Like a kind of Gallic Colonel Blimp, Paris' conservative Le Figaro (circ. 390,000) takes French imperial prestige with deep seriousness. To awaken the same feeling in other Frenchmen, Le Figaro decided to dramatize what it considered the nation's deplorable indifference to the fact that the French colonial empire (73 million people) is now the world's largest. Le Figaro's correspondents polled 500 citizens, a cross section of the population, on French colonial geography. Last week the paper reported the gratifyingly horrendous results.
Only five of the 500 knew the answers to all twelve questions; every colonial official in the sampling flunked the test....
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