The State of Greater Lebanon (; ), informally known as French Lebanon, was a state declared on 1 September 1920, which became the Lebanese Republic ( ; ) in May 1926, and is the predecessor of modern Lebanon. The state was declared on 1 September 1920, following Decree 318 of 31 August 1920, as a League of Nations Mandate under the proposed terms of the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon which was to be ratified in 1923. When the Ottoman Empire was formally split up by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, it was decided that four of its territories in the Middle East should be League of Nations mandates temporarily governed by the United Kingdom and France on behalf of the League. The British were given Palestine and Iraq, while the French were given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon. General Gouraud proclaimed the establishment of the state with its present boundaries after splitting a few Syrian villages on the southern and western borders with Lebanon and adding them to Lebanon and with Beirut as its capital. The new territory was granted a flag, merging the French flag with the Lebanese cedar. Background Name and Conception The term Greater Lebanon alludes to the almost doubling of the size of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, the existing former autonomous region, as a result of the incorporation of the former Ottoman districts of Tripoli and Sidon as well as the Bekaa Valley. The Mutasarrifate had been established in 1861 to protect the local Christian population by the European powers under the terms of the Règlement Organique. The term, in French "Le Grand Liban", was first used by the Lebanese intellectuals Bulus Nujaym and Albert Naccache, during the buildup to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Nujaym was building on his widely read 1908 work La question du Liban, a 550-page analysis which was to become the foundation for arguments in favor of a Greater Lebanon. The work argued that a significant extension of Lebanon's boundaries was required for economic success. The boundaries suggested by Nujaym as representing the "Liban de la grande époque" were drawn from the map of the 1860-64 French expedition, which has been cited as an example of a modern map having "predicted the nation instead of just recording it". Paris Peace Conference On 27 October 1919, the Lebanese delegation led by Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek presented the