The memoirs of the man behind Sykes-Picot, in unpublished translation

Sykes, Mark / Chambard, Roger (transl.). Le dernier héritage des califes.

€ 4.500,00

Never published: the only known French translation of "The Caliph's Last Heritage" by Lieutenant Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919). The translation is attributed to the French diplomat Roger Chambard (1904-82); it was probably carried out while Chambard was stationed at the High Commission of the French Republic in Syria and Lebanon (Haut-commissariat de la République française en Syrie et au Liban).

Sykes's work traces the rise of Islam as a political force and the account of his five trips undertaken from 1906 to 1913 in the Ottoman Empire (Iraq, Anatolia, Kurdistan, Persia and Egypt) on the eve of the Great War, with his dragoman (a Christian from Jerusalem), his English servant, his Greek cook, five Syrian mule drivers and sometimes his wife. The first edition dates from 1915, and no French translation has been published.

The document is doubly interesting: on the one hand, it gives the unpublished version of a text written by a major diplomat, a negotiator in 1916 alongside François Georges-Picot of the infamous Sykes-Picot agreements; on the other hand, it comes from an emblematic personality of French diplomacy from the 1940s to the 1980s, Roger Chambard, who then held the position of head of the press service of the High Commission in the Levant.