The Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle sounded last week like the unmourned Fourth Republic. At passionate issue in the National Assembly was a bill to give state aid to church schools, the touchiest of all domestic questions in France for a century and a half. It is an issue that echoes in almost every village, where unrelenting antagonism exists between priest and public schoolmaster, who is usually a Socialist or a Communist. At first the leftist anticlerical wing in the Cabinet seemed to be having its way (TIME, Dec. 28), and...
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