In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Française, or AOF, as France's West African possessions were known, consistently failed to introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration under their purview.Footnote ¹ This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, administrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the Government-General of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates to these interlopers of empire, most of them from present-day Lebanon, who first began to venture into West Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. By the late 1930s, some six thousand citizens of the Mandatory states of Lebanon and Syria resided across AOF.Footnote ² Most worked as produce brokers, shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as textiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches.Footnote ³ Despite their attempts to channel and stem this flow of men and women, AOF administrators proved unable to impose effective legislative checks upon their movements.

This failure is particularly striking when one remembers that these years witnessed a formidable bolstering of the bulwarks against human movement across the world.Footnote ⁴ It has recently been recognized that such efforts began well before the outbreak of global conflict in 1914. As early as the 1880s and 1890s, decades long regarded by scholars as the heyday of untrammeled migration, administrators and politicians in the United States, France, Australia, and South Africa sought to regulate the movements of itinerant peoples and migrants deemed “undesirable” on racial grounds.Footnote ⁵ They did so not only by imposing restrictions upon entry, but also by wielding powers of expulsion.Footnote ⁶ These measures grew increasingly rigid during the First World War, when passport controls were widely reintroduced, and were cemented in its wake by legislation like the American Reed-Johnson Acts of 1921 and 1924, which imposed a series of quotas upon migration from various parts of the world.Footnote ⁷ The second of these measures was particularly significant, for it gave a central role to the strategy of “remote control,” as Aristide Zolberg and others have named the screening of migrants at their point of departure.Footnote ⁸ This regulation, which required ship passengers to present a visa granted by appropriate consular authorities before boarding, was quickly replicated by governments elsewhere.Footnote ⁹

Thus the early years of the twentieth century saw not simply a gradual erosion of the liberty of movement but also the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated administrative initiatives. As John Torpey has argued, these decades brought a shift from efforts to supervise migrants on a country's own territory, to checking their entry at the border, and finally toward remote control. Innovations in one country were rapidly emulated and augmented by others keen to bolster their defenses against human movement. In the words of Adam McKeown, this period witnessed the universalization of “the basic principles of border control,” which came to serve increasingly as the “foundation of sovereignty for all states within the [international] system.”Footnote ¹⁰ By World War II, many states had come to resemble, at least on paper, “the wall-enclosed towns of the medieval period.”Footnote ¹¹

While governments everywhere were fastening their bolts, the administrators of AOF kept their doors reluctantly open. Their failure was, in essence, a consequence not of lack of administrative wherewithal, but rather of external pressures that significantly constrained their capacity to act. Particularly important here was the unyielding position of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Quai d'Orsay, whose functionaries insisted that Lebanese and Syrian migrants be accorded lenient treatment both on grounds of diplomatic reciprocity and, more significantly, in order to protect France's cherished interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Much is revealed by a sustained examination of the frustrated legislative schemes of the administrators of AOF and their fraught exchanges with both the Quai d'Orsay, always quick to protect aggressively its own prerogatives, and with migrants who, when faced with unfavorable rulings, sought to capitalize upon France's political and sentimental commitments in the Eastern Mediterranean in order to obtain clemency. This exercise elucidates ways in which imperatives of governance and diplomatic reciprocity could impede the seemingly impermeable controls upon human movement erected in the first half of the century. My goal here is not simply to retell the familiar tales of inconsistency, evasion, and fraud, or to underscore the eternal disjuncture between the neatness of paper schemes and the messy reality of practical inefficacy. Rather, I want to highlight an often-neglected aspect of this story: the ways in which administrative endeavor was stymied by prevailing reason of state.

I also want to flesh out our understanding of the ways in which colonial states operated, or failed to operate. I do so in several ways that are closely interlinked. First, I will describe the far-flung webs of interest in which administrators in any particular colonial territory were regularly enmeshed, which left their own powers severely curtailed by priorities well beyond their purview.Footnote ¹² Scholars of colonial statecraft can easily overlook that territorial administrations and those who staffed them did not dwell in isolation. They were but part of an overarching “imperial system,” albeit one markedly unsystematic in its composition, remaining to the end a patchwork of varying administrative arrangements and contested prerogatives.Footnote ¹³ Indeed—and this is my second point—relations between the numerous departments that made up the French empire-state, with its sprawling congeries of agencies and administrations, were marked by clear and deep asymmetries of power that allowed some to assert their own priorities of rule above those of others.

I will argue that this unevenness in both the power of departments and the status of territories was a structural feature of France's empire. The density of the Quai d'Orsay's strategic and affective investment in the Eastern Mediterranean, as much as its superior position to the Ministry of Colonies, determined the fate of the legal endeavors of the functionaries of AOF in the years before World War I. The Mandate states of Lebanon and Syria, meanwhile, were no simple colonial territories.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, they were ambivalent annexes of empire, at once within and outside its formal realm. The relations of French functionaries to the constituents of these novel constructs were marked by a profound ambiguity. On one hand, they retained a distinctly imperial attachment to the territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, often considering them, in what was perhaps never more than wishful thinking, as zones of uncontested French sovereignty. On the other, they sought to craft these polities in the image of “the universal ideal of the sovereign state.” In their willingness to treat Lebanon and Syria as entities that stood apart from the main body of the French empire, and their inhabitants as that most paradoxical of creatures—colonial citizens—they participated in efforts to “rework the Westphalian system … on a global, extra-European basis.”Footnote ¹⁵

While the citizens of Lebanon and Syria in many regards bore the brunt of the post-war settlement, they were, in one important respect, its beneficiaries, for France's Mandatory commitments enshrined their right to free movement within both metropolitan France and its empire. Indeed, the tale I recount here of the frustrated endeavors of AOF functionaries might equally be told of the administrators of Guadeloupe and Martinique, who encountered many of the same difficulties in their efforts to erect boundaries against Eastern Mediterranean migrants.Footnote ¹⁶ But, crucially, this right was accorded to them not as imperial subjects, but as citizens of “most favored nations.” Lebanon and Syria were considered in this regard—if not in other, perhaps more significant domains of sovereignty—to be independent entities bound to France by treaties of reciprocity. This is a pertinent reminder of the inconsistent, incoherent legal basis upon which rested the new migration regime brought into being in the interwar years by the French government's ratification of a raft of bilateral agreements with countries such as Italy, Poland, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹⁷ No doubt these agreements, as Mary Dewhurst Lewis has stated, created “new inequalities among migrants” which “reflected the uneven power relations … between nations in Europe and … European countries and their colonies,” granting “foreign nationals from treaty countries … more substantive rights” than were accorded to “migrants from within the French empire.” But equally striking is that Lebanese and Syrian migrants did not fall prey to such prejudicial measures, as did the Moroccans and Tunisians who nominally benefited from France's protection. Instead, they were granted a privileged position within the complex “system of stratifications” by which various mobile populations were accorded social rights within the French body politic.Footnote ¹⁸ The stance of the French functionaries of the Quai d'Orsay and the Mandatory High Commission toward their Lebanese and Syrian charges was, then, Janus-faced; Eastern Mediterranean migrants were granted freedom of movement as the citizens of nominally sovereign polities, but they were accorded this right only because French officials believed them to be bound to France by the ties of imperial benevolence and appreciation.Footnote ¹⁹

