Lebanese Migration to Frech West Africa

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Failing to Stem the Tide: Lebanese

Migration to French West Africa and

the Competing Prerogatives of the

Imperial State

A N D R E W K E R IM A R S A N

Princeton University

In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Franaise, or

AOF, as Frances West African possessions were known, consistently failed to

introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration

under their purview.1 This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, admin-

istrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the Government-

General of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates tothese 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.2 Most worked as produce brokers,

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank the anonymous CSSHreviewers, as well as the par-ticipants in the France and the Arab World workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in Sep-tember 2009, for their helpful comments. Simon Jackson and Ben White, in particular, proved

insightful and generous readers. Megan Vaughan read through more versions of this paper thanshe would care to remember; her suggestions have proved invaluable. David Akin has been anunderstanding and sensitive editor, and I am grateful to him for clarifying both my thoughts andmy muddy syntax.

1 The Federation of Afrique Occidentale Franaise was created in 1895 as a union of Senegal,Soudan, Guinea, and Cte dIvoire. In 1902, its separate territorial administrations were subordi-nated to a Government-General, whose seat lay first in Saint-Louis, then from 1904 in Dakar. Itwas also in 1904 that Dahomey was included in this group of colonies. Mauritania and Nigerremained territoires militaires, administered by military men answering to the Ministry ofDefence until the 1920s and the 1940s, respectively, while the colony of Haute-Volta (present-dayBurkina Faso) was created only in the 1920s. For accounts of the shifting makeup of AOF, seeCatherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Odile Goerg, eds., LAfrique Occidentale au Temps des Fran-

ais: Colonisateurs et Coloniss, c. 18601960 (Paris, 1992); and Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civi-lize: The Republican Empire in France and West Africa, 18951930 (Stanford, 1997).

2 Jean-Gabriel Desbordes provides the aggregate figure of 5,792 for 1936, in LImmigration Libano-Syrienne en Afrique Occidentale Franaise (Poitiers, 1938), 18. Robert Delavignette

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(3):450478.0010-4175/11 $15.00# Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011doi:10.1017/S0010417511000211

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shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from

African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as tex-

tiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches.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 wit-

nessed a formidable bolstering of the bulwarks against human movement

across the world.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, Austra-

lia, and South Africa sought to regulate the movements of itinerant peoples

and migrants deemed undesirable on racial grounds.5 They did so not only

by imposing restrictions upon entry, but also by wielding powers of expulsion.6

These measures grew increasingly rigid during the First World War, when pass-

port 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.7

estimates that 6,235 Lebanese and Syrians were dwelling in AOF at the close of the 1930s, in Les

Vrais Chefs de lEmpire (Paris, 1939), 37. The slight discrepancy can be explained by lax methodsof enumeration and the fluidity of this community.

3 On the history of these communities, see Andrew Arsan, Lebanese Migrants in French WestAfrica, 18981939, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009; Sad Boumedouha, The Leba-nese in Senegal: A History of the Relationship between an Immigrant Community and ItsFrench and African Rulers, PhD thesis, Centre for West African Studies, University of Birming-ham, 1987; Salma Kojok, Les Libanais en Cte dIvoire, PhD thesis, Universit de Nantes, 2002.

4 For broad surveys of these changes, see Adam McKeown,Melancholy Order: Asian Migrationand the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); and John Torpey, The Invention of the Pass-port: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, 2000), esp. chs. 45.

5 See, on the United States, Aristide Zolberg, The Great Wall against China: Responses to theFirst Immigration Crisis, 18851925, in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration,

Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Berne, 1997), 291315; andAdam McKeown, Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in theUnited States and China, American Historical Review 108, 2 (2003): 377403. For a comparativeapproach, see Patrick Weil, Races at the Gate: Racial Distinctions in Immigration Policy: A Com-

parison between France and the United States, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and PatrickWeil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices inEurope and the United States from the French Revolution to the Interwar Period (New York,2003), 27197. On efforts to check the movements of itinerant peoples in metropolitan France,see Christophe Delclitte, La Catgorie Juridique Nomade dans la Loi de 1912, Hommes etMigrations 11881189 (1995): 2330.

