The article is a defense of an historic and spiritual Franco-Lebanese bond spanning close to a millennium, framed around Philippe de Villiers’s March 18, 2026 editorial in the Journal du Dimanche titled “Adresse au Liban martyr” (“An Address to Martyred Lebanon”). It weaves a “longue durée” historical span—from the 1250 “Promise of Saint Louis” to the 1918 French arrival—with emotional appeals, Biblical imagery, and a call on the French to honor their commitments amid Lebanon’s current suffering in the latest Israel-Hezbollah spat.
Few pens in modern French politics are as compelling as that of Philippe de Villiers, former Minister of Culture under Jacques Chirac. A captivating orator and gifted stylist who alternates historical erudition with epic prose, de Villiers’s style and demeanor marry the spirit of Chateaubriand to that Charles Martel, incarnating for many Frenchmen, Francophiles, and Christians the figure of an oracle exalting (and exhaling) an ideal image of France—a modern “une certaine idée de la France” as it were. Very much Gaullian in his sententious, peremptory style, de Villiers’s passionate, nostalgic tone is unafraid of valorizing France’s Catholic roots, celebrating its Judeo-Christian values, and repositioning it as Eldest Daughter of the Church duty-bound to give voice to muffled Christian voices, in France and across the world—the Near East in particular. It is in this spirit that a March 18, 2026 editorial in the Journal du Dimanche struck a special emotional chord with a cross-section of Lebanese, both at home and abroad, Christians and otherwise, caught in the throes of yet another war not of their own choosing. Evocative, dripping pathos rare in political writing, de Villiers’s essay reasserts a lasting Franco-Lebanese bond as an eternal French mission, a solemn “oath of honor” offering catharsis and sanctuary from the stresses (and distresses) of the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
In this, his poignant testimonial, de Villiers passionately reconfirms the visceral, centuries-old bond between France and Lebanon. He laments Lebanon’s “dying in silence,” facing yet another ghastly, “lonely demise” while the world—much of it a “Christian world”—relentlessly averts its gaze. Brimming with “memory” and historiography many Lebanese and Frenchmen may still be sensitive to, de Villiers’s narrative invokes a thirteenth century “pledge” sworn by the Crusader King Saint Louis: a vow to protect the Maronites as if they were Frenchmen, bound to the French of the mainland by the same sinews of history and memory—a promise that de Villiers deems binding to this day. [i]
Framing Lebanon as an intimate extension of France’s “eastern soul” de Villiers spoke of enduring links twining the two nations: a thread of “spiritual mystery” steeped in the origins of Christianity; a thread of “affective attachment” dating back to the Crusades; and a third thread of “cultural affinities,” where the French language and French literature are upheld and cherished by the Lebanese as if they were offsprings of their own genius. “The Lebanese are our elder brothers” noted de Villiers, “preceding us Frenchmen in all things,” echoing the words of another Frenchman, a French colonial officer no less, declaring from New York, in 1939, how the French “attained the pinnacles of intellect and poetic genius thanks to Lebanon… a spot of earth where civilization… and divine wisdom were born.” [ii] In this same vein, almost waxing Maronite, an earlier version of a pan-Arabist-leaning Kamal Jumblat would write that “Lebanon [was] the Alpha and the Omega; the birthplace of the first City-State, the first national ideal, the first maritime empire, and the first representative democratic system… long before the radiance of Athens, Rome, Constantinople… [and] at a time when early humanity was still stumbling clumsily through its very first footsteps.” [iii]
De Villiers concludes his panegyric with an emotional appeal—“Ô Liban de mon cœur, ma deuxième patrie, je t’aime” (O Lebanon of my heart, my second homeland, I love you); a cry in which he calls upon his countrymen to recognize Lebanon as a piece of themselves and to find, in the suffering Levant, a wake-up call and a renewal for a France that has become oblivious to its own past, its historical bearings, and its moral duty to Lebanon and the Lebanese.
Notwithstanding its emotive tack, this cry is no mere rhetorical flourish—or at least not only. It echoes a bond forged across a millennium of history—one that has repeatedly resurfaced in moments of Lebanese perils and bouts of French awakenings. The “Promise of Saint-Louis,” as noted de Villiers, is much more than Maronite lore or French romantic yearnings; it is a living thread of devotion, emotion, and expectation that has navigated in dignity through centuries of Muslim rule and Ottoman hardships. That promise finally erupted in jubilation when France re-appeared on Lebanese shores, at the conclusion of the Great War, reaching back to embrace Lebanon as a long-lost relative coming home as liberator, restorer, and protector, putting an end to a long silent twilight. Might that France redeem itself today? live up to its promise and the pledges of its ancestors? That is the question that de Villiers’s essay leaves the reader with.
