Who said “We are back O’Saladin” when France occupied Damascus in 1920?

However, Puaux was not with Gouraud when he first entered Damascus in 1920, and would only reach the city as high commissioner in 1938. He must have then heard it from the locals, since by the late 1930s, many Syrians were frequently citing it in their works and discourse.

And when taking Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on a tour of the Old City in March 1958, President Quwatli stopped at Saladin's tomb and repeated the exact same story. Nasser enjoyed it tremendously and began to repeat it himself, and since then, everybody began to refer to it as an undisputed fact.

Closer look

But a closer look takes us back to an account published by French historian Louis Garros in Le Monde in 1970, marking the 50th anniversary of the French occupation of Syria. Garros had served in Gouraud's army and he says that "a general" entered the Saladin mausoleum – without explicitly mentioning Gouraud.

And again, he repeats that this general said: "Saladin, nous voici." It might have been either Gouraud or his top commander Mariano Goybet, the man who actually occupied Damascus on 25 July 1920. Gouraud himself did not enter the city until 7 August 1920.

Like any commanding general, he was accompanied by a parallel army of French correspondents and journalists, including Maria Rosette Shapira, who was covering the Syria occupation for the French weekly L'Illustration. Shapira was writing under the pseudonym Myriam Harry, and she published her first report from Damascus on 21 August, followed by a second on 11 September 1920.

Her first article entitled, Le Général Gouraud à Damas, says that Gouraud visited the Umayyad Mosque before arriving at the tomb of Saladin, where he sat outside the premises under the shade of a lemon tree.

He didn't enter Saladin's tomb but returned to the mosque where he was received by various Muslim dignitaries, before turning to the al-Midan neighbourhood, outside the Old City.  

The report implies that this was the second visit by French officers to Saladin's tomb, not the first. The first had actually taken place a few days earlier, and it was led by General Goybet. And it was during that visit that something "obscene" had been said by a Frenchman, explaining why Gouraud decided not to enter, so as not to add insult to injury.

Goybet's visit is mentioned in the second report dated 11 September 1920, not the first, implying that it took place between 21 August and 11 September.

Goybet's own account

To clear up the mess, we returned to what Goybet himself had written about the event for the magazine Revue des Troupes du Levant in January 1937. He entered Damascus with vengeance in his eyes, admitting that he thrived at seeing the city fall, due to a little bit of his own family history.

This is what Goybet himself said:

"I am in Damascus. This name used to evoke fabulous associations in my mind as a young boy whenever I came across it in the records of my family. Jean Mongolfier, the distant ancestor of my paternal grandmother Louise was captured during the Second Crusade in 1147 and brought to Damascus." 

"He was an ordinary foot soldier. The people of Damascus worked him as a slave in one of the factories engaged in manufacturing paper from cotton. Poor Jean labored there for three years until he managed to escape from the city, and, after countless perils, rejoined the Crusader Army."

"When he returned to his birthplace (in France) after a 10-year absence, he built the first paper mill in Europe. Is it not an act of supreme justice that the descendant of a prisoner during the Crusades should enter the holy city as a triumphant conqueror?"

This settles the dispute and proves that it was General Mariano Goybet and not Henri Gouraud who said: "We are back O'Saladin."

Gouraud is still to blame for the ill-advised statement, however, given that Goybet was his right-hand man. Both men belonged to the same colonial school that took great pride in the occupation of Damascus and consequent dismemberment.

It's been over 100 years since then, however. So much has happened in Syria that it doesn't really matter whether it was Goybet or Gouraud. Both men still deserve their place in the black book of Syrian history but for the sake of historical precision, we need to start attributing the quote to its rightful owner.