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Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Sarah Griswold about her book titled Resurrecting the France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Now, this is really interesting as a book because it's taking us into a topic that comes up a lot of times, right? France and its history is known to be a thing that various French governments have been pretty obsessed with and are still definitely prioritising today. But we generally don't talk about it. I don't think in the time period of the immediate years of Post World War I, focusing on the countries that today are Syria and Lebanon. Back then, they were the Levant. They were under French colonial control. We'll talk about it, but. But that's a really interesting aspect of these debates around heritage and the role of the French state, because it's not talking about the Eiffel Tower or baguettes, but is, in many ways, as I'm sure we're going to discuss today, linked and kind of familiar, despite the time and place being a lot less commonly discussed. So clearly we have a lot to get into and a lot to talk about. So, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. It's my pleasure.
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B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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C
Yeah. So I am a European historian of the 20th century. It's my focus, and up to now, I've specialized on modern France. I did a doctorate in history and French studies at nyu, so very much kind of bathed in French cultural history. And I came, you know, to this project with a really long fascination in how cultural objects become political actors or kind of mobilized for political ends. You know, as you touched on in the introduction, I found myself fascinated by France's changing global status in the early 20th century. It's a time of great flux for the country through World War I being the kind of main battleground with the Western Front and really decimated by World War I in multiple ways. And so I was really interested in how France, known for its kind of cultural, you know, history and its cultural prowess, how did France flex the politics of heritage to meet those challenges that it was facing? And I should mention here that I have an MA in Museum studies, and I worked in museums as a curator before I became a historian. So I've really been long interested in museums as power and in curators as agents of politics, but also as professionals in their own right with, you know, their own agendas. And so I was, you know, interested in France in that time period. And I should say, too, I was very interested in kind of the French Empire and the international, new internationalism that came out of World War I. And so I was in the diplomatic archives in France back in 2012, and I came across a lot of documents about the mandate. And it just seemed like the perfect topic for multiple reasons given my interests. But I ended up writing a book on France's mandate in Syria and Lebanon because I wanted to understand why what's arguably one of France's least studied colonial dependencies, at least among French historians, Middle Eastern historians have covered the Mandate. But why it mattered so much to French governmental and cultural leaders after 1918. As I said, it's a place that's usually treated peripherally in French historiography. But as I looked further into the Mandate in the archives and the. In a lot of press, I saw it everywhere. So, you know, my question became, why were. Why was France there? What were they doing? And what was the role of heritage? And I gradually came to see heritage. I try to show this in the book as not just a facet of Mandate policies, but really the heart of the Mandate's logic. So I look at France in this era from 1918, after World War I, is the place of crisis, about its place in the world, about its empire, but also about its own heritage, identity. And so what becomes the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon becomes one theater or I guess like a field site for addressing that crisis that France is experiencing. And the book tracks a lot of different people, too many people who had really different visions about what the Levant meant for French history and for the French present and for the French future. So I look at Catholic pilgrims and the Archbishop of Lyon and archaeologists, military leaders, to kind of get at their different views of French heritage. And, I mean, I think ultimately my goal was to reposition the Mandate as a center of 20th century French cultural politics. And that's kind of, you know, what you were. I really liked the introduction you gave because that is kind of exactly what I was trying to do. And at the same time, I also wanted to kind of narrow down to one core group that, to me, comes out through my research, which was the people who were affiliated with the Antiquity Service of the Mandate. They were mostly French men, but it is a fairly sprawling cast of characters, and I wanted to look at how they navigated the political pressures that they were facing with their professional interests as well. So there's kind of a nested story within that intersects with this broader story about France. And I should say, as a final note for why I wrote this book, or at least what was in the back of my mind as I wrote it, was that I mentioned I started the research in 2012 and that spring, about a year after the Arab Spring began. And so I was, you know, in the Syrian Civil War. And so I was really struck by the discourse, especially in, you know, the international and kind of the Western press about the plight of Syria during the civil war, especially the discourse about its monuments. And, you know, what I found interesting was what got focused on, what didn't, the loss of human life that often was eclipsed by consternation about what was happening to monuments. And it doesn't necessarily work its way into the book per se, but it certainly informed questions that I was asking myself and of the sources as I pursued my research.