How it all Began
It was close to midnight on October 18, 1918. At the Saint-Elias Greek Orthodox abbey of Shwayya on Mount Lebanon, the night was draped in a heavy, devastating silence. Squinting into the cold twilight, the monks—groggy from fitful sleep after a long day tending to the hungry and destitute—could make out the nearby half-empty Maronite villages of Zighrine, Bikfayya, Khenshara, dangling in a fog over a sleepy Mediterranean below.
Four years of war and an Ottoman orchestrated famine had brought the Lebanese to their knees, their villages were lain waste, half of their population decimated. The Ottomans had “determined to exterminate […] wholesale and Turkify [their] empire by massacring the non-Moslem elements” wrote in those days the American ambassador to Istanbul, Henri Morgenthau, [iv] concluding that “the physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and children by massacres […] seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire.” [v] Hence, “race extermination” [vi] was visited on Mount Lebanon, rendering it “one colossal mass grave” according to one eyewitness of the times. [vii] That is how the thousand-year-old Shwayya abbey, among the few remaining Christian establishments not yet requisitioned for the Ottoman war effort, had become a refuge for the Mountain’s destitute and homeless. [viii] And so it slumbered in the slumbers of the extenuated on that cold October evening; it slept the cold, shallow, furtively stolen stone sleep that, in times of war, the worn catch in a ditch or on a roadside. [ix]
That night, Father Superior awoke abruptly to shrieks and ringing church bells echoing across mountains and valleys tumbling down to the sea. Hurriedly scrambling into his cassock, still dazed by a sleepy night now awake and bustling bright, he jumped out onto the frosty terrasse “only to be greeted by throngs of euphoric hugs and shouts of joy, emanating from monks gathered on the roof of the abbey.” [x] A group of villagers from the neighboring hamlets had just passed by, claimed the monks, haggard but enraptured as if in a trance, “yelling at the top of their voices that the Turks had left; that the French are landing; that a hopeless hope they had long since stopped daring to hope, was finally smiling down upon them.” [xi]
Since the fall of the last Crusader state in 1291, all had seemed lost for Lebanon’s Maronites. But now there was renewed optimism and faith in a brighter future. October 18, 1918, was a new day; “the new Crusaders are back,” [xii] or so dreamt the monks on that fateful evening; the same dreams their congregations had been dreaming for close to seven centuries. Now that the Lebanese people’s “compassionate mother” [xiii] was back, they thought, thirteen centuries of Muslim domination were drawing to a close, and hope for a recovered Lebanese (Christian) sovereignty, under French auspices, was back. [xiv] The “Promise of Saint Louis” was no longer a dusty parchment, or a mad Maronite dream. It was the Crusader King coming alive, standing at the Lebanese mountains’ gates, his shadow spilling across the abbey’s courtyard, recalling a scene plucked from a page of the Frankish chronicles that de Villiers so often invoked. Soon the towering shadow becomes a young French officer, an exhausted Poilu; his blue tunic dusty from the mountain trails, he steps forward and offers a crisp, formal salute. “We are here,” he says, his voice steady despite the thin mountain air; “France has returned.” Father Superior, a man whose eyes had seen the “lonely death” of so many, could not answer. Timorously, perhaps in disbelief, he reaches out a weathered hand, touching the rough wool of the soldier’s sleeve, as if to confirm this emanation of Saint Louis wasn’t a phantom of the morning mist. And when he finally spoke, his voice was a mere whisper, raspy, carrying the weight of seven centuries: “We have waited since the time of your promise. It was a long time ago. We knew you would come.” [xv]
It was at that moment that the “Promise of Saint Louis” ceased being a theological abstraction, a religious delusion, a hallucination. And as the soldiers began to unload supplies—flour, medicine, and hope—the abbey of Shwayya became the first sanctuary of a new era. [xvi] For the Lebanese monks and villagers gathered in that moment in time, the long night of silence had ended; the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” had finally answered the call of her distant kin awaiting.
France and the Maronites: A Question of Honor?