6 Franck Caestecker, The Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Expulsion Policy, 18801914, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, eds., Migration Control in the

North Atlantic World(New York, 2003), 12037.7 For details of these measures, see Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American

Immigration Policy, 17981965 (Philadelphia, 1981); and Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design:Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

F A I L I N G T O S T E M T H E T I D E 451


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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.8 This regulation,

which required ship passengers to present a visa granted by appropriate consu-

lar authorities before boarding, was quickly replicated by governmentselsewhere.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 countrys

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 foun-

dation of sovereignty for all states within the [international] system.10 By

World War II, many states had come to resemble, at least on paper, the

wall-enclosed towns of the medieval period.11

While governments everywhere were fastening their bolts, the administrators

of AOF kept their doors reluctantly open. Their failure was, in essence, a con-

sequence not of lack of administrative wherewithal, but rather of external press-

ures that significantly constrained their capacity to act. Particularly important

here was the unyielding position of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

the Quai dOrsay, whose functionaries insisted that Lebanese and Syrian

migrants be accorded lenient treatment both on grounds of diplomatic recipro-

city and, more significantly, in order to protect Frances 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 dOrsay, always quick to protect aggressively its own prerogatives,

and with migrants who, when faced with unfavorable rulings, sought to capita-

lize upon Frances political and sentimental commitments in the Eastern Med-

iterranean in order to obtain clemency. This exercise elucidates ways in which

imperatives of governance and diplomatic reciprocity could impede the

8 Aristide Zolberg, Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy, in Charles Hirschman,Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The AmericanExperience (New York, 1999), 7576; and, The Archaeology of Remote Control, in AndreasFahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World(New York, 2003), 195222.

9 Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, Introduction, to Migration Control in theNorth Atlantic World(New York, 2003), 7.

10 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 23.11 Zolberg, Matters of State, 71.

452 A N D R E W K E R I M A R S A N


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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 inef-

ficacy. Rather, I want to highlight an often-neglected aspect of this story: theways 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 admin-

istrators in any particular colonial territory were regularly enmeshed, which left

their own powers severely curtailed by priorities well beyond their purview.12

Scholars of colonial statecraft can easily overlook that territorial adminis-

trations 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.13 Indeedand this is my second

pointrelations 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 Frances empire. The density

of the Quai dOrsays strategic and affective investment in the Eastern Mediter-

ranean, 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.14 Rather, they were ambivalent annexes of

12 See Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Introduction: Bodies, Empires, and World His-tories, in T. Ballantyne and A. Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in

World History (Durham, N.C., 2005), 115.13 Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society

(Manchester, 2005), 1. See also Frederick Cooper, States, Empires, and Political Imagination,in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 153203; GaryWilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the TwoWorld Wars (Chicago, 2005), esp. 27, 36; and Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies

beyond National Identity, in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with andthrough the Nation (Durham, N.C., 2003), 12543.

14 There has been a revival of interest in the Mandate states in recent years. See, in particular,Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000). For two helpful collections of essays concernedwith teasing out the particularities of French rule over Lebanon and Syria, see Nadine Mouchy

and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (Leiden,2004); Nadine Mouchy, ed.,France, Syrie et Liban 19181946: Les Ambiguts et les Dynamiquesde la Relation Mandataire (Damascus, 2002). On the high political life of Lebanon and Syria, seeMeir Zamir, Lebanons Quest: The Road to Statehood 19261939 (London, 1997); Kais Firro,



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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 attach-

ment to the territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, often considering them,

in what was perhaps never more than wishful thinking, as zones of uncontestedFrench 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 citizensthey participated in efforts to rework the Westphalian

system on a global, extra-European basis.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 Frances Mandatory commitments enshrined their right to free movementwithin 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 Med-

iterranean migrants.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 regardif not in other, perhaps more significant

domains of sovereigntyto 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 governments ratification of a raft of bilateral

agreements with countries such as Italy, Poland, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.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 Frances protection. Instead, they were granted a privileged pos-

ition within the complex system of stratifications by which various mobile

Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London, 2003); and PhilipKhoury, Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton, 1987).

15 Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (London,

2003), 1. The notion of a colonial citizenry is borrowed from Elizabeth Thompson.16 See Grard Lafleur, Les Libanais et les Syriens de Guadeloupe (Paris, 1999), 69.17 Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the

Wars (Ithaca, 2006), 12425.



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populations were accorded social rights within the French body politic.18 The

stance of the French functionaries of the Quai dOrsay 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 citi-

zens of nominally sovereign polities, but they were accorded this right onlybecause French officials believed them to be bound to France by the ties of

imperial benevolence and appreciation.19

Frances 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 Francetheir tender mother and secular protector.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.21

The duty of care and protection enshrined in the Mandate was one that func-

tionaries at the Quai dOrsay 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.22

As Thompson understood, this process was by no means unilateral; Leba-

nese and Syrian citizens participated in this new order by negotiating and

18 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrants Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 19181940 (Stanford, 2007), 1921. See also Rosenberg, PolicingParis, 10.

19 Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (Hono-lulu, 1998).

