Does France risk being drawn back into the cauldron of Lebanon?

Just days after the massive explosion in Beirut that destroyed the port and killed at least 150 people, President Emmanuel Macron deemed it appropriate to visit the stricken city to offer his condolences and to reassure the Lebanese that France stood by them in their agony.

To date, no other western leader has followed his example.

Macron’s visit was not a total surprise. What might be thought a little strange is that the Lebanese people also thought it the appropriate French response. The President was mobbed in the streets. Men and women threw their arms around him, weeping and calling on him to rescue them from their native oppressors. Macron was moved. France would come to their aid, he said. Medical supplies and equipment would be sent by air within days, and the prime minister, Jean Castex, had been instructed to review longer-term aid as a matter of priority.

But first, he said, it was up to the people of Lebanon to abandon the old ways, re-embrace democracy and put an end to corruption.

Having thus spake, he was off. He had enough troubles of his own back home. A worsening spike in cases of coronavirus and a looming economic crisis worse than anything since the 1930s. While he was no doubt appalled by the devastation caused by what might just prove to have been the biggest-ever man-made explosion, he was in no position to apportion blame or to fund the rebuilding.

The Lebanese were not so sure. An online petition, with the number of signatures heading into six figures, calls for nothing less that the restoration of the French Mandate under which modern Lebanon was established in the years following the First World War.

“Those Lebanese now in charge have displayed a complete inability to secure and run the country. With a failing system, marked by corruption, terrorism and militancy, the country is drawing its final breath. We believe that Lebanon must come back under the French mandate in order to put in place a healthy and sustainable governance”.

Many years ago, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, then editor of the Sunday Telegraph, announced, following a visit to Harare, that the people of Zimbabwe yearned for the restoration of colonial government from London. Not for the last time, he was laughed out of court. But given the criminal nature of so much of the Lebanese government – whose leaders did not dare to meet Macron during his tour of the port area – who can say what ordinary Lebanese citizens might think or dream of?

Lebanon was the centerpiece of the French Mandate, instigated by the League of Nations in 1923, to bring order to a region that for centuries had been part of the Ottoman Empire. France was empowered to administer the territories we now know as Syria and Lebanon. The UK, by way of the British Mandate, was given similar reponsibility for Palestine and Trans-Jordan.

So how did that work out? The truth is, it worked out very badly indeed. France saw the mandate as an extension of its empire. The people of Greater Syria would not be allowed to join a pan-Arab federation. Instead, they would, over time, find their place in the francophone world. Or not, as the case turned out to be.

Lebanon, meanwhile, was to be a French-speaking enclave, governed effectively by Maronite Christians, with space for the various Muslim factions. Over the years, the Maronites declined in number and the Muslim populations grew. At the same time, as the British made a hash of their half of the mandate, presiding over the creation of Israel without establishing anything remotely similar for the Palestinians, conflict became inevitable.

The golden age of Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was regarded as the Riviera of the Middle East, with the best bars and restaurants, the most nearly-honest casinos, the most effective diplomatic representation and the most liberal attitudes, all topped off by skiing in the winter, was doomed from the start. Once the Palestine Liberation Front, and later Hezbollah entered the scene, there would be fighting on all fronts, punctuated by Israeli invasions south of the Litani river. The bloody civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 was followed by an uneasy peace in which the Government was made up of various ethnic factions, each at the others’ throats, all riddled with corruption.

This week’s explosion at the port wasn’t planned by anyone. It wasn’t supposed to happen. It was the result not of malice aforethought, but of criminal irresponsibility. Yet it perfectly encapsulated what happens when every individual and every agency charged with public safety and the common good abdicates its role, and retreats behind walls made up entirely of selfishness and greed.

It’s hard to see France having any wish to once more raise the tricoleur on government buildings in Beiruit. Macron’s enemies at home would have a field day. But might the Legion be deployed in some limited fashion? Might gendarmes be sent to guard the port? Or might the Quai d’Orsay launch a UN initiative that, while raising the President’s profile in the international arena, seeks to separate Lebanon from the wider Middle East Question? Who knows?

The afterlife of France’s empire is very different from Britain’s post-imperial experience.

Years ago, when studying a map of the British Empire in my school atlas, I remember asking our history teacher, Mr Stanley, what all the green bits were in West Africa that surrounded our pink-coloured colonies, all of which, with the exception of little Gambia, had recently won their independence.

“Oh, that,” he said, dismissively. “That’s French equatorial Africa – you don’t need to bother with that.”

And I didn’t. I was vaguely aware that the French “owned” Algeria and Tunisia, and possibly Morocco, but my feeling was that France had been kicked out of Canada and India somewhat ignominiously before losing out rather badly in the scramble for Africa. The green bits, I imagined, were the best they could do.

Fast forward 50 years. The British Empire is long gone. Cecil Rhodes might have supposed that the Union flag would fly forever from Cairo to the Cape, and from Bathurst (now Banjul) to Khartoum. But he was wrong. In the same way, anyone who believed that Britain would somehow shape the development of the Arab World into the twenty-first century, or play a central role in the affairs of either Israel or Palestine would have been sorely mistaken.

But consider now the position of the French in Africa. Currently they have troops in Mali, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, known to the French as the G5 Sahel. Their soldiers are not there for show. They are fighting and dying in an attempt, largely successful but constantly challenged, to prevent the takeover of these sub-Saharan former colonies by Islamic extremists.

France also exercises influence by way of trade and support for the West African and Central African francs: shared currencies formerly linked to the French franc that are still in an informal sense overseen by officials of the Bank of France.

Is it a new form of imperialism, or, more likely, paternalism? Whatever the truth, France remains bound to its history in a way that Britain is not. The Queen may be head of the Commonwealth, but Boris Johnson, as her prime minister, would not dare to suggest that he is in some sense the organisation’s guiding light, or patron, to whom its member states automatically turn in time of trouble.

France remains exceptional. Whether its sense of itself will lead it back into the quagmire of Lebanon is, however, seriously to be doubted.