The Levant crisis

On the evening of 29 May 1945, three weeks after Germany’s surrender, French artillery opened fire on Damascus. Mortars, field guns and tanks shelled the Syrian parliament building, defended by a handful of gendarmes, and then Senegalese tirailleurs stormed it. Over the next two days shells fell on police stations, government offices, the citadel and the commercial districts of the capital of a state that France itself had declared independent four years earlier. Clashes had already been going on for ten days in other Syrian cities, while in Lebanon there were strikes and demonstrations against the presence of French troops.

The statement that “fighting broke out in Syria and Lebanon” on this day needs two qualifications. First, 29 May was not the beginning of the fighting but its climax – the first riots and casualties in Aleppo, Hama and Homs occurred between 19 and 28 May. Second, armed fighting took place mainly in Syria; in Lebanon the crisis took the form of demonstrations, strikes and boycotts, without comparable bloodshed. Moreover, the nationalists in both countries were no longer demanding independence as such – both states were formally sovereign – but the withdrawal of French troops and the handover of the local formations that were still under French officers.

These events went down in history as the Levant crisis. They were ended by the intervention of Britain, which forced its ally to back down, provoked the sharpest dispute between London and Paris since the start of the war and sealed the end of the French presence in the Levant.

Independence without evacuation

Since 1920 Syria and Lebanon had formed a French League of Nations mandate. In the summer of 1941 British, Australian and Free French troops took them from the Vichy administration, and General Georges Catroux, on behalf of Charles de Gaulle, promised both countries independence. Britain guaranteed that promise. The road to fulfilling it, however, was a long one, and it ran through to the declaration of war on the Axis by Syria and Lebanon: after the crisis of November 1943, when the French arrested the Lebanese president and government, and after firm British intervention, the French handed most of their powers over to the governments in Damascus and Beirut from 1 January 1944. They retained, however, their own garrisons and command of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant (Special Troops of the Levant) – formations made up of local soldiers under French command.

For de Gaulle the Levant was a matter of prestige and of France’s place in the world. He believed that before the troops were withdrawn Syria and Lebanon must conclude treaties with France guaranteeing her military bases and a privileged cultural and economic position – on the model of the agreements Britain had with Iraq and Egypt. He also suspected that the British, who had much larger forces in the region, wanted to push France out of the Middle East. The governments in Damascus and Beirut – in Syria under President Shukri al-Quwatli, in Lebanon under President Bechara El Khoury – refused to conclude any agreements under the pressure of foreign troops. In the spring of 1945 both sides had their eyes on the San Francisco conference, at which Syria and Lebanon sat among the founders of the United Nations.

Reinforcements and demonstrations

French reinforcements provided the spark. At the beginning of May, and again on 17 May, further units were landed at Beirut, including a battalion of Senegalese tirailleurs; according to French historians, de Gaulle agreed to send them despite warnings that it would inflame the population. In Damascus and Beirut this was read as a sign that force would be used. Already on VE Day, 8 May, there were incidents in Beirut and other cities between celebrating French soldiers and Arab demonstrators.

In mid-May the French Delegate-General in the Levant, General Paul Beynet, presented the conditions on which Paris made the handover of the Special Troops dependent: guarantees for French cultural, economic and strategic interests. The governments of both countries broke off talks. On 19 May there were strikes and demonstrations in the cities of Syria and Lebanon; in Damascus shots were fired near the French hospital. On 20 May three French soldiers were killed in riots in Aleppo. The French blamed the Syrian gendarmerie for failing to act, and their aircraft and armoured patrols circled over the cities.

On 27 and 28 May the fighting spread to Homs and Hama. At Hama insurgents attacked a French relief column and seized some of its weapons; the French responded with artillery fire and air raids, in which – according to some studies – about 80 people were killed. More and more soldiers of the Special Troops deserted their French officers and went over to the insurgents; in the Hauran, local people disarmed French posts. Beynet concluded that only a blow against Damascus would restore order; military authority there was in the hands of General Fernand Oliva-Roget.

The shelling of Damascus

On the evening of 29 May, at about 7 p.m., an incident took place outside the parliament building: according to French accounts, Syrian gendarmes refused to salute the French flag being raised outside a nearby headquarters, a grenade exploded and shots were fired. The French used heavy weapons – mortars, 75 mm guns and tanks – and Senegalese tirailleurs then took the building. Of the roughly 30 defenders of the parliament, 28 were killed according to findings cited by French authors, some of them with bladed weapons after they had already been taken prisoner. The deputies managed to escape; the building was looted and burned.