20 Matt Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford, 2005), 34, 15.21 Ann Laura Stoler, Affective States, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., A Companion

to the Anthropology of Politics (Oxford, 2004), 67; and Along the Archival Grain: EpistemicAnxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, 2009), 4041, 63.

22 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 1, 12, 67.



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defining their entitlements and rights through regular interactions with func-

tionaries, routine transactions conducted across the desks and tables of gov-

ernment offices.23 As I will argue in the final part of this article, migrants faced

with orders of expulsionand the Lebanese dignitaries and French function-

aries whose assistance they enlistedadroitly played the game of juridical poli-tics, nagging at small tears in the legal fabric of empire until they succeeded in

overturning the decisions of administrators in AOF.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.25 There was, as Grard

Noiriel has observed, little Weberian about a process in which administrators

remained compelled by circumstance, continuingas they had long done

to consider individual, always particular, cases rather than reaching

decisions based upon abstract criteria, identical in all circumstances. More-

over, transactions between officials and migrants and their intercessorsremained profoundly personal throughout this period, and lacked the anon-

ymous detachment of bureaucratic practice. Not only were these often con-

ducted 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.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 insti-

tutions capable not only of performing the essential functions of sovereignty

retaining the monopoly over violence, enumerating people, gathering taxes,

23 Ibid., 1.24 This is a paraphrase of Lauren Bentons highly useful notion of jurisdictional politics; see

Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the ColonialState, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 3 (1999): 56388. For further uses of theterm, see Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, JurisdictionalPolitics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 18811935, Journal of Modern History 80(2008): 791830, esp. 797; and James McDougall, The Secular States Islamic Empire: MuslimSpaces and Subjects of Jurisdiction in Paris and Algiers, 19051957, Comparative Studies inSociety and History 52, 3 (2010): 55380. See also Frederick Cooper, Decolonisation andAfrican Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996).

25 Max Weber, Bureaucracy, in From Max Weber: Essays in Society, H. H. Gerth andC. Wright Mills, trans. and eds. (London, 1991), 196.

26 Grard Noiriel, La Tyrannie du National: Le Droit dAsile en Europe 17931993 (Paris,1991), 6061, 26063.



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and of course securing the integrity of the territories under their supervision

but also of modifying and molding the behavior of their subjects.27 They have

instead insisted that they were messy congeries of competing agencies and

agendas, constantly frustrated by material circumstances and incapable of

broadcastingto borrow Jeffrey Herbsts termtheir authority beyond afew scattered points.28 Thus, Zinoman has argued that French Indochinas

decentralized and heterogeneous penal system, with its brutality, squalor

and corruption embodied the chaotic and unsystematic workings of the colo-

nial state.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.30 In this

perspective, colonial administrations were not antiseptic laboratories of moder-nity in which administrators could escape the constraints of metropolitan govern-

ance31 so much as faltering, belabored enterprises, creaking, jerking, jostling,

gasping declensions of the forms of state-craft elaborated in Europe during

this time.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 actof 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 states sovereignty does not rest simply upon

27 For a statement of this view, see Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in ComparativePerspective (New Haven, 1994). For discussions of distinctly colonial forms of rationality, see JohnComaroff, Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa, in

Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Mean-ings in Current Debates (Oxford, 2002); David Scott Colonial Governmentality, Social Text 43(1995): 191220.

28 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control(Princeton, 2000), 1.

29 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 18621940(Berkeley, 2001), 70.

30 Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African Colonial History, Ameri-can Historical Review 99, 5 (Dec. 1994): 1533.

31 For an examination of the hopes and ambitions of one such administrator, Lyautey, and hisendeavors to escape Third Republic politicking and create a new social order in Morocco, seePaul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge,

Mass., 1989), esp. 28991.32 This quote is from Nadine Gordimers wonderfully uneasy short story, Train From Rhode-

sia, in which the locomotive stands as a synecdoche for a defective, strained version of colonialmodernity. In Selected Stories (Harmondsworth, 1983), 50.



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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 [poli-

ties] must respond.33 This is all the truer of colonial administrations like those

of AOF: the Federations territories were not islands of authority, self-containedentities 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-Generals inability to broadcast its own directives to assert theirown will, paying little heed to the growing pile of official journals and expla-

natory circulars that Maurice Delafosse, an administrator in pre-First World

War Cte dIvoire before he became an influential ethnographer, recalled stash-

ing beneath his head before he fell to peaceful sleep at night.34 However, com-

mandants 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 rec-

ommendations, 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 cre-

ation of a powerful central executive in Dakar would wear down their own pre-

rogatives, 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 Frances foreign relations.35

In turn, the lowly position of the Ministry of the Colonies within the min-

isterial pecking order left it at a distinct disadvantage in its dealings with other

33 Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 3.34 William Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford, 1971),

57.35 Bernard Durand, Les Pouvoirs du Gouverneur Gnral de lAOF, in Charles Becker, Saliou

MBaye, and Ibrahima Thioub, eds.,AOF: Ralits et Hritages. Socits Ouest-africaines et OrdreColonial, 18951960 (Dakar, 1997), 50, 5657.



