In the summer of 1925, High Commissioner Maurice Sarrail’s draconian methods and harsh rule over the Levant (1924–25) began to unravel.Footnote 1 A sworn Freemason and army general, he was a typical representative of the anticlerical legacy of revolutionary France. Described as a “darling of the French left,” his term in office broke with French theories of indirect colonial rule rolled out a decade earlier by the famed Resident-General Marshal Louis Hubert Lyautey in Morocco (1912–25).Footnote 2 To compensate for a diminishing French budget, Sarrail’s administration used forced labor and other repressive measures to “modernize” the region. When the Druze leadership of Jabal Hawran sent a delegation to express their grievances, Sarrail imprisoned them, sparking the 1925–27 Great Syrian Revolt.Footnote 3 In time, the high commissioner was recalled to the metropole, and France had to rethink its approach in the Levant.Footnote 4
By late 1925, a new high commissioner, Henry de Jouvenel (December 1925 to June 1926), arrived in Beirut. The atmosphere was tense, as people were still grappling with the momentum of the revolt. The unrest surged out of Syria and across the French-imposed borders of Greater Lebanon.Footnote 5 It was in this context that the first Lebanese constitution was drafted, asserting colonial borders and thwarting Syrian nationalists’ hope of a united region.Footnote 6 Amid this politically charged environment, de Jouvenel attended a ceremony in Beirut to honor those who resisted the insurgents in Rachaya, southeast Lebanon, declaring: “Peace to those who want peace, war to those who want war.”Footnote 7 He argued that only “where security is established can we move forward with independence and prosperity,” his euphemism for constitutionalism.Footnote 8 To avoid a boycott, de Jouvenel effectively gave the rebels and their supporters an ultimatum: If they continued the revolt, the constitution would be written without them, potentially forfeiting their rights. However, joining the constitutional process implied officially endorsing the colonial borders and project the rebels were fighting against.Footnote 9
By initiating a constitutional process, the French attempted to distance the mandate from colonial practices and ensure that the borders they imposed in 1920 became legally binding against the revolt’s threat of Arab unity.Footnote 10 In this sense, the push for a Lebanese constitution was less a break from colonial power than a transformation of its techniques.Footnote 11 Behind the scenes, two colonial officers, Robert de Caix (secretary-general of the High Commission, 1919–23, and French representative of the Mandate authority to the League of Nations, 1924–39) and Paul Verchère de Reffye (secretary-general of the High Commission, 1923–27) worked closely to pressure the new High Commission in Beirut and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris to multiply bureaucratic procedures, which became the tool for a new and deeper logic of control.Footnote 12 The multiple pushes and pulls of French high administrators revealed by the archives remind us that behind the facade of intended reform lay a compulsive drive for power that trumped all other considerations.Footnote 13
Building on the research of famous mandate-era lawyer and historian Edmond Rabbath (1902–91), this article investigates the authorship of the 1926 Lebanese constitution. The public intellectual Michel Chiha is widely assumed to have written the constitution. Yet Rabbath observes that he skipped the parliamentary debates and vote to enact it, casting doubt on the widespread belief that Chiha was actually its author.Footnote 14 The constitution was drafted between January and May 1926. A thirteen-member committee was formed to oversee the process, with the actual writing delegated to Chiha.Footnote 15 The draft was then debated by the Council of Representatives and promulgated on 23 May 1926.
By retracing the paper trails left by Chiha I hope to uncover why and how the main sectarian clauses (Articles 9, 10, and 95) found their way into Lebanon’s founding document and what these clauses meant for the country’s future. Combined with an excavation of French colonial archives, a dual lens allows for a comparison of successive drafts, laying bare a deliberate legal intent: European minority rights were recast into sectarian guarantees and imposed on a reluctant Chiha.Footnote 16 Although Chiha absented himself from the parliamentary sessions that formally adopted the constitution and was critical of the document, it remains, even a century later, the work most associated with his name.
This article centers France’s colonial role in shaping the Lebanese national project through the sectarian clauses of the 1926 constitution. It argues that Lebanon’s sectarian provisions were fundamentally linked to the European legal framework of interwar minority rights that engineered the state in the first place. The results align with Laura Robson’s recent work, which reconstructs the logic of minority rights as instruments of imperial control and shows how humanitarian concern over minorities was deployed for political and military control.Footnote 17 Evidence indicates that the constitutional debate was not merely grounded in indigenous sectarian realities, but also in an almost mechanical reproduction of a European discourse that assumed its own universality.Footnote 18
The narrative I offer is based on an in-depth examination of Michel Chiha’s private papers. I read these papers and dozens of constitutional drafts in conversation with the colonial archives to demonstrate how two documents—the mandate charter and The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—were embraced by French colonials and imposed on a French high commissioner struggling to implement instructions from above. A particular troika of French administrators—de Caix and de Reffye, mentioned above, along with French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand (1925–32)—played a key role in this process. In addition, I argue that the Maronite clergy played a role in inspiring the infamous Article 95 of the constitution, which created a quota system for public posts by sectarian affiliation. Ultimately, the French mandate controlled and manipulated public debate to both meet the League of Nations’ legal requirements and maintain its colonial power in the Levant.
