French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon

The French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon was the League of Nations trusteeship that gave France the Levant after the Ottoman collapse, formalized in September 1923 from the Sykes-Picot division of Ottoman Syria, with Alexandretta and a corner of Cilicia beside it. The mandate was never one country: France ruled a shifting set of states, the Syrian Federation, the State of Syria, Greater Lebanon, the Alawite State and the Jabal Druze State, each with its own capital and flag, while the League's Mandates Commission watched from Geneva. Syrian nationalism answered with revolts in every Syrian state, and the Sunni cities rejected partition until France merged Aleppo and Damascus into one State of Syria in 1925, while Hatay was lost to Turkey in 1939. Both Syria and Lebanon declared independence during the Second World War, and when the last French troops sailed in 1946 the mandate closed, leaving two republics whose borders France had drawn.