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departments of state, and militated against the imposition of a special regime

regulating the entry of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to AOF. Formed only

in 1894until which point the Ministry of the Navy administered, with a

few exceptions, Frances overseas possessionsthe fledgling colonial admin-

istration established at the Rue Oudinot was still regarded some twenty yearslater as the Cinderella ministry. It consistently faced hostility from the Min-

istry 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 organizationa muddled assemblage of small

bureaucratic contrivances, as a 1911 internal report put itand 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.36 Under such circumstances, functionaries at the Rue Oudinot couldhardly hope to provide any tangible opposition to the desires of their counter-

parts at the Quai dOrsay.

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 dOrsay. 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.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 dOrsay

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 reli-

gious interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. In particular, Frances vaunted

moral protectorate over the Maronite and Greek Catholic populations of

Greater Syrialong a cornerstone of its policy in the regiontook on

greater significance as its position in the Ottoman Empire came under increas-

ing pressure from foreign competition.38 While Wilhelmine Germany secured

36 Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and theClimax of French Imperial Expansion (London, 1981), 19, 21.

37 Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 45.38 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 42. See also Colin Burrows, Mission Civi-

lisatrice: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 18601914, Historical Journal 29 (1986):

10335; Dominique Chevallier, Aux Bases dune Intervention: Lyon et la Syrie en 1919, inVilles et Travail en Syrie du XIXe au XXe Sicles (Paris, 1982), 4186; William Shorrock,French Imperialism in the Middle East: The Failure of Policy in Lebanon and Syria 19001914(Madison, 1976); John P. Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 18611914 (London, 1977).



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economic concessions like the Baghdad railway, Italian and Anglo-American

missionary establishments threatened the spiritual monopoly of French edu-

cation. As Maurice Pernot, the editor of the Journal des Dbats, declared in

1913, In certain parts of Lebanon, where we assume our influence to be pre-

ponderant, English is certainly better known than French; Italian is makingrapid progress at certain points along the coast. Elsewhere, we are holding

our own, but nowhere are we gaining ground.39

This was all the more worrying because, as John Spagnolo has noted, French

diplomats saw their nations presence in the Eastern Mediterranean as inextric-

ably linked to favorable relations with their political clients in Lebanon.40

Frances 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 com-panies; in port concessions at Beirut, Tripoli, Haifa, and Jaffa; and in mines,

road construction, and various other operations.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 intel-

lect and the expansion of its culture.42

As French colonial propagandists and Catholic missionaries never ceased to

reiterate, None of the Catholic communities of the Orient calling upon

Frances protection since the Crusades has shown greater gratitude and devo-

tion than the Maronites.43 In a series of articles, pamphlets, and books, histor-

ians 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 Frances

own obligations toward their Uniate inhabitants.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

39 Comit de Dfense des Intrts Franais en Orient, Rapport sur un Voyage en Egypte et enTurquie dAsie (Janvier-Aot 1912), par Maurice Pernot (Paris, 1913), 224.

40 Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 1.41 Shorrock, French Imperialism, 13839. On French economic activity in the Ottoman Empire,

see also Jacques Thobies immense, scrupulously detailedIntrts Franais dans lEmpire Ottoman(18951914) (Paris, 1977).

42 Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau, Histoire des Colonies Franaises et de lExpansionde la France dans le Monde, Vol. I: Introduction Gnrale (Paris, 1929), xvixvii.

43 Ren Ristelhueber, Les Traditions Franaises au Liban (Paris, 1925), 5.44 Maurice Barrs, Une Enqute aux Pays du Levant (Paris, 1923), vol. 1, 70.



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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.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 toinsist that Frances position in the Eastern Mediterranean rested upon sentimen-

tal ties to its Christian populations. Strategic considerations obviously figured

in such a political calculus. As George Leygues, one of the architects of

Frances Syrian policy during the First World War, declared, It is in the Med-

iterranean 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.46 However, mere

power alone could not suffice, for as Jules Cambon put it, religion and nation-

ality were indistinguishable in the Orient, making the religious protec-torate a considerable force which benefited Frances moral influence and,

hence, political authority.47

Moreover, for figures like Maurice Barrs, who traveled to the Eastern Med-

iterranean on the eve of global conflict, Frances 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 every-

thing [falls] the friendship of souls. Jaurs supposed insistence thatit is both

right and inevitable that intellectual preponderance should belong to those who

are economically dominant was, to Barrs, 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 Frances spiritual power in the world.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.49 The majority of those involved

in formulating the Quai dOrsays line on the Middle East were members of the

Comit de lAsie Franaise, dedicated to furthering Frances interests from Asia

45 Gabriel Hanotaux, Prface, in Ren Ristelhueber, Les Traditions Franaises au Liban(Paris, 1925), vi.

46 Quoted in Etienne Flandin, Groupe Snatorial pour la Dfense des Intrts Franais l Etranger, Rapport sur la Syrie et la Palestine Prsent par M. Etienne Flandin, Snateur

