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The French Map of Beirut (1936)
Abstract
Toponymic inscriptions are an ‘authorized version’ of history written on space. This article aims to explore the toponyms on a French map of Beirut published in 1936 to show how France, as a sovereign power, transformed her ‘Lebanese policy’ into place names and thus created a different reality, in rupture with the past. This reality still endures today on the map. The new polity was created under the mission protectrice of France. The ‘mission’ is read on the map through the names of Gouraud, Foch, Pétain, and other generals of World War I, and by key features of the French Republic (‘The Marseillaise’, ‘the French’, ‘Paris’, and so on). With Lebanon being a ‘refuge for minorities’, the 1936 map of Beirut has thoroughfares named after saints, ulemas, and religious figures of Christians and of Muslims (‘rue patriarche Hoyek’, ‘rue Ibn Arabi’, and ‘rue Abou Bakr’). In 1918, political martyrdom was introduced to political discourse, but also to the map; thus the main square of the city is renamed ‘Place des Martyrs’, with numerous streets named after intellectuals hanged by the Ottomans and considered martyrs of the new Republic. These three ‘toponymic systems’ are in discontinuity with the toponymic past of Beirut. These toponymic dynamics still shape the map of Beirut; no constitution change or ‘toponymic cleansing’ happened after Independence in 1943. There are more ‘martyrs’ and religious figures added to the map and mandate army generals are still commemorated. Mandate-made maps continue to shape Beiruti place names today.
Beirut, Lebanon, has been a nexus for the east and west, has undergone episodes of conflict including the civil war between 1975 and 1989, and still witnesses instability to the present. This status has affected its everyday life practices, particularly as manifested in its public spaces. Over time, Beirut’s population has reflected the ability to adapt to living with different states of public spaces; these include embracing new public space models, adjusting to living in the war-time period with annihilated public spaces, and establishing a reconnaissance with post-war reintroduced, securitized, or temporary public spaces. Lefebvre’s space production triad serves to distinguish among spaces introduced through planning tools, from spaces appropriated through immaterial space-markers, or spaces established through social practices. This article provides an overview of the evolution of Beirut’s public spaces, starting with the medieval city and through into the 19th century, before examining the impact of instability and the conditions leading to the emergence of social spaces in the post-war period. It particularly highlights public spaces after 2005—when civic activism played an important role in raising awareness on the right to inclusive public space—by referring to literature, conducting interviews with public space protagonists, and addressing a questionnaire survey to inhabitants. The cases of Martyrs Square, Damascus Road, and the Pine Forest are presented, among other spaces in and around Beirut. The article reflects on the ability of some public spaces to serve as tools for social integration in a society that was segregated in the bouts of Beirut’s instability.
Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names. He sheds light on the procedures of the naming and the renaming of streets and the utilization of street names for commemorative purposes as a fundamental feature of modern political culture. Further, he elaborates on how street names, in addition to their fundamental role in the spatial organization and semiotic construction of the city, are also participants in the cultural production of shared past. In addition, the author uncovers commemorative street names as a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order. Commemorative street names provide for the intersection of hegemonic ideological structures with the spatial practices of everyday life. Therefore they are instrumental in rendering natural the official version of history which they incorporate into the urban setting. The author concludes that the power of (commemorative) street names stems from their ability to implicate the national narrative of the past, though in a fragmented manner, in numerous narratives of the city.
France and the Protection of Maronite Christians. The Genealogy of an “Invented Tradition”
The subject of France’s protection of Oriental Christians has re-emerged in political discourses since 2013. It refers to a centuries-old tradition, whereas in reality this “tradition” was invented in the course of the nineteenth century when it was jointly fashioned by certain French political and media circles as well as representatives of the Maronite clergy. This protection “tradition” was designed to support the proto-nationalist and sectarian Maronite efforts as well as the French interventionist ambitions in Syria.