France's imperial entanglement with the Eastern Mediterranean, though “coded in languages and practices of dominance and possession,” remained “amorously defined.” Its investment in the region, always as much sentimental as it was strategic, was “bounded by and invested in demonstrations of love.” Its contours were “discursively shaped” by an amorous lexicon of reciprocal feeling, and a marked insistence upon the familial ties that ruled the relations between the Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular, and France—their “tender mother” and secular protector.Footnote ²⁰ As Ann Laura Stoler has contended, such harping upon affect was more than a “smokescreen of rule, … a ruse masking the dispassionate calculations that preoccupy states.” Rather, imperial reason of state rested upon a “visceral register,” on the constant deployment and management of notions of honor, charity, and reciprocity, on contemptuous anger or kindly concern.Footnote ²¹

The duty of care and protection enshrined in the Mandate was one that functionaries at the Quai d'Orsay and the High Commission in Beirut seem to have taken seriously, if only because it permitted the management of affective states, the cultivation of feeling. Elizabeth Thompson has tracked the ways in which Mandatory rule over the states the French constructed from the smoldering remains of the Ottoman Empire was marked by the emergence of a “colonial civic order.” While administrative practice shifted perceptibly in the mid-1930s with the creation of a “colonial welfare state” providing “social benefits” directly, in place of the more “paternalistic” treatment previously meted out by French administrators through their local intermediaries, these bureaucrats remained committed in one form or another to the well being of their charges throughout the interwar years.Footnote ²²

As Thompson understood, this process was by no means unilateral; Lebanese and Syrian citizens participated in this new order by negotiating and defining their entitlements and rights through regular interactions with functionaries, routine transactions conducted across the “desks and tables” of government offices.Footnote ²³ As I will argue in the final part of this article, migrants faced with orders of expulsion—and the Lebanese dignitaries and French functionaries whose assistance they enlisted—adroitly played the game of juridical politics, nagging at small tears in the legal fabric of empire until they succeeded in overturning the decisions of administrators in AOF.Footnote ²⁴ Despite the existence of a clear legal framework, the latter found it difficult to frame their work within the “fixed rules” of “laws or administrative regulations.”Footnote ²⁵ There was, as Gérard Noiriel has observed, little Weberian about a process in which administrators remained compelled by circumstance, continuing—as they had long done—to consider “individual,” always “particular,” cases rather than reaching decisions based upon “abstract criteria, identical” in all circumstances. Moreover, transactions between officials and migrants and their intercessors remained profoundly “personal” throughout this period, and lacked the anonymous detachment of bureaucratic practice. Not only were these often conducted directly between migrants (or those lending them assistance) and high functionaries like the governor-general or the minister of colonies, but they also drew upon “Christian norms of charity far more than upon administrative principles.” They retained many of the features of private correspondence in place of the form-filling and standardized language of bureaucratic process.Footnote ²⁶ By retracing the often-protracted tractations around migration controls and their application, we can follow the uneven workings of a messy imperial order, riven with inconsistency and imbalances of power. It also enables us to understand the ways in which Eastern Mediterranean migrants exploited this convoluted web of legal obligations and pragmatic considerations.

Scholars like Frederick Cooper and Peter Zinoman have in recent years come to query conceptions of colonial states as purposeful, monolithic institutions capable not only of performing the essential functions of sovereignty—retaining the monopoly over violence, enumerating people, gathering taxes, and of course securing the integrity of the territories under their supervision—but also of modifying and molding the behavior of their subjects.Footnote ²⁷ They have instead insisted that they were messy congeries of competing agencies and agendas, constantly frustrated by material circumstances and incapable of broadcasting—to borrow Jeffrey Herbst's term—their authority beyond a few scattered points.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, Zinoman has argued that French Indochina's “decentralized and heterogeneous” penal system, with its “brutality, squalor and corruption … embodied the chaotic and unsystematic workings of the colonial state.”Footnote ²⁹ Cooper, meanwhile, has maintained that “power in colonial societies was more arterial than capillary”; far from diffusing through society, insidiously working away at the site of the individual, it was “concentrated spatially and socially, not very nourishing beyond such domains, and in need of a pump to push it from moment to moment and place to place.”Footnote ³⁰ In this perspective, colonial administrations were not antiseptic laboratories of modernity in which administrators could escape the constraints of metropolitan governanceFootnote ³¹ so much as faltering, belabored enterprises, “creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping” declensions of the forms of state-craft elaborated in Europe during this time.Footnote ³²

Such visions of colonial governance have increasingly come to hold sway in recent years. But they illuminate only what we might call the inner story of colonial power, its intimate failures and intrinsic weaknesses. The power—the capacity to act—of colonial functionaries was undermined not only by their administrations' impecuniousness and their lack of numbers, but also by external exigencies that affected what they could and could not do, which in some cases considerably narrowed the range of options available to them. As Torpey has pointed out, a state's sovereignty does not rest simply upon its capacity to exercise authority within its realm; affirmations of sovereign power can acquire meaning only with the assent of a wider society of states, and are governed by a “set of norms and prescriptions to which individual [polities] must respond.”Footnote ³³ This is all the truer of colonial administrations like those of AOF: the Federation's territories were not islands of authority, self-contained entities cut off from wider currents, but rather elements of a far more extensive imperial polity. Because they were but one part of this overarching entity, their interests and the ability of their administrators to reach decisions independent of the metropolitan state could be, and indeed were, dismissed in particular instances.

It may well be that French commandants de cercle scattered through the administrative districts of AOF were, before 1939, the “almost undisputed masters” of this empire in most matters. These men gleefully seized upon the Government-General's inability to broadcast its own directives to assert their own will, paying little heed to the “growing pile of official journals and explanatory circulars” that Maurice Delafosse, an administrator in pre-First World War Côte d'Ivoire before he became an influential ethnographer, recalled stashing beneath his head before he fell to peaceful sleep at night.Footnote ³⁴ However, commandants de cercle had no control over entry to the Federation, or the power to expel undesirable migrants. They could only pass to their superiors their recommendations, which would then travel up the administrative hierarchy before being decided upon by the governor-general himself in Dakar. In this area of policy, at least, decision making remained highly centralized.

More significant still, the governors-general themselves, though nominally designated as “depositor[ies] of the powers of the Republic,” were never in practice proconsuls with plenipotentiary authority over the territories in their trusteeship. The deep-seated fears of both the governors of individual West African territories and functionaries at the Ministry of Colonies, that the creation of a powerful central executive in Dakar would wear down their own prerogatives, led to the “slow construction, often through jurisprudence” of a set of constraints upon the autonomy of the governors-general. These administrators, while they certainly did retain a degree of latitude, were ultimately bound to the metropolitan government in matters of legislation, particularly those that might impact upon France's foreign relations.Footnote ³⁵

In turn, the lowly position of the Ministry of the Colonies within the “ministerial pecking order” left it at a distinct disadvantage in its dealings with other departments of state, and militated against the imposition of a special regime regulating the entry of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to AOF. Formed only in 1894—until which point the Ministry of the Navy administered, with a few exceptions, France's overseas possessions—the fledgling colonial administration established at the Rue Oudinot was still regarded some twenty years later as the “Cinderella ministry.” It consistently faced hostility from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that of the Interior, both of which were disdainful of this poor and somewhat embarrassing relation and wary of any attack upon their prerogatives in North Africa. The Ministry of the Colonies was further hampered by its own chaotic organization—a “muddled assemblage of small bureaucratic contrivances,” as a 1911 internal report put it—and by chronic internal discord; “the inability of all its officials to arrive at general views or to coordinate their efforts” became infamous in Parisian administrative circles.Footnote ³⁶ Under such circumstances, functionaries at the Rue Oudinot could hardly hope to provide any tangible opposition to the desires of their counterparts at the Quai d'Orsay.

