Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [254]
The French saw Lawrence as Feisal’s “evil genius” who had turned the simple Arab against them. When Lawrence arrived with Feisal at Marseille in November 1918, wearing, as a French colonel noted in disgust, “his strange white oriental dress,” they told him he was welcome only as a British officer. Lawrence left France in a fury, but turned up for the start of the Peace Conference, still in Arab dress. While he was fêted by the British and the Americans, the French muttered darkly about his unreasoning hatred of their country. He had taken, it was said, his Croix de Guerre and paraded it on a dog’s collar. Clemenceau, hoping to avoid a confrontation with Britain over Syria, agreed to see him. He reminded Lawrence that the French had fought there in the crusades. “Yes,” replied Lawrence, “but the Crusaders had been defeated and the Crusades had failed.”21
The French, who suspected that the British hoped to use Feisal to weaken their own case for Syria (“British imperialism with Arab headgear,” in the words of one French diplomat), did not want him or Lawrence in France at all and would have stopped them in Beirut if they had known in time. But they hesitated to turn Feisal away at Marseille; there was always a faint chance that he could be detached from the British. Feisal was greeted correctly but coolly and informed that he had no official standing and that he had been badly advised in making his trip. He was dragged off on a tour of the battlefields to keep him away from Paris and it was only when he threatened to leave that he was given an audience with Poincaré. The French also doled out a Légion d’Honneur, which Feisal received, as fate would have it, from General Henri Gouraud, who was later to turn him off his throne in Syria.22
When he went on to London, Feisal found a warmer welcome but with undercurrents that unsettled him. The British suggested that he might have to accept French overlordship in Syria. They also wanted him to agree that Palestine was not part of Syria, as the Arabs maintained, and to sign an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organization, recognizing the Zionist presence there. Feisal was lonely and at sea in an unfamiliar world. He needed British support in the face of French hostility. He signed at the beginning of January; the validity of the document, like that of so many others dealing with the Middle East, has been debated ever since.23
When the Peace Conference opened, the French tried to drive a wedge between Feisal and the British. His name was omitted from the list of official delegates. When Feisal complained, a French Foreign Ministry official said bluntly: “It is easy to understand. You are being laughed at: the British have let you down. If you make yourself on our side, we can arrange things for you.” After the British protested, the French grudgingly allowed Feisal to attend as an official delegate, but only as representing his father’s Hejaz. Lawrence was close at his side, chaperon, translator and, because Feisal was receiving a subsidy from the Foreign Office, paymaster. The French press attacked Feisal as a British puppet; French intelligence opened his letters and delayed his telegrams back to the Middle East. In an ultimately unsuccessful gambit, the Quai d’Orsay also nurtured the Central Syrian Committee, which claimed to speak for Syrians around the world and which wanted, it said, a greater Syria, including the Lebanon, under French protection. The main effect was to make Arab nationalists even more suspicious of the French.24
On February 6, the delegation from the Hejaz finally got its chance to address the Supreme Council. Feisal, in white