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B
That is a very helpful introduction because it gives us loads of things to talk about and very much also frames the kind of richness of investigating this time period. Right. Just because it's not well known doesn't mean that there isn't a lot to figure out and get into and it does connect with these wider debates that kind of have survived the passage of time more. So let's start to get into then what the kind of political and conceptual goals are for the time and space that we're talking about. So we're in sort of 1918 France. It has the idea that they're going to have this mandate in the Levant sort of on the horizon with World War I ending. What were they hoping to get from this? And to your point earlier about kind of the centrality of heritage to it, how important were debates around religion and heritage in sort of shaping these expectations about we're going to get this and here's what we want to get from it?
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C
Yeah, well, so this was something that I thought I understood before I did the research. I mean, not that I, you know, thought the question had already been answered or I wouldn't have embarked on it. But, you know, there's a long standing body of research on French political and cultural attachment to the Catholic Maronites of Mount Lebanon, at least since the 19th century and arguably even earlier. And so, you know, I knew that that was at play with what was going on in France in terms of lobbying efforts and the rhetoric and the explanations for why France deserved or needed to be in the Levant. What I found in the process of researching was I did find that, of course, there were certainly a lot of rhetoric and machinations that have to do with Mount Lebanon and Catholic Maronites. But at least in terms, you know, as I focused on heritage, kind of the rhetoric of heritage and then also the policies of cultural heritage, what was really interesting that emerged for me is that there were these French claims to being the historical Catholic protector of the Holy Land. And so that meant Ottoman Palestine too. And that was not something that I expected to find. That is not something that I think is as at least well covered. And, you know, the Catholic Protectorate, the French Catholic protector of the Holy Land, was a real thing. It wasn't completely made up, although the French sort of dressed it up in. In the ways that they needed. And it dated from the 16th century. So, you know, so that's before World War I. During World War I, as it becomes clear that the Ottoman Empire is likely going to lose its. Its Arab provinces, we see a really strong lobbying group emerge in Paris. And they're there from, like 1914 very loudly. Pundits at the time called them the Syrianists. So I adopt that language in the book to refer to them, too. I think it's important to distinguish, though, that they're Mostly not Syrian. There are some who are from Syria who are emigrants, but most are French. And you have a kind of potpourri of clergy and diplomats and businessmen. And they lobby throughout World War I into 1918 for French control of all of what they call the Holy Land if the Ottoman Empire falls. And so I make the point in the first part of the book, and it's called the Christian Heritage Mission, the first part of the book is that these claims they're making should be understood as partly geopolitical. There's definitely strategy there, but there also is real, I think, ideological belief among certain members of the Syrianist group. And I think really this is where my background in French as a French historian comes into play. I argue that they're an extension of these seismic rifts within France, which had troubled France throughout the 19th century over France's past and present and future as a Catholic country. And that comes out of the, you know, enlightenment, the 1789 revolution, and then really strong anti clericalism in France from the end of the 19th century. And so I think there's a real argument there that the desire for this quote, unquote, French Holy Land comes out of real theological motives. You see that on the part in the book of people like the Archbishop of Lyon, the Archbishop of Paris, the Rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris, Dominican, French Dominican priests in Jerusalem, they all have a real vested religious interest in trying to claim a much broader swath of the Levant than I think we're used to thinking of. And then you also have people like Maurice Baraz, who I talk a lot about in the book, who I think has a more cultural view of France, of its claims in the Levant. And when I say cultural, I mean kind of cultural Catholic, that even if you don't necessarily believe in, are really pious. France deserves the Levant because it's a historically a Catholic nation and that it is good for French prestige if France retains as much of the Holy Land as possible. Yeah. And so one other thing I'll just say is that this is clearly a lot of visions. There's not much during World War I because the Ottoman Empire hasn't fallen yet. This is a lot of projection and rhetoric and not a lot of practice. And it's kind of only later, after 1918, once things shake out, not really in the French favor in terms of Ottoman Palestine, that they have to figure out, okay, how do we operationalize heritage in a real sense, in a physical sense? Now that we have what we have, we're going to have to do something with it, whatever we can, you know, best do.
