the British occupied Syria and Lebanon in June–July 1941.
With the British occupation of Syria, the Free French promised full independence to Syria and Lebanon. In a proclamation read shortly after the Anglo-French invasion, General Georges Catroux, speaking on behalf of General de Gaulle, announced: “I come to put an end to the mandatory régime and to proclaim you free and independent.” 44 The French declaration of Syrian and Lebanese independence was guaranteed by the government of Great Britain. Nationalist celebrations in Syria and Lebanon proved premature. The Free French had not forsaken the hope of retaining their empire after the war. Both Syria and Lebanon would face an uphill battle to secure their independence against tremendous French opposition.
No sooner had the Free French proclaimed an end to the mandates than the Lebanese began to prepare for independence. Nationalist leaders of the different religious communities worked out a power-sharing arrangement in an unwritten agreement known as the National Pact, concluded in 1943. Witnessed by the political heads of all of the communities involved, the Lebanese upheld the National Pact without ever seeing the need to record its terms in an official document. According to the terms of the pact the president of Lebanon would henceforth be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim. Other important cabinet posts would be distributed among the Druzes, Orthodox Christians, and other religious communities. Seats in the parliament would be distributed in a ratio of six Christian seats for every five Muslim deputies (for which purposes the Sunnis, Shiites, and Druzes were all considered Muslim).
The National Pact seemed to have resolved the tensions between Lebanon’s communities and given them all a stake in their country’s political institutions. Yet the pact enshrined the same principle of “confessionalism” upheld by the French, rigidly distributing posts based on religious community, undermining Lebanese politics, and preventing the country from achieving genuine integration. In this way, the French left a legacy of division that long survived their rule in Lebanon.
Once the Lebanese notables had resolved their political differences, they called for fresh parliamentary elections in 1943. In keeping with the country’s constitution, the fifty-five new members of parliament assembled to elect the president, and on September 21, 1943, they chose the lawyer and nationalist Bishara al-Khoury to serve as the first president of independent Lebanon.
Al-Khoury was the same lawyer who had once advised General Gouraud and who had been an early critic of the French mandate in Lebanon. He had risen to national prominence in 1934 when he and a like-minded group of politicians formed the Constitutional Bloc, seeking to replace the French mandate with a Franco-Lebanese treaty. Since that time he had worked consistently to bring French rule in Lebanon to a close. The deputies broke out in loud applause when al-Khoury was named president, and white doves were released in the Chamber. “When the final result was announced,” al-Khoury recalled, “and I went up to the podium to give my speech, I could barely hear my own voice over the shouts and gunfire from outside. Yet I managed to make myself heard and told how we would cooperate with the Arab states and end Lebanon’s isolation.”45
The Lebanese considered themselves fully independent and saw no grounds to expect any resistance from the French. The Free French had pledged to end the mandate, and the Vichy Regime had been forcibly expelled from the Levant by the British. The Lebanese parliament proceeded to assert its independence by revising the constitution to strip France of any privileged role or right to intervene in Lebanese affairs. However, when the Free French authorities learned of the agenda for the Lebanese parliamentary session of November 9, 1943, they demanded a meeting with al-Khoury. They warned the Lebanese president that General de Gaulle would not tolerate any unilateral measures to redefine Franco-Lebanese relations. It was a tense meeting that ended without a resolution of the two sides’ differences.
The Lebanese paid little concern to French warnings. The Free French were a fragmented government in exile whom the Lebanese believed to be in no position to halt their legitimate claim to independence—which Great Britain had guaranteed. The Lebanese deputies met as planned and revised Article 1 of the Constitution, which defined the frontiers of Lebanon as those “the Government of the French Republic officially recognized” to assert their “complete sovereignty” within the country’s current and recognized boundaries, which were spelled out in some detail. They established Arabic as the sole official national language, relegating French to a subordinate status. They empowered the president of Lebanon, rather than the government of France, to conclude all foreign agreements, with the parliament’s consent. All powers and privileges delegated to France by the League of Nations were formally excised from the Constitution. Finally, the deputies voted to change Article 5 of the Constitution, which defined the national flag: horizontal bands of red, white, and red replaced the French Tricolor, with the national symbol, the cedar tree, still emblazoned in its center. Legally and symbolically, Lebanon had asserted its sovereignty. It remained to secure French agreement to this new order.
The French authorities reacted swiftly and decisively to the revision of the Lebanese Constitution. President al-Khoury was awakened in the early morning hours of November 11 by French marines who burst into his house. His first thought was that they were renegades who had come to assassinate him. He shouted to his neighbors to call the police, but no one answered. The door to his room was flung open by a French captain armed with a pistol, holding his son. “I do not mean to do you harm,” the Frenchman said, “but I am carrying orders from the High Commissioner for your arrest.”
