State of Greater Lebanon

The State of Greater Lebanon was proclaimed on 1 September 1920 by the French general Henri Gouraud, acting under the mandate that the League of Nations had assigned to France over the former Ottoman territories of Syria and Lebanon. French authorities made Beirut the capital and sought to include the coastal cities, the Bekaa Valley and the Druze mountain in a single pro-French territory. The state replaced an earlier French-administered territory and was officially separate from the neighbouring State of Syria, which France also controlled. In May 1926 the French high commissioner reorganised it as the Lebanese Republic with a constitution, a parliament and an elected president. French control remained decisive, and the republic's borders became the basis of the modern Lebanese state. During the Second World War the French mandate was contested by Free France and later by the Lebanese national movement; independence was declared in November 1943 and the last French troops withdrew in 1946. Greater Lebanon thus marks the transition from Ottoman administration through the French mandate to the independent Republic of Lebanon.