Word: baylot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like Victor Hugo's dogged Javert, Jean Baylot, Prefect of Paris Police, was a policeman with one idea. The shootings, burglaries, thievery and other routine crimes he left to his staff to handle; the shadowy underworld which lies behind the beauty of Paris hardly knew his name. Baylot concentrated 16,000 policemen and his own single-minded will on hunting and harassing Communists. He was uncommonly effective: when Parisian Communists said the name of Jean Baylot, they spat...
...Zealot. Baylot ordered Paris' cops to start swinging their white batons, and blandly explained: "There is no defensive action that is not offensive in nature." When the Communists resisted, he gave his cops steel helmets, machine guns and tear gas. His weak eyes squinting through a pair of heavy-rimmed dark glasses, plump little Prefect Baylot looked like a clerk, but he used his force and the terrain like a general...
...moment came on the day General Ridgway arrived to take over SHAPE from General Eisenhower in May 1952. The Reds were out in full force, crying: "Ridgway, go home!" Baylot met them with 20,000 cops. His men even arrested tubby Top Communist Jacques Duclos. After that day, the Reds never regained control of Paris' streets. In last year's Bastille Day parade they tried, lost seven militants killed in the rioting, and failed...
There were many besides Communists who thought that Baylot's strong-arm men were a little too zealous on occasion. Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, protested that some of his worker-priests, arrested in a demonstration, received "treatment unworthy of human beings." (To which Baylot retorted: "I don't care if they're ambassadors, priests, pastors, rabbis, or candy salesmen. If they take part in an illegal demonstration, they will suffer the consequences.") Last April Baylot's cops, on his own responsibility, seized 213,000 copies of the Communist L'Humanité, because...
Kick Upstairs. As Bastille Day (July 14) drew near again, word got around that the Prefect of Police and the new Mendès-France government were not hitting it off well. Baylot wanted to ban the traditional Red parade; some Cabinet ministers disagreed; Socialist supporters of the new regime, though antiCommunist, were anti-tough...