There can be no doubt, then, that formidable institutional impediments stood in the way of any attempts by administrators in AOF to develop a migration policy away from the scrutiny and strictures of their superiors at the Ministry of Colonies, or, crucially, the Quai d'Orsay. If, as Torpey has maintained, the monopoly to authorize and restrict movement must be considered an essential attribute of the state, it was one that was never held solely by administrators in AOF, who effectively lacked the capacity to decide alone on the legal status of Lebanese migrants.Footnote ³⁷ They had to pay heed to the will of metropolitan agencies of state.

In the years before the establishment of the Mandate, the Quai d'Orsay opposed the introduction in AOF of prohibitive measures targeting Eastern Mediterranean migrants. This was born of a deep-seated and growing concern for the safeguard of French political, commercial, educational, and religious interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. In particular, France's vaunted moral protectorate over the Maronite and Greek Catholic populations of Greater Syria—long a cornerstone of its policy in the region—took on greater significance as its position in the Ottoman Empire came under increasing pressure from foreign competition.Footnote ³⁸ While Wilhelmine Germany secured economic concessions like the Baghdad railway, Italian and Anglo-American missionary establishments threatened the spiritual monopoly of French education. As Maurice Pernot, the editor of the Journal des Débats, declared in 1913, “In certain parts of Lebanon, where we assume our influence to be preponderant, English is certainly better known than French; Italian is making rapid progress at certain points along the coast. Elsewhere, we are holding our own, but nowhere are we gaining ground.”Footnote ³⁹

This was all the more worrying because, as John Spagnolo has noted, French diplomats saw their nation's presence in the Eastern Mediterranean as inextricably “linked to favorable relations with their political clients in Lebanon.”Footnote ⁴⁰ France's economic interests were dispersed widely throughout what remained of the empire: it held a considerable stake in the Ottoman public debt, but also in financial institutions such as the Imperial Ottoman Bank, which controlled the state tobacco monopoly and a number of public utilities and railway companies; in port concessions at Beirut, Tripoli, Haifa, and Jaffa; and in mines, road construction, and various other operations.Footnote ⁴¹ However, the Ottoman Empire was, for many of those most intimately involved in furthering French interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, “not merely a field of economic activity for France. It [was] also, and above all, a territory for the radiation of its intellect and the expansion of its culture.”Footnote ⁴²

As French colonial propagandists and Catholic missionaries never ceased to reiterate, “None of the Catholic communities of the Orient calling upon France's protection since the Crusades has shown greater gratitude and devotion than the Maronites.”Footnote ⁴³ In a series of articles, pamphlets, and books, historians and journalists elaborated in florid terms a narrative of an enduring and secular reciprocal friendship, stressing equally the “love for France” with which the towns of Mount Lebanon “humm[ed] and vibrat[ed]” and France's own obligations toward their Uniate inhabitants.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Gabriel Hanotaux put it, the Maronites “who saved their liberty, their religion, their race, simply by holding out, when others elsewhere richer and more powerful bowed their heads,” were indissolubly bound to France. He insisted that France simply could not relinquish its longstanding obligations towards them, since, “These peasants, whose friendship for France has been handed down from father to son for twelve centuries … lived, from afar, the lives of our own fathers … they are, all in all, ours; they possess a part of our thoughts, our will, our heart. France has never abandoned them; and she will not abandon them.”Footnote ⁴⁵

These words were more than fig leaves covering the cruder designs of power; a set of deeply-rooted conceptions of the Orient as an inherently spiritual place, and an idealist understanding of the world, led both statesmen and thinkers to insist that France's position in the Eastern Mediterranean rested upon sentimental ties to its Christian populations. Strategic considerations obviously figured in such a political calculus. As George Leygues, one of the architects of France's Syrian policy during the First World War, declared, “It is in the Mediterranean that can be found the axis of French [strategy]. One of its poles passes, to the West, through Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. The other must be to the east, through Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.”Footnote ⁴⁶ However, mere power alone could not suffice, for as Jules Cambon put it, “religion and nationality” were “indistinguishable … in the Orient,” making the “religious protectorate a considerable force which benefited France's moral influence and, hence, political authority.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Moreover, for figures like Maurice Barrès, who traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean on the eve of global conflict, France's entanglement with the world was quite distinct from that of other states. “To others, sometimes,” it conceded the “primacy of force and business … but to us, always and in spite of everything [falls] the friendship of souls.” Jaurès' supposed insistence that “it is both right and inevitable that intellectual preponderance should belong to those who are economically dominant” was, to Barrès, both wrongheaded and dangerous. After all, the “belief in a material law of the world, according to which only economic ascendancy, and the prestige of the trader and the engineer, could generate spiritual actions,” was not simply difficult to square with the sight “in Canada, in the Philippines, of an intensive commerce with the United States [which] has hardly affected moral dispositions”; it also threatened to undermine the edifice of France's “spiritual power” in the world.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such an expansive sense of sentimental commitment informed policy-making at the highest levels, for as Ann Laura Stoler has suggested, “‘political rationalit[y]’ … that strategically reasoned, administrative common sense,” was “grounded in” affect and its cultivation.Footnote ⁴⁹ The majority of those involved in formulating the Quai d'Orsay's line on the Middle East were members of the Comité de l'Asie Française, dedicated to furthering France's interests from Asia Minor to Japan.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their numbers included prominent figures like François Georges-Picot and Robert de Caix, whose vision of a constellation of statelets under French tutelage was implemented in the years after 1920.Footnote ⁵¹ Stephen Pichon, meanwhile, “a staunch supporter of imperial expansion in the Middle East” as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1917 and 1920, served in the pre-war years as president of the Comité d'Orient, and was one of the founders of the Comité de Défense des Intérêts Français au Levant.Footnote ⁵² These men were actively committed to protecting France's interests in the Middle East, and keen to stress reciprocal ties to the region's Uniate communities and to cajole and placate their representatives—men like the émigré journalists Shukri Ghanim and Georges Samna, who regarded themselves as the spokesmen of the peoples of Lebanon and Syria and lobbied the Quai d'Orsay on their behalf. Figures like Flandin and Leygues, so prominent in the war years, had not only campaigned actively before 1914 for the reform of the Algerian indigénat, but had also become convinced that Syria should have a far more liberal regime than that in place in French North Africa—one standing, in other words, apart from France's other possessions, and basking in the gentle light of a particularly benevolent mode of rule. These ties and convictions, together with France's diplomatic obligations to the Ottoman Empire, led the ministry's functionaries in Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, and Damascus to obfuscate as best they could the efforts of their counterparts in Dakar and Conakry to erect boundaries against Eastern Mediterranean migration.