The investigation starts with an exploration of the conversation on sectarianism and the Lebanese constitution. It proceeds to unpack the explicit techniques and ideology that drove these French officials in shaping the final document. Then, through a forensic investigation of Michel Chiha’s papers, it attempts to reverse engineer the confessional clauses of the 1926 constitution and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the contested legacy of this prominent intellectual.
Sectarianism in Question: Origins, Narratives, and Controversies
The tendency to cast Chiha as either a colonial partner or the celebrated ideologue of modern Lebanon is closely tied to a belief widely shared across the Lebanese political spectrum that he single-handedly authored the constitution. But, as Wissam Saade aptly noted:
Attributing the constitution to Michel Chiha is the easy path. The right relied on it to justify the idea that the republic was the result of French acquiescence to Lebanese demands, while the left has not yet sufficiently distinguished between Chiha’s important role in producing the ideology of the mercantile republic and his marginal role in shaping the constitutional framework, and with it the colonially engineered social contract for Lebanon.Footnote 19
Among other things, the evidence I provide below lends credence to Saade’s remark and pokes holes in our conceptions of what cooperation with the French mandate meant and how it unfolded.Footnote 20 Revisiting the founding moment of the Lebanese nation problematizes the widespread myth that, whether hero or villain, this single historical actor was at the heart of its creation.Footnote 21
It is widely accepted that sectarianism is a dominant factor in Lebanese political, social, and economic life. But sectarian divisions at the communal level have played, and continue to play, a significant role in many other societies, including some Western ones.Footnote 22 Lebanon, however, has long stood out for the extent of the sectarian considerations in its constitution.Footnote 23 It is a perfect example of what can be referred to as “legal sectarianism” in contrast to “communal sectarianism.” The latter refers to the presence of bottom-up divisions involving daily practices and solidarities, as well as social prejudices and exclusions. Once these privileges, opportunities, and differences are encoded into laws, we have legal sectarianism.Footnote 24 In Lebanon, these codifications have permanently institutionalized sectarianism and stifled alternatives.Footnote 25
A common response to this by advocates of legal sectarianism is to say that one does not get rid of sectarianism by erasing it from constitutional texts. To eliminate it properly, we need to eliminate it from hearts. The often-repeated slogan is yajib ilghāʾ al-ṭāʾifiyya min al-nufūs qabl al-nuṣūṣ: sectarianism must be removed from hearts before removing it from texts. But a comparison between sectarianism and racism here may provide a different perspective. Although communal racist prejudices are not necessarily eliminated by abolishing racist laws, it is also clear that abolishing such laws removes an important hurdle to overcoming communal racism.Footnote 26 The analogy is useful: the introduction of sectarian clauses into the Lebanese constitution may have created the very obstacle that prevents society from overcoming sectarianism.
These legal barriers, however, fit well with the colonial vision of the interwar period. In one of its clearest expressions, French General Gouraud likened this region to a “mosaic” of religious groups, each akin to a nation of its own.Footnote 27 The implication is that legal sectarianism was simply the political management of Levantine communities with their essentially ingrained sectarian fractures. Of course, this view of the Levant is simplistic, reducing social identities to religious affiliations, while ignoring the real “mosaics” of sectarian and other identities that make up all nations.
Framed as an uplifting effort toward less advanced regions of the world, France pushed for constitutionalism in 1926 through the language of secular modernity and progress. Indeed, Jean Louis Aujol (1902–2002), who traveled to Beirut with de Jouvenel, insisted the constitution was “essentially secular and modern,” and crafted so the new state could accede “without problem” to major international organizations, namely the League of Nations.Footnote 28 This position from within the closed circle of French high administrators in Beirut reveals how legal sectarianism was perceived as belonging to the framework of modernity. Transformed into the language of minority rights, legal sectarianism did not represent the legacy of a premodern past as much as a standardized template of international law. In particular, this vision of transition to modernity showcases how France navigated the new, post–World War I internationalized rules of imperialism.Footnote 29
The logic is startling. To prevent sectarianism, it became mandatory to codify sectarian guarantees. Instead of implying an Arab incompatibility with modernity, these sectarian provisions universalized minority protection (making them a prerequisite for inclusion in the Western-led modern international order) while simultaneously, although perhaps not inadvertently, solidifying communal difference.Footnote 30 Parallel to this, the existing historiography has long stressed the “divide and conquer” logic of colonialism. As such, the imperialist project was simultaneously officially paternalistic, claiming to pave the way to modernity for “immature” nations, while at a deeper level promoting French interests by dividing and conquering.
