The French mandate over Lebanon and Syria linked these former Ottoman Arab provinces to other territories under French tutelage, including North African colonies and protectorates. While some of the ensuing mobilities, such as the arrival of colonial troops, resulted from French administrative strategy, unregulated circulations- whether of Arabs traveling to the Americas, Bedouin disregarding mandate borders, or Jewish migrants into the region were regarded as destabilizing to a fragile mandate governance. Women´s movement in particular aggravated authorities’ disquiet regarding what the archive labels the policing of morals. Women circulated in mandate Lebanon and Syria according to overlapping logics, increasingly finding work in service positions which ran the gamut from the café chantant to hat confectioners, secretaries in the colonial bureaucracy or state employed madames recruited in Morocco. Whether as providers of Western crafts and commodities in the urban modern materializing in Eastern Mediterranean ports or as prostitutes engaged in state engineered servicing of troops stationed in rural outposts, working women sparked local hostility on the part of conservative and religious sectors who increasingly identified the category of ‘françaises’ with prostitution and depravity. In order to dissociate moral scandal from colonial women, French authorities severely restricted the arrival of women, while instituting close surveillance of dancers and other itinerant performers constantly suspected of being spies, and of Arab women employed in the prostitution industry servicing the colonial garrisons in the Bekaa and smuggled into the British mandate of Palestine to flesh out the flesh trade in the thriving industrial port of Haifa. This paper is based on original archive research at the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres archives in Nantes and Paris, the City Archive of Haifa, and numerous interviews.