The Quai d'Orsay's position on Lebanese migration to AOF in the years before World War I not only reflected the Middle Eastern commitments of its senior functionaries, but was also entirely consistent with the stance the ministry had adopted throughout the 1880s and 1890s in the face of proposals to implement a discriminatory tax on foreigners working on French territory. These proposals, though enormously popular with parliamentarians, were repeatedly vetoed by the ministry's officials, who argued it would contravene the clauses guaranteeing free circulation included in agreements with a number of other states. To introduce such legislation, maintained one legal scholar, would be tantamount to a self-imposed exile from the community of nations.Footnote ⁵³

The need to respect the binds of diplomatic reciprocity was repeatedly cited in the years before 1914 by both the Quai d'Orsay and administrators in West Africa as a significant impediment to any exclusionary measures targeting Eastern Mediterranean migrants. As early as 1904, the Ministry of Colonies advised Governor-General Roume that the French government had “undertaken, by conventions agreed with most of the Powers, including Turkey, to assimilate to its own workers citizens of the signatory states [residing] in its overseas possessions.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These obligations effectively prevented the creation of a special tax on Ottoman subjects in French West Africa, a measure Roume had sought to implement in order to stem the growing influx of Eastern Mediterranean migrants.Footnote ⁵⁵ For, as France's consul in Damascus, Couget, understood, “the protests of … Syrian migrants, who will not fail” to complain of measures which, “if too rigorous, may be contrary to the clauses of our treaties with foreign powers,” severely curtailed the “choice” of means available to “our colonial administration.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The stringent measures colonial administrators continued to press for may well have seemed to the Quai d'Orsay not merely undesirable on grounds of diplomatic reciprocity, but also inconsistent with its own regular interventions on behalf of Lebanese migrants elsewhere in the world. It is true that this duty does not seem to have been a deliberate policy choice; it was forced upon French agents in Latin America who were pressed into playing the role of protectors by the repeated entreaties of Eastern Mediterranean migrants themselves. Such requests had become so frequent by the beginning of the twentieth century that the Minister of Foreign Affairs Delcassé thought it necessary in 1902 to clarify that France could not “officially and regularly” consider “the Syrians or other Ottoman subjects, whatever their religion” as “French protégés.” The French “protectorate” over the Maronites “in the Levant,” he insisted, was simply a “religious protectorate, which has no purpose beyond this region”: “In another country, a Maronite is no more than an ordinary Ottoman subject; our agents have no rights to act on his behalf, and he himself has no right whatsoever to request their official protection.” However, Delcassé went on to fudge significantly this seemingly unequivocal line. In practice, he acknowledged, French representatives had “often … intervened to protect these Orientals.” While such a course of action could only be considered a “favor,” it fitted too well into France's “traditions of humanity” to be “discarded entirely.” Moreover, he continued in more pragmatic terms, “The traditions binding us to Syria's populations are too precious for us to run the risk of seeing them broken, or even weakened, by our refusal to grant our unofficial protection to these Orientals when this duty is in keeping with our obligations towards the Ottoman government.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The informal assistance in which Delcassé acquiesced was, for all his evasions, little more than a thinly disguised attempt to spread the blanket of French protection over those Christian Ottoman citizens living far beyond the confines of their Eastern Mediterranean homelands.

This directive served only to rubberstamp prevailing practice among French plenipotentiaries, which often went far beyond the bounds of appropriate behavior dictated by the Quai d'Orsay. In 1903, France's envoy to Port-au-Prince, Paul Desprez, citing “the instructions of the Department [of Political Affairs] regarding the unofficial protection granted by the French government to the Syrian populations established in the Americas,” sought to ensure repeal of an act that imposed upon all Syrians resident in Haiti the liquidation and closure of their wholesale and retail businesses and allowed them to trade only on consignment.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, Desprez's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to safeguard the commercial interests of Eastern Mediterranean migrants arose not in response to the instructions of the Quai d'Orsay, but out of a longstanding engagement with Haiti's Eastern Mediterranean population. He had not only kept a register of Ottoman subjects who had presented themselves to the French legation, but had gone so far as to issue some with passes to the “interior of the country” and, more rarely, travel documents to France and Beirut. In doing so, he effectively treated these migrants not as nationals of another power, but rather as his own consular charges.

Desprez seems to have been particularly keen to indulge the “conviction,” which all new arrivals from the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to share, that “they will find in Haiti” a “degree of protection at the very least equal to that which they receive in their country of origin.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But for other plenipotentiaries like Boulard-Ponqueville, France's ambassador to Colombia, the “unofficial protection of Syrian Ottoman subjects” offered “real political interest” not simply in the Ottoman Empire, but also in their own fields of operation in Latin America. Boulard-Ponqueville acknowledged that Eastern Mediterranean migrants, with their constant petty requests for assistance, could easily be seen as little more than pesky irritants, but he maintained that these men and women, with their commercial links to compatriots in France and preference for French manufactured goods, could lend the Republic invaluable assistance, helping to carry France's reputation to the farthest reaches of countries where its prestige “tends unfortunately to slip away a little further by the day.” Their commercial activities could serve as a “powerful means of propaganda and influence which others, should we abandon it, would be quick to seize upon.”Footnote ⁶⁰ For some amongst the Quai d'Orsay's agents, then, Eastern Mediterranean migrants were not just passive pupils of French civilization and recipients of republican benevolence, bound to France by secular ties of sympathy; they could also serve as agents of the French civilizing mission in other parts of the world, working to buttress what diplomats regarded as its once-uncontested commercial reputation.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus it is little surprise that the Quai d'Orsay should have acted to overturn measures in France's own West African possessions when these seemed injurious to both the ministry's “obligations” to the Porte and its “duty” to its Eastern Mediterranean protégés.

Diplomatic reasons of state again compelled Roume to act in 1906, and he repealed two decrees instituted by Frézouls, the lieutenant-governor of Guinea, that had regulated the landing and residence of foreigners in the colony. The first of these required all migrants to present a passport upon entry, and to register within twenty-four hours of arrival with the local police or commandant de cercle—only upon fulfillment of this obligation would individuals be granted a residence permit. The second decree forbade all ship captains to allow their passengers to disembark without explicit authorization from the local authorities.Footnote ⁶² Roume did not “dispute the utility” of “safeguard[s]” against the entry of undesirable migrants, but he argued that these measures constituted a breach of federal legislative arrangements. They required all decisions affecting foreign relations to receive the assent of the governor-general, and stipulated that the provision of punishments for offences beyond the ordinary purview of criminal law needed “the approbation of metropolitan authorities.” Further, he felt that these two acts, “because they target all foreigners without any distinction of origin or situation,” were both incapable of effectively regulating immigration, and “likely to give rise to the objections, not only of individuals, but also of governments whose citizens are subject to the ordinary regulations of international law, or with which we have trade or shipping treaties.”Footnote ⁶³ As Jean-Gabriel Desbordes was to point out, these measures were “more than a simple check”; they “constituted … a veritable regulation of foreign immigration,” which threatened to affect France's “foreign relations.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Diplomatic imperatives dictated their abrogation.

