I will examine in this paper the thoughts of two Lebanese émigrés, Shukri Ghanem and Khairallah Khairallah. These men frequented the same Parisian journalistic circles, shared acquaintances in the French colonial lobby, and established together the Comité Libanais de Paris, which petitioned for reform of the special statute governing Mount Lebanon. They also both elaborated – Ghanem in his journalism and novel Da’ad, and Khairallah in an extended essay on Syria in the Revue du Monde Musulman – vicarious visions of Beirut and the surrounding areas as the catalysts driving the rapid changes coursing through Syrian society. Ghanem described Beirut in 1908 as rising briskly towards progress, out of the morass of ancestral sectarian and ethnic hatreds which had characterised the ‘Orient, where so many different races live cheek by jowl, and these diverse peoples make up a great heterogeneous, disparate flock, all stuck together in the same place, where reasons for disagreement [...] are countless’. The opening to Da’ad, set in the 1870s, presents a Beirut, which ‘at that point was not the nearly European town it has since become [...] Its inhabitants of various religions and races all lived side by side without intermingling’. However, these differences had ‘since melted away a little’, the Genoese architecture of the houses ‘more representative of their inhabitants’ ways’. Ghanem, then, drew a neat equation between the adoption by the town’s denizens of the accoutrements of European bourgeois comfort, and progress towards a more open, secular society. Khairallah, meanwhile, proclaimed confidently that the ‘Syria of old, and that of today, no longer look alike’. Throughout the land, ‘a new order has been remade, a new generation born’. These were forceful visions of a distinctly middle-class progress, driven forward by young intellectuals – journalists, lawyers and writers, whose ‘daring’ ‘literary and social theories’ had ‘stimulated that old oriental society, and sustain a powerful current pushing it forward’. These men, and women, were formidable vectors of change, transforming Beirut into the ‘intellectual capital of Syria’. However, their secular tone was systematically undercut by an emphasis upon the predominant role Christians – and particularly Maronites – played in driving the thoroughgoing transformations coursing through Bilad al-Sham. Sectarian sentiment consistently overlapped with an insistence upon the importance of intellectuals to social change. In the eyes of Ghanem and Khairallah, class, confession, and generation came together to explain the profound revolutions reshaping Beirut, Lebanon, and Bilad al-Sham.