ANDORRA: Auriol v. Auriol

By a tradition dating back to King Henry of Navarre, France’s chief of state is ex officio co-ruler of Andorra, a tiny (pop. 5,200) feudal principality of happy, Spanish-speaking shepherds and smugglers nestling amid the peaks of the Pyrenees. This amiable sharing of rulers has not prevented Andorrans from quarreling almost continuously with their big neighbor and protector to the north. Last week they were at it again, and, as both co-Prince of Andorra and President of the Republic of France, blinking, kindhearted Vincent Auriol was in the middle.

Like Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pooh-Bah, the President stepped over to the French side of his office where the co-Prince could not hear him, and announced that he no longer recognized the leaders of Andorra’s Council of the Valleys, who governed in his name. The Pyrenees principality promptly threatened to get even by issuing new postage stamps franked “Sovereign Republic of Andorra.”

The quarrel, or this phase of it anyway, had been going on ever since the end of World War II, when France nationalized all its radio stations, thereby erasing all paid advertising from the air. Andorra refused to play ball. Unduly proud of its own radio station—”Here Here Andorra” —and of its beautiful lady announcer, whose dulcet commercials had earned more than 1,000 offers of marriage for herself and many more advertisers’ pesetas for her employers, it kept both working at top speed, entertaining and selling not only its own people but a goodly section of southwest France as well.

Charging that Andorra was reaping commercial benefit from a purely “illusory independence,” France set about jamming the station, and sent in technicians to build a new one. The Andorrans promptly slapped a fat import tax on all radio parts. The French countered by charging 1,000 francs for an exit visa for any Frenchman who wished to visit Andorra. Andorrans protested that the French were ruining their tourist trade.

“Relations between France and Andorra cannot be broken, because Andorra is not a sovereign state,” said one Quai d’Orsay official impatiently last week. “One of her co-Princes, the President of France, has now sent a message complaining that the Council of the Valleys has failed to ratify certain French reforms. We are now waiting to hear what Andorra’s other co-Prince has to say.” The other co-Prince, the Spanish Bishop of Urgel, whose title goes back as far as Auriol’s, said nothing. He had only their spiritual welfare at heart, the bishop told the Andorrans. As the words fly back & forth, Andorra’s six-man police force and 200-man army stand by, waiting for the call to arms.