Such failures did not prevent administrators in French West Africa from presenting a new scheme for the imposition of a special tax on Ottoman subjects to their superiors at the Rue Oudinot in 1909.Footnote ⁶⁵ This, too, was turned away by an intransigent Quai d'Orsay, which reiterated the stance it had relayed to the Ministry of Colonies in 1904, insisting that Ottoman subjects “enjoying the treatment [accorded to nationals of] a most favored nation, should be assimilated to our own nationals in our overseas possessions, and that no consideration could allow at the present time any modification to the obligations incumbent upon the French government by dint of our treaties with foreign powers.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This statement unambiguously placed reason of state ahead of the concerns of colonial administrators.

The obduracy of the Quai d'Orsay could not prevent Camille Guy, Guinea's new lieutenant-governor, from finding in late 1910 a way to circumvent the obligations of international convention. With the support of Roume's successor, William Ponty, Guy—profoundly hostile to the Lebanese and Syrians, whom he was later to deem the “Chinamen of West Africa”—implemented a decree, applied at the federal level some six months later, that imposed a series of stringent checks upon new migrants to Guinea.Footnote ⁶⁷ Under its terms, residency would only be granted to those who could provide a birth certificate and an extrait de casier judiciaire confirming their unblemished criminal record, translated into French, certified, and accompanied by a photograph. Passengers wishing to disembark were now also to be subjected to a compulsory medical examination to check that they were free of “epidemic and contagious diseases.” They were also required upon arrival to deposit the costs of their repatriation with immigration officials.Footnote ⁶⁸

These measures, as Desbordes observed, could be seen as doing no more than establishing “general administrative and sanitary control[s].” They therefore could not be charged with singling out “Syrian” migrants upon entry or of violating international obligations.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, as Ponty made clear, their apparently general character was an administrative ruse disguising a tightly circumscribed exclusionary measure. In a circular in which he sought to elucidate “the exact scope of the new regulations,” he informed the lieutenant-governors of the Federation that the principal objective of the legislation was “to check Syrian immigration.” Officials, he insisted, should not “burden” with unnecessary procedures passengers whose “identity and morality” they had little reason to doubt. Rather, they should take “particular care” to apply these measures “without pause” to Eastern Mediterranean migrants and call upon police commissioners to “verify meticulously” the required documents. In addition, he intimated, functionaries should not hesitate to exceed the letter of the law in their efforts to stem this particular stream of migration. Thus, he called upon administrators to remind physicians charged with carrying out medical examinations that they “should not lose sight of the great powers entrusted in them to protect the colony” against the deleterious consequences of migration, and, in doing so, to dismiss cases arbitrarily in order to check the number of Ottoman subjects entering the Federation.Footnote ⁷⁰

This legislation remained in place until 1921 but, despite its stringent requirements, it failed to stop the constant stream of new arrivals from the Eastern Mediterranean, who rapidly found means of supplying proof of their identity and probity, calling upon friends and relatives to vouch for them and to provide the costs of repatriation. It was augmented in May 1918 by a set of restrictions upon the circulation of “Syrians and Ottoman subjects,” prompted, belatedly, by the war. Observing that the “frequent” journeys these individuals undertook “for extremely diverse and trivial causes” were intolerable in wartime, Governor-General Angoulvant urged territorial administrators to turn away all requests for travel, save in cases of dire medical need or departure from the colonies.Footnote ⁷¹ This ban was an essential element of a raft of prohibitive measures introduced in the spring and summer of that year in order to trammel the activities of these “undesirable Lebanese,” “Asiatics” whose “mercantile ways” posed a grave threat to the growth of “French and indigenous trade.”Footnote ⁷² Under these measures, Ottoman subjects were forbidden to acquire land for the duration of the hostilities, while their movements and correspondence were to be closely controlled.Footnote ⁷³ Angoulvant also pressed the Ministry of Colonies to accede to his plans to prevent Eastern Mediterranean traders from participating in the annual traite in Senegalese groundnuts, now conducted, under wartime provisioning regulations, with a single purchaser: the colonial state itself. Angoulvant seems to have intended his actions to achieve nothing less than the “elimination of Syrian business.”Footnote ⁷⁴

“Small vexatious measures,” he argued, would no longer do in the face of a population who “oppose our hygiene and public health regulations … with an inertia equaled only by their esteem for dirt,” whose “noisy … sometimes bloody … quarrels … disturbed the public peace,” and whose fraudulent ways were an “insolent and permanent challenge to public morality and commercial probity.” While these arguments echoed the complaints of those colons and propagandists who had campaigned in the years before 1914 for prohibitive measures against Eastern Mediterranean migrants, Angoulvant said that the latter's presence was to be feared all the more in wartime. Not only did their constant rumor-mongering and the suspicions of spying which hung over some of them mark them as a threat to the “security” of the colony; they had transformed their shops into “veritable desertion agencies,” and “had trafficked in personal effects, sold disguises, and hidden absentee conscripts.” Perhaps most significantly, the colony could no longer tolerate the “boundless … arrogance” and “insolent luxury” of the Syrians, their “noisome opulence” so profoundly at odds with the “contemplative dignity of the European and indigenous population, its apprehensions and hopes,” and “the vulgar fanfare of their pleasures” that were an insult to “our mourning.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The governor-general called for the imposition of conscription upon all migrants resident in AOF for over a year. This, he maintained, was the sole adequate response to the constant abuses which had allowed men who, before the war, had “scraped by in their miserable shops” to accumulate vast sums and acquire “sumptuous establishments.” It also might prove fitting punishment for the disdain with which migrants had greeted the call to arms issued by the Légion d'Orient, created in 1916 to incorporate young Lebanese and Syrian men willing to fight under the French flag. While Frenchmen were struggling to secure the “liberty” of Lebanon and Syria, and to free these lands from the “yoke of Turkish tyranny,” migrants in AOF had profited from the absence of competitors gone to the front, and had accumulated vast sums by means both fair and, more often than not, foul.Footnote ⁷⁶

Such behavior, it might be argued, seemed utterly beyond the pale to Angoulvant. Migrants had reneged upon their obligation toward France by their stubborn refusal to take up arms in the Légion d'Orient, their ingratitude belying the myth of an enduring and reciprocal friendship between the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and their secular protector. They had also, in doing so, made a show of their deep-rooted opportunism, dishonesty, and cowardice. These complaints were informed by a keen sense of the respective merits of France's civilizing mission in the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa, itself founded upon an essentially affective assessment of the two undertakings. For Angoulvant, there could be no doubt that African indigènes were “appropriate carriers and recipients” of the sentiments of patriarchal benevolence which framed the mission civilisatrice Footnote ⁷⁷; Syrians were worthy only of contempt for the insolent indifference with which they treated the French authorities.

