The creation of Lebanon in 1920 by France from what once was three disparate Ottoman administrative units, coupled with the imposition of a French colonial order, against the wishes of a sizable portion of the population, provoked a current of anti-colonial resistance that manifested itself in several outbursts of armed popular insurrection, and in a literary campaign launched in the press by Arab-nationalist writers who denounced and tried to de-legitimize the French mandatory project for the region. These two aspects of resistance to the French mandate have been the topic of several well known academic studies, including "The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism", and "Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon" to name but a few. Although these studies tapped the Lebanese press for historical evidence, they neglected to utilize the medium of vernacular poetry, especially that of 'Umar al-Z'inni (1898-1961), who was its master par excellance during the inter-war mandate era. Al-Z'inni, a Sunni Muslim from Beirut, composing under his pen name Hunayn, became famous as the most adroit social critic of the mandate, its governmental apparatus and its whole social order. However, Z'inni was no religiously motivated throw-back-into-the-past intellectual: he believed in the benefits of adopting a selective modernity, exemplified by using the French Chansonnier and adapting it to the local cultural and social environment. Z'inni's scathing social and political criticism spared no one, most notably the French government, its mandatory High Commissioners in Lebanon, and its local indigenous highly Frenchified supporters who were ridiculed in his poems. However, he also turned his lens toward the people of Beirut and Lebanon and criticized many an aspect of their way of life in the fast changing modern world, so much so that he won the epithet of Mulyir al-Sharq (Molière of the Levant). In my paper I will show that the vernacular satirical poetry of 'Umar al-Z'inni de-centers the traditional educated elites approach that has characterized academic studies on French mandate Lebanon, and engenders a more dynamic, fluid and multi-layered approach to understand the modes of collaboration and resistance between the colonized Lebanese and their French colonial masters.