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Lucien George, Francophone publisher, editor, foreign correspondent, authority on all things Middle Eastern, man of culture, humour and exceptional insight, died last week. He had been ill for some time. He slipped away peacefully, in the house he loved in Beirut, surrounded by his family. He was 85.
Life is full of surprises. Perhaps the greatest and most rewarding surprise of my life was to discover – in the back of a Syrian taxi from Damascus to Beirut shortly after the 1973 Middle East war — that I had a Lebanese cousin who would become one of my closest and dearest friends. Lucien and I teamed up in Damascus, covering the 1974 Kissinger-led ceasefire talks between Syria and Israel. We had never met. But we clicked. I spoke French and he was impossible not to like with his high forehead, Father Christmas beard and bright sparkling eyes.
He wrote for Le Figaro and the Nouvel Observateur, I for the Financial Times. He later became Le Monde’s distinguished Middle East correspondent.
He was erudite, charming, sophisticated and easy company. He had forgotten more about the Middle East than most of us will ever know. So, on that trip, I followed happily in his slipstream, picking up little gems of wisdom to beef up my despatches to the FT.
Job done, we decided to share a taxi from Damascus to Beirut over the foothills of Mount Lebanon, buying green figs on the way. We chatted about this and that, oblivious of the revelation that was about to hit us.
Just as we reached the Lebanese border we discovered, through one of those fluke detours in our conversation (which if it wasn’t meant to be should have been) that we shared a close relative.
My grandfather, a jurist, lived in Egypt, where I was born. He turned out to be Lucien’s great uncle. We both come from mildly exotic Mediterranean stock. We had become close on the story. In that instant we became brothers. The rest, as they say in the family, is folklore.
Lucien was a significant intellectual figure in post-World War II Lebanon, a country he loved but which also caused him great pain as it collapsed into civil war and became a failed state. He loved its complexity, its hitherto easy way of life and its uniquely cosmopolitan character.
We would often drive up to the village of Ehden on Mount Lebanon, close to where he was born, to eat kibbeh meshwiyyeh – finely ground beef, bulgur wheat, onions and basil — at an open-air restaurant by a small spring, shaded by great chestnut trees. Lucien was invariably greeted with great deference.
He was a consummate professional. During the Lebanese Civil War he could be relied on to file his stories — whether or not it was raining rockets in Beirut. His editors at Le Monde waited by the telex for what they called “Le Lucien George”. It would always arrive chattering over the antediluvian machine, invariably hitting the deadline.
One of his scoops was interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iraq in 1978, not long before the overthrow of the Shah. He wasn’t especially keen on going to meet this elderly cleric. But other Le Monde correspondents were banned from Iraq.
Lucien asked the old Ayatollah what his plans were. The reply was uncompromising: “To overthrow the Shah.” Which he did.
Lucien could also be an “Open Sesame” for an inexperienced reporter. In 1975, on the day King Feisal of Saudi Arabia was assassinated, I happened to be in Cairo. After fruitless attempts to reach the Saudi embassy for a visa, I rang Lucien. “Come to Beirut,” he said. I did. The following day he’d fixed me up with a seat on the official Lebanese government aircraft attending the funeral —enabling me to get in and out of the Kingdom without a visa, munching on caviar blinis washed down with excellent Lebanese wine.
Lucien loved life. But he wasn’t especially afraid of death. There was so much of it. He chose to stay in Beirut through the horrors of the Civil War, the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, the upheavals that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the effects of the Syrian Civil Warband, more recently, the corrosive influence of Hezbollah and its paymaster, Iran.
Beirut’s car bombs, killings on the Green Line that divided the Muslims and the Maronite Christians (which he crossed regularly), political assassinations, the slow bleeding out of a country once so full of talent and hope: none of it phased him. Others left. He stayed. His reaction to the devastating explosion of the port of Beirut in 2020? “We will rebuild. We always do.”
This resilience, this proximity, this granular view of events, gave him an insight that made him worth listening to. Unlike many of us journalists, he wasn’t a fireman or an armchair pundit.
Lucien never fell into the trap of offering simple answers to the immensely complex problems of Lebanon. Only the Lebanese (not the Syrians or the Israelis or the Palestinians) were responsible for their country’s fate.
He had an exceptional big picture view of how the players in the Middle East puzzle fitted together. His contacts in the courts and presidential palaces were second to none. He was trusted to get it right. And he was rarely wrong.
He embodied that cultured part of Lebanon, a country barely 100 years old, that contrasted so sharply with the bestial and corrupt forces that have brought it to its knees. My son and his son Alain (now chair of Islamic Art and Architecture studies at Oxford University) twice visited his close family in Tripoli, Lebanon’s northern capital, where there still exists a little alley in the old town that bears our family name. As the years went by the bonds grew deeper.
Despite being a committed and profoundly erudite supporter of La Francophonie (he was a recipient of the Légion d’honneur), Lucien was also a bit of an anglophile. He drove a sleek, racing green Jaguar XJ, navigating the anarchy of Beirut traffic with panache, if not always with perfect skill.
He wore smart, green corduroy trousers and drank Earl Grey tea – when Lapsang Souchong was not available. Tea leaves only, mind you, strained through a silver filter. Definitely not tea bags.
At the height of the Civil War, when investors fled Lebanon in their thousands, he borrowed money to buy a magnificent Arabesque Ottoman mansion in the Christian quarter of Ashrafiyeh. He kept faith with the country he loved.
In the living room he installed a fine 19th century marble fireplace from Damascus. He spent his last days in a medical bed in front of that fireplace. He was an aesthete to the last.
He leaves five children and 13 grandchildren. He also leaves a great void, but memories of a life filled to the brim. RIP.
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