- [15:40]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not what ends up happening, but it is always helpful to have a sense of kind of what the goals are. You know, if everyone's, like, in hypothetical land, ideally we'd have this. Right, because then we can understand sort of to what extent is what they actually got sort of satisfactory or kind of how many tensions we're starting with. And obviously, we're starting with at least some tensions, because if the. Some of these goals are about France having Jerusalem or obviously that's not what happens. Right. Ottoman Palestine becomes a British mandate, not a French one. So how do these religious, cultural, imperial, French goals change once we get into the 1920s and kind of the reality of which bits the French do and don't get become clear?
- [16:27]
C
Yeah, so I think, you know, the kind of quick answer, but I'll go longer, but the quick answer is the French kind of make do, as I mentioned, with what they can. And one of the arguments I make throughout the book is that this is a history of kind of adaptation within the limits that it's not really one of heritage hegemony. It's in some ways a more kind of pernicious and powerful form of heritage practice that shows its ability to adapt. But, yeah, I mean, just to answer your question, so, yeah, the Treaty of San Remo in Spring of 1920, signed by a bunch of European diplomats, this is what dashes hopes of the French for having a larger swath of land, of having Palestine. And so, you know, this is where we see the first kind of sign of real French weakness of what the geopolitical realities are. What comes next is that French actors in charge of heritage, and it's a. It's a bunch of different people at this point in 19, you know, 1920, it's. It's not really professional. We have an antiquity service. It gets founded in 1920, but it's very inchoate. It's not very strong. It's. There's a lot of voices in the room who are trying to make heritage policy. And so what I show in the book is we see kind of two broad pivots away from Palestine, where the French decide, okay, we've got kind of. We want to stick with this Christian heritage register. And we see two different ways that we can do it. So for one, they redirect heritage policies more forcefully to Lebanon. This is kind of what I expected to see, and I did see this in the. In the archives. That's where they have a mandate. So At San Remo, too, in spring of 1920, the French get what becomes the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon. Later in 1920, the French controversially decide to split Lebanon off into its own state, statelet. And so the interest here, the kind of shift that I see, is that they try to enact heritage policies and then create heritage sites that are focused on celebrating the history of France's protectorship of Maronites, the Catholic Maronite, since at least the 18th century, if not like the 12th century in the Crusades, you see some kind of rhetoric about that, and there's a desire to devote resources to preserving and promoting that heritage within Lebanon. What I show in the book is that the potential sites for promoting and, you know, kind of realizing French Maronite cultural heritage, those sites don't really appeal to the French heritage officials. They seem like they like to talk about it, but they don't actually do much to operationalize those sites. And that's partly because the potential sites are mainly Ottoman era. There's no real specialist in France who can readily be called upon to do that or who wants to do that. And so what I show in the book is that the interest in promoting a Christian kind of heritage within the mandate that they get really falls on the second track. And that is to embrace the rhetorical, but also the really monumental, fairly kind of show stopping, physical heritage sites of the Crusades. And we get both basilicas and churches, but also these massive hilltop castles, fortresses that become a target of French heritage planning. Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the elements or stories that I try to bring out with that pivot towards crusader heritage is that we see a move from a more kind of, I think, sacred heritage about the Protectorate, which is really, in, you know, some ways about religious devotion and its more recent history to the prospect and the opportunities provided by a deeper historical cultural myth like the Crusades. So the Crusades are really kind of deep enough and they're mythical enough in French memory by the 20th century that they appeal to a lot more people. They can represent French culture, not just French cults, like cult meaning religion. And it appeals to a secular audience as well as well as to Catholics. So it has a more kind of, you know, expansive heritage repertoire that it offers these crusader sites, not to mention they're spectacular.
