The alliance between the French kings and Ottoman sultans lasted for centuries, as it was based on shared strategic interests. Francis I of France had not been afraid to have his country, the "eldest daughter of the Church," team up with Islam's most powerful empire, if only so that they might jointly oppose the Habsburgs. Louis XIII had justified such an alliance by the "protection" Paris thereby granted Eastern Catholics, starting with the Maronite Christians in Lebanon. His successors on the French throne embraced this claim, and the country's successive 19^th-century regimes also adopted it in various forms. Léon Gambetta was credited with saying, "anti-clericalism is not an item for export," and indeed France's Third Republic, secular though it was, had persisted in asserting that it had a mission to protect Eastern Christians. Moreover, when France obtained a mandate over the former Ottoman province of Syria from the League of Nations, it carved out, in 1920, a "Greater Lebanon" state – tailor-made for its Maronite "protégés."

The "Arab kingdom" established in Damascus in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in 1918, had adopted a constitution that respected civil liberties and minority rights, but the French army's intervention shattered this initiative by overthrowing the Damascus-based kingdom, in 1920. Not only did France institutionalize political confessionalism in Lebanon, but it also remained intent on dividing Syria along sectarian lines, creating a "Druze state" in the south and an "Alawite state" on the Mediterranean coast.

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