Les stéréotypes s'accommodent mal des nuances et de la polysémie. Si, aux yeux des Occidentaux, l'image du Liban a rapidement basculé de la proximité complice à l'inexplicable barbarie, n'estce pas aussi à cause de la naissance de l'Etat d'Israël, nouvel avant-poste de l'Occident en terre d'Orient? /// How did the loss of a century-old communication between the Lebanese land and the West occur? Despite an undeniable democratic experience, a free press and a dynamic cultural life, Lebanon ceased after 1945 to appear as the western outpost in the Orient, the indispensable intermediary it had always wanted to be. It is not possible to blame this disinvestment on 'Arab face' which was only one of the aspects of its reality. The belated Phoenician affirmation shows that the break cannot be imputed to the Lebanese alone, especially since it would appear that the West could not have two respondents in the Orient. The state of Israel was able to capture the images and imaginations of the West, while reminding it of its responsibility in the catastrophe that led to its birth. This left no place for Lebanon, which could slide into barbarianism.
The history of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Saint George in Beirut, Lebanon, is well recorded in written documents and the material culture uncovered by archaeological excavations between 1994 and 1995. In 1995, Archbishop Elias Audeh, the metropolitan of Beirut began a restoration of the cathedral, heavily damaged by the civil war. This article details the archaeological excavation work done by the author underneath the cathedral prior to its restoration. The two objectives for this project were to: (1) investigate the historical sequence and continuous use of the location as a religious site even before the construction of the cathedral; and (2) locate the Byzantine Anastasis Church, which was known to be located near the Law School of Justinian.
This 2006 collection examines the urban spaces of Berlin and Washington and provides a comparative cultural history of two eminent nation-states in the modern era. Each of the cities has assumed, at times, a mythical quality and they have been seen as collective symbols, with ambitions and contradictions that mirror the nation-states they represent. Such issues such stand in the centre of this volume. The authors ask what these two capitals have meant for the nation and explore the relations between architecture, political ideas, and social reality. Topics range from Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the new capital of the United States to the creation of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, from nineteenth-century visitors to small-town Washington to the protesters of the 1968 student movement in West Berlin. This lively collection of essays speaks to audiences as diverse as historians, urban sociologists, architects and readers interested in cultural studies. © German Historical Institute 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2007.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Beirut and Mount Lebanon underwent important changes that have affected Lebanon's political life up to the present day. The city and the countryside had always been to some extent mutually dependent. They became more closely tied in response to the economic and political transformation of the region in the age of European penetration. This growing interdependence increasingly took the form of Beirut's ascendancy over the Mountain. While in earlier centuries it was the Mountain which had extended its sway over the city, in the nineteenth century the process was reversed. But Beirut's triumph as the dominant partner in the relationship was not an unmixed blessing: While bringing prosperity to the city, it also transferred to Beirut many of the unresolved tensions of the Mountain, preparing the way for the city's sectarian rivalries and tensions in more recent times.
At the outbreak of World War I, Lebanon was a part of the Ottoman Empire and comprised mainly the Mutasarrifîyah, or Independent Sanjaq, of Mount Lebanon and the Wilâyah, or province, of Beirut. Because of its position in international power politics, Lebanon was not under as strict Ottoman control as other provinces, with Mount Lebanon enjoying a considerable degree of local autonomy. Turkish involvement in the war, however, resulted in military occupation of Lebanon, which comprised part of the Fourth Army Command under Jamâl Pâsha, in prosecution of the war effort against the British in Egypt.
In Turkey, foreign trade now confines its principal operations to the cities of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria … Aleppo, which was before the Middle of the last century the most considerable emporium in Turkey, is now a place of comparatively little commercial importance. The trade began to decline shortly after the above mentioned period, and in the year 1792 the Levant Company finally dissolved the respectable Establishment which they had previously supported there, the Consul in fact being then the only English resident in the city, whereas in former times there had been as many as twenty-eight British merchants attached to that factory. The towns in Syria have been of late supplied with British manufactures from the establishments at Alexandria, but the consumption dose not appear to have been sufficiently extensive to encourage any of the trading houses in that city to form branch establishments on the Syrian coasts.
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