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A
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B
Okay, thank you for explaining to us then what this starts to look like on the ground. And I'm glad you've mentioned the crusader castles because they really do seem to care quite a lot about them. So is it just because they are quite cool looking or like what were the sort of wider political goals with focusing so much on crusader ruins given kind of what's happening more broadly with French politics in the 1920s?
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C
Yeah, I think that politically there's a couple of convenient elements about the crusader castles. First, most of the crusader castles are located in the Alawite state I mentioned before, you know, greater Lebanon. The Alawite state is one of the other statelets that's created and it is one of the states that the French have the most control over. They basically control the representative council of the Alawite state. And that means then they can sort of do a bit more without the amount of negotiation required in a place like Damascus. So I think that's one element. I mean, but clearly I think the fact, fact that these are these massive, gorgeous, in some cases really evocative ruins clearly stands out as this kind of material example for why they would be targeted by the French. I think that also, you know, I talk about how the crusader castle projects begin in the early 1920s and that is around the time when the French are also invading Syria, the state of Syria and taking it over. And that's very contested. It sucks resources of the French government. You know, lives are lost on both the French side and on the Syrian side. So it's Highly, you know, in the, in the world press, it's not doing France any favors. And so I think there's an interest in promoting the Crusader history in order to appeal to a broad swath of the French public. There's not only these kind of amazing photographs that you can take, but there's kind of great rhetoric about the bravery of French soldiers, past and present. I also mentioned, you know, the kind of sensational aspect of the, of the castles in terms of promotion. There's, you know, magazines and photographers and painters who are coming, who are being paid by the French High Commission to come and propagate for the regime. And so I think that the crusader castles becomes a way to not only consolidate and kind of legitimize France's shaky political status there, but it is also this clear way to try to bring in French tourists. And I write in the book about how that's in some ways a folly because the crusader castles are so remote that they end up being really hard to get to for French tourists. Many French tourists beg off, but that is something that the French state tries to do. The French regime, they're not trying to bring colonists over to a place like the Mandate, but they do want to try to attract your average, well, wealthy French traveler to build in a kind of metropole support that way. And the crusader castles seem like a really great destination in the French planner's mind.
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B
That is very interesting to think about kind of promoting these castles. And then, oh, wait, now people are randomly up halfway side of the hill. Oh, that causes some problems for us. So I suppose given that sort of outcome of that promotion, it's probably not therefore a surprise that the crusader ruins were not the only aspect of the colonies that the French heritage makers were really interested in. They also picked some other places that were, well, for one thing, a lot easier to get to. So, for example, Damascus, aside from just being a city that doesn't have these kinds of logistical problems, why else was this city a key place for these heritage makers in the 1920s?
