Much of the historiography on the French Mandate in the Levant recognizes that Lebanon and its constitution were a French project. However, there is still much to untangle in the tumultuous story that culminated in the promulgation of the constitution of 1926. A closer look at the archives, and especially at the detailed documentation for an Organic Statute preceding the 1926 constitution, indicates that the standard narrative is less than perfectly accurate. Through the archives, I explore the unfolding of the Great Syrian Revolt in parallel to the drafting of the constitution. The crucial role of that revolution is often drowned in the story of the constitution as merely one additional factor in the cacophony of negotiations between Lebanese urban notables and French High administrators. The conventional narrative explains the granting of a constitution as one of the requirements imposed on the French Mandate by the League of Nations. While the French administration had until September 1926 to issue an ‘Organic statute’ for Lebanon and Syria, the concept of a constitution was never pronounced until the outburst of the Great Syrian Revolt. As the revolution unfolded in the territories of Greater Lebanon, the French authorities feared their own demise and the unmaking of the borders they had violently imposed a few years earlier. Accordingly, I show how the French re-adapted the ‘organic statute’ already in preparation at the Quai d’Orsay into a local constitution that would be promulgated in Beirut. My research demonstrates how and why the unfolding of the Great Syrian Revolt in Lebanon was the prime motive behind the granting of a constitution. More importantly, I add a new case study to the literature on Constitutionalism as Counterinsurgency -namely the introduction of constitutions as a means of forestalling, preventing, or suppressing revolutions. In this literature, where the cases of post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq loom large, we find their precedent in Lebanon under the French mandate.