Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon was born on the 29th of September 1923, when France was formally assigned control over a vast stretch of the eastern Mediterranean world. It covered the territories of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and more, and it lasted until 1946. On the surface, the mandate system was not supposed to be colonialism. The League of Nations framed it as trusteeship: France would govern these territories only until the inhabitants were considered ready for self-government, and then a sovereign state would emerge.

  But the people living under that arrangement experienced something quite different. Within months of the mandate taking shape, France had carved the region into six separate states, deliberately drawn along sectarian lines. Revolts erupted almost immediately. Entire communities demanded reunification. Some minorities pleaded for protection from a future they feared. And through it all, France held the levers of power tightly, granting local leaders so little authority that their decisions could be overruled at any moment.

  How did a post-war settlement intended to shepherd nations toward independence instead produce decades of division, resistance, and competing national identities? The answers lie in the promises that were broken before the mandate even began, the battles fought to impose it, and the very particular way France chose to rule.

• 2. Broken Promises

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  General Sir Edmund Allenby entered Damascus in 1918 accompanied by troops of the Arab Revolt under Faisal, the son of Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz. Faisal established the first new postwar Arab government in Damascus in October of that year, naming Ali Rikabi as military governor. The pan-Arab flag was raised across Syrian cities. Arab leaders believed, based on earlier British promises, that a unified Arab state would stretch from Aleppo in the north all the way to Aden in the south.

  Those hopes collided with a secret agreement signed years earlier. The Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France had already divided the region. General Allenby assigned the Arab administration only the interior zones of Syria. Palestine went to the British. French troops landed in Beirut on the 8th of October and occupied the Lebanese coastal region down to Naqoura, dissolving the local Arab governments they found there.

  Faisal traveled to Europe repeatedly after November 1918, trying to persuade Britain and France to change course. He found no success. At the Paris Peace Conference, the European powers stepped back from the promises made to the Arabs. France demonstrated how serious it was about Syria by appointing General Henri Gouraud as high commissioner. On the 25th of April 1920, the inter-Allied council formally granted France the mandate over Syria and Lebanon. Syrians responded with violent demonstrations, and a new government under Hashim al-Atassi was formed on the 7th of May 1920, pledging to raise an army.

  In May 1919, elections for the Syrian National Congress had placed 80 percent of seats with conservative representatives. But the minority included figures who would shape Syrian nationalist politics for decades: Jamil Mardam Bey, Shukri al-Kuwatli, Ahmad al-Qadri, Ibrahim Hanano, and Riyad as-Solh. The American King-Crane Commission, arriving in June 1919, visited 36 major cities and met with more than 2,000 delegations from more than 300 villages. Their findings confirmed that Syrians opposed the mandate and the Balfour Declaration. Both Britain and France ignored the commission's conclusions entirely.

• 3. The Battle of Maysaloun

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  On the 14th of July 1920, General Gouraud issued an ultimatum to Faisal: submit or abdicate. Faisal, recognizing the balance of power, chose to cooperate. His young minister of war, Yusuf al-Azma, refused.

  Al-Azmeh assembled what remained of the Arab army alongside Bedouin horsemen and civilian volunteers. They met 12,000 French troops under General Mariano Goybet at the Battle of Maysaloun. The French won the engagement in less than a day. Al-Azmeh died on the battlefield, along with many of the Syrian fighters. The remaining troops possibly defected.

  General Goybet captured Damascus with little resistance on the 24th of July 1920. The mandate itself was formally written in London exactly two years later, on the 24th of July 1922. France then spent the following three years, from 1920 to 1923, suppressing insurgencies across the Alawite territories, Mount Druze, and Aleppo before it could claim full control of the region.

  The Lebanese situation unfolded differently. Lebanese nationalists had used the political crisis against Faisal to convene a council of Christian figures in Baabda, which proclaimed Lebanese independence on the 22nd of March 1920. When French troops arrived in Lebanon, many Maronite Christians received them as protectors, seeing French rule as a path toward the autonomy they had long sought.

• 4. Six States, One Strategy

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  France divided the mandate region into six states: Damascus, Aleppo, Alawites, Jabal Druze, the autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta, and the State of Greater Lebanon. All were proclaimed in 1920 or 1921. The divisions tracked sectarian demographics in part, but they served a deliberate colonial aim: by encouraging localized identities, France sought to weaken the nationalist movement and prevent a unified Syrian identity from taking hold.

