It is difficult to imagine a clearer anti-sectarian demand than for the abolition of sectarian political representation in Lebanon. In August 1975, the Lebanese National Movement (al-?araka al-Wa?aniyya al-Lubn?niyya), a coalition of political parties, movements, and independent figures representing an ideologically diverse, multisectarian constituency, released its "Transitional Program for the Democratic Reform of the Political System in Lebanon." Promulgated during the opening rounds of what became a fifteen-year international civil war, the program was the culmination of at least a decade of polarizing popular struggle. Calling for "a progressive, democratic, Arab nationalist Lebanon," it detailed a suite of comprehensive changes to the political system, premised upon the abolition of sectarian representation and the declaration of a voluntary civil personal status code. LNM leader Kamal Jumblatt argued the events of 1975-76 were "our 1789," a Lebanese equivalent of a republican revolution against a privileged aristocracy-despite his own lesser position within this elite. Using Lebanese and American archives and interviews, this paper considers the efforts of the LNM to push its program in the political sphere and on the battlefield. It places the LNM's struggle to persuade other forces to adopt it-and then impose it by accomplished fact-within the context of the countermoves on the local level by the Christian and Muslim conservative elite, counterrevolutionary parties, and some of the LNM's constituent groups and tenuous Palestinian allies; on the regional level, by Syria and Israel; and on the imperial level, by the United States. Many-perhaps most-myths of the war spring out of this period, and we must return to the rhetoric and images of the participants, understand the chronological and dialectical evolution of the contending forces, in order to understand the period on its own terms. Against a historiography that either dismisses the venture as predestined to fail, or only considers the period within the shackles of post-defeat melancholia, this presentation reevaluates the history of one of the most explicit emancipatory challenges to the Arab order.