The Press: The Empire

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. One Frenchman thought that the Mississippi was the longest river in the French empire. Guesses on the empire’s population ranged from 30 million to 300 million. A parliamentary undersecretary located the French Atlantic island of Marie Galante as “near Tahiti,” which is in the Pacific.

To show up its own readers, Le Figaro sprinkled nearby news columns with deliberate errors in geography. But the edition was hardly on the streets before phone calls from indignant readers began to. come in, denouncing the editors for taking a ruler to the French when they couldn’t get things right themselves. By the time almost a hundred readers had caught a single error, Le Figaro’s editors were ready to admit that 500 Frenchmen and 12 pollsters could be wrong.