This paper will explore the relationship between constructions of national historical narratives and the nascent tourist industry in Lebanon between 1920 and 1950. It will investigate the ways in which the political territory of “Lebanon” during the French mandate was defined, exhibited, marketed, and manifested. It aims to show how hoteliers, guidebook writers, journalists, as well as ‘average’ citizens identified different “tourist publics” as Lebanese, Arab, or ‘western’, and will explore the assumptions that underwrote how those groups were defined as consumers and to what purpose. This paper will reveal similarities and differences in the ways that the Lebanese and the French understood the role that tourism – from its beginnings as ‘summering’ (istiyaf or l’estivage) to the evolution of winter sports – could play in building a national economy with limited available natural resources, in delineating political boundaries within Lebanon as well as at its edges, and in cementing an image of national patrimony marked by particular materiality. Who was excluded from this image? What currency does Lebanon’s 1960s nomenclature as “the Paris of the Middle East” have, in this historical light? This paper ultimately attempts to use tourism as a lens to analyze densely nested structures of power and their impact on social and cultural organization.