In July 1919, Maronite Patriarch Elias Pierre Hoyek arrived in Paris to lead Lebanon's Second Delegation to the Peace Conference, determining his country's post-Ottoman political fate. Advocating for the creation of “Greater Lebanon” under French Mandate, Patriarch Hoyek drew political support not only from the Administrative Council in Baabda but also from sizable pockets of Lebanese Christians in the diaspora. Indeed, Hoyek came to Paris flanked by leaders from two of the diaspora's most active political groups: the Hizb al-Ittihad al-Lubnani headquartered in Cairo, and the Jama'iyah al-Nahda al-Lubnaniya of the Americas. During World War I, these organizations nurtured transnational activist network stretching from Brazil and Argentina to the United States and Egypt, ostensibly representing some 250,000 Lebanese living around the world. By 1919, these two parties cultivated an alliance with the Maronite Church as a means of actualizing their nationalist program “at home,” often at the expense of secular and anti-clerical nationalist parties like Shukry Ghanem's Comite Central Syrien, Khalil Sa'adeh's Hizb al-Dimuqratiya al-Wataniya, or the Syria-Mount Lebanon Liberation League of Ayyub Thabet, Amin Rihani and Gibran Khalil Gibran. Discussions of interwar Lebanese nationalism usually emphasize Franco-Lebanese relations, relegating the powerful nexus between the Maronite Patriarchate and Lebanese diaspora to the margins. But this alliance between the Church and Christian nationalists living abroad was not only central to the construction of “Lebanese” national identity, it would also prove enduring. From the Peace Conference in 1919, to the declaration of the Lebanese Republic in 1926, and until the Lebanese national census of 1932 (which enumerated Lebanese emigrants alongside residents), Lebanese diasporic parties embraced the Maronite Church as a means of ensuring that they “counted” in the homeland's politics. In turn, the Church depended on political organizations in the diaspora as a source of organizational and ideological sustenance. As a result, Lebanese nationalism during this period was an inherently transnational phenomenon, depending on ties between intellectuals, activists, and clergymen in places as far flung as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York.