“I am president of an independent republic,” al-Khoury replied. “The High Commissioner has no authority to give me orders.”
“I will read the order to you,” the captain responded. He then read a typewritten statement that accused al-Khoury of conspiracy against the mandate. The officer refused to give the order to al-Khoury and allowed him only ten minutes to pack his things. He was surrounded by soldiers “armed to the teeth.” Al-Khoury was disturbed to see that the soldiers were Lebanese. The French took al-Khoury by motorcar to the fortress of the southern town of Rashayya. They were joined en route by several other cars carrying the prime minister, Riyad al-Solh, and leading members of his cabinet. By that afternoon, six members of the Lebanese government had been taken to Rashayya.
Violent demonstrations broke out in Beirut as word of the arrests spread. Al-Khoury’s wife joined the demonstrators to show solidarity with those protesting the injustice done to her husband and the Lebanese government. The Lebanese appealed to the British, in their role as guarantors of the Free French declaration of Lebanon’s independence in July 1941, who intervened to force the French to release President al-Khoury and the other Lebanese politicians. The changes to the Lebanese Constitution were preserved, but France clung to its Levantine mandate through its control over the security forces. The government of Lebanon would continue its struggle against the French to secure command of its army and police forces in a tug-of-war that would last another three years.46
The Syrians were less sanguine than the Lebanese about their prospects for achieving independence after the July 1941 Free French proclamation. The Free French authorities in Damascus had made clear to the Syrian political leadership that they had no intention of conceding independence to Syria or Lebanon until a new set of treaties had been concluded to secure French interests in both countries. The National Bloc needed to mobilize for a major confrontation with the French to force its demands for independence.
The leader of the National Bloc was Shukri al-Quwwatli, a wealthy Damascene from a notable land-owning family. Exiled in 1927 by the French for his nationalist activities, al-Quwwatli returned and assumed the leadership of the National Bloc in September 1942. When parliamentary elections were called in Syria in 1943, al-Quwwatli’s list emerged with a clear majority and elected their leader as president. The National Bloc government pursued conciliatory policies toward France, hoping to persuade the Free French to relinquish increasing authority until Syria might secure its independence. However, as in Lebanon, the Syrians found the French unwilling to make concessions with the country’s security forces—the national army, known as the Syrian Legion, and the internal security force, the Sureté Générale.
Al-Quwwatli’s government in Syria worked closely with the al-Khoury government in Lebanon, seeking international support for their position against France. Large anti-French demonstrations were held in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945. When France announced it would not surrender control over the Syrian national army until the government of Syria had signed a treaty, the governments of Syria and Lebanon refused further negotiations.
French intransigence led to widespread demonstrations and anti-French protests across Syria in May 1945. Damascus emerged as the center of opposition, as the capital and the seat of national politics. Without sufficient armed forces at their disposal to police a situation rapidly deteriorating beyond their control, the French responded with lethal force to decapitate the government and bombard its citizens in to submission.
The first target of the French attack was the Syrian government itself. Khalid al-Azm was a member of the National Bloc who had been elected to parliament in 1943 and was appointed finance minister. On the evening of May 29, 1945, he was in the Government Palace in downtown Damascus discussing the crisis with a group of deputies when they heard the first rounds of artillery at six in the evening.47 Al-Azm and his colleagues were appalled by the French escalation of the crisis and the severity of the artillery bombardment. They tried to call for help but found that all the telephone lines in the government offices were dead. Al-Azm received reports from messengers that the parliament building had already been stormed and occupied by French troops, who had killed all of the Syrian guards there. Shortly after they had taken the parliament, French soldiers took up positions around the Government Palace. They opened fire on the building, shattering its windows.
The French had cut the electrical power supply to Damascus, and night fell over the darkened city. The politicians and their guards in the Government Palace worked together to barricade the entrance to the building with tables and chairs in a vain attempt to deter the French from entering. Before midnight, al-Azm and his colleagues were tipped off that the French planned to occupy their building, and they slipped out through a back window. They made their way through the back streets of the city, eluding the French forces, and took refuge in al-Azm’s spacious house in the center of the Old City of Damascus. His large courtyard was soon filled with over one hundred refugees—government ministers, deputies, and guards. The French discovered their whereabouts when the prime minister, Jamil Mardam, foolishly attempted to use al-Azm’s telephone, which was under French surveillance. Once the French knew their whereabouts, they trained their artillery on al-Azm’s neighborhood and unleashed a merciless barrage. The government ministers and deputies sought refuge in the most secure rooms of the house. The ground shook beneath their feet with the impact of the artillery and aerial bombardment, showering plaster and masonry onto those sheltered inside. They passed the night in fear and uncertainty, to the sounds of the destruction of their city.
