Samuel Dolbee, New York Unviersity
Tozsuz Evrak readers need no reminding that France ruled Syria under a mandate allotted by the League of Nations for a few decades after World War I. The New York Times, however, does. In an article on French debates on intervention (which reveal that everyone can unite to hate on François Holland), Suzanne Daley notes that one of the arguments for French warplanes over Damascus includes "protecting neighboring Lebanon, a former French mandate." This is, of course, true. It is an argument some people make. And France did have a mandate in Lebanon.
But the reference to France's colonial legacy in Lebanon highlights a weighty absence. An entire article on France potentially pounding Syria fails to mention that France has done this sort of thing before when it not only had a mandate in what is now Lebanon, but also in Syria. To be fair, this absence may attest to French amnesia as much as New York Times myopia.
Nevertheless, in the name of clarity, I submit two documents - for you, informed Tozsuz Evrak readers, and also for all of the New York Times writers following this blog - that demonstrate the complicated nature of France's colonial relationship with Syrians, even from outside of Syria's territorial boundaries. Emerging from the peculiarly racialized cauldron of 1920s America, both of these stories demonstrate how colonialism opened some possibilities and foreclosed others.
In the first case, the French Ambassador to the United States, Jean-Jules Jusserand, wrote back to Paris regarding harassment of Syrians in America by a "secret society of vigilantes...who operate under the mask." He added that this group showed murderous animosity "to foreigners, to Catholics, to Negros, etc." Jusserand was writing about the Ku Klux Klan. By the account of Jusserand's interlocutor - the doyen of New York's Arabic-language press, Naoum Mokarzel - the sheet-wearing white-man's terrorist club had dynamited a Syrian family's home in Georgia, in addition to being the subject of less explosive complaints from the community, many of which are detailed in Sarah Gualtieri's Between Arab and White.
Even in 1923, Americans were confused about France's relationship with Syria. Jusserand approvingly attached to his letter a Washington Post article that quotes the American Secretary of State explaining that "a mandate in Syria has been entrusted to France, which undertakes the protection of Syrian nationals abroad." In addition to striking a blow against American suspicion (if not ignorance) of the mandate, Jusserand believed the publication would score some paternalism points for French colonialism. "It will not be bad," he wrote, "for our proteges to know that they are not here without defenders."
But French colonialism in the 1920s was not all about protecting Syrian expatriates from American terrorists. French diplomats also hoped to schmooze, cajole, and bribe the Syrians of America into amity. A dispatch from the French Consul of Chicago to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris details this process. He wrote of his excitement for an event celebrating the translation of the French classic tragicomedy Le Cid by a member of the Syrian community. The Consul hoped to exploit the event to have "the close contact with them that I have always wanted to establish." He may have been uninformed about Syria (he wrote that Le Cid had been translated into "Syrian"), but he did understand the difficulty of colonial PR. "If certain members of the Syrian colony (in America) have always been keen to have a friendly rapport with the Consul of France," he reasoned, "it must be recognized that the Syrians of America are very sensitive to the propaganda that is among them and whose instigators, all having a little bit different views, are united in a community hostile to our mandate."
If the Consul's charm failed to convince these people of France's benevolence, perhaps money would do the trick. Reckoning that all of two of the 12 Syrian newspapers in America supported the French, the Consul suggested providing a grant to one of the Franco-friendlies so that it might up production to a daily basis.
And although the Consul said nothing of the hooded marauders in the American south, America's racial politics inflected his mission, too. American xenophobia extended far beyond Jim Crow. The 100,000 Syrians within the Consulate's jurisdiction (probably an exaggeration), the Consul wrote, "are not able to naturalize as Americans. Considered geographically as Asiatics, they fall into the category of the Japanese and the Indians, to whom a recent ruling of the United States Supreme Court denied the right to naturalize." For the Consul, these exclusionary immigration practices made the French mission imperative. "We must therefore do more than ever to reinforce their links that attach them to their country of origin and to ours," he concluded.
Whether founded on paternalistic protection or old-fashioned bribery, these links constitute a small part of a long history of French colonialism that has entangled Syrians inside and outside of Syria.
 |  |  |
 |  |
Source: MAE-La Courneuve, Levant E 407
No comments:
Post a Comment