Lebanon's parliament, elected weeks earlier, moved in late August 1943 to unilaterally amend the constitution to remove references to the French mandate, asserting full sovereignty. The Free French delegate-general responded with arrests of Lebanese leaders in November, provoking mass protests that forced France to release them and effectively concede Lebanese independence, achieved formally in 1943.
Lebanon had been a French mandate since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and Free French authorities under Charles de Gaulle, despite championing liberty against Nazi occupation, initially resisted relinquishing colonial control over Lebanon and Syria.
The parliamentary maneuvering in late August set the stage for a direct confrontation: when President Bechara El Khoury and Prime Minister Riad Al Solh's government pushed through constitutional changes removing mandate authority, French officials reacted with fury, eventually imprisoning the president, prime minister, and other officials at the Rashaya citadel in November.
The arrests backfired spectacularly. Lebanese of all sects united in protest, foreign pressure mounted (including from Britain, wary of French colonial overreach undermining wartime unity), and France released the prisoners just eleven days later, on November 22, 1943, now celebrated as Lebanese Independence Day. The August parliamentary session is remembered as the opening move in the endgame of French rule in the Levant.