For all the wounded eloquence of Angoulvant's repeated entreaties to the Rue Oudinot, functionaries there refused to acquiesce to his demands for the introduction of conscription and the wholesale exclusion of Eastern Mediterranean migrants from the produce trade. While particular cases were open to consideration, “general principles affecting all Syrians” were inadmissible so long as “allied aliens” remained untouched by similar measures.Footnote ⁷⁸ The imposition of such severe impediments upon their commercial operations was prevented by the ambivalent legal status of Lebanese and Syrian migrants in particular—they were considered as neither allies nor enemies by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Interior, but rather as “special protégés” enjoying a certain degree of latitude.Footnote ⁷⁹ Angoulvant found himself compelled to implement a far less substantial set of strictures than he desired, but one in which the prohibition of movement took on a central importance.

The Quai d'Orsay responded to even these attenuated measures by issuing Angoulvant a severe, if diplomatically worded, rebuke. In a memorandum drafted in November 1918, the Directorate of Commercial and Political Affairs reminded its counterparts at the Rue Oudinot that the ministry had decided, upon the end of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state, not to extend the status of enemy subjects to the “numerous Ottoman subjects, for the most part not Muslims, who resided on French territory, and whose respectability, morality, and Francophile sentiments were well known.” The decision to maintain the special protection these individuals had been accorded in the past had been vindicated, over the course of hostilities, “by political necessities of an imperious kind.” “It seemed consistent,” insisted this missive, that “any measure intended to abrogate or even to restrict our benevolent measures towards our traditional clients would not only be discordant with our traditions of generosity but also, and most importantly, constitute a grave political fault. The Syrian colonies of French West Africa therefore have a right, as in the past, to benefit from our kindness.”

The memorandum further brushed away Angoulvant's request for conscription, and insisted that French functionaries could not “begrudge the Syrians of Dakar and other towns [in West Africa] their failure to enlist.” Not only had the “Government of the Republic” not adopted “at any moment” this “attitude towards the Syrians, Armenians, and other non-Muslim Ottoman subjects resident in the métropole,” but it was prevented from doing so by the international agreements of The Hague, which forbade the executive “to corral, even by indirect means, nationals of an enemy state into serving under our flag.” Such an argument was, it could be said, not mere bluster but rather a means of putting Angoulvant in his place. Its author intimated that the course of action the governor-general had contemplated was driven by little more than resentment against a “state of affairs created by conflict and not by the Syrians,”Footnote ⁸⁰ who could not be blamed for their immunity, and stated unequivocally that Angoulvant had no grounds for considering the implementation of measures that were both rejected by the metropolitan government and contrary to international law. These, the memorandum made clear, held an authority far superior to that of a simple colonial governor, who was in no position to adopt a divergent course of action.

In a letter to Angoulvant bundled together with this reprimand, the minister of colonies, while acknowledging that criticism of the Syrians could be “justified by their lack of hygiene … and their often disloyal competition,” stressed, “The Syrian question in French West Africa cannot be divorced from France's policy in the Orient generally, and more particularly in Syria. The attitude of local authorities in our West African possessions can indeed not fail to have repercussions on this question, and threatens to hinder the actions of the Government of the Republic at a time when it is striving to attach the populations of Syria” to France by a “definitive settlement.” Though careful not to disavow completely the measures Angoulvant had sought to implement—insisting that the Department of Political Affairs had “long since” been aware of the problems created by the “introduction” of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to AOF—the minister of colonies was compelled to recognize the paramount importance of the exigencies of Middle Eastern policy.Footnote ⁸¹ It is clear that both the Ministry of Colonies and the Government-General of AOF had little choice but to bow to the diplomatic imperatives that the Quai d'Orsay defended so vigorously.

France's precarious position in the Eastern Mediterranean was foremost in the minds of functionaries in 1918, with its claims to control over Bilad al-Sham threatened by both the rival claims of Sharif Faisal and the recalcitrance of the local population, but the establishment of a French Mandate over Lebanon and Syria in the early 1920s consecrated the Quai d'Orsay's commitment to a migration policy of the utmost tolerance both in the metropole and colonial territories like AOF. Indeed, intervention on behalf of Lebanese and Syrians in the mahjar, or the lands of migration, was no longer seen in the interwar years as a “favor” to be granted at the discretion of France's plenipotentiaries, but rather as an obligation dictated by the terms of Article 3 of the League of Nations Mandate, which considered “nationals of Syria and the Lebanon living outside the limits of the territory” as being “under the diplomatic and consular protection of the Mandate.”Footnote ⁸²

This was in stark contrast with the status of other non-European migrants who sought to move between the various parts of the French empire in the 1920s and 1930s. The war years had witnessed a sharp increase in the number of North African, Indochinese, and Chinese laborers in metropolitan France as these men were recruited to compensate for the constant loss of Frenchmen to the front. Algerians in particular, freed in 1914 from the need to present permits for travel to the métropole, had risen dramatically in number. However, with the close of hostilities the French state hastily sought not just to repatriate these workers—who, their usefulness exhausted, were viewed as an insidious danger to the body politic—but also to erect a “series of administrative hurdles that significantly limited freedoms guaranteed” to North African migrants by “existing legislation.” By 1921, only two hundred of the wartime laborers recruited from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria remained, and fourteen hundred from Indochina and China.Footnote ⁸³ Migration did not cease, and picked up again with the “shift from repatriation to improved surveillance” on the soil of the metropole.Footnote ⁸⁴ The number of Algerians resident in France had risen by 1928 to more than sixty thousand.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, both Algerians—who remained under the care of the Ministry of the Interior—and Moroccans and Tunisians—who, as subjects of nominal protectorates, depended on the Quai d'Orsay—had to surmount a raft of measures designed as obstacles to free movement, such as requirements that they obtain nationality certificates, identity cards, medical certificates, and approval from the Ministry of Labor for their employment contracts.Footnote ⁸⁶

Eastern Mediterranean migrants were able to secure far more substantive entitlements from the French state than, say, Moroccans. The ambiguous status of Morocco certainly matched that of Lebanon and Syria, which were regarded as at once French possessions and foreign states, but this rarely afforded its constituents any privileges in metropolitan France. On the contrary, as one Moroccan migrant who appealed for compensation for a workplace injury was told, “As a Moroccan you are a foreign worker; returning to Morocco which is not a colony but a protectorate, you cease to live in French territory.” While reciprocity in Franco-Moroccan relations would have seemed intolerable to French administrators, Lebanese and Syrian citizens were entitled to a share of “social citizenship,” which gave them not only freedom of movement between their own states and metropolitan France and its colonies, but also French protection elsewhere in the world.Footnote ⁸⁷

This commitment, enshrined in the terms of the Mandate, was pressed into service by French administrators in their efforts to manage the sentiments of Lebanese and Syrian citizens and to maintain at least a measure of acquiescence to the Mandatory presence. As oft-repeated pieties about the long attachment of these populations to France came to ring hollow in the face of the wearying realities of rule, the Quai d'Orsay faced calls from officials in Beirut to assist Eastern Mediterranean migrants facing difficulties in the mahjar, in the hope that such intercession might bolster their own embattled position. As the high commissioner pointed out in 1929, intervention on behalf of migrants in Portuguese Guinea could have only “beneficial results” in the Mandatory territories themselves, since “relations between Syrian and Lebanese migrants and their families remaining in the country of their birth are close and sustained, and the services the Mandatory Power might be able to provide the former can only serve to bring the latter to appreciate the utility of the Mandate.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He was not alone in holding this perspective. As Simon Jackson has recently argued, the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora had by the close of World War I come to be seen “as a powerful, and potentially unified, political and economic force.” It is no surprise that the High Commission should have regarded these men and women as “essential” to the mise en valeur of their homeland, potential “collaborators in our economic and moral expansion” who might serve “the double interest of France and the countries under French Mandate.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Such pragmatic concerns were compelling enough to motivate officials in both Paris and Beirut to ensure that Lebanese and Syrian migrants were treated as nationals of most favored states not just in France's own colonial possessions, but also in other territories.