But what was behind this long “hoping and waiting”? Why this centuries-long emotional attachment? And was the “coming back” mere political expediency, a colonial exercise as the un-nuanced post-colonialists would have it, or did the “Second Advent” carry a deeper moral duty—a question of “national honor” that compelled “us Frenchmen to never abandon these Christians of the Near East” as one nineteenth century French traveler put it? [xvii] Even Charles de Gaulle, a sententious unsentimental soldier who despite his realist view that politics knows only interests, not feelings, still wove French Christian nostalgia into his own approach to Lebanon. [xviii] In July 1941, a few days following the liberation of the Lebanon and Syria Mandates from Vichy control, de Gaulle noted, not without emotion, how much of a “special place” Lebanon held for him; “in the heart of every Frenchman worthy of being called French” as he put it, “the mere mention of the word Lebanon stirs something viscerally peculiar within us,” and this, to the same extent that “the hearts of the Lebanese themselves throb to the rhythm of France’s own heartbeats.” [xix] Oddly enough, this sense of affection and duty persists into the modern era. As recently as 2014, three former French prime ministers—François Fillon, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Alain Juppé—affirmed that French politics in the East remained guided by a longstanding code of honor, that France was entrusted “a mission for the past five centuries to protect the Christians of the East; a mission that… [Frenchmen] have a duty to keep upholding for our times.” [xx]
In this same vein from a century earlier, French novelist and Académicien René Bazin wrote in 1915 that “here, on this old soil of France, there are still those of us who remember having sent throngs of people over to the Holy Land, in the times of the Crusades […] as a testament to history, to the importance of our role as protectors of Eastern Christians,” those children of “an admirable old French outpost, still waiting for France,” [xxi] still “reaching out to us, wishing to embrace us.” [xxii] For many Lebanese Christians, this bond remained, and became a “Second Advent,” a Parousia of sorts—a period of “waiting,” and “hoping.” [xxiii]
Recalling the arrival of French troops in October 1918, a twenty-five-year-old Lebanese poet captured this legacy of memory and anticipation, describing how French blood—spanning the Crusades to the Napoleonic and 1860 expeditions—had mingled with Lebanese blood in a “holy matrimony.” Charles Corm recounted how a dying father had his son swear an oath: that when he sees the morning of France dawning again, to come to his gravesite and whisper “Father, they have come; they have finally come.” [xxiv] And so, no more would the twilight enshroud the peaks of the Lebanon, wrote Corm, for “we have neither army nor navy, or guns, but we have our unwavering trust in France, protector of the weak, civilizer of nations, mother of all righteous causes and just liberties… France has never abandoned us. May God grant that she never abandons us.” [xxv]
And so, when on September 1, 1920, General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the birth of Greater Lebanon, his act was seen as a French answer to “the Maronites’ desiderata,” their quest for autonomy, territorial integrity, and independence in a redeemed homeland, restored in its natural historical frontiers; in a sense, modern Frenchmen making good on the “Promise of Saint Louis,” [xxvi] a fulfillment of an indefectible friendship, and France’s own commitment to a small people of the eastern Mediterranean; “a rose among thorns” owed France’s eternal loyalty in the telling of Pope Paul V. [xxvii]
Conclusion
And so, from Philippe de Villiers’s anguished 2026 plea—«Ô Liban de mon cœur»—back through the bells ringing in euphoria over Mount Lebanon in October 1918, the Franco-Lebanese bond reveals itself not as a fleeting sentiment or mere political convenience, but as a profound, enduring, covenant. It is etched in the soil where Christ’s feet once walked, guarded by the eternal Cedars, renewed in royal oaths and celebrated in the poetic matrimony of blood and memory. This is not abstract poetic nostalgia, but indeed “a question of honor,” a shared “calvary” twined in battlegrounds of faith and glory binding France’s “eastern soul” to Lebanon’s “Christian heart.” Adolphe Crémieux—one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent French Jews and a leading figure in the Alliance Israélite Universelle—reminded his fellow parliamentarians of this longstanding bond. In a July 3, 1847 address at the Palais Bourbon he noted that “the Christians of Lebanon… have been your brothers for centuries; not only your brothers in faith, but indeed your brothers in war, and on the battlefield. At every historical turn and in every circumstance, you have found them on your side. Saint Louis found them; Napoleon found them…” [xxviii] “Will you deign finding them today?” Philippe de Villiers’ seemed to be exhorting his countrymen in our times.
Yet today, as Lebanon once more “dies in silence”—while a post-Christian West looks away—de Villiers’s words seem to summon back an ancient promise; one that drew Western pilgrims of the heart eastward a millennium ago. The Maronites are still reaching out in de Villiers’s telling, as an “admirable old French outpost.” To honor their outstretched hand is to reclaim a piece of France itself he says; France’s Christian roots, its “Eastern soul,” its chivalrous past, its duty to protect the weak and honor the just. For if Lebanon falls silent forever, something essential, visceral, in France herself—in the West, in what many no longer wish to call “Judeo-Christian civilization”—falls with it. The “Promise of Saint Louis” endures, claims de Villiers; it awaits the honorable rising to the occasion, upholding the honor of honoring an ancient pledge.