(Paris, 1915), 6.47 Jules Cambon, Le Diplomate (Paris, 1926), 76, my italics.48 Barrs, Enqute, vol. 1, 5; vol. 2, 18384.49 Stoler, Affective States, 5.



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Minor to Japan.50 Their numbers included prominent figures like Franois

Georges-Picot and Robert de Caix, whose vision of a constellation of statelets

under French tutelage was implemented in the years after 1920.51 Stephen

Pichon, meanwhile, a staunch supporter of imperial expansion in the

Middle East as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1917 and 1920, servedin the pre-war years as president of the Comit dOrient, and was one of the

founders of the Comit de Dfense des Intrts Franais au Levant.52 These

men were actively committed to protecting Frances interests in the Middle

East, and keen to stress reciprocal ties to the regions Uniate communities

and to cajole and placate their representativesmen like the migr journalists

Shukri Ghanim and Georges Samna, who regarded themselves as the spokes-

men of the peoples of Lebanon and Syria and lobbied the Quai dOrsay 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 theAlgerian indignat, but had also become convinced that Syria should have a

far more liberal regime than that in place in French North Africaone stand-

ing, in other words, apart from Frances other possessions, and basking in the

gentle light of a particularly benevolent mode of rule. These ties and convic-

tions, together with Frances diplomatic obligations to the Ottoman Empire,

led the ministrys 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 dOrsays 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 minis-

try 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 ministrys 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.53

The need to respect the binds of diplomatic reciprocity was repeatedly cited

in the years before 1914 by both the Quai dOrsay and administrators in West

Africa as a significant impediment to any exclusionary measures targeting

50 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 2728.51 Grard Khoury, Robert de Caix et Louis Massignon: Deux Visions de la Politique Franaise

au Levant en 1920, in Nadine Mouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates,

170.52 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 28.53 Grard Noiriel, Le Creuset Franais: Histoire de lImmigration XIXe XXe Sicles (Paris,

1988), 8485.



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Eastern Mediterranean migrants. As early as 1904, the Ministry of Colonies

advised Governor-General Roume that the French government had under-

taken, 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.54 These obligations effectively prevented the creationof 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.55 For, as Frances 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.56

The stringent measures colonial administrators continued to press for may

well have seemed to the Quai dOrsay not merely undesirable on grounds ofdiplomatic 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 pro-

tectors by the repeated entreaties of Eastern Mediterranean migrants them-

selves. Such requests had become so frequent by the beginning of the

twentieth century that the Minister of Foreign Affairs Delcass 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 protgs. 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 protec-

tion. However, Delcass went on to fudge significantly this seemingly unequi-

vocal 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 Frances traditions of humanity

to be discarded entirely. Moreover, he continued in more pragmatic terms,

The traditions binding us to Syrias 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

54 Paris, Centre dAccueil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales, Fonds AOF, Ancienne Srie(hereafter CARAN AOF/AS/) 21 G 33, Governor-General (GG) to Ministry of Colonies (MC),Dakar, n.d. (1918).

55 Desbordes, LImmigration, 5354.56 Paris, Ministre des Affaires Etrangres, Turquie/Syrie-Liban/Nouvelle Srie (hereafter MAE

T/SL/NS), 115, Couget to Minister of Foreign Affairs (MFA), a/s de lEmigration Syrienne vers laGuine et de la mission de M. Poulet, Damascus, 18 Apr. 1911.



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with our obligations towards the Ottoman government.57 The informal assist-

ance in which Delcass 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 Med-

iterranean homelands.This directive served only to rubberstamp prevailing practice among French

plenipotentiaries, which often went far beyond the bounds of appropriate be-

havior dictated by the Quai dOrsay. In 1903, Frances 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.58 However, Desprezs ultimately unsuccessful attemptsto safeguard the commercial interests of Eastern Mediterranean migrants

arose not in response to the instructions of the Quai dOrsay, but out of a long-

standing engagement with Haitis 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.59 But for other plenipotentiaries

like Boulard-Ponqueville, Frances 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,

57 MAE T/SL/NS 108, Delcass, Paris, 29 Jan. 1902.58 MAE NS/Hati/10, Note pour la Direction des Affaires Politiques. Mesures prises contre les

Syriens par le Gouvernement Hatien, Paris, 12 Sept. 1903. On the Eastern Mediterranean commu-nities of Haiti, see David Nicholls, No Hawkers and Pedlars: Levantines in the Caribbean, Ethnicand Racial Studies 4, 4 (1981): 41531; and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Race, Nationality and Trade inthe Caribbean: The Syrians in Haiti, 19031934, International History Review 3 (1981): 51739.