The historiography of the mandates has long debunked presumptions of a “civilizing mission.” Scholars have firmly realigned sectarianism with modernity and the tools of colonial management, rather than the narrative of an essentially ingrained primordialism.Footnote 31 However, the historiography of the Lebanese constitution of 1926 breaks that consensus, although not in entirely consistent ways. Christine Manigand, for example, argues that rather than Chiha it was de Jouvenel and French legal expert and official Paul Souchier (1887–1938) who authored the 1926 constitution, but she also leans toward the idea that it was not just another colonial decree but something akin to “the first effective legal act of decolonization.”Footnote 32 In a similar vein, others have supported the claim that through its constitution, Lebanon was oriented toward a secular order even as sectarian clauses were incorporated due to homegrown imperatives rather than the French mandate.Footnote 33 One recent legal analysis argues that the constitution was not colonial but Lebanese, with Michel Chiha acting as the primary author.Footnote 34 Using Chiha’s private papers, it foregrounds Lebanese agency and the “communitarian straitjacket” that goes back to a deep history of sectarianism entrenched in the political arrangements of 19th-century Mount Lebanon.Footnote 35
The use of history as the vantage point for asserting the sectarian past, and likely future, of Lebanon and the region is not uncommon. Surely, the Réglement Organique of 1861, an international treaty between the Ottomans and the European powers that worked as a quasi-constitution for Mount Lebanon, provided a useful precedent for the constitution of 1926, especially in the eyes of French colonials, including Robert de Caix.Footnote 36 To him, and others, it justified the partition of the region and France’s strong sectarian policies: “France pursued a minority policy in the former Ottoman Empire . . . by analogy we were inclined to create other autonomies for the benefit of other minority groups.”Footnote 37 This modern “hyper-sectarianization” was perhaps the strongest argument made by anticolonial activists, like those of the Syro-Palestinian Congress, to demonstrate that what France was engineering was not the natural path of historical continuity, but a deliberate hyper-fragmentation with no honest local precedent.Footnote 38 In September 1925, the Congress addressed the League of Nations: “Hitherto the people had been divided into two main categories—Moslems and non-Moslems . . . France went a step further. The new [French] decree . . . has divided the nation into fifteen religious communities.”Footnote 39 It was not only a matter of multiplying communities. Rather, as Benjamin White has demonstrated, there lay an incongruity between the Ottoman millet system and the distinctly modern phenomenon of “minorities” (so intimately tied to the emerging nation–state paradigm) that made it impossible for one to be mapped onto the other.Footnote 40
Historians of the 1980s and 1990s hoped that newly released French archives would resolve the debate surrounding the authorship of the 1926 constitution.Footnote 41 However, their overreliance on a questionnaire sent out in December 1925, just before the constitutional drafting process, to 189 hand-picked religious and intellectual figures (many of whom boycotted the survey) led them to prematurely conclude that the constitution’s sectarian clauses were an accurate reflection of the general will of the people.Footnote 42 This view undermines a crucial context: namely, how the French forbade collective deliberation, soliciting selected individual opinions precisely to prevent concerted efforts at organizing opposition. Further, and particularly relevant to Article 95, the confessional distribution of public posts was a French administrative practice that predated the constitution. It was characteristically entangled with clientelism, as it remains today, favoring particular sects at the expense of others.Footnote 43 For these underrepresented communities, therefore, accepting quotas was less about embracing sectarianism than securing their fair share in a system that was already bent on sidelining them.
Although Arab historians like Massoud Daher and Shafiq Juha have argued that colonialism promoted sectarianism, their argument is limited by a lack of French archives.Footnote 44 By bridging this gap, this article focuses on the authorship and genealogy of the Lebanese constitution to reframe sectarianism in Lebanon. It proposes a meaningful understanding of the path legal sectarianism enabled and the alternatives it foreclosed. The analysis highlights the assumed intent of the law (in this case, the supposedly humanitarian concern to protect minority rights in interwar Europe); their translation into sectarian guarantees in Lebanon; and how this subtle distortion was erased from the historical record, ultimately entrenching a system that claimed to serve one purpose when, in reality, it accomplished another.Footnote 45
Legal Fictions and Imperial Realities: Constitutionalism in Lebanon
Colonial archives show that until the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925, it was unlikely that Lebanon would receive a constitution, much less draft its own.Footnote 46 In an attempt to regain France’s credibility after Sarail’s draconian measures led to outright revolt, the troika of French officials—de Caix, de Reffye, and Briand—worked closely together to pressure de Jouvenel in Beirut and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Pulling long-buried details from the archives demonstrates that even when reform was the public goal, power dynamics dominated the conversation.
De Reffye’s Political Formulas
On 3 November 1925, de Reffye outlined a constitutional strategy for Lebanon.Footnote 47 He proposed the creation of a document, le règlement mandataire (the mandatory regulation), to consolidate France’s extended powers in the Levant and give local representatives a semblance of sovereignty by allowing them to draft their own internal constitution. This two-part framework (the règlement mandataire and the internal constitution) formed the basic laws of governance in Mandate Lebanon. De Reffye’s rationale was clear: “Once we have reserved the rights necessary to accomplish our mission [in the règlement mandataire], we will be able to appear liberal in the discussion of the internal constitution of States.”Footnote 48
Lebanese representatives were given a limited and targeted list of questions to discuss that omitted essential principles of state constitutions.Footnote 49 They received the form of constitution-making but not the substance. The latter was imposed from two ideological documents: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the League of Nations mandate charter with its legally binding articles on minority rights.Footnote 50 The local representatives were not meant to tackle the sensitive issue of power politics, nor could they insert or edit clauses of an economic nature.