Franck Salameh is the Terse Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College
NOTES
i. René Ristelhueber, Les traditions françaises au Liban (Paris : Librairie
Félix Alcan, 1918), 65-66.
ii. Discours de Marcel Olivier 13, Juillet, 1939, The New York World’s Fair
1939-1940 Records, Box 2155, Folder 17. See also “À l’Exposition de New-
York,” Phénicia (Beirut, Volume 2, Number 13, July-August 1939), 45, and
Al-Hoda’s Special Commemorative Issue celebrating the inauguration of
the Lebanon Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, “Speech of the French
Pavilion’s Commissioner General, Mr. Olivier” (New York: Volume 42,
Number 122, July 17, 1939), 2.
iii. Kamal Jumblat, “La Méditerranée, Berceau de la Culture Spirituelle,”
Les Années Cénacle (Beirut : Dar al-Nahar, 1997), 99.
iv. Andrew Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (New York:
Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918), 286-90.
v. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, 286-90.
vi. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, 301.
vii. Alfred Coury, Le Martyre du Liban; Sanctions et Réparations (Paris :
Imprimerie de la Presse, 1919), 9.
viii. The death toll collected by the American Red Cross put the numbers of
those who had perished on Mount-Lebanon, by May 1917, at 250,000 dead
by famine, out of a population of 400,000.
ix. Roland Dorgelès, Les croix de bois, (Paris: Michel Albin, 1919), 282-83.
x. Dominique Baudis, La passion des chrétiens du Liban (Paris : Éditions
France-Empire, 1979), 185.
xi. Baudis, La passion, 185.
xii. Thierry Desjardins, Le martyr du Liban (Paris: Plon, 1976), 23.
xiii. In Lebanese, mainly Maronite historiography, France is still viewed as
the “Eldest daughter of the Church,” protector of Eastern Catholics, and in
that sense acting as a “doting” or “affectionate/compassionate mother” vis-
à-vis of the Maronites.
xiv. See for instance Joseph Michaud and Baptistin Poujoulat,
Correspondance d’Orient, 1830-1831 (Paris: Ducolet, 1835), and Alphonse
de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (Paris: Pagnere-Hachette-Furne, 1845).
xv. Chinalef Rélame (pseudonym for Charles Corm), “Le Français tel qu’on
le parle” (“French the Way We Speak It”), La Revue Phénicienne, Beirut:
Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne, July 1919), 57-62.
xvi. J. de la Remoulière (pseudonym for Charles Corm), “L’œuvre du
Ravitaillement Civil de Beyrouth” (“Organization of Beirut’s Civil Relief
Work”), La Revue Phénicienne, (Beirut: Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne,
July 1919), 55-57.
xvii. Charles Reynaud, «Catholiques et Français, toujours!» in Le Voyage en
Orient ; Anthologie des voyageurs français dans le Levant au XIXème siècle
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), 772. See also Charles Reynaud, D’Athènes à
Baalbek (Paris : Furne et Cie., 1845), 156-7.
xviii. Paris Match, December 9, 1967. See also Jean-Luc Barré, De Gaulle,
Une Vie ; Tome 1, L’Homme de Personne, 1890-1944 (Paris : Grasset,
2023), 439.
xix. Philippe de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle; Lettres, Notes, et Carnets 1905-
1941, (Paris: Bouquins Éditions, 2010), 1262.
xx. «Proche-Orient : la lettre de Fillon, Juppé et Raffarin à Hollande,» Le
Monde, August 13, 2014,
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2014/08/13/juppe-raffarin-et-
fillon-exhortent-hollande-a-intervenir-au-proche-orient-pour-eviter-le-
deshonneur_4470766_3232.html
xxi. René Bazin, «La France du Levant,» December 29, 1915, in Revue de
l’Anjou, Nouvelle Série (Angers, France: G. Grassin, 1915), 373-77.
xxii. Reynaud, D’Athènes à Baalbek, 157.
xxiii. Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo II (Paris: Flammarion,
1998), 863.
xxiv. Charles Corm, “L’Ombre s’étend sur la montagne…” (“A Shadow is
Spreading Over the Mountain…”), La Revue Phénicienne, (Beirut: Éditions
de la Revue Phénicienne, July 1919), 11-12.
xxv. Ibid.
xxvi. Peter Elias Hoyek, «Les revendications du Liban; Mémoire de la
délégation Libanaise à la conférence de la paix» [Lebanon’s Demands:
Memorandum of the Lebanese Delegation to the Peace Conference] (Paris,
MAE, Série E-Levant, Sous-Série Syrie-Liban, Volume 266).
xxvii. See for instance Carine Marret, Les Chrétiens d’Orient et la France ;
Mille Ans d’une Passion Tourmentée (Paris : Éditions Balland, 2025), 65-
66 and 153.. See also René Ristelhueber, Les traditions françaises au Liban
(Paris : Librairie Félix Alcan, 1918), v.
xxviii. Adolphe Crémieux address at the French National Assembly, July 3,
1847. See René Ristelhueber, Les traditions françaises au Liban (Paris :
Librairie Félix Alcan, 1918),
