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 on traditional divisions among Maronites shaykhs, to gather a respectable number of signatures. However, these did not seem to fully satisfy the Turkish governor, who decided to force matters and exert pressure on the remaining notables to have them sign petitions prepared by his agents. Reports of threats, bribery attempts, promises of future official positions, and the counterfeiting of seals reached the Ottoman capital, where the Western ambassadors, availing themselves of consular dispatches from Beirut, totally rejected the Ottoman allegations that they were acting according to the wishes of the population.
In the Mountain, the Church immediately understood the significance of the Ottoman campaign and launched a counter-campaign of petitions, denouncing the appointment of an Ottoman governor and claiming the restoration of Emir Bashir II. Soon the whole Mountain was engaged in this battle of pro-Ottoman and pro-Shihabi petitions, with notables sometimes signing one or another petition according to their sincere convictions, but more often affixing their seals to both petitions in order to please everybody or denouncing the forced extortion or counterfeiting of their signature on one type of petition and sanctioning the other. An analysis of these petitions as genuine representations of public opinion is therefore an elusive affair. What seems to be practically established is that the campaign for the restoration of Bashir II was not the result of a spontaneous initiative of the local population nor an expression of its genuine sanctioning of the content of the supplications. The Maronite bishop of Beirut himself, Mgr Tubiyya Awn, admitted to the British consul in Beirut, Colonel Rose, that “the party or faction (Hosb) of the Shihabs were composed of servants of the late Emir, who naturally wished for his return, but that the people of Lebanon did not care for them.”41 The pro-Shihabi campaign was instigated by the Church, which also often used quite unorthodox methods to gather as many signatures as possible. Even so, they were unable to present a unanimous Maronite espousal of their aspirations, because many of their communicants signed, willingly or unwillingly, opposite petitions.
The “battle of petitions” of 1842 was an innovation in the Mountain, and it well illustrates the process of composing such petitions allegedly representing the “will of the people.” It inaugurated an era in which similar campaigns were continually being instigated by some party or another and used as propaganda tools to back or justify certain claims or to promote or oppose certain policies. As such they represented more the opinion of their authors and instigators than that of their signatories, seriously impairing their value as a manifestation of the aspirations of the local inhabitants.42
This fact was shrewdly perceived by the French consul, Bourrée, who in response to an inquiry by his minister about events, facts, and figures reported in the 1847 petitions by the Maronites of the mixed districts, prepared by Mgr ‘Abdallah Bustani, bishop of the Shuf and presented to the French Parliament by Father ‘Azar, which contained inflated estimates of the Maronite population and a dramatic account of the devastation allegedly wrought on them by the Druzes, lamented the credulity of the French politicians: “It is Arab exaggeration, proportional to the distance separating the site of production from the site of destination . . . [and which] . . . supposes no doubt that one is as ignorant in France of the affairs of Syria that the Arabs are about affairs in France.”
Then reminding his minister of the terrible confusion that prevailed during the 1842 “battle of petitions,” he warned him that these supplications should be treated with great caution: “It is not on documents of this kind that one can appreciate the state and the wishes of the populations.”43
MOUNT LEBANON IN DISARRAY
While the negotiators in Istanbul could congratulate themselves on having found a solution to the Lebanese predicament, the new regime adopted in 1842, or the Dual Qaimaqamiyya as it came to be known, served only to exacerbate tensions in the Mountain. Its main problem lay in the fact that the Lebanese population was not neatly divided geographically between a Christian and a Druze sector. In the Christian sector, which covered two-thirds of the Mountain, only the northern districts and part of the central districts were inhabited solely by Christians. In the Matn, attached to the Christian sector, lived a small Druze minority, while in the southern Druze sector the Christians formed a slight majority.44 For the next three years the Porte and the Western chancelleries debated whether the Christian qaimaqam should have authority over the whole Christian population, or only over the Christian sector, leaving the rest of the Christian population under Druze rule. This controversy was stimulated and accompanied by periodic fighting in Mount Lebanon between the Druzes and the Maronites trying to enhance their position on the ground. The focal point of conflict lay in the mixed sectors, that is, the Druze sector and the Matn, where the returning Druze muqata'jis strove to fully recover their former political authority over the Christian population, whereas the latter,
