At the turn of the 1920s the Armenians of the Levant were mostly a population of refugees, largely outnumbering any previous Armenian presence in the region. Cutting across all layers and backgrounds of Armenian society, the tragedy of war and the Genocide had shattered the foundations of virtually all aspects of the life of the Armenian survivors as it was known before 1914. From the very start, the Armenians worked hard to reconstruct (or to construct, perhaps) an Armenian world in the post-Ottoman Levant. In the span of a few years this new Armenian world started to emerge in the life of the refugee camps and in the new Armenian residential quarters; a new set of Armenian institutions gradually appeared, catering for the material and spiritual needs of the community. The proposed paper will explore two crucial dimensions of the process of (re)construction: the re-establishment of the Armenian Churches (in the context of the French Authorities' religious policy), and the question of the participation of the Armenians in public, political affairs. The paper will argue that French colonial policy, and its approach to ethno-cultural diversity, are crucial to understand the Armenian community's comparative success in 'finding its place' in the post-Ottoman Levant.