Sons Emancipated

With their black berets jammed on their heads, clutching their steel-tipped walking stick-sheep goads, the young men of Andorra crowded into the tiny State's Council chamber last week and broke a 1,000-year old precedent. Since Charlemagne Andorra has been an autonomous State, but a State in which only the heads of land-owning families could vote. No man could vote whose father was still living, and Andorran shepherds and smugglers (leading industries) are almost indestructible. Faced by the menacing crowd of vote-seekers last week, the Andorran Councillors--who govern with "advice" from the Spanish Bishop of Urgel and the Government of France--suddenly discovered that there was no written law denying sons a vote. Universal male suffrage was decreed.

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