- [27:24]
C
Yeah, so this was something that was, you know, very interesting, was to look at this juxtaposition of different heritage sites that the French were trying to manage. On the one hand, these castles in remote Alawite state, and then, yeah, these very accessible cities like Damascus, which was the capital of the state of Syria. So I think that Damascus throughout Most of the 1920s is a place that the French regime holds with a certain distance. I mean, it's the center of resistance to the French regime from as early as 1920. And then in 1925 of the great Syrian Revolt, which breaks out, it lasts two years, and the French get into, you know, international kind of come under international opprobrium for bombing Damascus and burning part of it in this counterinsurgency attempt. So one of the reasons that the French end up focusing on Damascus is because in the aftermath of the Great Syrian revolt, from 1927, there's this desire in the French regime to try to seem more pluralistic, to actually fulfill what the mandate ostensibly was supposed to do, which was to build future nations, Syria and Lebanon, and to encourage what in the language was the mandate and the League of Nations language was tutelage. And so what we see is the French pursue different kinds of reforms on a really wide scale, but in terms of heritage, they really start to try to improve both their policy and the projection, the representation of their caretaking of Islamic heritage. So I don't really say this in the book, but it's kind of a refinement of the regime's Islamic heritage diplomacy from the late 1920s. They do a couple things that I won't really talk about all of them, but for one, they start to work more closely with the Syrians who are in charge of the National Museum in Damascus. The curator of the Syrian National Museum, Jafar Al Hasani, had actually been trained at the Ecole du Louvre in France in the early 1920s. So that's an interesting case of somebody who's entangled in the French regime. Yet both in reality and again, in representation, doing more cooperative work with him and seeming to give him more autonomy is perceived as a win by the French regime. The other kind of key sort of story that I talk about in the book in Damascus is this really happy rediscovery of the mosaics of the great Umayyad Mosque. And these are mosaics that date from the early Umayyad area era, which is kind of seen as a golden Islamic age. It's one of the, you know, earliest kind of centuries of Islam and Islamic art. What they find when they find these mosaics is that they feature Byzantine materials and craft. And so this offers a really useful past for making an argument there. There then convergence and coexistence between early Islam and early Christianity. And that really serves the French regime's desire to rehabilitate its image in the wake of, you know, what was seen as blatant disregard for human life, for heritage, and for the nationalist kind of aspirations of the Syrian people.
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B
That sounds all very interesting, but also like a recipe for at least tension if not chaos, I mean, that's a whole bunch of different actors there. Different historical traditions, different religious traditions, different sort of political backing or kind of funding to go around, for example, and kind of do an archaeological dig or something like that. Like, how much do we actually see cooperation or collaboration from the late 20s into the 30s? I mean, just for instance, who gets to decide, like what exhibition we're putting on at the museum in Damascus or which bit of this very, very old city we're going to try and excavate next? How were things like that figured out?
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting. There's, there's a lot of competing actors in the mandate. You know, I haven't even talked about the kind of international that the non Syrian, non Lebanese, non French interest groups and actors that we have. There's some of this, you know, these decisions, for example, about an exhibition or an excavation is dictated by personal relationships. And of course that gets very thorny. I mean, I mentioned Jafar Al Hasani, who has this interesting indebtedness or an entangled kind of relationship with both Muhammad Khurd Ali, who is the head of the Arab Academy in Damascus and who founds the Arab Museum, which becomes the Syrian National Museum. So Jafar Al Hasani is sort of his protege. But then Alhassani gets sent through an agreement between the French government and the government in Damascus. He gets sent to the Louvre for training to become a curator. And there he's mentored by French archaeologist Rene Douceau, who I profile a lot in the book is his mentor. And yeah, so I mean, I see him in letters between, with Dussault, for example, seeming really conflicted about in some ways, like his loyalties, which is understandable, and the kind of decision about who gets to put on an exhibit and who gets to do an archaeological excavation. In addition to those navigating a personal relationships, you also have the kind of overhang of what, you know, politics of what. And I see this most in the French case because I've looked at their archives the most, you know, what should we be doing? What does the League of Nations expect us to do? And I don't want to get into the arcane details here, but the League of Nations expectations, and this gets codified in a whole bunch of kind of laws and charters is the expectation is that a. The French are supposed to be, as I mentioned, tutoring or catering to, for example, Syrian best interests. But it's complicated because there's also an open door policy on excavations and the mandate. This is under the League of Nations kind of idea that France won't get the mandate and have a monopoly, that if you are British or Danish or American, you have an open door to excavation. If the French and the Syrians or the Lebanese agree that you should have access. And, yeah, I mean, so it's. I would say that on balance, the French still come out as having, you know, an asymmetrical amount of power. They hold the pen and the paperwork and they're on the ground making decisions about who gets an excavation. The Antiquity Service gets to make those decisions, but it's contested. The Syrian and Lebanese are pushing back within their power. And there's international opinion, too, that matters. The League of Nations is watching to try to hold the French to account, to make sure they're obeying and paying, adhering to the expectations that they agreed to when they got the mandate.
