French Intelligence-Gathering in the Syrian Mandate, 1920-40

Abstract

In the inter-war French Levant political stability proved elusive. Relations between the ruling power, reluctant client governments and the civilian population were always fraught. In French Syria that most misleading of imperial terms, 'pacification', was a more or less constant feature of mandatory rule. It signified a dependence on military force to impose a thin veneer of political and social control. Beneath this, disruptive economic pressures, ethnic rivalries and political violence were endemic. The French high commission in Beirut exercised limited imperial power, lacking the popular consent or the economic wherewithal to consolidate its local authority.' In the Syrian mandate, central themes of factionalized urban nationalist politics, Hashemite-Saudi monarchical rivalry, popular protest and communal rebellion confirmed that French control was never secure. These issues have dominated the historiography of the mandate period. For over 25 years, historians of the inter-war Middle East have debated the origins of Arab nationalism in Syria and neighbouring mandated territories. Until recently, this work has tended to focus on urban Arab elites, the emerging groups of effendiyya functionaries in major administrative centres, and the nature of the intra-Arab conflicts between former Ottoman officials, radical nationalists, tribal shaykhs and the wider urban population. Underlying this debate has been the attempt to trace the ideological distinctiveness of pan-Arabism within Fertile Crescent territories arbitrarily divided into national units by the First World War settlement. Understandably, the bulk of this work has drawn on Arab sources and the papers of the mandatory administrations concerned. A 'missing dimension' within this has been intelligence material gathered by the security agencies of the mandatory powers.2 As explained below, recent French archival releases allow us to fill in this gap. This article draws on these sources to reassess the French image of its political opponents within Syria, and the efforts made to contain them. The essential dichotomy of mandate governance lay between a theoretical long-term commitment to cultivate indigenous government and