De Caix’s Colonialism
Although the concepts of “colonialism” and “direct administration” were frowned upon, old imperial attitudes would prevail. The mandate system, formulated in terms suggesting the rearing and education of children, provided a useful lexicon for colonial aspirations.Footnote 51 This is how de Caix differentiated between the mandate’s commitment to “control and redress” and supposedly obsolete colonial practices.Footnote 52 This is also how French policy could grant Lebanon a constitution while downplaying the extent to which Lebanese sovereignty was restricted by this rebranded colonial system.Footnote 53
The powers to “redress and control” were seen and presented as acceptable in light of the indigenous people’s supposed immaturity.Footnote 54 Moreover, as the brutality of the French Mandate surfaced against the backdrop of the Great Syrian Revolt and its spread to Lebanon, French functionaries could justify extreme levels of power by virtue of an accepted and stringent kind of paternalism.Footnote 55 Beyond physical violence and the diplomatic realm of high politics, this authoritarianism took the form of artful deceptions and exclusions.Footnote 56
As de Jouvenel was appointed high commissioner in November 1925, de Caix authored a thirty-page report on French policy in the Levant. In it, he reinterpreted the League’s call for indigenous collaboration.Footnote 57
It does not appear that Geneva asks us to make the [indigenous] populations deliberate on the regime which will be given to them by the Organic Statute [i.e., the constitution]. The Mandates Commission . . . is more concerned with good organization than with the form in which the natives will be called upon to take part in its elaboration. . . . The commission is much more concerned with having before them a mandatory authority retaining all the powers that make a person responsible than with seeing us let go of the political minor entrusted to us.Footnote 58
Based on the assumption that the League of Nations was more concerned with order and authority than indigenous sovereignty, de Caix shaped the framework for drafting Lebanon’s constitution by suggesting that issues “too dangerous or inadmissible to leave to the natives’ deliberation” be drafted by the French as a “règlement mandataire.”Footnote 59 Both this document and the constitution were meant to be submitted to the League of Nations in September 1926.Footnote 60
Three sets of issues would fall under French prerogative, revealing the power dynamics behind the constitutional process. First, all “general principles” would be dictated by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, signaling the prestige and legacy of French civilization as well as the selective deployment of universalist ideals to legitimize colonial authority. Second, France determined the number and division of states in the Levant, for which “the government has an excellent excuse to put forward as justification for this decision . . . : to guarantee minority rights,” a classic colonial strategy of managing difference under the guise of protection.Footnote 61 Finally, the mandate’s own powers were placed entirely beyond local debate, with the rationale that “the means of exercising the guardian’s authority obviously cannot be discussed by the minor.”Footnote 62 This dynamic was exemplified by the mandate policy of granting the representative council “the task of deliberating its constitution,” while explicitly noting that the “constituent power of this Assembly is itself limited by the obligations resulting for France for the exercise of the mandate.”Footnote 63 The language of guardianship and minority rights both justified and exposed the limits of constitutionalism under empire.
Aristide Briand’s Instructions
On 18 January 1926, Briand sent de Jouvenel drafting instructions to ensure that French republicanism and minority rights were included and respected. He stated:
Certain parts of this text hardly call for comment. The liberties that it assures to the inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon are, as I telegraphed to you on November 29 [1925] and as I have since explained to the Chambers, in conformity with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. They are already accepted, at least in theory, in the East and can, therefore, hardly be discussed.
I would add that I have ensured that they are formulated in terms reproducing, as far as possible, those of the Mandate Charter itself.Footnote 64
With these words, Briand explicitly linked the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the mandate charter to the framework of the Lebanese constitution. By ensuring that the “liberties” of Syria and Lebanon’s inhabitants were articulated in terms closely mirroring these texts, the quotation offers one example of how the French administration embedded its own principles as the ideological cornerstone of the 1926 constitution.
