Antoine Portales silk and politics on Mount Lebanon

There is no doubt that the silk factories that spread across Mount Lebanon in the 19th century were an indication of the link between local production and European capital, and the shift in economic activity to export mainly through the port of Beirut. , which led to the emergence of a new class of merchants and intermediaries who will play an important role in the history of modern Lebanon.

Among the most important of these institutions is the French Factory, founded by the Portales brothers, and which was the first to introduce the method of artificially dissolving silk cocoons in Mount Lebanon through the adoption of modern artistic means. The Portales lords transferred their business interests from Alexandria in Egypt to Lebanon in 1838 and bought a plot of land in Battar (now Aley district) from Sheikh Yusef Abd al-Malik al-Maqatiqi al-Druze, which belongs to this area. The factory partnered with commercial establishments in Lyon, which secured financing from French banks and allowed it to increase its production and make large profits.
Antoine Fortunay Portales, who represented the interests of the family, played a political role in the events that took place on Mount Lebanon, especially after the civil war that broke out in 1860 between the Maronites and the Druze. He claims that he obtained from the commander of the French army sent by Emperor Napoleon III to Syria in order to protect Catholic Christians, to obtain a power of attorney to recover property from Christians that had been stolen during the fighting. Portales surrounded himself with a group of French soldiers and went to the village of Bhamdoun, where he mistreated its inhabitants and arrived at the home of a Greek Orthodox clergyman, demanding that he return the items that the Druze had stolen from the Christians and leave them with him. with him, saying: “Oh pig, I dare to hide the Druze money, and prick it with my head. His stick in the stomach ”, as stated in the collection of political editors that Philip and Farid El-Khazen published in 1911 (Part Three, p. 156). The same reference adds that Portales arrested four relatives of the aforementioned priest and imprisoned them in his laboratory, and each commissioner of the town of Bhamdoun demanded that he bring him “six pounds of raisins and a quantity of wheat and barley in a period of six days. on the pretext that the people of Bhamdoun hid the Druze lords in their homes and warned them of their usurpation. With the French soldiers on the town and looting it if they do not do according to their sign ”(p. 152).

He played a political role in the events that took place on Mount Lebanon, especially after the civil war in 1860.

Among the very rare documents that reflect the prosperity of the silk factories in Lebanon is the invoice issued by the Portales factory on May 11, 1876, which obliges the Royal Ottoman Bank of Beirut to pay, after three months, the sum of ten thousand francs to one of his clients in Lyon, France. The name of the plant owner appears on the document. P. Portales and its location in the village of Btater, and the name of the plant, Filature du Mont-Liban, is printed on the background, meaning “Mount Lebanon Silk Factory.” The document bears the signature of Antoine Fortunay Portales, as well as the seal of the Royal Ottoman Bank of Beirut.

* college professor

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