In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we return to Susan Pedersen's *The Guardians* – the definitive history of the mandate system – to examine one of its darkest chapters: the French bombing of Damascus in October 1925.
The French had acquired Syria under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, though the British never really accepted their claim to it. Lawrence of Arabia had raced to Damascus in 1918 to deliver it to the Arabs – and by extension to the British – in defiance of the agreement. But the French got their mandate, and they ran it with a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and violence.
The revolt that erupted in 1925 was not, as the French insisted, the work of brigands and agitators. It was the product of accumulated grievances: the division of Syria into four statelets, the creation of Greater Lebanon, the subordination of Syrian officials to French approval, the demotion of Ottoman-trained officers, and an economic policy that pegged the Syrian pound to the unstable franc. The Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash – a Syrian nationalist who had served in the Ottoman army and joined the Arab Revolt – was not a local warlord, as the French imagined, but a man with a vision of complete independence and free elections.
The French response was brutal. Villages were burned. Circassian, Kurdish and Armenian irregulars were unleashed to loot and terrorise. Corpses were paraded through the streets of Damascus and strung up in Marjeh Square. And then, on 18 October 1925, French tanks rolled through the narrow streets and the bombardment began – two days of shelling and aerial bombing of an undefended city.
The international outcry was immediate. The *Times* of London, hardly a radical publication, ran reports that turned colonial assumptions on their heads. Readers who knew nothing of Syrian villages could place them in the category of the primitive – but every biblically literate child had heard of Damascus. And now its ancient streets were being blasted by a European power that claimed to be a civilising force.
This episode explores the bombing of Damascus as a moment of crisis for the mandate system – a moment when the gap between the rhetoric of tutelage and the reality of colonial violence became impossible to ignore.
**Topics covered:**
- The French acquisition of Syria under Sykes-Picot
- The revolt of Sultan al-Atrash and the Druze
- General Sarrail and the blindness of French colonial officials
- The use of irregular forces and aerial bombardment
- The bombing of Damascus, October 1925
- The international outcry and the *Times* coverage
- The crisis of legitimacy for the mandate system
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