French Mandate Syria/Lebanon

The French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon was created in 1920 and lasted formally until 1946. It came out of Sykes-Picot, the wartime agreement in which Britain and France divided the Ottoman Arab provinces between them. The Arabs had been promised independence for revolting against the Ottomans, and Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria in Damascus in March 1920. France destroyed that kingdom at Maysalun in July, four months later, and Faisal was given Iraq by the British instead. France then governed by division. The territory was carved into separate states - Damascus, Aleppo, an Alawite state, a Druze state - and Lebanon was enlarged to include Muslim districts around a Maronite Christian core, creating the confessional balance whose collapse became the Lebanese civil war. Minorities were recruited heavily into the local troops, which is one root of later Alawite prominence in the Syrian army. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-27 spread from the Druze mountain across the country; France suppressed it by shelling Damascus from the air and from the citadel, twice. A treaty promising independence was negotiated in 1936 and never ratified by Paris. Vichy held the territory in 1941 until British and Free French forces invaded. Independence was proclaimed under wartime pressure, and France still shelled Damascus again in May 1945 before Churchill intervened. The last French troops left in April 1946. The borders drawn in the 1920s are the borders of Syria and Lebanon today. Lebanon's confessional system allocated the presidency, premiership and speakership to particular communities on the basis of a 1932 census that has never been repeated. Syria has had no census of religion since. The mandate also detached Alexandretta and gave it to Turkey in 1939, which Syria has never recognised.

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