The life of French General Henri Gouraud (1867-1946) spanned over two centuries and three major conflicts between France and Germany. The exceptional military and political career of this highly decorated commander of World War I is emblematic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century French history. Gouraud’s successive postings and the lengthy periods that he served away from the Métropole perfectly illustrates the nature of French Colonialism in both Africa and the Middle East. The twenty years that Henri Gouraud spent (between 1894 and 1914) in the recently ‘acquired’ colonies and protectorates of Sudan, Mauritania, Tchad and Morocco were characteristic of how France employed its soldiers not only as its celebrated bâtisseurs d'empire, empire builders, but also as its colonial administrators who were then charged to spread la mission civilisatrice de la France, the civilizing mission of France. This paper will investigate General Gouraud’s career and utilize French archives held in the Ministère des affaires étrangères (MAE) and the Service historique de la défense (SHD) located in Paris and Vincennes. This paper will elaborate why France planned to fulfill its imperial ambitions in the Middle East during the Great War by accepting to divide the region (formally ruled by the Ottoman Empire) with Britain through the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, and how after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, it swiftly occupied Lebanon and Syria with the official approval of the League of Nations’ mandate. This study will present a sweeping narrative of the early years of French occupation in Lebanon and Syria, and detail how colonial rule in the Levant was markedly different from the Maghreb. This paper will not only focus on military and political events that occurred from 1919 onward, but also on the administration of the mandate, especially within the vital religious, social and cultural spheres. Gouraud’s time in Damascus provides a better understanding of the ‘divide to rule’ strategy that France implemented to control Lebanon and Syria. The three years that Gouraud spent as the Haut-Commissaire de la République in Syria and Lebanon, reflected French colonial rule and how it firstly re-arranged both countries in the small states of Aleppo, Damascus, the Greater Lebanon, the Jabal Druze and secondly, the way it primarily favored the Lebanese Christian minority at the expense of the Muslim majority with grievous consequences that sadly reverberated well after the end of World War II, when the French ultimately departed the region.