59 MAE T/SL/NS 108, Extrait dun rapport adress par M. Paul Desprez, Ministre de France enHati, M. Delcass, Ministre des Affaires Etrangres, Port-au-Prince, 7 Mar. 1902. Delcass had

explicitly circumscribed the keeping of registers, since such a measure effectively recognized theright to official protection of Ottoman subjects, and stressed that while the granting of passportswas legally permissible, it should be scrupulously avoided beyond the direct confines of the ter-ritory where it was issued (MAE T/SL/NS 108, Delcass, Paris, 29 Jan. 1902).



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with their commercial links to compatriots in France and preference for French

manufactured goods, could lend the Republic invaluable assistance, helping to

carry Frances 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 whichothers, should we abandon it, would be quick to seize upon.60 For some

amongst the Quai dOrsays 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 commer-

cial reputation.61 Thus it is little surprise that the Quai dOrsay should have

acted to overturn measures in Frances own West African possessions when

these seemed injurious to both the ministrys obligations to the Porte andits duty to its Eastern Mediterranean protgs.

Diplomatic reasons of state again compelled Roume to act in 1906, and he

repealed two decrees instituted by Frzouls, 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

orcommandant de cercleonly upon fulfillment of this obligation would indi-

viduals be granted a residence permit. The second decree forbade all ship cap-

tains to allow their passengers to disembark without explicit authorization from

the local authorities.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.63 As Jean-Gabriel Desbordes was to point out, these

60 MAE T/SL/NS 108, Boulard-Ponqueville to MFA, Bogota, 25 Mar. 1902.61 On Frances cultural policies in Latin America in this period, see J. P. Daughton, When

Argentina Was French: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-EpoqueBuenos Aires, Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 83164.

62 Journal Officiel de la Guine Franaise, 15 Nov. 1905, Arrts passed on 9 Nov. 1905. Thesemeasures were repealed by an Arrt on 18 Jan. 1906, and recorded in the Journalon 30 Jan. 1906.

63 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 36, GG to Lieutenant-Governor (LG) of Guinea, a/s darrts-relatifs lembarquement et au sjour des trangers en Guine, Dakar, 14 Jan. 1906.



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measures were more than a simple check; they constituted a veritable

regulation of foreign immigration, which threatened to affect Frances

foreign relations.64 Diplomatic imperatives dictated their abrogation.

Such failures did not prevent administrators in French West Africa from pre-

senting a new scheme for the imposition of a special tax on Ottoman subjects totheir superiors at the Rue Oudinot in 1909.65 This, too, was turned away by an

intransigent Quai dOrsay, which reiterated the stance it had relayed to the Min-

istry of Colonies in 1904, insisting that Ottoman subjects enjoying the treat-

ment [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.66

This statement unambiguously placed reason of state ahead of the concerns

of colonial administrators.The obduracy of the Quai dOrsay could not prevent Camille Guy, Guineas

new lieutenant-governor, from finding in late 1910 a way to circumvent the

obligations of international convention. With the support of Roumes succes-

sor, William Ponty, Guy profoundly hostile to the Lebanese and Syrians,

whom he was later to deem the Chinamen of West Africaimplemented a

decree, applied at the federal level some six months later, that imposed a

series of stringent checks upon new migrants to Guinea.67 Under its terms, resi-

dency 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 dis-

eases. They were also required upon arrival to deposit the costs of their repa-

triation with immigration officials.68

These measures, as Desbordes observed, could be seen as doing no more

than establishing general administrative and sanitary control[s]. They there-

fore could not be charged with singling outSyrian migrants upon entry or of

violating international obligations.69 However, as Ponty made clear, their

apparently general character was an administrative ruse disguising a tightly cir-

cumscribed 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

64 Desbordes, LImmigration, fn. 3, 55.65 Ibid., 58; Bulletin du Comit de l Afrique Franaise 21, 6 (June 1911): 202.66 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, Angoulvant to MC, Dakar, n.d. (1918).67 Camille Guy, LAfrique Occidentale Franaise (Paris, 1929), 74.68 Journal Officiel de la Guine Franaise, 15 Dec. 1910, Arrt of 7 Dec. 1910; and 1 May