The mandate charter provided the constitution with moral values and guarantees of French power, especially in the much-invoked concept of minority rights. For Lebanon, “minority rights” and “community rights” were used interchangeably. It was this rhetorical slip that allowed colonial authorities to institutionalize sectarianism under the guise of legal protection. And so, we find in the mandate charter two of the most controversial clauses of Lebanon’s constitution: the application of personal status laws (Article 6 of the mandate charter) and the protection of religious education (Articles 8, 9, and 10). The instructions for the inclusion of these clauses can be found in an internal memo of the League of Nations dated November 1925. It outlines the “Terms of the mandate,” explicitly citing its “obligations” to “institute” and “guarantee” articles 6, 8, 9 and, 10.Footnote 65
Sectarian personal-status laws were inserted verbatim into Article 9 of the Lebanese constitution as the pledge to ensure “respect for [the population’s] personal status and their religious interests.”Footnote 66 Likewise, Articles 8, 9, 10 of the mandate charter—copied into Article 10 of the constitution—safeguarded the power of religious figures over education of their constituencies.Footnote 67 Under the guise of community rights, these clauses guaranteed the freedom of missionaries in mandate territories. These provisions go back to the successful actions of the International Missionary Council at the League of Nations as they “secured the inclusion of clauses guaranteeing religious toleration and missionary freedom in the mandates.”Footnote 68
Genealogically, then, two of the constitution’s three main sectarian articles were not Lebanese inventions at all: they were drafted in London, signed on 24 July 1922, and transplanted to Beirut four years later—over Michel Chiha’s objections.Footnote 69 Although it is difficult to ascertain what Chiha thought of this, we catch hints here and there in the long list of editorials he published. In what sounds like a retrospective indictment of the 1926 drafting process, Chiha spoke out against the practice of mechanically transplanting European legal models, arguing that Lebanon need not “search only in the arsenal of old constitutional texts” to become a functional nation.Footnote 70 The statement speaks directly to the patronizing French efforts to confirm that “the 1926 constitution, [was] modeled on those of the Great Western powers.”Footnote 71
Briand’s document is relentless in emphasizing the overarching goal of the mandate. It was “not only to advise, but also to effectively control the acts of the Syrian and Lebanese governments, to rectify them and even to supplement them in the event of deficiency in serious matters.”Footnote 72 He also spelled out the method: permit local representatives to deliberate “very freely within this framework,” yet reserve for France, “the powers of rectification and replacement which, in constitutional matters as in any other, belong to the Mandatory for all the acts of the governments entrusted to his supervision.”Footnote 73 This strategy reveals how a supposedly liberal constitutional era, rather than rolling back colonialism, introduced more subtle ways of maintaining it. It granted a space for debate, only to correct, redress, and restrict that debate whenever imperial interests—borders, minorities, mandate powers—were at stake.
Drafting the Constitution: Chiha’s Missing Papers
Driven by the imperative to look beyond the colonial archives, I sought out family papers to shed a more intimate and local light on the debate over Lebanon’s sectarian constitution. This led me to Michel Chiha’s gracious descendants and the Chiha Foundation. His personal papers reveal more than twenty drafts: some partial, most complete, one fully handwritten, the majority typed on a typewriter, three printed in French, and two printed in Arabic. They are largely marked by layers of handwritten corrections. The absence of dates has forced historians to do some detective work, reconstructing chronology from the first edits to the latest revisions incorporated in the typed texts. The format of ten typewritten drafts—with a vertical line dividing typed text on the left from handwritten corrections on the right—suggests a correspondence. The format also replicates how the Quay d’Orsay often communicated with Beirut in their revisions of the organic statute (the legal framework that included the constitution). In French diplomatic records, one column presented the original clause, and the other presented new suggestions and modifications. It was a conversation of sorts that, with each correspondence, eventually led from progress to completion.Footnote 74
Although some drafts, in multiple hands and inks, betray the presence of French mandate officials (most likely Paul Souchier, the constitutionalist lawyer dispatched to Beirut by the high commissioner, as well as de Jouvenel himself), it seems the most prolific annotations were in Chiha’s handwriting.Footnote 75
If we accept this view, what can we then conclude regarding authorship of the constitution’s sectarian clauses? Here, some factors may be worth our attention. First, the earliest and fully handwritten draft by Chiha does not contain the sectarian provisions of the final constitution; there is no mention of personal status laws, distribution of public posts by sect, or communal schools. These only appear as the drafts and marginalia pile up. Second, Chiha explicitly criticized the sectarian clauses in some of his later published editorials, particularly sectarian quotas in public administration and personal status laws. Third, he did not attend the Lebanese parliamentary vote to adopt the constitution he presumably wrote, which Rabbath, for instance, reads as a sign of disapproval. In light of these factors, there is good reason to believe that the handwritten notes do not represent Chiha’s views.Footnote 76
My interpretation, informed by the colonial archives and the unusual, divided format of the drafts, accentuates a conversational element: Chiha’s notes were likely comments from French high officials that he wrote in the margins. In this light, the scribbles form a record of the “tutelage” that shaped mandate policy and the constitutional process, first as suggestion, then, as Briand’s framework made clear, as imposition. This reasoning helps explain why the same annotations recur across multiple drafts. The repetitions indicate that Chiha was not simply recording suggestions. He may well have been resisting, draft after draft, their incorporation into the typed text.
Although I posit that Chiha’s notes were feedback from French officials, some drafts featured their direct intervention. Souchier’s comments are easily discernible. “Do not confuse, as we often see here, ‘law,’ ‘decree,’ ‘order,’ ‘decision,’ ‘public administration regulations,’” he admonishes.Footnote 77 “Since you are writing an organic statute, you have to define exactly the constituencies, or say that they will be defined by ‘public administration regulations’ — or leave the care of all this to the electoral law.”Footnote 78 The authoritative tone is unmistakable. Put together, the handwritten corrections—including Chiha’s—consistently and incrementally realigned the drafts with Briand’s instructions and the key ideological documents imposed by the French administration.
