jeopardizing the time-honored protectorate of France over Catholics in the Near East. As early as 1898 an anonymous writer sounded a clarion call to Catholics and nationalists alike that German economic penetration in Turkey was a matter of their common concern: "Pre-*eminent in the Levant, thanks to the friendship of the Sultan and to the progress of the commerce of her nationals, Germany, if she gathers in, besides, our religious heritage, will crown her formidable material power with an enormous moral power; she will assume in the world the eminent place which Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I, Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon have assured to our country. The 'nationalization' of missions will inaugurate a period of German supremacy in the Orient, where the name of France has been so great and where it still is so loved."[22]
France occupied a unique position in the Near East. For centuries she had been recognized as shouldering a special responsibility in the protection of Catholics and of Catholic missions in the Ottoman Empire. This protectorate—which as late as 1854 had provided the occasion for a war between the empire of Napoleon III and Russia—had been acquired not by military conquest alone, but by outstanding cultural and religious services as well.[23]
Certainly at the end of the nineteenth century French missions held a preëminent position in Turkey. French Jesuits and Franciscans maintained elementary, secondary, and vocational schools in Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, and numerous smaller towns throughout Syria and Palestine. A Jesuit school established at Beirut in 1875 rapidly expanded its curricula until it obtained recognition as a university, its baccalaureate degree being accredited by the French Ministry of Public Instruction early in the decade of the eighties. The medical faculty
