A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East

by James Barr

While serving as France’s consul in the booming port of Beirut immediately before the First World War he had received letters from educated and ambitious young Arab army officers, lawyers and journalists who wanted France to help them achieve their goal of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs had even held a congress to discuss this aim in Paris in 1913, but the French government was unwilling to help them because of its financial stake in the Ottomans’ endurance, and Georges-Picot could only file the hopeful approaches carefully away. In June 1914, Georges-Picot was sent an Arab leaflet demanding complete independence for Syria that convinced him that his government’s policy had to change. Believing that the flyer had ‘more chance than in the past of waking an echo in the souls of its readers’, he warned his masters that, if they did not help the Arabs, others – by whom he meant the British – would.5 His government, however, did nothing. In desperation, when it looked likely that France and the Ottomans were about to go to war that autumn, he secretly arranged for the Greek government to supply Christians in the Lebanon with fifteen thousand rifles and two million rounds of ammunition. When war broke out, he was obliged to leave. Georges-Picot wrongly expected that France would rapidly invade to assist the Lebanese uprising that he hoped the arms and ammunition would start. On this assumption, rather than burn the letters he had been sent by Arab correspondents, ...