The Lebanese Civil War, which erupted in 1975 and would grind on until 1990, is often described in terms of Christians against Muslims, left against right. The Ehden massacre shattered that framing. Both sides were Maronite Christians. The Frangieh family, based in the northern town of Zgharta, had been part of the Lebanese Front -- the coalition of right-wing Christian parties and their militias that also included Camille Chamoun's Tigers and Pierre Gemayel's Kataeb (Phalange). But the Frangiehs' close relationship with Syria put them at odds with the Gemayel clan, which had allied with Israel. In 1977, Suleiman Frangieh broke from the Lebanese Front entirely. By 1978, northern Lebanon had become a zone of bitter tension between the Kataeb and Frangieh's Marada Brigade, with political offices as contested territory and killings escalating on both sides.

The immediate spark was the killing of Joud El Bayeh, a senior Kataeb member, on June 7, 1978. Armed men sent by Tony Frangieh shot El Bayeh when he attempted to open a Phalangist political office in Zgharta -- the Frangieh family's stronghold. The Lebanese Forces decided to retaliate. The initial plan called for capturing Tony and forcing him to hand over the Marada fighters responsible for the Phalangist deaths. Concerns about the consequences led to a revised plan: capture the gunmen directly, and do it on a Tuesday when Tony would have left Ehden. On June 13, Gemayel dispatched 500 commandos to the mountain town. They arrived to find Tony still at his summer house. Gunfire broke out immediately.

Tony Frangieh, his wife Vera (born el Kordahi), their three-year-old daughter Jihane, and some thirty Marada bodyguards and aides were killed in the raid. More than ten Kataeb gunmen also died. Suleiman Frangieh -- Tony's father, the former president -- later claimed that the Phalangist attackers forced Tony and Vera to watch the shooting of their infant daughter before killing Vera in front of Tony, then killing him. The family dog did not survive. Tony's young son, Suleiman Frangieh Jr., was not at the house that day; he was with his grandfather. The boy survived. Decades later, he would lead the Marada Movement and become a prominent Lebanese politician, carrying forward a family name steeped in the violence of that June afternoon.

The aftermath was swift and brutal. Syrian troops stormed Deir el Ahmar, a village 15 miles southeast of Ehden, searching for the perpetrators the next day. Marada forces launched revenge killings and kidnappings. On June 28, Marada allies carried out the Qaa massacre, killing 26 Kataeb members. Bashir Gemayel, who had ordered the Ehden operation, dismissed it as a "social revolt against feudalism." No official investigation into the killings of the Frangieh family was ever completed. When the case file was reopened in 2002, Suleiman Frangieh Jr. rejected the move, saying the affair was "buried in the past." It took until November 14, 2018 -- forty years after the massacre -- for Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rahi to formally reconcile the Lebanese Forces and the Marada Movement at Bkirki, the patriarchal seat.

The historian and travel writer William Dalrymple concluded that the Ehden massacre revealed, more clearly than any other event, the medieval feudal reality behind the civilized twentieth-century veneer of Lebanese politics. The families, the clans, the blood debts -- these were not abstractions. They played out in specific houses, on specific mountain roads, with specific children caught between armed men who shared the same faith. Ehden itself is a summer resort town in northern Lebanon's mountains, a place of stone houses and terraced orchards. The violence visited upon it in 1978 was intimate in the worst sense: neighbors who knew each other, political allies turned killers, a three-year-old girl dead in a dispute over office space in a nearby town.