Word: figurehead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Laval wanted more. As on the night of his dismissal, he demanded authority for himself, with the Marshal as a figurehead. To back up his demand he offered tempting concessions on the part of the German conqueror. More war prisoners would be released. The cost of occupation would be reduced from $8,000,000 to $3,600,000 a day. The boundaries of unoccupied France might be extended, possibly to include Paris. Admiral Darlan took a train back to Vichy, half won over to Laval's cause...
Chief witnesses for the prosecution were members of the crew Hoppy had taken with him on his high-buccaneering through A. G. & E.'s uncharted archipelagos. Mostly stenographers and clerks (some of whom had been raised to figurehead officials and directors), they pieced out the odyssey between them. They told how Howard Hopson had once netted $2,000,000 from selling parts of a $63,000,000 bond issue back & forth between member companies via a $10,000,000 rubber check (TIME, May 20); how operating companies had to pay two salaries for each of many employes...
Laval lost his temper. He upbraided the Marshal for his stubbornness and Peyrouton for his suspicion. He demanded that in the future his powers be precisely defined, that he be given executive authority, with Pétain as a figurehead. Then he stalked from the meeting...
...Balkan monarch. He liked most of all the boyish pastime of playing with railroad trains - real ones. His royal hobby became so famous that Yugoslav engineers named him Locomotive Führer Honoris Causa. Then in 1934 the Bulgarian Army abolished Parliament and established Boris as the somewhat bewildered figurehead of a military dictatorship. Boris buckled down to serious work and within a year made it just plain dictatorship, with the Army very much in the background. He had married Princess Giovanna, daughter of Italy's King Vittorio Emanuele III, and has carefully borne in mind the example...
...most of Japan's modern history - from 1185 to 1868 - the real power in Japan was held by military dictators called Sei-i-tai-Shogun ("Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo"). The most astonishing degree of delegation came in the 13th Century, when a titular Emperor's functions as a figurehead were usurped by an abdicated Emperor, while temporal power was supposedly held by a hereditary Shogun, who left actual authority to the Shogun's hereditary adviser...