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The French Map of Beirut (1936)

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Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((ICA))

Abstract

Toponymic inscriptions are an ‘authorized version’ of history written on space. This article aims to explore the toponyms on a French map of Beirut published in 1936 to show how France, as a sovereign power, transformed her ‘Lebanese policy’ into place names and thus created a different reality, in rupture with the past. This reality still endures today on the map. The new polity was created under the mission protectrice of France. The ‘mission’ is read on the map through the names of Gouraud, Foch, Pétain, and other generals of World War I, and by key features of the French Republic (‘The Marseillaise’, ‘the French’, ‘Paris’, and so on). With Lebanon being a ‘refuge for minorities’, the 1936 map of Beirut has thoroughfares named after saints, ulemas, and religious figures of Christians and of Muslims (‘rue patriarche Hoyek’, ‘rue Ibn Arabi’, and ‘rue Abou Bakr’). In 1918, political martyrdom was introduced to political discourse, but also to the map; thus the main square of the city is renamed ‘Place des Martyrs’, with numerous streets named after intellectuals hanged by the Ottomans and considered martyrs of the new Republic. These three ‘toponymic systems’ are in discontinuity with the toponymic past of Beirut. These toponymic dynamics still shape the map of Beirut; no constitution change or ‘toponymic cleansing’ happened after Independence in 1943. There are more ‘martyrs’ and religious figures added to the map and mandate army generals are still commemorated. Mandate-made maps continue to shape Beiruti place names today.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    High Commissioner of France and Commander-in-Chief of its Army in the Levant.

  2. 2.

    For more information see (Ammoun 1997; Salibi 2002; Kassir 2010; Najjar 2014).

  3. 3.

    Lebanon was not a colonie of France, but under mandate. Thus in this article ‘colonization’ is defined in its broader sense: the mise en tutelle d’un territoire sous-développé et sous-peuplé par les ressortissants d’une métrople according to the French Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales. The Class A Mandate on Syria and Lebanon was covered by the Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919 (SDN 2011).

  4. 4.

    This article follows the distinction between the prototype and the image, as put forward by Theodore the Studite and Paul Evdokimov: the image is always dissimilar to its protoype ‘in essence’, and similar to it’in hypostasis’ (Evdokimov 1997: 52). Toponyms are considered as ‘images’ of their prototypes; they reproduce the hypostasis, not the essence. For example, ‘Louis IX of France has a rue Saint Louis’ means that King Louis IX of France has a certain ‘image’ of himself that is inscribed or marked on the map of Beirut.

  5. 5.

    The map is at the archives of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a scan is available from: http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/lebanon/beirut/maps/tfl_1936_beirut.html Courtesy of The National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Geography—Historic Cities Research Project.

  6. 6.

    This study is partially based on toponymic systems analyses made in the context of a doctoral thesis defended at the Sorbonne in 2018: The centre and the name, readings in Beirut’s toponymy. The abstract is available from: http://www.theses.fr/2018SORUL067.

  7. 7.

    Toponyms, for this study are every name attached to a place, e.g. a street name, a river or water-surface name, a quarter name, a city name, or a green-space name.

  8. 8.

    In this paper toponymic systems are defined as interacting toponyms present in more or less the same space, and usually written, re-written, controlled and run by political power.

  9. 9.

    The Löytved map of 1876 shows some commemorative trends but not these two toponyms. This map, drawn by Julius Löytved (Vice-Consul of Denmark), is a south-up map and one of its original copies is located within the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and available from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8494564f.

  10. 10.

    The Baedeker map of Beirut was drawn by Karl Baedeker in a ‘Handbook for Travellers, 5th Edition’ in 1912 and is available from: http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/lebanon.html

  11. 11.

    The map of Beirut 1920 is in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and is available from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53066704k/

  12. 12.

    Some historical Beiruti maps are available at the Archives militaires de la Défense in Vincennes and at the archives of the IGN in Saint-Mandé. The author visited the two archives during his doctoral research on Beiruti toponyms.

  13. 13.

    The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret 1916 agreement between France and the United Kingdom to define and to share the spheres of influence in the Levant.

  14. 14.

    By that time the Port of Beirut was the most important of the Eastern Mediterranean façade and the main entry point to Beirut (For more information see Fawaz (1984) and Issawi (1977).

  15. 15.

    During the whole French presence in Lebanon (1918–1945) Algeria was, officially, a French département, a part of France.

  16. 16.

    In other words, General Henri Gouraud commemorated himself by putting himself on the map of Beirut.

  17. 17.

    Another Mandate officer was commemorated on the 1920 map; Colonel Émile Niéger, who played an important role in ‘pacifying’ the southern parts of Lebanon (Khoury 2004), has a rue Colonel Niéger connecting the Grand Serail to the south-western quarters of the city. The street is renamed rue [Maurice] Barrès in the 1936 map.

  18. 18.

    Later and in 1945, rue Pétain became rue France and is still on the map of Beirut today.

  19. 19.

    Field Marshal and 1st Viscount Allenby of Megiddo in 1919, see Hughes (2011).

  20. 20.

    See Abu Madi (1996: 241, 595–597) and Shawqi (2005).

  21. 21.

    For more information see Leo XIII (1884), the entry ‘Benoît XV’ in Ambrogi and Le Tourneau (2017), and Drago and Tawil (2017).

  22. 22.

    Mar is a Syriac word meaning ‘saint’ or ‘venerated’, found in many Beiruti hagiotoponyms.

  23. 23.

    Saint Michael the Archangel gives his names to a street and to the Camp St Michel of Armenian refugees.

  24. 24.

    In Arabic sidi is ‘my lord’ and saïde is ‘my lady’, both words are used as veneration titles for members of the House of Mohamed.

  25. 25.

    In a city where notable Muslim families claim descent from the Prophet or from first caliphs (Hallak 1987, 2010) the choice of toponyms among members of Mohamed’s household and caliphs can make sense.

  26. 26.

    The Arabic word for martyrs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Jack Keilo

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  1. Jack Keilo
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Correspondence to Jack Keilo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Human and Life Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent, UK

    Alexander James Kent

  2. Department of Art Sciences and Archaeology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Soetkin Vervust

  3. Department of History, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA

    Imre Josef Demhardt

  4. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK

    Nick Millea

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Keilo, J. (2020). The French Map of Beirut (1936). In: Kent, A., Vervust, S., Demhardt, I., Millea, N. (eds) Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23447-8_14

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