Beirut in the 1930s was no ordinary city. It was a place where the questions that would define modern Lebanon were beginning to take shape. Between the port, the newspapers, the schools, the universities, and the youth organizations, the newly emerging Lebanese state was searching for its own political language and for a sense of purpose amid a turbulent region and sweeping global change.

At the time, the challenge was not simply how to govern a new state. It was how to transform Lebanon from a constitutional idea into a living political community. Large segments of Lebanese society, particularly within the Christian community, saw the Lebanese entity not merely as a geographic or administrative reality, but as a space of freedom that had to be secured, strengthened, and protected.

It was in this context that Pierre Gemayel emerged. He did not enter public life merely as a politician seeking office, but as a man of beginnings. His story, in many ways, intersects with the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, who argued that the only true political miracle is the human capacity to begin something new. Every person who enters the world carries the possibility of starting something that did not exist before. Politics, in its deepest sense, is not simply the management of existing institutions; it is the creation of a shared world that opens new possibilities for freedom and action.

Seen through that lens, Pierre Gemayel was more than a party leader or political figure. He was, in Arendt’s profound sense, a founder — someone who sought to create a new public arena in which an entire generation could appear as an active force in history rather than merely a passive witness to it.

Political Birth: Founding the Public Arena in 1936

Arendt believed that authentic political action begins when individuals step out of isolation and appear before others in a shared public space. Freedom is not realized solely within the individual; it becomes real in the public realm, where people meet, speak, and act together.

In 1936, Pierre Gemayel founded the Kataeb Party. That act was more than the creation of another political organization. It was an attempt to establish a new arena of public participation. It enabled large numbers of young people to move beyond family ties and traditional loyalties and enter the world of organized political engagement and collective action.

In that moment, the individual ceased to be defined solely by inherited affiliations and became a participant in a political and social project with a vision of society and the state. This is precisely what Arendt meant by a founding act: the creation of a space in which speech, action, and participation become possible.

It was, in every sense, a moment of political birth — a moment when an entire generation entered history.

The Political Covenant: Independence in 1943

Arendt argued that political authority is rooted not in violence but in covenant — in the mutual promises that citizens make to one another. A shared political world becomes possible when people commit themselves to a common project that gives continuity to collective action.

In 1943, the Lebanese confronted the French Mandate authorities in one of the defining moments of their national history. Independence was not merely a constitutional event or an administrative transfer of power; it was the creation of a new covenant between citizens and the emerging state.

Pierre Gemayel participated in that struggle and was imprisoned alongside several leaders of the independence movement. Yet the significance of that moment extends beyond the imprisonment itself. It marked Lebanon’s transition from dependence to political responsibility. In Arendt’s terms, independence is not simply liberation from foreign rule; it is the willingness to assume responsibility for building and sustaining a shared political world.

It is a movement from submission to commitment, from passivity to action.

Founding and Resistance: When Preserving the State Becomes Political Action

Arendt reminds us that politics does not end with the moment of creation. It also requires the ability to preserve the common world from disintegration and collapse. Every political project needs those who are willing to defend it against disappearance.

From this perspective, a central dimension of Pierre Gemayel’s experience becomes clearer. Resistance, in this context, is not limited to its military meaning. It becomes resistance against political dissolution and the loss of collective agency. It is the defense of a community’s ability to continue shaping its own destiny rather than becoming merely the object of events driven by others.

In that sense, resistance is an extension of the founding act itself. Founding creates the public sphere; resistance preserves the conditions that allow it to survive.

Politics in a Time of Collapse: From Founding to Preservation

By the mid-1970s, Lebanon had entered a radically different era. As state institutions weakened and much of the country’s institutional structure began to unravel, the central question changed. It was no longer How is a public sphere built? but How can it be prevented from collapsing?

It was in this context that the Lebanese Resistance within the Lebanese Front emerged as a political framework that brought together multiple forces within the Lebanese Christian community in an effort to organize political action amid the fragmentation of the state and the erosion of central authority.

From a perspective close to Arendt’s, this marked a shift from the act of founding to the act of preservation — an attempt to keep politics itself possible at a moment when the very conditions that make politics possible were beginning to disappear.

What came to be called resistance during that period should therefore not be understood only as a military strategy, but as an effort to prevent society from descending into a condition of unrestrained violence in which political action loses its meaning and becomes merely a struggle for survival.

The Founder, Not the Leader

Political leaders are often judged by the power they held or the offices they occupied. Arendt, however, suggests a different standard: the ability to found.

By that measure, Pierre Gemayel appears less as a conventional leader and more as a political founder. He sought not simply to lead a community, but to create a public arena in which people could gather, act together, and articulate a shared vision of the future.

What founders leave behind are not speeches or slogans, but political worlds. Power fades, individuals pass away, but the founding act endures as long as others continue to carry its idea forward and give it new life.

Lebanese have disagreed — and will continue to disagree — about Pierre Gemayel’s political positions and choices. That is natural in any historical assessment of a figure who played a major role in public life. What is difficult to ignore, however, is that he was one of those rare figures who sought not merely to govern, but to found; not merely to occupy a place within the public sphere, but to create that sphere itself.

For that reason, Pierre Gemayel’s enduring significance lies not only in the answers he offered, but in the question he left behind for future generations: How does freedom become action? And how can a small society, surrounded by a turbulent world, preserve its right to shape its own history?

Here the life of Pierre Gemayel meets the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. History is not made by those who simply adapt to the world, but by those who decide to add a new beginning to it. In that sense, founding becomes an act of resistance, and resistance against disappearance becomes the beginning of a new history.

This is the English adaptation of an opinion article written by Father Raymond Abi Tamer and published in Annahar.