but ultimately conceded a council composed of Christians and Druses. After the Crimean War the reiteration in the Hatti Hamayun of the promise of equal rights to Christians and Jews led the Druses to believe that the Maronites were to be supreme in the Lebanon; and in 1859 blood again began to flow.
The fighting in the Lebanon was followed in 1860 by fierce attacks on the Christians of Damascus. The Turkish Governor, finding that Moslem lads had been insulting the Christians by making crosses on the roads in the Christian quarter and then trampling and spitting on them, ordered some of the culprits to be put in chains and to clean the district. They were quickly liberated by the passers-by; and the excited mob then attacked the Christians and plundered some of the European Consulates. On the eve of the Damascus massacres the Sultan had sent Fuad Pasha to restore order in the Lebanon, and when he heard of the new explosion he issued a stern threat of reprisals against individuals and towns which should insult a Christian.
Had these events, so common in the Ottoman dominions, occurred elsewhere, little notice would have been taken of them; but Syria was bound to France by the ties of memory and ambition, and nothing that happened there could be indifferent to her ruler, himself the nephew of the invader of 1799. It was no longer a question of supporting a rival claimant to Syria, as in the reign of Louis Philippe, but of occupying the country with French troops. On the news of the Damascus massacres the French Minister of Foreign Affairs informed the French Ambassador in London that France merely desired to discover, in concert with other Governments and with the Porte, the best means of obtaining the compensations due to humanity and of re-establishing peace in Syria. His proposal was for the joint occupation of Syria by French and British troops; and Great Britain assented, but in the end sent no military force.
On August 7 the Emperor addressed the departing troops:
