Before France settled in Syria, the Alawites were prohibited in town. The geographer Jacques Weulersse highlights their absence in the cities except as servants. The creation of the “Alaouites” State changed their political situation and they were allowed to live in the cities but they still formed an urban minority in Latakia, Tartus, Jableh or Banias at the end of the French Mandate even if they were two thirds of the population of the statelet. In the 1950s, anAlawite urban elite had started to grow especially in Homs and Damascus where many Alawite military figures settled. The creation of public, secular schools in Homs, Latakia and Tartus was the first step toward their social promotion. However, this new generation did not turn out to be pro-French partisan as the Mandate Authorities had expected. The new well-educated Alawite generation joined the Arab nationalist movement and shook the power of traditional notability who, failing to maintain the Alawites State after 1936, preferred to be reunited with Christian Lebanon rather than Sunni Syria. This paper will focus on the period between the installation of the French Mandate (1920) and the Baathist revolution of 1963. It is based on both French sources (Weulersses, Jalabert and the Vincennes military archives) and Arab (Bou Ali Yassin, Saadeh). During this period the Alawites were migrating to the city and beginning their political rise through the Army (Batatu). How did the Alawite community become structured independently of the traditional notables? We will suggest that it had a very modernist face through the Baath and the Syrian Socialist National Party, but that it also kept a structure inherited from its tribal organization: the assabiyya.