The side revisions did not simply edit. They overwrote many articles and changed their substance. If Chiha was correcting the material he had himself typed on the left side of these papers, his comments aligned that text with French policies. Given the historical context and Chiha’s own later declared dislike of these sectarian provisions, the most plausible explanation is that Chiha tailored the drafts to fit the views of higher authorities who insisted on their inclusion. The drafts show comments that were repeatedly ignored. By delaying these changes and by absenting himself from the sessions to defend this constitutional project, Chiha was perhaps signaling his opposition.
I now turn to concrete examples of these corrections as they appear in relation to the most prominent sectarian articles in the constitution (Articles 9, 10, and 95) and their marked evolution in Chiha’s papers.
The Sectarian Articles of the Constitution
The Imperial Alibi
Legal sectarianism is a striking and defining feature of Lebanon’s political system. At the same time, the issue of personal status law, in which the personal details of life (from marriage and divorce to inheritance) fall under religious sectarian laws, echoes across the Arab world and the region. Crucially, however, this system is far from being the relic of a bygone Islamic system of governance.Footnote 79 The colonial misconception that it served as a continuation of the Ottoman millet system fails when we explore the legal practices of the decades and centuries past. As Judith Tucker has notably argued, the flexibility afforded between the law and its practice during Ottoman times reflected conscientious interpretations of justice rather than legal doctrines.Footnote 80 By contrast, as codification became a cornerstone of the French mandate’s centralizing policies, a new legal reality emerged. To this day, this law remains emblematic of a perceived sectarian and misogynistic Arab world. Specifically, the events behind the inscription of Article 9 support what postcolonial scholars have already established: in intent and genealogy, personal status laws bear little resemblance to their regional antecedents, although crucially those antecedents provided the “historical alibi” for their inclusion.Footnote 81 The first draft of Article 9 stated: “Freedom of Conscience is absolute. By paying homage to the Highest, the state recognizes all faiths and guarantees and protects their free exercise on condition that public order is not undermined.”Footnote 82
Here, the article seems to promise broad religious liberty. Yet, in the final printed constitution, personal status laws appear. The newly added clause was lifted directly from the mandate charter: “It also guarantees to the populations, to whatever rite they belong, respect for their personal status and their religious interest.”Footnote 83 Missing from all the previous drafts, it was enshrined in the constitution.
This shift is telling. The formula was a product of colonial policy. If we retrace the politics of the League of Nations, then its inclusion in the 1922 mandate charter was itself possibly inspired by the legal precedent set by Article 10 of the 1919 Serb-Croat-Slovene Minorities Treaty.Footnote 84 This lineage undermines the idea that there is a single, fixed, and rigid conception of sectarianism, as illustrated by the divergence between French colonial minority politics and Chiha’s ideology. Each sectarian conception had its own purpose and intent, suggesting that some variations of sectarianism were more pertinent to European imperial history—specifically the complex legacy of the minority rights regime—than to Arab realities and intellectual thought. By situating these concepts within their respective historical contexts, we are better able to appreciate their differences in content.
Chiha had famously championed the idea that all sects should have proportional representation in parliament. He defended this arrangement as “a lesson in tolerance,” in which “the [parliamentary] assembly [formed] the meeting point and union of the communities.”Footnote 85 However, his writings also reveal deep resignation to personal status laws—a reality “considered by pure reason an impossibility.”Footnote 86 He warned that “Lebanon which already has enough personal status laws as it is, cannot give laws that would only be valid for this or that part of its nationals.”Footnote 87 He viewed personal status laws as fragmenting citizenship and preferred a unified legal code. His most direct and scathing criticism came in a 1934 editorial in which he denounced “the diversity of jurisdictions, the imprecision of the legal texts, and the differences in interpretation [that] lead to injustices” leaving the most vulnerable, children, as victims of these legal gaps: “Behind the texts on personal status lie all the family dramas, the horror of abandoned or nearly abandoned children. . . . From a humanitarian and social point of view, the personal status system must be reformed as soon as possible, the competent jurisdiction unified, and the legal texts coordinated.”Footnote 88
Missionary Education and Sectarian Guarantees
The issue of what gets taught in schools was central to the constitution’s article on freedom of education. In the early drafts, the typewritten text repeatedly ignored handwritten marginalia that urged sectarian guarantees. The first version simply stated: “Education is free as long as it is not contrary to public order and morality.”Footnote 89 In the third draft, a note, drawn from the mandate charter and Briand’s instructions, appeared: “There shall be no infringement of the right of communities to maintain their schools, with a view to the instruction and education of their members in their own language, on condition that they comply with the general prescriptions on public education enacted by the state.”Footnote 90
Despite relentless annotations to insert these sectarian educational rights, Chiha’s subsequent drafts retained the original phrasing. The sixth draft finally conceded a partial inclusion: “Education is free insofar as it is not contrary to public order and good morals, and subject to the general prescription on public education enacted by the state. There shall be no infringement of the right of communities to have their own schools.”Footnote 91 In this revised version, Chiha reduced the sectarian clause and dropped the language provision, signaling resistance to the full colonial template.
