Word: tocsins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sert, in Brittany, the apples grow big and sweet, and the Calvados (apple brandy) is a potable that is more in demand than the local water. In the town one morning last week the biggest bell in the church tower began to peal. It was a familiar but urgent tocsin of alarm. Government tax collectors had been sighted. The revenuers were looking for illegal Calvados and unlicensed stills...
...headquarters in nearby Louvigné, Lieut. Jean Leroux of the Gendarmerie Nationale got up from his desk and went to the roof. He was supposed to help the revenuers and he would have to discipline the tocsin-sounders, but there was no great rush. Leroux paid no attention as farmers barricaded their barn doors and pulled their little wagon-stills into the fields to be hidden under piles...
...much less for being factually improbable than for being dramatically overdone. Sartre's soft-soaping Senator, for instance, is pure burlesque, and too amusing to be alarming; the whole story is so charged with sex and suspense that it titillates rather than terrifies. But if Prostitute is no tocsin of social protest, it rings the bell as melodrama...
Novelist André Malraux, De Gaulle's highbrow pressagent, rang a tocsin of his own: he predicted that Maurice Thorez' Communist legions would soon launch a major offensive which might lead to civil war by April 15. Other alarms came from a less intellectual but intensely French quarter. In Paris, 5,000 midinettes, shivering in thin coats, protested against their dismissals by Paris dress houses (which were suffering a slump despite the New Look). Cried clothing union leader Alice Brisset: "Hardy measures are needed...
...advise and enjoin those who direct the paper in the tomorrows never to advocate any cause for personal profit or preferment. I would wish it always to be 'the tocsin' and devote itself to the policies of equality and justice to the underprivileged. If the paper should at any time be the voice of self-interest or become the spokesman of privilege or selfishness it would be untrue to its history. ... I have never regarded the News & Observer as property, but [as] having an unpurchasable soul...