Straight to the point

A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged by ordinary people, elbowing each other out the way to shake his hand, many begged Macron to save their country from itself.

In the wake of a cross-sectarian protest movement, and deep-seated popular anger against the corrupt and intransigent Lebanese state, many Lebanese saw their former colonial master as the answer to all their prayers. The President was especially well-received in Gemmayzeh, a Christian bastion, and one of the neighbourhoods most affected by the port explosion. Macron, for his part, played his part well, echoing the grievances of a people beset by a crumbling economy and shameless elite corruption. “I’m not here to help them,” Macron proclaimed. “I’m here to help you.”

So popular was Macron’s visit, in fact, that 50,000 Lebanese even signed a petition urging France to recolonise their homeland. The President never addressed the petition, but beyond helping raise €250 million for the benighted country, he also established an ambitious roadmap to transform Lebanon, claiming he’d received assurances from Lebanese leaders that they’d soon form a new cabinet. The humanitarian duly arrived — but the reforms never materialised. It took another year before Lebanon’s bickering politicians finally formed a new government, and by all appearances it’s just as feckless as any other.

Now, four years later, Macron is trying to save Lebanon once more — this time motivated as much by domestic political concerns as by France’s influence in the Middle East. Today in Paris, he’s hosting an international conference to garner “support” for Lebanon’s people and sovereignty, after already endorsing a ceasefire proposal to end Israel’s war in the country. Facing challengers from both the Left and the Right at home, Macron has become all but powerless domestically, and sees high-profile crises in places like Ukraine, Africa, and especially Lebanon as opportunities to boost his credentials as a bold international player. But his chances of success this time around are little better than they were four years ago. For while France has grand pretensions in Lebanon, drawing on centuries of tangled cultural and political engagement, the truth is that the Middle East has moved on.

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Relations between France and Lebanon stretch back almost 1,000 years. During the First Crusade, Count Raymond of Toulouse “discovered” the Maronites, the largest of Lebanon’s Christian sects, living in the mountains of the Levant, thereby reconnecting them to the rest of Western Christendom. Centuries later in 1649, as the area today known as Lebanon gained a degree of autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty, France opened its first consulate in Beirut and officially took the Maronites under its protection at the behest of the community’s patriarch. In the 19th century, meanwhile, as the protector of Lebanon’s Christian population, France armed the Maronites against their local rivals and even sent troops on their behalf. All the while, France spread the glories of its culture across the Mediterranean, opening universities and lycées. Even today, names like Beirut’s Saint Joseph University evoke the best schooling Lebanon can offer.

These varied efforts would be crystalised in 1923, when France established colonial mandates in Lebanon and Syria. Unlike in Damascus, where foreign rule was fiercely resisted, many in Beirut saw the French as cousins — perhaps unsurprising for a Christian-majority country where French education had long been prized. Soon enough, meanwhile, these varied influences would reshape Lebanese identity. Greetings like ça va and bonjour became common refrains in Beirut cafés, even as many Christians named their children Georges or Pierre. Michel Aoun, a commander during the Civil War and later the country’s president, is just one of many political luminaries to have a French name too.

Though French was most eagerly embraced by the Maronites, it was equally used right across society. At the institutional level, French has long appeared on Lebanon’s currency, its central bank is officially known as The Banque du Liban, and French transliterations of Arabic place names continue to appear on signs across the country to this day. Even now, around 40% of Lebanese can speak at least some French.

All the same, French in Lebanon would fade. Perhaps the main obvious factor is demography. Though the Maronite elite envisaged the modern Lebanese state as a Christian island in a Muslim sea, the country today is a multicultural nation of Sunni and Shi’a, Christian and Druze. Maronites, for their part, along with other Christian sects, have fallen sharply as a share of the country’s total population. As Lebanon’s population has grown and many Christians emigrated in search of greener pastures, the percentage of Maronites and other Christian groups in the country dropped from around 50% in 1932 to around 32% today. And while French retains some prestige among the country’s elite, the idea that Lebanon is some hardy Christian outpost is unsurprisingly alien to the Shi’as of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley.

Little wonder, then, that English has supplanted French as the most popular foreign language among young Lebanese. White-collar professionals have moved the same way, with English business jargon and phrases like “sorry” or “bye” (often in combination with the Arabic expression yalla) now as ubiquitous in the local Arabic dialect as French once was. Renowned newspapers that once published exclusively in French like L’Orient-Le Jour have launched English-language versions in the past few years, and recent Lebanese films like The Insult have opted to use English, rather than French, titles. While I was in Beirut several years ago, a friend comically recounted how a Lebanese university student at a poetry reading said they had written their poem in Arabic because, they claimed absurdly, it was “a dying language” in Lebanon — and was giving way not to French, but rather to English.

Nor is this merely a story of linguistic change. For as French’s star has fallen, so too has that of the Republic itself. Though Paris deployed troops to Lebanon during the Civil War — and helped secure the release of then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Saudi custody as recently as 2017 — it’s generally been supplanted by the US. After all, it’s now Washington not Paris that funds the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the Pentagon pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Lebanon since the Nineties. The US too has emerged as the primary Western backer of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim political elite alongside its ally Saudi Arabia, and there is hardly a better symbol of its growing might in the country than its gargantuan, fortress-like embassy looking down on Beirut from the surrounding hills. It hardly helps that France’s own foreign policy, typified by the independent spirit of people like Jacques Chirac, has long since been subsumed by American interests.

Taken together, then, the pleas of Lebanese Francophiles back in 2020 were little more than the dying breaths of a lost age. As the President’s appearance in 2020 so vividly proved, the “Paris of the Middle East” vanished long ago. And performative proposals aside, today’s conference won’t achieve much either. Tellingly, neither Israel nor Iran are attending Macron’s shindig, making any progress towards a ceasefire a non-starter, and although the US is sending a few diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will not be present. It’s clear then that the most critical players involved in the conflict see it as a sideshow, and Macron’s ability to act decisively in the region has long disappeared, if it ever existed at all. Where Lebanon now goes, in short, is out of France’s hands.

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