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robes embroidered with gold, a scimitar at his side, spoke in Arabic while Lawrence translated. It was rumored that Feisal merely recited the Koran while Lawrence extemporized. The Arabs, Feisal said, wanted self-determination. While he was prepared to respect the exemptions of the Lebanon and Palestine, the rest of the Arab world should have its independence. He invited Britain and France to live up to the promises they had made. While Lloyd George posed questions designed to show the contribution the Arabs had made to the Allied victory, Wilson asked only whether the Arabs would prefer to be part of one mandate or several. Feisal tried to dodge what was an awkward question, stressing that the Arabs preferred unity and independence. If the powers decided on mandates, then, he hinted, his people would prefer the Americans to anyone else. When Feisal, with Lawrence, called on Wilson privately, they found him reserved and noncommittal, although years later, when things had gone badly for Feisal, he maintained that Wilson had promised that, if Syria really established its independence, the United States would protect it.25

The French foreign minister tried to catch Feisal out. As a British observer reported maliciously, “Pichon had the stupidity to ask what France had done to help him.” Feisal at once praised the French while managing to point out the very limited amount of aid France had sent. “He said it all in such a way that no one could possibly take offence and of course Pichon looked a fool, as he is.” A few days later the French returned to the attack, producing Arabs who claimed that their people, whether Christian or Muslim, wanted nothing so much as French help. Unfortunately, as the gray-bearded spokesman for the Central Syrian Committee was launching into his two-hour oration, an American expert slipped Wilson a note pointing out that the speaker had spent the previous thirty-five years in France. Wilson stopped listening and wandered about the room. Clemenceau whispered angrily to Pichon, “What did you get the fellow here for anyway?” Pichon replied with a shrug, “Well, I didn’t know he was going to carry on this way.” Clemenceau’s own view was that Feisal’s demands were absurdly extravagant, but he still hoped to avoid an open confrontation with the British, especially since the discussions on the terms to be offered Germany were reaching an acute stage.26

The French also brought in a delegation asking for a separate Lebanon under the protection of France, whose praises they sang. “Her liberal principles,” said its leader, “her time-honoured traditions, the benefits Lebanon never failed to receive from her in hard times, the civilisation she diffused throughout made her prominent in the eyes of all the inhabitants of Lebanon.” France had historically been the protector of the Christian communities throughout the Ottoman empire but it had particularly close ties to the Maronites, who probably formed a majority in the wild country around Mount Lebanon. In 1861 France had forced the Ottomans to set up an autonomous province there. Maronites had fought side by side with French Crusaders; they claimed, improbably, a family connection with Charlemagne; like French Catholics, they looked to the pope in Rome rather than to the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople; and, most important perhaps, they admired French culture almost as much as the French themselves. When Maronite leaders outlined a greater Lebanon, to include the Bekáa Valley and most of the coast from Tripoli to Sidon, as well as a large number of Muslims, France was sympathetic.27

Although Clemenceau himself was mainly concerned at the Peace Conference with France’s security in Europe, he could not entirely ignore his own colonial lobby. He told Kerr, Lloyd George’s assistant, that he “personally was not particularly concerned with the Near East. France, however, had always played a great part there, and from the economic point of view a settlement which would give France economic opportunities was essential, especially in view of their present financial