Sound the Tocsin

Around the village of Bazouges-du-Desert, 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.

At his headquarters in nearby Louvigne, 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 of hay.

Deeper Knowledge. "In a moment of such alarm," said Leroux to his sergeant, "the experienced police officer allows himself the luxury of noticing more important things, which may deepen his knowledge of the country. For instance," and Leroux's arm swung this way & that, pointing, "the little men who are not the little husbands coming quickly from the little houses, and that blonde number from the bar hurrying from behind the hedge. But quick! We have practically not a moment to lose."

Lieut. Leroux and four other gendarmes drove to Bazouges, where Leroux and his sergeant climbed up the church bell tower. There they found a bicycle repairman and a carriagemaker smoking their pipes and swinging the clapper against the big bell.

"The meaning of this?"snapped Leroux.

"It is a question of a telephone call," said the bicycle man blandly. "I had thought we might need a lawyer and hoped that if someone heard the bell ringing he would call a lawyer for me."

"No time for drolleries," said Leroux. "You are under arrest. We must find the flying squad of the department of indirect taxation."

The gendarmes took the two prisoners down to the church courtyard, where some 200 glowering men of the district had gathered to defy the revenuers. The prisoners were put into one of the police cars, which cruised about until two harassed men in city clothes stepped from a doorway. "We had hardly begun asking around about alcohol," said one of the revenuers, "when the bell sounded." In the end the revenuers got nothing and the bell-ringing prisoners were freed, after a long and fatherly lecture from Lieut. Leroux.

Ordinary Liberty. Like many another village in France's northern apple country, Bazouges felt that it had not yet been truly "liberated." Before the war, the people could make as much tax-free Calvados as they wanted for local consumption. The Germans had decreed that each orchardist could distill only ten liters a year--hardly enough to wet the sale of a good heifer. The postliberation French government had not only failed to repeal the silly law, it had even tried to enforce it.

In Bazouges-du-Desert, red-cheeked Farmer Fernand Juban explained: "I'll tell you. We farmers are difficult to separate from our money, especially by the government. That is true all over the world. Is it not? Eh bien, what we want is just liberty, just plain ordinary liberty."

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