The Lebanese historian Georges Corm died on August 14, 2024. Author of an essential work, actor in Arab intellectual life, he marked his time. Tigrane Yegavian retraces the moral role of Georges Corm.
For generations of French-speaking students, Georges Corm was first and foremost reading a book on the history of the contemporary Middle East, constantly republished since its publication in 1983. Historian, political scientist, jurist, the former Lebanese Minister of Finance (1998-2000) marked the XXe Arab century. His personal history is intertwined with that of the Levant: born in Alexandria in 1940, he came from a Maronite family which had established roots in Egypt. He made the Franco-British military expedition during the 1956 Suez Crisis a key moment in his reflection on East/West relations. From his training with the Jesuits, then at Sciences Po Paris, he gained a mastery of political economy and the history of ideas.
A thinker and a doer
Imbued with the thought of Karl Popper (1902-1994), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Lebanese intellectuals like the journalist Georges Naccache (1902-1972) and the priest Youakim Moubarac (1924-1995), Georges Corm evolved against the tide of official doxa. He made the fight against colonialism, radical ideologies, social inequalities and the instrumentalization of religion for political ends a constant. But he was overtaken by the demons of confessionalism which ravaged his country during the civil war (1975-1990). We can read his first works on Lebanese drama as an attempt at resistance, a manifesto of self-defense against Manichean and stereotypical readings. In Paris, Georges Corm remained accessible and human. Always available for an interview or a discussion at Sciences Po Paris and at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut, he awakened many vocations among his students. In the name of a universal vision of human rights and secularism, reader of Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406) and Louis Massignon (1883-1962), he could not adhere to the “clash of civilizations”. Western hypocrisy, Zionism in its colonizing expression and Islamic fundamentalism exerted a comparable horror on him.
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Lebanese patriot and Arab nationalist, Georges Corm had a high conception of Lebanon. His favorable positioning of a citizenship opposed to the Christian withdrawal of the Maronite elites earned him many enmities within the Phalangist camp. In this, he placed himself as an heir to the Syro-Lebanese thinkers (mainly Christian) of the Nahda you XIXe century. Without ever breaking with the Maronite Church, which he helped to think of a theology of liberation in phase with the socio-political context of the Arab East, he remained a man of ideals at odds with his time. This ideal for a reformed, modern and secular Lebanese state put an end to his short experience as minister in a government where he no longer had his place while the militia elites shared the dividends of a reconstruction under a backdrop of corruption.
At the end of his life, his positions on the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the war in Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah sowed incomprehension. Open to the debate of ideas, he willingly accepted contradiction, while remaining economic advisor to several Arab heads of state. He was the worthy descendant of a family of artists like his uncle Charles, writer, and his grandfather Daoud, painter. He knew he was not a prophet in his country. But he leaves an inestimable legacy; his work will not grow old as long as the Arab world remains in darkness. T. Y.
