Word: prefect
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jean Moulin, alias Joseph Mercier, alias Regis, alias Max, who held the unexciting prewar job of prefect of Chartres, had simply decided to stand up to the boches. Once, after being tortured by the Germans, his courage failed him and he tried to slit his throat (afterward, he always wore a scarf and became known as The Man with the Muffler). Eventually, De Gaulle charged him with coordinating all of France's hopelessly scattered resistance knots. The result was the National Council of Resistance which unified all underground activities. It was at one of the council's meetings...
...mainly the work of 77-year-old Monsignor Angelo Mercati, Prefect of the Vatican Archives, who began looking into the papal roster during the reign of the present Pontiff's predecessor, Pius XI. Two centuries ago, Giovanni Marangoni, custodian of the Roman catacombs, made up a list of popes based largely on a series of dated papal portraits on the walls of the famed Roman church, St. Paul's Outside the Walls. Scholars had known that the old list was inaccurate, but it took Monsignor Mercati's diligent digging to discover how inaccurate it was. This week...
Fortnight ago, the chiffoniers ran into trouble. Prefect of Police Charles Luizet had signed a health and anti-rat measure: "It is forbidden for persons to rummage in garbage cans on the streets...
Next day, an anguished howl was heard across Paris. The chiffoniers cried thatthe Prefect was out to rob 50,000 people of their honest work. Several thousand gathered in cramped, dim-lit Jean Jaurès Hall to hear stooped, 63-year-old René Cormaud, who "does" the rue des Ecoles and the rue Monge, defend chiffonage. Said Cormaud: "It's those fly-by-nights who cause all the trouble. They have no sense of professional standards. Instead of emptying each can carefully on a burlap sack to sort it out, they dump the garbage helter-skelter...
...Prefect Luizet felt the ground swell of sympathy for Paris chiffoniers, and annulled his directive. Declared one of the reprieved entrepreneurs: "What we want .to keep above all else is our liberty. You understand? We want to be our own bosses...