1911.69 Desbordes, LImmigration, 59.



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Syrian immigration. Officials, he insisted, should notburden with unnecess-

ary 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 com-

missioners to verify meticulously the required documents. In addition, heintimated, 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 exam-

inations 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.70

This legislation remained in place until 1921 but, despite its stringent

requirements, it failed to stop the constant stream of new arrivals from theEastern 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 admin-

istrators to turn away all requests for travel, save in cases of dire medical need

or departure from the colonies.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 indigen-

ous trade.72 Under these measures, Ottoman subjects were forbidden to

acquire land for the duration of the hostilities, while their movements and cor-

respondence were to be closely controlled.73 Angoulvant also pressed the Min-

istry of Colonies to accede to his plans to prevent Eastern Mediterranean traders

from participating in the annual traite in Senegalese groundnuts, now con-

ducted, 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.74

70 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 36, GG to LGs, a/s de larrt du 1ermai 1911, rglementant limmi-gration trangre en AOF, Dakar, 24 May 1911.

71 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, GG to LG of Guinea, Dakar, 24 May 1918; and GG to LGs,Dakar, 24 May 1918.

72 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, a/s des Syriens, Dakar, 9 Nov. 1918.73 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to LGs, Dakar, 13 June 1918; and LG of Senegal to GG, a/s

des trangers, Dakar, 11 Nov. 1918.74 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, a/s de la prochaine campagne darachides, Dakar, 1

Aug. 1918.



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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 com-mercial 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

latters 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 arro-gance and insolent luxury of the Syrians, theirnoisome opulence so pro-

foundly 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.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 ade-

quate 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 Lgion dOrient, 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.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 Lgion dOrient, 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 cow-

ardice. These complaints were informed by a keen sense of the respective

merits of Frances 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 indignes

75 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, Dakar, 15 Aug. 1918.76 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, Dakar, 2 Mar. 1918.



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were appropriate carriers and recipients of the sentiments of patriarchal ben-

evolence which framed the mission civilisatrice77; Syrians were worthy only of

contempt for the insolent indifference with which they treated the French

authorities.

For all the wounded eloquence of Angoulvants repeated entreaties to theRue Oudinot, functionaries there refused to acquiesce to his demands for the

introduction of conscription and the wholesale exclusion of Eastern Mediterra-

nean migrants from the produce trade. While particular cases were open to con-

sideration, general principles affecting all Syrians were inadmissible so long

as allied aliens remained untouched by similar measures.78 The imposition of

such severe impediments upon their commercial operations was prevented by

the ambivalent legal status of Lebanese and Syrian migrants in particularthey

were considered as neither allies nor enemies by the Ministries of Foreign

Affairs and the Interior, but rather as special protgs enjoying a certaindegree of latitude.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 dOrsay 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 respect-

ability, 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 Angoulvants request for conscrip-

tion, and insisted that French functionaries could notbegrudge 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 resi-

dent in the mtropole, but it was prevented from doing so by the international

77 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 40.78 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, MC to GG, Paris, 13 Nov. 1918.79 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 39, MC to GG, Paris, 25 May 1917.



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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 thanresentment against a state of affairs created by conflict and not by the

Syrians,80 who could not be blamed for their immunity, and stated unequivo-

cally 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 justi-fied by their lack of hygiene and their often disloyal competition, stressed,

The Syrian question in French West Africa cannot be divorced from Frances

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 Gov-

ernment 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 implementinsisting

that the Department of Political Affairs had long since been aware of the

problems created by the introduction of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to

AOFthe minister of colonies was compelled to recognize the paramount

importance of the exigencies of Middle Eastern policy.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 dOrsay defended

so vigorously.

Frances 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 recalci-

trance of the local population, but the establishment of a French Mandate

over Lebanon and Syria in the early 1920s consecrated the Quai d Orsays

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 Frances

80 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, Direction des Affaires Politiques et Commerciales, MFA, Paris,n.d. (Nov. 1918).

81 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, MC to GG, Paris, 23 Nov. 1918.



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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 diplo-

matic and consular protection of the Mandate.82

This was in stark contrast with the status of other non-European migrantswho 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 mtropole, had risen dramatically in

number. However, with the close of hostilities the French state hastily sought

not just to repatriate these workerswho, their usefulness exhausted, were

viewed as an insidious danger to the body politicbut also to erect a seriesof 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.83 Migration did

not cease, and picked up again with the shift from repatriation to improved

surveillance on the soil of the metropole.84 The number of Algerians resident

in France had risen by 1928 to more than sixty thousand.85 Nevertheless, both

Algerianswho remained under the care of the Ministry of the Interiorand

Moroccans and Tunisianswho, as subjects of nominal protectorates,

depended on the Quai dOrsayhad 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.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

82French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, American Journal of International Law 17, 3

(1923): 178.83 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 14445, 124.84 Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914

(Berkeley, 2008), 214.85 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 13031.86 Ibid., 144; Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 213.



