[pepsionice]

As much as people want to believe that nations in Europe are run from the top down....I would suggest that most of the countries in Europe tend to have states or regions within the make-up of the country, and they dominate a great deal of the structure of the country.

In the case of France, I might suggest that they reviewed the various acts of ‘maturity’ and couldn’t come to one single conclusion....like buying cigarettes, drinking booze, getting a hunting license, getting a drivers license, and so on. Each wanted a different view of maturity and then this led onto public questions why you couldn’t have one single view or age of maturity.

[Army Air Corps]

From the article:

“In the 1970s and 1980s, the question of the relationship between adults and children and the issues of rights and the autonomy of minors were recurrent in the press (in France),” he wrote. “The identification of the potentially sexual nature of the relationship between adults and children was one of the ways of going against the bourgeois order.” [emphasis mine}