The French redoubled their efforts to reduce the Syrian government to submission the following day. President al-Quwwatli had set up office in the hillside suburb of Salihiyya, where most of the government ministers went to join him. Al-Azm chose to remain with his family in Damascus and share the city’s fate. The French attack grew yet more severe. They began to fire incendiary shells into the city’s residential quarters, setting fires that blazed out of control. “Terror spread among the residents who feared the entire neighbourhood would be consumed by the flames,” al-Azm recalled. “The shells continued to fall, and there was no fire brigade willing or able to fight the fires, as the French soldiers would not allow them to perform their duty.” After another day under the artillery barrage, al-Azm decided to abandon his home and take his family to the relative safety of the suburbs with Shukri al-Quwwatli and the rest of the government.
From his safe house in Salihiyya, President al-Quwwatli appealed to British officials to intervene. Invoking the 1941 guarantee of Syrian independence, he formally requested the British to intercede with the French to stop the bombardment of Damascus. The Syrian president’s appeal gave Britain legitimate grounds to interfere in French imperial affairs, and they prevailed upon their wartime ally to lift their attack. By the time French guns fell silent, more than four hundred Syrians had been killed, hundreds of private homes had been destroyed, and the building that housed the Syrian parliament had been reduced to rubble by the ferocity of the attack. France’s desperate bid to preserve its empire in the Levant had failed, and nothing could persuade the embittered Syrians to compromise on their long-standing demand for total independence.
The French finally admitted defeat in July 1945 and agreed to transfer control of the military and security forces to the independent governments of Syria and Lebanon. There was no question of France imposing a treaty on either state. The international community recognized the independence of Syria and Lebanon when the two Arab states were admitted as founding members of the United Nations, on an equal footing with France, on October 24, 1945. All that remained was for France to withdraw its own troops from the Levant. The French military withdrew from Syria in the spring of 1946 and that August boarded ships in Beirut to return home.
As a young woman, Damascene journalist Siham Tergeman remembered the celebrations in Damascus on “the Night of Evacuation,” when the last French soldier withdrew from the capital in April 1946. She described a jubilant city celebrating its first night of true independence as a “wedding of freedom” in which “the happy charming bride” was Damascus herself. “The guests came in carts and in cars big and small, and torches lighted up all the roofs of the city, the hotels and sidewalks, electrical poles, the gardens of Marje and the poles of the Hejaz Railway line, the iron railings of the River Barada, and all the thoroughfares and crossroads.” Tergeman and her family celebrated through the night as singers and musicians entertained the crowds that gathered around the central Marje Square. “And the wedding of independence in Syria,” she recalled, “continued on until daybreak.”48
Syrian joy was matched by French bitterness at the end of the mandate. Though France still held its Arab possessions in North Africa, it regretted the loss of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. After twenty-six years in Beirut and Damascus, the French had nothing to show for their efforts. Worse yet, France suspected its wartime ally and imperial rival, Great Britain, of coming to Syria and Lebanon’s assistance only to draw the Levantine states into its own sphere of influence. Even so, the British Empire in the Middle East was under pressure and on the retreat in 1946. Indeed, France’s troubles in Syria and Lebanon seem benign in comparison to the crisis Britain faced in Palestine in 1946.
1. Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud, better known in the West as Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is pictured here (center with glasses) towering over his advisers in Jidda in 1928. Following his conquest of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Hijaz in 1925, Ibn Saud took the title “Sultan of Najd and King of the Hijaz.” In 1932, Ibn Saud renamed his kingdom Saudi Arabia, making it the only modern state named after its ruling family.
2. Fawzi al-Qawuqji (center) among commanders of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Qawuqji took part in the most famous Arab revolts against European rule, including the Battle of Maysalun in Syria (1920), the Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), the Arab Revolt in Palestine, and the Rashid Ali Coup in Iraq (1941). He took refuge from the British in Nazi Germany during WWII before returning to lead the Arab Liberation Army in Palestine in 1947–1948.
3. Exemplary punishment: The British Army destroy the homes of Palestinian villagers suspected of supporting the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. Such collective punishments, conducted without due process, were given legal standing by a series of Emergency Regulations passed by British authorities to combat the Arab insurgency. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed between 1936 and 1940.
4. The opening of the Syrian Parliament, August 17, 1943. Following the Free French declaration of Syrian and Lebanese independence in July 1941, the Syrians went to the polls to elect their first independent government. The National Bloc list took a clear majority and, in the first parliamentary session (pictured right), their leader Shukri al-Quwwatli was elected president of the republic.
