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had strongly reacted to the appointment of an Ottoman governor in Mount Lebanon, considering that it “crowned the malevolence and duplicity of the Porte” in its policy toward the Maronites since the reestablishment of its rule in Syria.²⁴ He had instructed his ambassador in Istanbul to support the restoration of the Shihabs, whom he saw as having an acquired “right” to govern the Mountain.²⁵ Therefore the French ambassador and the special envoy of the Patriarch, Abbot Nicolas Murad, urgently dispatched to the Ottoman capital to request the return of the old Emir, worked closely together, although the impetuous demeanor of this “sly levantine”²⁶ often annoyed and irritated the French diplomat. However, they were defending the same cause, and the French ambassador could only welcome the mission of Murad, which served to reinforce his own stand by substantiating it with the claims of the Maronites themselves, as expressed by Murad, in the intricate negotiations then taking place in the Ottoman capital.

      Indeed, intense and contentious negotiations had opened in Istanbul between the Western powers and the Porte over the future administration of Mount Lebanon.²⁷ They were prompted by the demise of the Shihabi family and the appointment of an Ottoman governor to rule directly the Mountain, which provoked at first a common European initiative for the revocation of this last Ottoman measure and the restoration of the Shihabs.²⁸ Discussions focused on the opportunity to preserve the previous de facto semi-autonomy of the Mountain, on the basis of its former vaguely and variously perceived self-administrative traditions, and on the basis of the pledges made by British and Ottoman officials to its inhabitants in 1840 to preserve “their ancient rights and privileges” with the restoration of Ottoman rule.²⁹

      These pledges came to the fore of discussions between the European powers and the Porte. Based on these promises, and on the repeated assertions of the special British envoy, Richard Wood, that he had been formally entrusted by Reshid Pasha, the then-minister for foreign affairs, to advance such pledges to the Lebanese, the European ambassadors tried to hold the Ottomans true to their word.³⁰ The Ottoman government vehemently denied having made any such promises to the Maronites, asserting that it had only offered some guarantees to Emir Bashir II personally, had he accepted to join its camp, and that this offer had been annulled by Emir Bashir's refusal to cooperate. ‘Izzet Pasha, who then commanded the Ottoman forces, and who became Grand Vizier in 1842, asserted for his part that these “promises were only general promises of good-will and protection, which he was ready to renew, or special and conditional promises to the old Emir Bashir.”³¹

      The issue was complicated by the fact that there was no clear or agreed consensus among the Western powers themselves as to what these “ancient rights and privileges” represented. Some pretended that they included the “ancient right” of the local inhabitants to be ruled by a Christian prince, while others maintained that they only represented an unspecified local autonomy. As for the Ottomans, they always denied the existence of such ancient privileges.³²

      In the confused talks that ensued, the Western unanimity that had emerged at first for the reestablishment of the Shihabi family soon broke out. While the French stood firm on this position, the British began to falter in view of the staunch opposition of their Druze proteges and the Ottoman officials to any restoration of the Shihabs. What the Ottomans had in mind was a greater integration of Mount Lebanon in the new administrative system being introduced in Syria, and they were in no mood to examine requests for a confirmation of its former semi-autonomous status, for the reestablishment of the Shihabs or Bashir II. From the Ottoman perspective, Bashir II was an official—an appointed multazim—who had exceeded his prerogatives; he exemplified an old and bygone order that the new policy they embarked upon after 1840 quickly rendered obsolete.³³ Moreover, the Ottomans saw in Bashir II a traitor who had defected to the Egyptian side, and they considered his “degenerate Shihabi descendants” to be “incompetent” and unfit to govern henceforth Mount Lebanon.³⁴ Reshid Pasha, expressing the state of mind in the Ottoman capital bluntly stated: “The erection of an independent principality in Lebanon is out of the question, given the fact that there was no point to have taken this country from Muhammad Ali in order to remove it again from the domination of the Porte.”³⁵

      In the face of the definite opposition of the Ottomans to the restoration of the Shihabs, the Austrian Chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, who had at first endorsed the common European claim in favor of the restoration of the Shihabs,³⁶ submitted, after several months of intense haggling, a way out to the diplomatic dead end reached in Istanbul. He suggested dividing the Mountain into two separate districts, a Christian one and a Druze one, each administered by an official of its own community, under the general supervision of the Ottoman wali of Sayda.

      This compromise, adopted in 1842 and refined later in 1845, had the advantage of satisfying the many contradictory demands of the European powers, which pressed the necessity of granting the Mountain some degree of autonomy in accordance with its former ill-defined privileges, and of the Porte, who was firmly opposed to such a principle. The latter had finally had to give some ground. By an official proclamation of the Ottoman minister of foreign affairs, Sarim Pasha, to the European ambassadors, the Porte agreed to Metternich's plan, conceding some self-administrative prerogatives to the local populations.³⁷ The Ottomans nevertheless managed to save face and could congratulate themselves on having succeeded in thwarting Western attempts to consolidate the previous autonomy of the Mountain, since formally the new administration remained under the authority of the wali of Sayda. The British were also satisfied to have secured for their Druze protégés a self-administrative district while at the same time redeeming the pledges made in 1840 by their agents to the Maronites, since the latter too had obtained a self-administrative district of their own.³⁸ The French, isolated in their lone insistence on the restoration of Shihabi rule, finally had to yield, gratifying themselves with the fact that they had partly succeeded in upholding the principle of Maronite self-rule in a large part of the Mountain but expressing reservations as the to the future success of the experiment.

      An interesting development occurred during the 1842 negotiations, when a tentative attempt to consult the local population on its wishes for its future government was applied for the first time in Mount Lebanon. It was initiated due to the need of the Ottoman government and the European powers to support their positions in the ongoing negotiations in Istanbul by establishing them on allegedly popular wishes. As a result, a real “battle of petitions” unfolded in the Lebanese Mountain.

      The custom of subjects sending petitions to the central government relating to certain specific grievances was not unusual in the Ottoman Empire, where the Porte represented the highest recourse in judicial matters and political affairs. It was this traditional device that was applied to sound out the opinion of the population, unaccustomed to being consulted on political matters and unfamiliar with voting processes. However, in a social structure in which individual opinion was conditioned and determined by the familial environment, the principle of polling public opinion, which rests on the sum of independent, individual wills, was basically flawed. As a matter of fact, most of these petitions were signed only by the shaykhs or the heads of certain family lineages, who thus engaged their whole clientele or descendance. If we add to this the fact that in 1840 the overwhelming majority of the population did not know how to read and write—an ability mostly monopolized by the higher clergy, monks, and a small number of their students who acted as secretaries to political dignitaries—the dubious representative value of the signatures assembled in these petitions becomes clearer.³⁹ Nevertheless, these considerations did not impede the interested parties engaged in this battle who seemed more concerned to use these petitions as propaganda tools than to bother about the authenticity of their reflection of any popular will.

      The “battle of petitions” was initiated by the Turks who, confounded by the firm European reaction to the appointment of an Ottoman governor for the Mountain, tried to justify their move.⁴⁰ Soon after his appointment, the new Ottoman governor of Mount Lebanon, ‘Umar Pasha, began to circulate ready-made petitions expressing the satisfaction of the local population with the establishment of direct Ottoman rule and its opposition to any idea of restoring Bashir II or the Shihab family. In his endeavor, he could count on the support of most of the Druze shaykhs, some of whom had already made such claims even before ‘Umar Pasha's appointment, and

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