Elites, power and political change in post-war Lebanon

In 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, backed by the League of Nations, granted French control over what are currently Lebanon and Syria. Four years later, in 1920, decree 318 formally made official the creation of Greater Lebanon, which definitively separated Lebanon from Syria, and, in 1926, the new country became a presidentialist republic after the promulgation of the Lebanese Constitution. This Constitution provided a framework in which major positions in state institutions, the army and the administration were distributed between the notables of the most powerful confessional communities in the country.