  Greater Lebanon was the clearest expression of France's political calculations. On the 1st of September 1920, General Gouraud publicly proclaimed its creation at a ceremony in Beirut. The state was created as a safe haven for the Maronite population of Mount Lebanon, which had enjoyed varying degrees of Ottoman-era autonomy. To build a viable state, France added mainly Muslim regions, including areas that correspond today to North Lebanon, South Lebanon, the Biqa Valley, and Beirut itself. The new state received a flag merging the French tricolour with the cedar of Lebanon. Most Muslims in Greater Lebanon rejected it from the start. The State of Greater Lebanon lasted until the 23rd of May 1926, when it became the Lebanese Republic.

  The State of Alawites, located on the Syrian coast with Latakia as its capital, followed a shifting path through the mandate years. Its population stood at 278,000. It joined the Syrian Federation in 1922, left again in 1924, was renamed the Independent Government of Latakia in 1930, and finally joined the Syrian Republic on the 5th of December 1936. It had witnessed the rebellion of Salih al-Ali as early as 1918-1920.

  The states of Aleppo and Damascus were unified in 1925 into a single State of Syria, after France recognized the impracticality of keeping them separate. The State of Aleppo had encompassed northern Syria and the entire fertile Euphrates basin, holding much of the country's agricultural and mineral wealth. Its governors included Kamil Pasha al-Qudsi, Mustafa Bey Barmada, and Mar'i Pasha Al Mallah. The Jabal Druze state, created for the Druze population of southern Syria, had a population of some 50,000 and its capital in As-Suwayda. In 1936, both Jebel Druze and the Alawite State were incorporated into the State of Syria.

• 5. Minorities and Autonomy

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  The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations monitored French governance and allowed other states to voice concerns, particularly in economic matters. But on the ground, local authorities were given almost no independent power. French officials could overrule any decision made by local leaders. France's explicit goal was to prevent the development of self-sufficient governing bodies.

  Some communities used this fractured landscape to press for their own arrangements. In 1936-1937, Assyrians, Kurds, and some Bedouins in the province of Al-Jazira agitated for autonomy, fearing that a nationalist Damascus government would replace minority officials with Muslim Arabs from the capital. France had actively encouraged Kurdish immigration into Syria and supported Kurdish political demands through the Terrier Plan, which aimed to build Kurdish cultural and political influence in northeastern Syria. Despite that earlier support, French authorities refused to grant Al-Jazira any new autonomous status.

  In the Golan region around Quneitra, a sizeable Circassian community made a parallel request in 1938. Several Circassian leaders sought special autonomy and wanted the region designated as a national homeland for Circassian refugees from the Caucasus. A Circassian battalion had served in the French Army of the Levant and had fought against Arab nationalist uprisings. Even so, France refused their request as well.

  The Sanjak of Alexandretta followed a different and more consequential path. Under Article 7 of the French-Turkish treaty of the 20th of October 1921, it received a special administrative regime protecting the Turkish language and cultural development of its Turkish inhabitants. By 1938, the Turkish military had entered the province and expelled most of its Alawite Arab and Armenian inhabitants, who had previously formed the majority. A French-Turkish treaty settling the sanjak's status was signed on the 4th of July 1938. The assembly proclaimed it the Hatay State on the 2nd of September 1938. After a popular referendum in 1939, it became a Turkish province.

• 6. Economy and Trade

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  As early as 1921, French planners were assessing which parts of the mandate could turn a profit. A feasibility study by the Union Economique de Syrie identified northeastern Syria and the Alawite State as promising zones for cotton cultivation. Investment began in 1924, but production did not surpass its 1925 levels until the 1930s.

  The economic logic of the region resisted political fragmentation. Because trade had been deeply integrated during the Ottoman era, separating the French and British mandates into distinct commercial zones would have damaged both. Britain and France therefore agreed in 1921 to establish a customs-free zone covering goods produced in their respective territories. French manufacturers protested the arrangement. The populations of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon strongly favored it and successfully pushed back against a proposed abolition in 1927.

  By 1933, Palestine had become the largest importer of Syrian goods. France itself held a 7.5 percent share of imports to the mandate territories by that year. Between the two World Wars, France grew into the largest overall trader of goods within the French Mandate. From 1933 onward, Japan joined as a significant source of imports. The last High Commissioner to serve, Paul Beynet, remained in post until the 1st of September 1946, the date the mandate formally ended and French troops finally withdrew from Syria and Lebanon.