- [35:58]
B
That definitely is a very convoluted picture. And, of course, there are loads more details on the book. We're doing sort of a highlights tour here. So for any listeners who want to more about all of these different actors, some of whom definitely have some kind of crazy ideas, I would definitely point you towards the book there. But I want to get more into some of these projects in particular, where we see lots of different people kind of trying to achieve different goals at the same time. So we mentioned archaeology a little bit earlier, and there does seem to be quite a lot of it happening in the sort of 1920s, 1930s period. So what kind of archaeology are we talking about? Like, what sorts of time periods or histories are the French interested in excavating, and what are they less prioritizing at this point?
- [36:46]
C
Yeah. So I can. I'll start by answering what they're less interested in and then focus on what they spend their time and money doing. They tend to be less interested in kind of Arab vernacular or Ottoman heritage from more recent periods. And I think that's partly a factor of bias, and that is itself related to, or at least because of that kind of ingrained bias, you also have a lack of trained experts. And so you see that in some of the conversations in letters and memos is that when they do do decide that they want to have somebody who's an archaeologist of more recent periods of, you know, the early Ottoman era, they basically say, we don't have anybody. Nobody is an expert in that. And so what, you know, I see in terms of the kind of archaeological focus is broadly, there's two areas that they lay their money and their kind of bureaucratic attentions on the first is classical archaeology, which is sometimes called Greco Roman archaeology. And this is a really interesting type of genre of archaeology in this era because it attracts so many different people. And this kind of draws on the last question I was just answering. You have for example, Syrian archaeologists working with Danish archaeologists at Palmyra. You have French and Lebanese archaeologists working together in Lebanon at Baalbek. You have international digs coming in. This is where the League of Nations open door policy was in play. So for example, Belgium sons one of its, I think only excavations in the region to Apamea, which is a Greco Roman site. And what I found really interesting about classical archaeology is partly the arguments that the French are making, which they make in for example, Algeria as well, that, you know, we're the inheritor and we are the heirs of, of Greece and Rome. We, you know, this is our heritage. What I also found interesting though, beyond the ideological messaging where it was just the politics that were involved with classical archaeology, because there were so many different, you know, nations that were interested in classical archaeology, it becomes a bit of a double edged sword for the French. So on the one hand they really tout it their positive impact on restoring the mandate and particularly the ruins of Greece in Rome. They come to the League of Nations and say, we're doing such a good job of fulfilling the expectations of our role because we're bringing in teams from all over Europe and we're partnering with the Syrians. But it's also a double edged sword because there's so much interest and attention in classical archaeology. When the French falter, when there's, when Baalbek shows cracks and, you know, it seems like it's going to fall down. Really this is a light on the mandate that the French don't want, that they find, you know, difficult. So that's one archaeology that I look at in the book. And the second kind of kind of archaeology that the French spend a lot of time on is what's known as ancient Near Eastern archaeology. And this is the broad term for archaeology that related to cultures dating before the Greco Roman period, so Sumerian, Phoenician, Ugaritic and what was called biblical archaeology. And I focus a lot on biblical archaeology in one chapter because I found that very interesting, showed a real shift from earlier chapters and the earlier interest of the mandate in, you know, the Holy Land and kind of Christian rhetoric which was, you know, as I argued, was somewhat religiously motivated with biblical archaeology. What's really interesting is that the French insist that they're approaching it with a, you know, as a scientific. It's a scientific approach. And that also gives them a certain kind of sense of superiority that I found interesting over some of their British and American compatriots, or not compatriots, competitors. So I found really interesting critiques by some of the French archaeologists of the British archaeologist Leonard Woolleys kind of willingness to sensationalize his biblical finds, claiming that he'd found evidence of the Great Flood. Another French archaeologist critiques the Americans who are working at Megiddo, the biblical Armageddon. He says they're driven by biblical zeal. And so there's this, you know, French commitment or perceived commitment to the science of Near Eastern archaeology. It just so happens that they also themselves tend to traffic in kind of biblical sensationalism. And so this is one of I try to explore in the book is this tension that the French heritage makers are finding between their desire to do, you know, real science, but also this sensed need to sensationalize the past for what they perceive as the good of the Mandate as the political regime and the good of their profession of getting purchase within the Mandate regime by drawing attention, favorable attention to their work.