5. The Syrian Parliament in disarray, May 29, 1945. Despite French assurances, De Gaulle’s government had no intention of conceding full independence to Syria and refused to transfer control of the country’s armed forces to President al-Quwwatli’s government. When the Syrians rose in nationalist demonstrations in May 1945, the French stormed the Parliament, fired upon government offices, and bombarded residential quarters in Damascus in a vain attempt to impose their authority on the unwilling Syrians. The last French soldier withdrew from Syria in April 1946.
6. This posed propaganda photo portrays a mixed group of regular and irregular soldiers defending the walls of Jerusalem from Jewish attack, under the command of a Muslim cleric distinguished by his turban.
7. In reality, Palestinian fighters were ill-prepared to defend their country in 1948. Poorly armed and trained, none had combat experience to match that of the Jewish forces they faced in 1948. Worse yet, they underestimated their adversary, and suffered total defeat to Jewish forces by the time the British withdrew from Palestine on May 14.
8. The Egyptian Free Officers shortly after taking power in Egypt in July 1952. At 51, General Muhammad Naguib (seated behind the desk) was the elder statesman of the young Free Officers, whose average age was 34. Lieutenant-Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser (seated to Naguib’s right) had Naguib placed under house arrest and assumed the presidency in 1954. Nasser’s right-hand man, Major Abd al-Hakim Amer is standing to Naguib’s right. Republican Egypt’s third president, Lieutenant-Colonel Anwar al-Sadat, is seated fourth from the left.
9. The leadership of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) is shown here before boarding the Moroccan airliner that would fly them to captivity. Originally destined for Tunis, French warplanes intercepted the DC-3 and forced it to land in the Algerian city of Oran on October 22, 1956, where (from left to right) Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider, and Hocine Ait-Ahmad were arrested and held for the remainder of the Algerian War. Prince Moulay Hassan (later King Hassan II, pictured here in uniform), son of Sultan Mohammad V of Morocco, saw off the Algerian revolutionaries.
10. Christian women, supporters of former president Camille Chamoun, taunted soldiers of the Lebanese Army with broomsticks in popular demonstrations against the government of Prime Minister Rashid Karami and the new president, General Fuad Shihab, in July 1958. Many women were reported wounded in the fighting.
11. Lebanon became the only country to invoke the Eisenhower Doctrine when President Chamoun requested American support against “Communist subversion” in the aftermath of the Iraqi Revolution in July 1958. Within three days, some 6,000 U.S. Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon, where they came under the scrutiny of the residents of Beirut. The force grew to a total strength of 15,000 men, backed by the Sixth Fleet and naval aircraft, before withdrawing on October 25 without having fired a shot in anger. [original caption: Interested Lebanese watch as U.S. marines relax . . . ]
12. Colonel Abd al-Salam Arif was one of the leaders of the Iraqi Revolution that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in July 1958. He seized the national radio station on July 14 to declare the Republic and the death of King Faysal II to the shocked Iraqi nation. The Iraqi people gave their full support to the revolution. Here Arif addressed masses of supporters in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf on the objectives and reforms of the new government. Arif subsequently overthrew President Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1963 to become the second president of the Iraqi republic.
13. The Israeli Air Force initiated the June 1967 War with a series of devastating attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air bases on the morning of June 5. In less than three hours, the Israelis had destroyed 85 percent of Egypt’s fighter aircraft and rendered their air bases unusable. Once they had achieved air superiority, Israeli ground forces swept over the Sinai, the West Bank, and Golan, inflicting total defeat on the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Here, Israeli soldiers examine destroyed Egyptian aircraft in a Sinai air base.
14. The Israeli conquest of the West Bank in June 1967 drove over 300,000 Palestinians to seek refuge in the East Bank of Jordan. The journey was made all the more perilous by the destruction of road and bridges between the two banks of the Jordan River. Many of the new refugees fled with only those possessions they could carry.
15. Leila Khaled was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who successfully hijacked a TWA airliner in 1969 from Rome to Damascus, where all passengers and staff were released unharmed. Her second operation, against an Israeli airliner, was foiled by El-Al security officers who killed her partner and overwhelmed Khaled before making an emergency landing in London, where Khaled was taken into custody by British police. She was released by the British on October 1, 1970, as part of a prisoner exchange.
16. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took control of a deserted airstrip named Dawson’s Field in the desert east of the Jordanian capital Amman and declared it “Revolution Airport.” Between September 6 and 9, 1970, the PFLP hijacked an American TWA airliner, a British BOAC jet, and a Swissair flight to “Revolution Airport.” All 310 passengers were evacuated from the planes which were destroyed on September 12. The operation succeeded in bringing the Palestinian cause to international attention but provoked King Hussein to drive the Palestinian movement out of Jordan in the violent Black September War of 1970–1971.