In 1928, the Quai d'Orsay was drawn into a protracted dispute with the Liberian government by the latter's decision to ban all trade by citizens of countries with which it had not agreed a commercial treaty—a measure which affected, in the main, Lebanese and Syrian traders. Upon being informed of this threat by the French consul to Monrovia, Peytaud, officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged him to “intervene firmly … in order to obtain at the very least a stay of execution” until League of Nations arbitration had run its course.Footnote ⁹⁰ They sought to resort to the terms of the Mandate in order to safeguard the interests of their Levantine protégés, pointing out that Article 11 prohibited any “discrimination in Syria or the Lebanon … against the nationals of any member-state of the League of Nations,”Footnote ⁹¹ and suggested that reciprocal treatment for Lebanese citizens in Liberia might be expected.Footnote ⁹² It is clear that the Quai d'Orsay, rather than merely affirming the principle of protection, sought to safeguard the commercial position of Lebanese and Syrian citizens abroad and ensure their rights were upheld, if necessary through recourse to lengthy arbitration before the League of Nations.

Interwar migration controls in AOF, meanwhile, both steered clear of any measures of exception that might contravene international convention and submitted AOF to metropolitan law. Guy's 1910 arrêté, seen as failing “to correspond to the principles regulating the settlement of foreigners in France” and deemed “vexatious” to passengers, was abrogated in 1921 in an attempt to bring AOF into line with metropolitan practices. Crucially, the decrees of 1921 and 1923, unlike pre-war measures, were intended to regulate the activities of foreign nationals upon the territory of AOF rather than to police its borders. While they forbade foreigners from practicing certain professions without administrative authorization, they failed to impose restrictions upon entry. The 1921 regulations, in stark contrast with those of 1910, demanded nothing more of migrants than a simple declaration of identity to their landlords. While the decree of 28 April 1923 did stipulate that identity cards could be granted only to migrants who had paid a guarantee equivalent to the costs of repatriation, new arrivals were allowed to provide instead a guarantee given by a “solvent licensed trader, already established in the colony,” a concession that deliberately did away with a significant impediment to migration. In such circumstances, the only recourse available to administrators wishing to channel or stem the inflow of people from the Eastern Mediterranean was to refuse identity cards to migrants already on the soil of the Federation.Footnote ⁹³

These skeletal controls upon migration were, it is true, supplemented by subsequent decrees in 1925, 1927, and 1932 that required travelers disembarking in AOF to provide proof of identity, any criminal record they might have, and a medical certificate, and a monetary guarantee set in 1927 at 4,800 Francs for Lebanese and Syrian citizens.Footnote ⁹⁴ While these measures went some way toward reestablishing the legal status quo ante on paper, they failed in practice to provide effective checks upon migration from the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, this may well not have been their purpose. The requirement that migrants pay a guarantee seems to have acted essentially as a budgetary measure intended, not to bar entry to those unable to pay, but rather to free the administration from the costs of repatriating indigent aliens. Had functionaries regarded this consignment as an exclusionary measure, they would likely have been less willing to accept the guarantees of migrants already established in AOF, or payments by commercial companies, navigation lines,Footnote ⁹⁵ and the Mandatory authorities in BeirutFootnote ⁹⁶ on behalf of their employees, travelers, and administrative charges. Moreover, officials scrupulously avoided any suggestion of prejudice against migrants. Governor-General Carde went so far as to stress in 1925 that even criminal offences did not disbar new arrivals from being granted residence. The stipulation that passengers present any criminal record for a visa, he made clear, did not grant local authorities the capacity to “oppose the disembarkation of convicts.” This procedure was no more than a means of gathering “information” to be used “in the enquiry which precedes the issue of a definitive identity card.” Under no circumstances could the evidence thus acquired “justify a refusal” to grant the right to land, which was contingent only upon providing the appropriate documents rather than their content.Footnote ⁹⁷

Frustrated by the inefficacy of such local measures, which offered no real means of “selection” from the hundreds and thousands of migrants who disembarked in AOF each year, Governor-General de Coppet in 1936 suggested the creation of what amounted, in effect, to a system of “remote control.” Under this scheme, the issue of visas to prospective migrants before their departure would be conditional upon the personal authorization of the governor-general, who would base his decision upon the advice of both the Mandatory authorities and the territorial lieutenant-governors, who were better able to assess situations in their own colonies.Footnote ⁹⁸ However, as the head of the Federation's Sûreté Générale complained bitterly in an internal memorandum, almost a year later the Department of Political Affairs at the Rue Oudinot had still not responded to this proposal. Also unanswered, he said, was a request the Ministry of Colonies had forwarded to the Quai d'Orsay to “strengthen the existing regulatory measures.” This had been formulated in response to both a sudden hike in the numbers of new migrants over 1936 and 1937 and the mounting tension between colons and Libano-Syriens. He could not but conclude, “The local administration can count only upon itself to face down, using the legislation already in place, the dangers associated with the growth of Lebanese and Syrian migration to AOF.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Lebanese and Syrian migrants, then, could not be selected before their departure from Beirut or Tripoli, nor turned away at the borders of AOF. They could only be subjected to a screening process once already resident in the Federation. While identity documents, which doubled as residence permits, could be refused to new arrivals awaiting permission to remain in AOF, such rejections were “unfortunately … rare,” as the director of the Federation's Sûreté Générale conceded in 1937. He castigated local authorities for failing to make use of an administrative tool that enabled them “to select immigrants to their territories.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, though the colonial state could, by the letter of the law, withdraw identity documents from foreigners who failed to observe residence requirements or were found in breach of public health regulations, such provisions were rarely, if ever, used to expel Libano-Syriens from AOF. As the Department of Political Affairs took pains to point out in 1936, expulsion orders would only be accepted in cases where migrants had committed criminal offences, since Lebanese and Syrian citizens were “not to be treated with the same rigor as other foreigners.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Indeed, they were entitled, “by dint of the Mandate … to our protection, which is accorded them in France and the colonies on the same terms as to our own citizens and subjects, in keeping with the directives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”Footnote ¹⁰² This was no more than an extension to the colonies of regulations already implemented in the métropole in early 1935. These accorded Lebanese and Syrian residents in France the status of “citizens of a most favored nation,” in reciprocal recognition of the preferential treatment accorded French nationals in Lebanon and Syria. While this measure did not alter existing regulations upon the registration of foreigners and delivery of identity papers, Lebanese and Syrians were to be treated with benevolence in matters of “settlement, residence, the exercise of trade, occupations and professions, the purchase, ownership, and occupation of all mobile and immobile goods and, generally, the right to dispose of them, conscription, and state benefits.” They were also to remain free of any special taxes aside from residency taxes.Footnote ¹⁰³ While the signing of independence treaties with “the states of the Levant” in 1936 (never, in the event, ratified) put an end to the status of Lebanese and Syrian citizens as formal protégés, they were to continue to benefit from the same exceptional treatment as “nationals of a most favored” state.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Such clemency sometimes extended even to expulsion orders issued for criminal offences or breach of residency requirements.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Migrants often enlisted the assistance of both Lebanese dignitaries and French administrators in their individual and collective appeals to the Ministry of Colonies and the Government-General of AOF. Recourse to such intercession had its origins in the years before World War I. Already in 1910 the migrants of the commercial center of Kayes had expressed their dissatisfaction with the treatment meted out by the colonial administration in a letter to Sulaiman al-Bustani, the Maronite deputy for Beirut in the Ottoman assembly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is clear that, as Simon Jackson has argued, efforts to draw benefit from the “culture of legality” in which Mandatory rule was embedded had their origins in the lobbying and jurisdictional politics of the late Ottoman period.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ They became increasingly common in the interwar years, when Eastern Mediterranean migrants in AOF regularly sought and received assistance from Lebanese dignitaries.

