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of shock and dismay. These prevailing feelings, as well as the ensuing stern repressive measures adopted by the Ottoman authorities, facilitated the reassertion of Ottoman control and reform in the Syrian provinces, which were henceforth accepted in a more conciliatory spirit by their inhabitants.

      At the same time, the events of 1860 represent a momentous episode in the collective memory of the people of the region. They symbolize a rupture in the history of Syria, a moment when the normal order of things broke down, when underlying animosities and fervor were violently exposed and tested. In this sense, they remained thereafter a continual point of reference for local inhabitants, representing their most intimate fears and anxieties and a somber emblem of potential upheavals.

      

      Moreover, the significance of these momentous events reaches beyond their factual dimension. The thorough consideration they generated of the fate of the Syrian provinces had a direct bearing on the future development of nationalist ideas in the region. The diverse solutions considered in the wake of these events helped to shape future local nationalist claims and assertions and set the terms of nationalist thought and debate throughout the following century.

      The massacres and the Western and Ottoman reaction they provoked raised anew the issue of the Syrian and Lebanese provinces, first opened by the Egyptian crisis. Intense negotiations followed between the main European powers and the Sublime Porte in order to devise guarantees against the recurrence of such events. An impressive variety of political and administrative projects were envisioned or contemplated by local and foreign, official, and unofficial circles. In the case of Lebanon, the joint Ottoman–European search for a political solution involved a thorough inquiry, with a special commission convening in Beirut. The commission took particular pains to examine the economic, social, and political issues that led to the crisis and made genuine efforts to address all sides of the question. However, the final solution consisted, as usual, in a general compromise between the diverging views and interests of the powers concerned, who sought to defend the conflicting interests of the local population as they thought best.

      Alongside this official and diplomatic activity, several French agents and publicists promoted projects for the future of Lebanon articulated around the establishment of an independent Christian principality. Many local parties and personalities from the Mountain became involved in this activity. Thus, the “Franco-Lebanese dream” was revived, and, in this new episode, gained much in consistency and scope. The frontiers of the projected Christian principality were extended by its proponents well beyond the confines of Mount Lebanon. A detailed map was drawn by the headquarters of the French army, and historical, political, economic, and communal justifications were advanced to sustain these magnified pretensions.

      In short, a project for the establishment of a Greater Lebanon avant l'heure took form. And, if this whole project did not materialize at the time, its significance should not be measured by this failure, or by the apparent oblivion into which it fell for the rest of the century. Some decades later, Lebanese nationalists and the Maronite Patriarch claimed an identical entity in 1919, before the Paris Peace Conference, making use of the map drawn by the French army in 1860 to vindicate and impart legitimacy on the enlarged “natural and historical” frontiers of Lebanon that they demanded. And the Greater Lebanon that ultimately emerged in 1920 looked strangely in shape like the one already devised in 1860.

      

      The present chapter reviews the intense diplomatic, as well as unofficial, activity triggered by the 1860 massacres and the impact of all these factors on the development of the Lebanist ideal.

      THE 1860 MASSACRES

      By the end of the 1850s, Mount Lebanon was again in a state of turmoil. The 1845 Shakib Effendi Règlement had imposed an unpalatable political system on all parties in the Mountain, who hardly concealed their ill will toward any genuine implementation of its terms.¹ The new representative institutions designed to regulate and deflate the prevailing tensions in the mixed sectors—the councils and wakils—failed in their task in view of the irreconcilable claims of the Druze muqaqata'jis who sought to reassert their authority over Christian tenants, villagers, and townsmen and the blunt refusal of the latter to yield to their former overlords, thus accentuating communal tensions in the Mountain. At the same time, the Druze notables and their Christian counterparts did their best to prevent a fairer redistribution of taxes, thus disappointing peasants in the Druze and the Christian sectors alike, and exacerbating the horizontal tensions in society. Things came to a head in the Christian sector when a peasant revolt against the Maronite Khazin shaykhs broke out in 1858. Soon, the whole Christian central sector was in a state of turmoil, with an angry and unchecked peasantry in arms.

      Unrest eventually reached the Christians of the mixed sectors. The latter resumed their complaints about the intolerable tyranny of the Druzes.² At the same time, the Maronites of the central districts, driven by an overconfident enthusiasm following the success of their movement against their own muqata'jis, "dispatched letters couched in the most inflated and bombastic terms to the great Christian centres calling on them to rise fearlessly against their oppressors, and promising them immediate assistance.”³ They incited their Christian brethren in the mixed districts to rise against their own shaykhs, boasting of their 50,000-man force. In the mixed sectors, therefore, the social dimension of the conflict intertwined with the ongoing battle for political dominance in the Mountain.

      These Maronite designs prompted the indignant reaction of the Druzes. The Druze muqata'jis, determined to come to terms with a question that had plagued relations with their Christian tenants for the past twenty years, began to mobilize their own Druze tenants and followers. Christian boisterous threats against the Druze population in general facilitated this process, the social dimension of the conflict becoming totally overshadowed by the more essential struggle for mere existence. “The Druzes, in fact, felt it to be a struggle for successful and lasting ascendancy, or irremediable ruin and humiliation. And they declared war to the knife.”⁴

      In such an explosive atmosphere, trying to determine who fired the first bullet that inflamed the whole Mountain is a futile exercise. The seeds of the conflict were sown some two decades earlier, and by 1860 both parties were equally determined to come to blows. The 1860 conflagration was a repetition and sequel to the inconclusive 1841 and 1845 contests, “distinguished by circumstances of more than usual brutality.”⁵ The contradictory logic of the two parties had only been exacerbated by the failure of either to impose its own views, leading each party, imbued with a feeling of self-righteousness, to perceive the “Other” as an aggressor, and its fight as a legitimate act of self-defense.

      The exceptional ferocity of the ensuing fight can be attributed to the force each party drew from these intense perceptions of the conflict. “To depict therefore the quarrel between the Druzes and the Maronites as an onslaught of savage heathens on the inoffensive followers of Christian religion is a simple misinterpretation. It was a feud between two equally barbarous tribes in which the victors inflicted on their enemies the fate with which they themselves had been threatened.”⁶ Only total victory could satisfy the ambitions of either side.

      Hostilities in Dayr-al-Qamar, Zahla, Rashaya, and Hasbaya led to the massacre of some 6,000 Christians, the displacement of 20,000 others, and the devastation of 200 villages, including the two most prosperous Christian towns, Dayr-al-Qamar (8,000 inhabitants) and Zahla (7,000–10,000 inhabitants).⁷ It was the Christians of the mixed districts who paid the heaviest price. Abandoned by their brethren in the north, they had once more taken the brunt of the Druze attack. The northern Christian sector was spared any military confrontation, and the contribution of its Maronite inhabitants was limited to one or two unsuccessful sallies at the start of the conflict. Thereafter, the young popular leader, Yusuf Karam, gathered a small force and rushed to the Matn, but he confined himself to a policy of cautious expectation and procrastination. The Comte de Paris, who was visiting the northern regions of Mount Lebanon at the time, described the bellicose preparations and demonstrations of the Maronites of this sector, but he regretted that they did not make use of their ardor under the walls of Zahla and Dayr-al-Qamar. In his view, they were “thoughtless and light-minded,” and totally oblivious of “the duties that in a nation each should observe in order to ensure the welfare

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