The attack extended to police stations and government buildings. The artillery shelled the citadel, the area around Marjeh Square with the seat of government, the town hall, the Bank of Syria, hotels and the Hejaz Railway station; French bombers dropped bombs on the citadel, which was defended by troops loyal to the government. The city’s electricity was cut off, and Syria’s borders with Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq were closed. On 30 May the Syrians counter-attacked and for a few hours retook the parliament, the town hall and the police headquarters; by the evening the parliament building was again in French hands. Although that same evening the government in Paris authorised a ceasefire order, fighting continued on 31 May. French and Senegalese troops went into the souks and looted shops; British inspections of French barracks in June found many looted items, although Oliva-Roget denied any looting.

The number of victims is not known precisely. Estimates for Damascus alone range from about 400–480 to 600 killed (the latter figure, together with some 1,500 wounded, was given by the Syrian government), and some sources speak of at least 800 dead. Churchill spoke of 2,000 victims, but – as historians point out – this was an estimate for the whole of Syria; some studies give a total of about a thousand Syrians killed.

Churchill’s ultimatum

President al-Quwatli appealed to Britain for help. The Syrian prime minister, Faris al-Khoury, was in San Francisco at the time, putting his country’s case to the delegates gathered at the founding conference of the United Nations. In London Winston Churchill, who had been at odds with de Gaulle for months, feared that the fighting in Syria would set the whole Arab Middle East ablaze – from Cairo to Baghdad – and threaten British communications in the region. The formal basis for action was the principle that during the war – which was still going on in the Pacific – the French forces in the Levant were subordinate to the British Middle East Command, headed by General Bernard Paget. Churchill coordinated his move with President Harry Truman, who supported it.

On 31 May Churchill sent de Gaulle a telegram: “In order to avoid a collision between British and French forces, we request you immediately to order the French troops to cease fire and to withdraw to their barracks.” The same day the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, informed the House of Commons of it. De Gaulle later claimed in his memoirs that the French ceasefire order had preceded the British demand, and that London had made the telegram public in order to present France as a humiliated culprit. On the evening of 31 May a British general delivered an order to cease fire to the French command in Syria on behalf of the Allied Middle East Command.

On 1 June British units, including armoured units brought over from Transjordan, entered Damascus. The French soldiers were escorted to their barracks and withdrawn from the streets; the inhabitants cheered the British and jeered the convoys carrying French troops out of the city. Paget met President al-Quwatli and, with his consent, imposed a curfew, while order was kept by the Syrian gendarmerie. French civilians were evacuated to Beirut. The parliament building was a burnt-out ruin, and part of the city centre bore the marks of shelling and fires. Oliva-Roget was soon recalled.

De Gaulle’s anger

In Paris the British intervention was received as a humiliation. Beynet called it “a stab in the back”. De Gaulle believed that the British had for years been fomenting Arab nationalism in order to take over France’s influence, and he is said to have remarked that the whole affair “stank of oil”. He told the British ambassador in Paris, Duff Cooper – according to Cooper’s own account – that France was in no position to wage war on Britain, but that the British had betrayed France and the West, and that this could not be forgotten. The foreign minister, Georges Bidault, compared the crisis to the Fashoda Incident of 1898. The United States and the Soviet Union, however, sided with Syria and Lebanon, and France was left isolated in this dispute – in the same weeks she also came into conflict with the Americans over the occupation of Stuttgart and over the Aosta Valley.

What came next

May 1945 sealed the fate of the French presence in the Levant. The Syrian government refused any further negotiations with France, and the newly formed Arab League backed Damascus and Beirut. In the summer of 1945 the French withdrew most of their troops from Syria to the coast and to Lebanon, and on 1 August they handed the Special Troops of the Levant over to the governments of the two states; the armies of Syria and Lebanon grew out of them. In December 1945 Britain and France agreed on a simultaneous evacuation of their troops. Syria and Lebanon, dissatisfied with the terms, lodged a complaint with the United Nations Security Council in February 1946 – one of the first matters it dealt with; on 16 February the Soviet Union vetoed an American draft resolution, the first veto in the Council’s history. The powers nevertheless gave assurances that they would withdraw their troops. The last French soldiers left Syria on 17 April 1946 – Syrians celebrate the day as Evacuation Day – and Lebanon at the end of 1946.

The Levant crisis was one of several signs that the end of the war in Europe would not bring a return to the colonial order of before 1939. In the same month, after the Sétif riots of 8 May, French repression in Algeria claimed thousands of victims (estimates vary enormously), while in Asia the Vietnamese, Indonesians and Burmese were preparing to fight for independence after Japan’s surrender. The dispute over Damascus also showed the limits of French power: de Gaulle, who throughout the war had fought for France to be recognised as a power equal to her allies, had to give way to a British ultimatum, and trust between London and Paris was undermined for many months. For Syria and Lebanon the May fighting became the last stage of the road opened by the 1941 campaign: from a mandate under foreign rule to full independence.