France lays claim to Syria and Cilicia

The British chronology of the war records under 17 March 1915 that the French government laid claim before the British government to Syria and Cilicia. The exact date of this step could not be confirmed in the sources. What is certain is that in mid-March France for the first time officially defined what it wanted for itself from the lands of the Ottoman Empire, and that it put this first to Russia and only afterwards to Great Britain.

The price of Constantinople

The immediate cause was the Russian demand for Constantinople of 4 March. Great Britain agreed to it on 12 March, but reserved the right to compensation. France, which had long regarded the Levant as its sphere of influence, had no intention of giving way to Russia for nothing. French banks and companies had invested enormous sums in Syria and Lebanon, and for centuries France had acted as the protector of the Catholics there, especially the Maronites of Lebanon. As early as February 1915 the Comité de l’Asie française, influential in Paris, abandoned the old policy of guarding French influence throughout the Ottoman Empire as a whole and came out in favour of France taking Cilicia and the whole of an “integral” Syria, including Palestine.

On 14 March the French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, handed the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, a note in which France, in return for agreeing to the Russian demands, wished to annex Syria together with the area around the Gulf of Alexandretta, and Cilicia as far as the Taurus mountains. On 16 March Paléologue put France’s plans to the Tsar himself at headquarters in Baranovichi. According to his memoirs, he described the “civilising work” that France intended to undertake in Syria, Cilicia and Palestine, and Nicholas II, having looked at everything on the map, replied that he agreed to it all. Russian diplomacy proved less generous. Soon afterwards it stipulated that the French acquisition could not extend so far south as to include Palestine, since the land of Christianity’s holy places required a separate settlement.

Talks with London

In London, in mid-March, the ambassador Paul Cambon told the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, that since the question of Constantinople and the Straits had been settled, France and Great Britain should discuss their wishes in Asia Minor unofficially. Grey described this conversation in a dispatch of 23 March to the ambassador in Paris, Francis Bertie.

The British were not prepared for this. They did not yet have defined aims in Asiatic Turkey, and the French demands clashed with their own plans. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, argued in memoranda of mid-March that after the war Great Britain should take Alexandretta, the best port in that part of the Mediterranean and the natural outlet to the sea for Mesopotamia. Grey also did not want to tie his hands with regard to the Arabs, with whose leaders the British authorities in Cairo were already in contact. London therefore gave the French evasive answers.

The long road to partition

The French initiative did, however, force the British to think about their own aims. In April 1915 the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, set up a special committee under the diplomat Maurice de Bunsen to define British interests in Asiatic Turkey. Talks with France on the partition of the Ottoman lands began in earnest only in the autumn of 1915, and their outcome was the Sykes–Picot Agreement, concluded in 1916. In it France received the coast of Syria and Lebanon and Cilicia, though Palestine was to come under international administration.