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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.87

This commitment, enshrined in the terms of the Mandate, was pressed intoservice 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 rea-

lities of rule, the Quai dOrsay 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 ter-ritories 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.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.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 Frances own colonial possessions,

but also in other territories.

In 1928, the Quai dOrsay was drawn into a protracted dispute with the

Liberian government by the latters decision to ban all trade by citizens of

countries with which it had not agreed a commercial treatya 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 Min-

istry 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.90 They sought to resort to the terms of the Mandate in order to

87 Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 2122.88 MAE Nouvelle Srie, E, Syrie-Liban (hereafter NS/E/SL) 129, High Commissioner to MFA,

a/s Protection consulaire des Syriens et Libanais en Guine Portugaise, Beirut, 22 June 1929.89 Simon Jackson, Mandatory Development: The Political Economy of the French Mandate in

Syria and Lebanon, 19151939, PhD diss., New York University, 2009, 39495, 397.90 MAE NS/E/SL 413, answer attached to Peytaud, Monrovia, 26 Mar. 1928, Paris, n.d.



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safeguard the interests of their Levantine protgs, 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,91 and suggested that reciprocal

treatment for Lebanese citizens in Liberia might be expected.92 It is clear that

the Quai dOrsay, 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 sub-

mitted AOF to metropolitan law. Guys 1910 arrt, seen as failing to corre-

spond 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 of1921 and 1923, unlike pre-war measures, were intended to regulate the activi-

ties 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 land-

lords. 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 guar-

antee 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 Mediterra-

nean was to refuse identity cards to migrants already on the soil of the

Federation.93

These skeletal controls upon migration were, it is true, supplemented by sub-

sequent 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.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

91French Mandate, 179.

92 MAE NS/E/SL 413, answer attached to Peytaud, Monrovia, 26 Mar. 1928, Paris, n.d.93 Desbordes, LImmigration, 63, 65; Journal Officiel de l Afrique Occidentale Franaise

(JOAOF) (1921): 67678; and JOAOF (1923): 45859.94 Desbordes, LImmigration, 6680; JOAOF (1925): 21920; JOAOF (1927): 3001; JOAOF

(1932): 297302.



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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 function-

aries regarded this consignment as an exclusionary measure, they would likely

have been less willing to accept the guarantees of migrants already establishedin AOF, or payments by commercial companies, navigation lines,95 and the

Mandatory authorities in Beirut96 on behalf of their employees, travelers, and

administrative charges. Moreover, officials scrupulously avoided any sugges-

tion 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 pre-cedes 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.97

Frustrated by the inefficacy of such local measures, which offered no real

means ofselection from the hundreds and thousands of migrants who disem-

barked 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 situ-

ations in their own colonies.98 However, as the head of the Federations

Sret Gnrale 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 Min-

istry of Colonies had forwarded to the Quai dOrsay 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

95 JOAOF (1925): 634; JOAOF (1926): 773.96 By Article 3 of the decree of 5 Mar. 1927, which stipulated that the caution could be replaced

by a document attesting that the government of the indigent migrants country of origin was pre-

pared to provide the costs of repatriation. JOAOF 1177 (9 Apr. 1927): 301.97 JOAOF (1925): 634.98 CARAN AOF/Nouvelle Srie (NS)/21 G 61, GG to Minister of Colonies, a/s immigration

libano-syrienne, Dakar, 2 Dec. 1936.



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legislation already in place, the dangers associated with the growth of Lebanese

and Syrian migration to AOF.99

Lebanese and Syrian migrants, then, could not be selected before their depar-

ture 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 Federa-tion. While identity documents, which doubled as residence permits, could

be refused to new arrivals awaiting permission to remain in AOF, such rejec-

tions were unfortunately rare, as the director of the Federations Sret

Gnrale 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.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 regu-

lations, such provisions were rarely, if ever, used to expel Libano-Syriens fromAOF. As the Department of Political Affairs took pains to point out in 1936,

expulsion orders would only be accepted in cases where migrants had com-

mitted criminal offences, since Lebanese and Syrian citizens were not to be

treated with the same rigor as other foreigners.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.102 This was no more than an extension to the colonies

of regulations already implemented in the mtropole 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 pro-

fessions, 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 resi-

dency t

Lebanese Migration to Frech West Africa

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