- [43:18]
B
That definitely makes sense in terms of the benefit to the mandate. What about the benefit to French interests more broadly? So, for example, if we go to Paris, are they paying attention to this? Are museums like the Louvre benefiting from these excavations happening somewhere in Syria, or do we not really see those kinds of connections?
- [43:40]
C
Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting because the Louvre, for example, which is the main recipient of artifacts from the mandate. The Louvre receives thousands of objects from the Mandate over the period of time that the French are in control. So I looked at ledgers and statistics that were within the minutes of the French curatorial committee, and it's clear that the Near Eastern Antiquities Gallery, which is where many of the Mandate artifacts were being funneled to, was outpacing all the other, you know, the paintings and the Greco Roman in terms of what it was receiving in the 1930s. But what's interesting is that these are really small artifacts. They're coming from these excavations that had been, you know, were getting a lot of attention in France in mass publications like Illustration. But these weren't previously known. These weren't kind of, you know, famous sites. So there's a site called Ra Shamra, which becomes identified as Ancient Ugarit. There's Classical Era Dura, Europis, there's Sumerian, Mari. And so the Louvre is getting a lot of these objects, but these aren't, you know, As I said, these are kind of small stones the Louvre does. And the reason for that is because of this kind of combination of legal texts. And the most important legal text is the Antiquities Law, which is passed in 1926, which basically sets the legal terms in the Syrian and Lebanese government's favor to keep the objects that they want. So what I show in the book is that the Louvre does get a lot of objects, but they have to try to be kind of creative with what they receive. These are not showstopper pieces. There's one exhibition that they, somebody suggests in the end of the 1930s, and the Louvre basically shuts it down kind of internally because they say we actually, we don't have enough show stopping artifacts to do a special exhibition about the Mandate. Most of the good stuff is back in Beirut and Damascus. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that it's an interesting sign of the politics of the time, of the politics of heritage in this period. It's not something that I necessarily knew I'd find when I started the research. And then I also think, you know, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that it's a. It made the French curators who were in the Louvre have to be somewhat more creative and adaptive with what they did with the kind of little pieces that they obtained.
- [46:43]
B
I mean, in some ways, being creative and adaptive about the little pieces they actually got kind of goes back to what we were saying right at the beginning of the religious leaders, the political leaders in the mandate having to be creative and adaptive with the sort of less of the land than they wanted. So there's sort of a full circle aspect of this already. Is that why you end the book talking about the Louvre, or are there other reasons that that's kind of the conclusion, conclusion that you come to?
