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 espousal of his claim for the restoration of the Shihabs. Guizot 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