Rabbath observed that the freedom of sectarian education did not reflect concern for local rights. It was an effort to protect foreign religious missions, both Jesuits and Protestants.Footnote 92 Indeed, guarantees of communal schools had entered the 1922 mandate charter through lobbying by the International Missionary Council in 1921.Footnote 93 They were reinserted in 1926 as Article 10 of the Lebanese constitution: “Education is free insofar as it is not contrary to public order and good morals and does not affect the dignity of confessions. There shall be no infringement of the right of the communities to have their schools, subject to the general prescriptions on public instruction enacted by the state.”Footnote 94
Sectarian Bureaucracy: Forging Power and Patronage
Article 95 of the Lebanese constitution is infamous for allocating public posts by sectarian quotas. It continues to be widely seen, as it was during the mandate, as a source of Lebanon’s corruption. By enabling sectarian leaders to distribute jobs based on communal solidarity, it reinforced patron-client networks at the expense of competence and transparency.Footnote 95 Ironically, its origins lie in Article 12 of the constitution, a provision about merit inspired by the universalist ideals of the French Revolution. Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen anchors public service in merit:
Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.Footnote 96
The earliest draft of Article 12, initially appearing as Article 11 of Chiha’s manuscript, mirrored this spirit: “Civil servants are chosen by their competence and their personal merit, taking into account, as far as possible, its practices, without however harming the good of the state. A law will give civil servants a legislative status.”Footnote 97
The influence of the Declaration’s emphasis on virtue and talent is unmistakable. But as the drafts evolved, the language of meritocracy faded. By the fifth draft, Chiha’s notes replaced the article entirely:
Article 12: All Lebanese citizens are equally eligible for all public employment without any other reason for preference than their merit and competence and according to the conditions fixed by law. However, given the custom of Lebanon and with the intention of justice and harmony, the communities will be fairly represented in public employment without, however, harming the good of the state. A law will provide civil servants with a legal status.Footnote 98
This revision marked a drastic change from principles of meritocracy to sectarian quotas. In a show of harsh disagreement, a reviewer, most probably the French high commissioner, scribbled on the margin: “This does not fit into a constitution. It is to make it obsolete at the very moment of establishing it. It is putting Lebanon outside civilization. What about competence and merit? Are they divided by community? Blatant contradiction.”Footnote 99 De Jouvenel’s comment on the draft corroborates the general view in the local press at the time that the French were against such sectarian considerations.Footnote 100 Lebanese journalist George Naccache in April 1926 urged Paul Souchier to intervene against “this aberration,” and “pure madness” that would turn a “dancer into an accountant, provided he is Latin [i.e., Catholic], and an accountant into a dancer on the sole condition that he be Shiʿi.”Footnote 101
A compromise seemed to emerge with de Jouvenel’s protest of the clause. Article 12 was eventually split: the original, with minor revisions, remained as Article 12, and Article 95 was added under “Final and Transitional Dispositions.” The final version, as found in the constitution, reads:
Article 95: As a transitional measure and in accordance with the provisions of article 1 of the Mandate Charter and with the intention of justice and harmony, the communities will be fairly represented in public employment and in the composition of the ministry without harming the good of the state.Footnote 102
Chiha himself condemned this outcome, both in print and in his private papers. His papers reveal a rare document labeled “observations,” including “Article 12: I would be of the opinion to delete the second paragraph. Proportional representation of communities should be limited to both Houses.”Footnote 103 Regrettably, this comment was met with a “non” marked on the side in Chiha’s hand, which, as his later articles clearly imply, did not reflect his views. In an obvious echo to this demand, Chiha published editorials against the insertion of sectarianism “in the administration and everywhere else,” insisting, “Is it not enough that the basic guarantee of proportionality exists in the Chamber?”Footnote 104 The belief in limiting sectarianism to political representation, especially in the parliament, was one of the cornerstones of Chiha’s confessional ideology. He repeated this plea multiple times, calling sectarian quotas in public posts an “element of disorder,” as he bitingly inquired, “Could we not ask the public authorities. . . . to renounce, in the name of fairness and justice . . . the sacrosanct principle of the confessional distribution of public offices?”—but in vain.Footnote 105
The final version of Article 95 explicitly cites the “Mandate Charter,” invoking its call to encourage local autonomy. The deputy Yusuf al-Khazen had protested this inclusion, presumably because the article does not find its source in the terms of France’s League of Nations’ mandate.Footnote 106 This raises the question of the clause’s origins. If both the drafting committee and the French administration seemed somewhat hesitant to include Article 95, then who insisted on it? Rabbath argues that the precise authorship is unclear, possibly emerging from “obscure suggestions and pressures within the office of the High Commissioner.”Footnote 107 However, he reports that Raymond Eddé later admitted his father, Emile Eddé, who was Chiha’s longtime political rival, had personally drafted it. In addition to the Eddé theory, Rabbath writes, without providing references, that the drive to include Article 95 came from deputies Omar Daouk and Subhi Haydar, who viewed it as a bulwark against Christian monopoly of the country’s administration.Footnote 108 Although it is incongruous for Haydar to have argued for its inclusion given his firm stance against it in the minutes of the constitutional debates, the archives attest to the claim about Muslim insecurity.Footnote 109 That concern resonates in the multiple petitions presented by Muslims who claimed to be underrepresented in public posts.Footnote 110 It also corroborates the curious content of a document absent from the constitutional files but found in the general records of “Grand Liban” at the Ministry of French Foreign Affairs.
