LITMIR.BIZ

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not want the only Christian people that for eight centuries has remained independent and free in the midst of the Ottoman Empire, in the very cradle of Christianity, in the places where one cannot take a step without treading on French bones—no, you will not want that people to vanish. Sooner or later, you will force the powers that be to protect them.”¹⁴

      Another eloquent exponent of the Maronite cause was the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, who as early as 1835 advocated the emancipation of the diverse nations of the Ottoman Empire from a decaying Ottoman Empire “in the name of humanity and civilization.” For him, the dislocation of Ottoman Empire was inevitable, and sooner or later the diverse populations and nations it was oppressing would replace it. Europe, and more specifically France, had a central role to play in the emancipation of these oppressed nations and their guidance on the path of civilization. In this mission civilisatrice aiming at regenerating the East, Europe could rely on the various Christian populations, and France could rely especially on the Maronites, “one of the finest, purest, and most bellicose people on whom France can, someday, depend to bring part of the Orient under its legitimate influence.” Lamartine repeatedly urged the French government to adopt a more assertive policy to support the “unfortunate” Maronites, who were subjected, since the demise of Emir Bashir II in 1840, to a campaign of “annihilation, oppression and devastation.”¹⁵

      The repeated interpellations of the French opposition did not, however, perturb Guizot, who tried as best as he could to dampen their enthusiasm and who reminded his critics of the confines of the French protectorate of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire and the limits of French influence and authority on the Lebanese question: “We should not believe that our Capitulations have granted us in the Ottoman Empire sovereignty rights; we should not believe that they have granted us the right to decide on the administration of these provinces. Nothing of the kind had ever been written, or claimed or practiced. The Porte has remained and remains today sovereign over the populations, even the Catholics among them, that we protect; The Porte has never ceased one instant to exercise over them the rights of sovereignty.” The help and assistance that traditions entitled France to lend to the Maronites, added the French minister of foreign affairs, “stemmed not by virtue of a special and direct right of protectorate but by way of influence and in a way of recommendation.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, the French minister decided to dispatch, in response to his critics, a commission of inquiry, presided by the Comte de Lallemand, attaché at the French embassy in Istanbul, and Eugène Borée, an eminent Orientalist close to the French Catholic circles who maintained tight relations with the Lazarists he eventually joined, to investigate the situation in Lebanon. The commission toured the Mountain and presented a report that vindicated the conciliatory Lebanese policy of Guizot and tempered for a while the ardor of the French opposition on the Lebanese issue.¹⁷

      The subtleties of the French official position with regard to Lebanon were not clearly discerned by the Patriarch and the Maronite clergy. In their opinion, as the Patriarch put it, their cause was just, and it was only natural that Catholic France should uphold and back their aspirations. The sudden celerity of the French officials to defend their cause and support them materially and politically as of 1841 only reinforced their conviction. This misguided appreciation of the French stance by Maronites clerical circles enhanced their expectations and confirmed their determination to obtain the confirmation of the rule of a Maronite governor.

      The Patriarch and clergy's misreading of the French official position was also influenced by the stance of French Catholic, legitimist, and liberal opposition, whose views were beginning to filter through to the Maronite clergy by way of missionaries, travelers, and French residents. Their views, directly and indirectly, fanned the aspirations of the Maronite Church. A sort of mirror game was established between some clerical Maronite circles and these French groups whereby an idea was put forward by one of the two sides, adopted and reproduced by the other, and thus gained credibility and authority through this process of mutual confirmation. The image of “persecuted Christians groaning under the weight of Ottoman tyranny” circulating among French Catholic opposition circles in France was adopted by some Maronite clerics who readily reproduced it. In their turn, the Maronites nourished this view with their own imaginations and added their own particular visions to it. The image of Maronites oppressed by their Muslim overlords, as well as the “dream” of some French opposition circles to uphold a Christian principality in the Levant approximately matched, and sometimes even exceeded, the Maronite clergy's views and ambitions. At any rate, they could easily be adapted to the pretensions of the Church for the Maronites and rearranged to fit its own project.¹⁸ Nicolas Murad stands out as a representative figure and a typical product of this ongoing process. He was the first Maronite to publish a pamphlet in French responding to and reproducing these inferences while adding other original features to the French “dream,” which henceforth became a sort of “Franco-Lebanese dream.”¹⁹

      The mirror game between some French parties and Maronite clerical circles gave birth to a vague political project aimed at establishing a Christian entity in the Levant under French aegis, as well as a whole concordant legitimizing history. The fantasies entertained by part of the French opposition and the Maronite clergy produced a prolific literature, celebrating the glorious deeds of the Maronites throughout history, praising their historic steadfastness in the middle of an hostile Muslim environment, remembering their close collaboration with the Franks during the Crusades and their ancestral devotion to France, and magnifying and romanticizing the extinguished “Emirate of the Maronites,” which had allegedly allowed them to preserve their distinct identity throughout the centuries. In sum, some in France began to portray the Maronites as a full-fledged nation that had throughout the centuries managed to survive in virtual independence under the protection of their own Emirs and according to their religion and traditions, and who had been treacherously overpowered by a Muslim Ottoman-Druze conspiracy.²⁰ They were thus presented as an already established and deserving “nation” that had earned its right to a guaranteed peaceful and independent existence and that furthermore was devoted to France. “The truth is that European readers have been served a Lebanon of fantasy, a monarchy and dynasty of fantasy . . . entitled [my italics] to proclaim forthrightly the legacy of a Christian governor . . .,” exclaimed Bourrée, who denounced the erroneous, and at times fanciful, views regarding the Maronites and Mount Lebanon entertained in France. He therefore insisted on the necessity of putting “history in the place of, I would not say poetry, but of lies.”²¹

      More concretely, the French consul was deeply concerned about the political implications of such idealized representations for the Maronites themselves: “If the only outcome of all this was greater sympathy for unfortunate populations who deserve every compassion, it might be better to foster the error than to eradicate it, but the error would bring a great danger, of which they would be the first victims, for those populations would be credited with a strength that they do not have and would be thought easily capable today of a task that would overwhelm them; that is, the child would be taken for a man, and there would be speculation about his current staying power, while, left to his own devices, he would perish under the load.”²²

      In the same vein, the Lallemand-Boré Commission of Inquiry sent to Lebanon in 1847 deplored the fact that “the most amazing pretensions have been raised in the name of the Christians of Lebanon, and statistics and history have been used for political purposes.” The good faith of “sincere [French] Catholics. . . . [has] been surprised by misleading stories and ridiculous information,” it added, expressing the hope that this “visible erudition . . . would not cause fatal harm when the error would be exposed.”²³

      The bewilderment of the Maronite Church in the midst of all these intricacies is understandable: the views and support of unofficial French circles became confused with the already equivocal position of the French government itself. Misplaced expectations and many misunderstandings ensued regarding the real intent and substance of the latter, which was never totally clarified and which led to frequent disappointments.

      THE CONFIRMATION OF LEBANESE AUTONOMY

      In the first months of 1842, however, the Patriarch, still oblivious to the subtleties of the French stance, could only congratulate himself on earnest pledges of French support. His satisfaction was further enhanced by French

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