The League of Nations mandate over Syria and Lebanon administered by France from 1920 to 1946. The Mandate created the modern borders of Syria and Lebanon, pursued a policy of divide and rule along religious and ethnic lines, and produced the political and institutional structures that shaped Syrian and Lebanese politics for the rest of the century.
France had claimed a sphere of influence in Greater Syria — covering modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine — since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. When Faisal I attempted to establish an independent Arab kingdom with Damascus as its capital, French forces defeated him at the Battle of Maysalun in July 1920 and established the Mandate. The French administration divided the territory into five separate entities — State of Damascus, State of Aleppo, Alawite State, Jabal Druze, and Greater Lebanon — pursuing the classic colonial strategy of empowering minorities against the Sunni Arab majority that dominated the nationalist movement. The most consequential decision was the recruitment policy for the troupes spéciales: France disproportionately recruited Alawites, Druze, and Circassians into its auxiliary forces, creating a military tradition and institutional pathway that would allow Alawite officers to dominate Syria’s Ba’athist military after independence. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–27 demonstrated the capacity for mass anti-colonial mobilisation; the French response — bombarding Damascus and dividing the nationalist movement through negotiation with compliant sectors — foreshadowed the tactics that successive Syrian governments would use against their own populations. Lebanon was permanently separated from Syria, enlarged to include Muslim-majority coastal regions and the Bekaa Valley that Syrian nationalists regarded as historically theirs — creating the Lebanese demographic balance that would generate civil war in 1975.
The French Mandate’s legacy is visible in virtually every Lebanese and Syrian political crisis of the subsequent century. The Lebanese sectarian system — its power-sharing arrangements, its politically organised communities, its structural inability to build a nonsectarian state — was not simply the product of ancient religious divisions but of administrative choices made by French officials trying to manage a diverse population in the interests of imperial order. The Alawite domination of Syrian security services that produced both Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship and the particular ferocity of the civil war was not inevitable; it was the downstream consequence of French recruitment policies designed to prevent a unified Sunni nationalist challenge to colonial rule. Colonialism does not end when the troops leave; it ends, if it ends, when its institutional consequences have been unwound — a process that, in Syria and Lebanon, remains unfinished.
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