84 A Short History of the Middle East
but also for the furtherance of French policy in the Levant. During
the intrigues of the Second Syrian War Britain, on the other hand,
had made use of the friendship of some of the Druze chiefs of
Southern Lebanon. Ibrahim Pasha's government, and the steady
increase of population in the mountain-valleys of the Lebanon,
had had the effect of unsettling the peasantry and making them less
tolerant of their subservience to their landlords. Social relation-
ships were complicated by the fact that, while in North Lebanon
landlords and peasantry were both mainly Maronite, in the South
there were both Maronite and Druze peasantry in the service of
Druze lords. The proclamation in 1839 of the equality before the
law of all religions within the Ottoman Empire had encouraged
the Christian communities; and the Maronite priesthood, which
was drawn largely from the peasantry and was anxious to extend
its influence over the people, stimulated the social unrest. It finally
came to a head in 1857, when the peasants of North Lebanon, in-
cited by their clergy, rose against their Maronite lords and divided
up the large estates, while those in South Lebanon were forbidden
by their priests to pay rents to their Druze landlords. This show of
Maronite truculence had the effect of uniting the Druze peasantry
with the Druze lords, since they saw that the Maronites already
outnumbered them in fighting-men and were increasing at a faster
rate. The antagonism of the two unruly communities was fanned
by the Turkish Pasha in Beirut, who hoped to see them weaken one
another; while the rival intrigues of French and British agents, the
one taking seriously France's role as protector of the Maronites,
the other giving some encouragement to the Druze, added to the
tension. In 1860 the Druze made a general attack on the Maronites,
in which some 14,000 of the latter were massacred.1 In Damascus
the Druze, helped by Kurdish and Syrian Muslims, attacked the
Christian population and killed some 5,000. The news of the
Damascus massacres caused horror in Western Europe, coming as
it did soon after the attacks on Christians in Jidda in 1858 as a
second example of anti-Christian fanaticism in the Ottoman
Empire. In France it was welcomed as providing an opportunity
for a military adventure in the Lebanon, for which immediate
1 It is stated that the smaller Protestant communities, evangelized in the main
by the American missionaries, were left for the most part in peace, except where
they sided with the Maronites to resist the Druze (J. Richter, History of Protestant
Missions in the Near East, 199). See in general the objective summing-up by
Pierre Rondot, Les Institutions Politiques duLiban (Paris, 1947), 44 ff.