France: L'Amour for la Patrie

The people of Paris celebrated summer in the traditional way. Young couples were laced together under the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, locked lip-to-lip on the Metro stairs, snuggled flank-to-flank on the swimming barges moored along the Seine. To the Gaullists in the National Assembly there was only one thing wrong with this surfeit of love: it is not producing enough babies. Introducing new legislation designed to change that situation, ex-Premier Michel Debre warned: "There is a direct and immediate link between the weight of our population and our future in...

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