- [47:08]
C
Yeah, yes, partly. I mean, I, I thought that the Louvre is a, Well, a. You know, it's so well known, it's such a flagship museum. And the fact that most of the artifacts, the, the real artifacts that the French were able to get ended up in the Louvre, you know, it made sense to, to end it there. But I also think that, you know, the, these objects that are excavated in Syria and Lebanon in very specific spots in these very specific circumstances. What I also found interesting about the Louvre is that the curators, you know, in charge, they try to, as I mentioned, do their best with these objects, but I actually think that, you know, they, for better or for worse, and I think in some ways worse, they're fairly creative and innovative with what they get. So in the book, I cover the final chapter and in the epilogue, that after World War II, the Louvre undergoes a kind of reorganization. It actually starts in the 30s, but in World War II, they have a lot of time to think about, you know, how do we actually execute this and pull this off? And so as the galleries reopen at the end of the 1940s, the Louvre gets rebranded as, you know, very explicitly a museum of Western civilization, which I really hadn't found, I haven't found in records, it being so explicitly referred to as such. The director who of the Louvre, who'd actually cut his teeth in the Mandate, actually, as an archaeologist, they present the Near Eastern galleries, which is where most of the Mandate artifacts are kept and are on display as the entry point for a journey into Western civilization that one can now make by traveling through the Louvre. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's interesting that you point out that it's kind of a really full circle moment in a way, from the French loss of this dream of Palestine and kind of figuring out how to make do that. We see that in the Louvre as well. And that's one of the main arguments I try to make in the book, is that this was not hegemonic. The French had real limits, the curators often, and the politicians didn't get what they wanted. And yet heritage is malleable. There's a lot of innovation that's going on that I'm tracking that, you know, is both professional but is also highly political. So, yeah, that's why I ended it in the Louvre. Yeah, and it made sense for the personnel too, because the people who I'm talking in the Antiquity service, most of them by the time that World War II ends are still stuck in France for the time being. So it also seemed like a kind of fitting place to end the book. They're in the Louvre working because they're not sure when and if they'll ever be able to go back to Syria and Lebanon.
- [50:29]
B
Yeah, that does make sense on a number of levels to be the ending. So thank you for explaining that to us. Thinking then, about the book overall, you've mentioned a few times things that you kind of weren't expecting to come across, which I think is always a really interesting aspect of historical research. So is there anything else that we haven't mentioned that you want to include that surprised you or that you want to make sure we discuss?
- [50:51]
C
I think that I, you know, I've definitely covered the kind of the push and the pull, the many different competing interests in the mandate that I didn't necessarily expect to find. I think that I was also very, you know, not surprised. Not surprised. But the level of kind of local Syrian and Lebanese agency is something I would like to highlight. Again, I wasn't necessarily surprised, but I do think it's, you know, it's very common in histories of colonial regimes and maybe especially in kind of histories of heritage to expect the governing power to have total control. And in this case, I really found that the Syrian and the Lebanese curators and archaeologists who I profile, they found ways to push back. Now, there was a lot of people, kind of Syrian and Lebanese landowners or farmers who found artifacts in their backyard and wanted to excavate and they would get denied. So it wasn't as if everybody had agency, but at least at this high level of, you know, elites within the mandate, it was a more dynamic picture than one might expect. And I wasn't necessarily sure what I would find when I started the project.
- [52:20]
B
I mean, that makes it fun, right? Because then you get to investigate. Yeah.
- [52:24]
C
Oh, absolutely, yes. No, I mean, I was pleased to be surprised.
- [52:28]
B
Exactly. Well, what are you going to go try and be surprised with next? What's the next project coming up? Whether or not it's related to anything we've talked about or not? What's on your horizon?
- [52:38]
C
Yeah, well, I have a new project that I've tentatively begun working on. It is not at all in some ways related to this project that I've just completed. So I'm calling it tentatively Pernicious Objects, the Things that Haunted Europe after World War II. And what I'm interested in is what became of the kind of residue of Nazi and fascist material culture, the small objects. There's been really interesting work on what Germany did with the Nuremberg parade ground. But the small objects, like all of the Mein Kampfs, the bust of Marshal Petain, there were attempts to purge Europe of that material culture, but clearly it wasn't successful fully. And so, yeah, I want to look at kind of what explains the persistence of those objects in the immediate post war era, but then looking all the way to the present and how relationships with those objects have changed both in Europe and in America over time. And so I'm thinking there about kind of active online trade in fascists and small fascist objects. So, yeah, that's the next project.
- [54:01]
B
Well, that certainly sounds very interesting. Best of luck with that investigation.
- [54:06]
C
Thank you very much.
- [54:08]
B
Well, while you are doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Resurrecting the France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [54:22]
C
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much, Miranda, for the invitation.