This document was a letter from Bishop Abdallah Sfeir initially addressed to Patriarch Howayek, but subsequently forwarded to the Quai d’Orsay in March 1926. Sfeir, reflecting on the unrest among Arab unionists and the pressures of the French mandate, proposed,
[It] consists in granting them a greater share in the administration of the country. A little more or less of Christian functionaries has no influence on [Greater Lebanon’s] well-being and its property. It is the regime that counts, as well as the vigilance of the Mandate. Civil servants are docile instruments in the hands of the Head of Government when he is French; and the eventual Native Governor must be influenced by the authority of the Mandate and communicate it to his subordinates [i.e., civil servants]. [Moreover,] Christian administrators can better assert their complaints against the abuses of civil servants when the latter are Muslims than when they are Christians.Footnote 111
This correspondence is found on microfilm several scrolls ahead of a preparatory draft of the constitution containing Article 95. It reveals how this article became a tool to balance competing demands, based on the Maronite clergy’s sectarian conception of the various parties’ motivations. On the one hand, it guaranteed Arab unionists, assumed to conceive of themselves as primarily Muslim, a share of power in the new nation, and on the other it reassured Maronite leaders, under the watchful eye of the mandate.Footnote 112 The clergy explicitly pushed for a quota system to buy Muslim loyalty to a new state struggling against serious dissent and the Great Syrian Revolt. In this sense, the sectarian allocation of public posts was not a natural outgrowth of local society, but a bargaining chip of the Maronite clergy that solidified the lesson that governance was transactional.Footnote 113 What looked like a local peculiarity (although it received scathing criticism in the local newspapers, some calling Article 95 a “heretic innovation”) was actually a manifestation of the chaotic system established by the French upon their arrival.Footnote 114 From the ideal of merit to sectarian structures of patronage (what Chiha sharply criticized as “administrative sophistry”), the transformation of Article 12 at the behest of Sfeir, Howayek, and their ilk incisively reasserts the heavy weight of the colonial context in how this story unfolded.Footnote 115
Conclusion
As the constitution marks its centennial, I have shown that its ideological core was not the result of local consensus, but rather the product of European legal engineering. Articles 9 and 10 of the 1926 constitution, far from being indigenous, were transplanted from the interwar system of European minority treaties, through the League of Nations’ mandate charter. Tracing this genealogy compels us to reconsider a fundamental disconnect between the local problems that legal sectarianism claims to address and the external European discourse that imposed it. It pushes us to question why a legal framework that collapsed so dramatically in Europe is still in place elsewhere. Perhaps the answer lies in the absence of this legal European connection from our historical narratives. This absence leads to the misattribution of sectarianism’s origins to local circumstances when it was mostly the outgrowth of Europe’s failed experiment with minority rights regimes. Article 95 of the constitution was an exception, originating from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and a Maronite proposal to address presumed Muslim grievances, a policy adopted by the Quai d’Orsay despite its flawed assumption that the rebels of the Great Syrian Revolt were exclusively Muslim. Yet Chiha’s papers, the colonial archives, and the local press reveal that Article 95, far from soothing insecurities, fueled controversy.
Jean Louis Aujol, friend of de Jouvenel, offers a telling remark in his memoirs, observing, “Forty years later, Lebanon is still living under this charter which we continued to call the ‘Jouvenel-Souchier constitution.’”Footnote 116 As we reflect on one hundred years of the Lebanese constitution, Aujol’s memories underscore the enduring legacy of imperialist policies, a fact this article has tried to formally corroborate in the historiography.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many people who have facilitated the research and writing of this article, in particular, the Chiha Foundation, Nadim Shehadi, Isabelle Doumet Skaf, Claude Doumet-Serhal, and Claude Asfar, who introduced me to Chiha’s papers. I also benefited from the generous support of mentors, colleagues, and friends who read and/or commented on different drafts: Ussama Makdisi, John-Paul Ghobrial, Nathan Citino, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Mary Wilson, Jens Hanssen, Charles Ganier, the Moving Stories team at the University of Oxford—Weston Bland, Christopher Cooper-Davies, Joseph Leidy, Orçun Can Okan, and Fergus Nicoll—and Saleh Agha. I am also grateful to two anonymous peer reviewers and the editor at IJMES, Lara Deeb, for their careful reading and constructive feedback. The research for this article was supported by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 101001717) as part of the project “Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East” at the University of Oxford. It was also made possible through the support of the Arab Council of the Social Sciences with funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York for the Early Career Fellows program (Cycle 10). The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
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