Of these, Monsignor Fighali, the Maronite vicar patriarchal in Paris, was perhaps the most frequent intercessor, intervening regularly throughout the 1930s on behalf of both Christian and Muslim Lebanese citizens served with expulsion orders. While not always successful in gaining repeals, Fighali seems to have been confident enough in his capacities to continue dispatching entreaties to the Ministry of Colonies appealing for clemency for his compatriots. He did not shy away from ending a letter acknowledging the expulsions, despite his efforts, of three men from Côte d'Ivoire with a further request for clemency in the case of Ahmad ‘Isa Khudr. Already expelled from AOF, Khudr hoped to “be authorized to return to his family,” particularly to his pregnant wife, and Fighali called upon Minister of Colonies Marius Moutet to reconsider his case and “see whether it would not be possible, with a little kindness, to allow him to return home.” The vicar patriarchal assured Moutet, “I am certain that this Lebanese national will become, like his compatriots who have already seen their identity cards returned, a most devoted friend to a benevolent and generous France.” This was a carefully worded appeal, ably moving between the overlapping lexicons of Christian charity for a man “with eight people at his charge” and nationalist sentiment; in this delicate game of praise and gentle persuasion, Fighali attempted to pull a concession from Moutet by pricking his conscience while simultaneously flattering his patriotic sensibilities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Fighali enjoyed some striking successes. In 1936, he obtained the suspension of expulsion orders hanging over Ibrahim Tham, Husain Wihbi, Muhammad Hilal, and Ilias Abu Rizq, whose identity papers had been confiscated for their political activities. He appealed on their behalf as “the representative of the Maronite Patriarch to the French government, as a Frenchman, and as Professor of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne and the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bordeaux.” In a pair of letters to the governor-general, Fighali asked him to reverse his decision, maintaining, “An act of clemency toward [these men] would be welcomed by … their Lebanese compatriots, at a time when they are amicably discussing with France the terms of a treaty of friendship.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ What is more, he explained, he addressed himself to the governor-general on the advice of functionaries at the Quai d'Orsay, “where [he had] brought up this matter the other day,” who suggested that he “write to you directly, asking you to examine carefully the case of these unfortunate Lebanese, currently France's protégés, and soon to be its friends and allies.” Benevolence towards these men would be “most opportune” and would coincide with the French government's decision “to reward the fidelity, the unshakeable commitment of the Lebanese towards France, their protector and friend for more than ten centuries” with independence.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Clearly, Fighali was prepared to deploy all rhetorical means at his disposal in pursuit of a favorable decision. Capable of humbly presenting himself as an ordinary French citizen, he also hinted at his influence as a Lebanese plenipotentiary who could, his turn of phrase suggested, casually drop by the Quai d'Orsay to discuss the position of his compatriots. He also underscored his authority as a religious emissary and accomplished scholar, and stressed the advantages of a favorable decision in terms that conflated immediate political exigency and long commitments. Such wiliness was effective: while Hilal and Abu Rizq had already left the Federation, Governor-General Brévié did postpone the expulsions of Tham and Wihbi, and assured Fighali he was “re-examining with the utmost benevolence the situation of these citizens under French Mandate.” He also reminded the Monsignor, “The withdrawal of a foreigner's identity booklet is not in itself an expulsion order,” and, in an apparent attempt to gloss over his decision to expel Abu Rizq and Hilal by presenting the possibility of their return, told him that requests for readmission to AOF at a later date might be welcomed.Footnote ¹¹¹

Cases like these are profoundly revealing in a number of ways. They illuminate the workings of the paternalistic civic order created by the French in Lebanon and Syria within which religious representatives like Fighali were treated as favored interlocutors, entrenching an enduring form of bureaucratic confessionalism, and they reveal the intimate language of “friendship,” “fidelity,” and “benevolence” that infused such exchanges. But they also allow us to trace the reverberations of such policy as far away as AOF, whose administrators found their own capacity to act constrained by the sentimental imperatives of the Mandatory state. Even after the introduction of the 1932 decree intended to centralize and rationalize all migration procedures, these functionaries still could not deal with the cases of Lebanese migrants according to inflexible, Weberian bureaucratic procedures. Instead, they found themselves enmeshed in the webs of empire, forced to navigate a tangled weave of personal commitments and sentimental ties.

I have sought here to trace the attempts of administrators across AOF to devise and implement measures of law that might check Eastern Mediterranean migration to the territories under their rule. Such endeavors, as I have shown, were repeatedly stymied by interventions of metropolitan departments of state, and by the entreaties of migrants themselves. This tale of frustration and half-measures underscores that no colonial territory was an island unto itself, its administrators safely marooned on the periphery away from the intrusive politicking of the imperial capital, and free to make law as they saw fit. In important areas of sovereignty, such as matters of international law and foreign relations, French possessions remained clearly subordinated to directives issued from Rue Oudinot, and the Ministry of Colonies was itself forced to bow in turn before directives of the Quai d'Orsay. This is a telling reminder that we cannot truly speak of a colonial state in the singular, but only of an imperial system, whose constituent parts were administered by a congeries of departments of state, each with its own priorities and imperatives. Furthermore, these relations were marked by stark asymmetries of power between various agencies that sometimes allowed one to protect its own interests at the expense of others around it.

This account has also shown ways in which this empire-state retained personal, affective forms and norms of governance even as it dealt in matters of international law that showed little concern for the circumstances of particular individuals. Not only were governors and ministers of state pulled into protracted personal correspondence with migrants and their advocates, but they also had to respond to such entreaties, and frame their own arguments, in emotive registers that bore scarce relation to the abstract language of jurisprudence. Imperial reason of state, then, rested upon the intimate registers of sentimental commitment.