In post-Assad Syria, the challenge of pluralism

Lhe alliance between the kings of France and the Ottoman sultans spanned the centuries, based on shared strategic interests. Francis I did not fear associating the “eldest daughter of the Church” with the most powerful empire of Islam, if only to oppose the Habsburgs with him. Louis XIII justified such an alliance by the “protection” thus granted by Paris to the Catholics of the East, starting with the Maronites of Lebanon. His successors on the throne of France took up this claim, which the successive regimes of the 19th century also assumed in various capacities. Léon Gambetta is credited with the adage according to which « anticlericalism is not an export item »as the Third Republic, secular as it may be, persisted in claiming its mission of protecting Eastern Christians. And when France obtained a mandate from the League of Nations (SDN) over the former Ottoman province of Syria, in 1920 it removed a “Greater Lebanon” tailor-made for its Maronite “proteges”.

The three stars of independent Syria

The “Arab kingdom” established in Damascus following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, had nevertheless adopted a Constitution respectful of public freedoms and the rights of minorities. But the intervention of the French army broke this momentum by overthrowing, in 1920, the kingdom of Damascus. Not only did France institutionalize political confessionalism in Lebanon, but it persisted in dividing Syria on confessional grounds as well, with the establishment of a “Druze State” in the south and a “Alawite State” on the Mediterranean coast.

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