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

by James Barr

In 1915 Etienne Flandin, the lawyer who had argued for French rule of Syria, had wisely warned his countrymen not to treat the Syrians as primitive, and predicted that they would need to ‘demonstrate regularity in administration, incorruptibility and impartiality in justice and probity in financial matters’ to win their support.7 However, six years on, in practice French rule in Syria and Lebanon appeared increasingly arbitrary, confessional, exploitative and corrupt. After Gouraud had seized Damascus in 1920, his secretary de Caix bluntly set out the options open to the general. France could either ‘build a Syrian nation which does not yet exist . . . by smoothing out the deep rifts which still divide it’, he suggested, or ‘cultivate and maintain all the phenomena, requiring our arbitration, that these divisions give [us]. I must say that only the second option interests me.’8 Gouraud agreed. In August 1920 he hived off Lebanon in a bid to curry favour with the significant Christian population there, and carved up Syria into four separate provinces that divided Damascus and Aleppo and recognised the minority Alawite and Druze sects.