Anglo-French rivalry in the Near East will not be an unprecedented phenomenon. “Since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, France and Great Britain have never fought in the Levant with naval and military weapons (though they have several times been on the verge of open war), but their struggle has been real and bitter for all that, and though it has not here gone the length of empire-building, it has not been confined to trade. Its characteristic fields have been diplomacy and culture, its entrenchments embassies, consulates, religious missions, and schools. It has flared up on the Upper Nile, in Egypt, on the Isthmus of Suez, in Palestine, in the Lebanon, at Mosul, at the Dardanelles, at Salonica, in Constantinople. The crises of 1839–41 and 1882 over Egypt and of 1898 over the Egyptian Sudan are landmarks on a road that has never been smooth, for conflicts [of one sort or another] have perpetually kept alive the combative instinct in French and English missionaries, schoolmasters, consuls, diplomatists, civil servants, ministers of state, and journalists. One cannot understand—or make allowances for—the post-war relations of the French and British Governments over the ‘Eastern Question’ unless one realizes this tradition of rivalry and its accumulated inheritance of suspicion and resentment. It is a bad mental background for the individuals who have to represent the two countries. The French are perhaps more affected by it than the English, because on the whole they have had the worst of the struggle in the Levant as well as in India, and failure cuts deeper memories than success.”[7] French statesmen were dissatisfied with the division of the spoils of war in the Near East. They had a feeling that here, as elsewhere, Britain had obtained the lion’s share. They believed that Mr. Lloyd George had been guilty of sharp practice in his agreement of December, 1918, with M. Clémenceau, by the terms of which Mosul and Palestine were to be turned over to Great Britain.[8] Frenchmen were suspicious of British solicitude for the Arabs, which they believed was not based upon disinterested benevolence; in fact, self-determination for the Arabs came to be considered a political move to render precarious the French mandate for Syria. French patriots chafed at British emphasis upon the fact that “the British had done the fighting in Turkey almost without French help” and that “there would have been no question of Syria but for England and the million soldiers the British Empire had put in the field against the Turks.” French pride was hurt by the rapid rise of British prestige in a region where France had so many interests. And prestige—diplomatic, military, religious, cultural, and economic—has always been an important desideratum in Near Eastern diplomacy.[9]