Beirut 1952: The Rosewater Coup That Toppled a President

In 1952, Lebanon's first president Béchara El-Khoury was forced to resign after a quiet, fragrant uprising known as the Rosewater Coup. This episode traces how a coalition of Druze emirs, Maronite journalists, Muslim politicians, and army officers — including the young Camille Chamoun and the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt — used a general strike, a newspaper campaign, and a symbolic bottle of rosewater to end El-Khoury's corrupt rule. We explore the role of the secret society Al-Hizb al-Watani, the political maneuvering around the 1951 parliamentary election, the Constitutional Bloc's internal splits, and how Lebanon's fragile sectarian democracy survived its first constitutional crisis. The coup set a precedent for peaceful transfers of power in a region prone to violence, but also revealed the underlying tensions that would erupt decades later.

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