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 Europe and the world."

No Explosion. Debre could have appealed to history. When Napoleon's armies swept over the Continent 160 years ago, France contained one-fifth of Europe's population. Today it represents one-twentieth, and only immigration has kept France from losing population. Since 1946, France's annual birth rate has stabilized at between 18 and 19 per 1,000 people. Though wel below the U.S. rate of 23.4, France is now actually doing better than most of its neighbors.

In Western Europe generally, the birth rate has slowly but steadily declined over the past decade, possibly because of postwar uneasiness about the future, the shortage of new housing that continues despite the economic boom, and the decision of newlyweds to space the arrival of children. The decline is even more rapid in the Communist countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia, where the rate has dropped from 28 to 22 per 1,000 in the same period, partly because Communist governments sanction legal abortions. Thus, ironically, while Asia, Africa and South America still fear the population explosion, Europe fears the opposite.

No Drinking. France has long fought the trend by offering bonuses for large families and by severely outlawing abortions as well as female contraceptive devices and the spread of birth control information. To achieve a national average of at least three children per family, Debre last week proposed 1) priority in apartments for young couples with children, 2) tax exemptions to families in the year they produce a fourth child, 3) a more "receptive government attitude toward unwed mothers." He also wants Frenchmen to lay off the bottle, because "each generation we lose a total of 500,000 persons due to overindulgence."

Opposition came from Socialist and Communist Deputies who argued that it was unrealistic to talk of increasing the population while French housing remained in its present wretched state. But Debre is strongly backed by President Charles de Gaulle, who hopes that France's present population of 47 million will grow to 100 million by the century's end.

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