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

by James Barr

In France a small but thick-skinned group of imperialists, the Comité de l’Asie Française, began to put pressure on Delcassé to lay claim to Syria and Palestine. Many of the Comité’s supporters were diplomats working at the French foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, who were concerned that the French government had not announced any formal ‘war aims’. ‘We may be certain that the others will not take the trouble to mark out our place for us,’ the Comité argued in March 1915. ‘Anyone who appears insufficiently determined to sit down risks seeing his chair removed.’30 This was a familiar argument from the Comité, which had traditionally relied heavily on the French public’s Anglophobia to rouse support for its own agenda. Imperial expansion, it had always argued, denied the rapacious British gains at French expense. The wartime alliance with Britain now made such a line awkward, and so the Comité’s secretary-general, an aristocratic diplomat named Robert de Caix, reached for the history books to make his case. He argued that France had a ‘hereditary’ right to Syria and Palestine because it was ‘the land of the Crusades . . . where Western activity has been so French-dominated since the beginning of the Middle Ages that all the Europeans who live there are still called “Franks”’.31 Disregarding the minor detail that the word ‘Frank’ was now used pejoratively to mean ‘foreigner’ by the Arabs, who had expelled the last of the crusaders six centuries before, de Caix brushed off...