On December 5, 1943, the Courrier du Centre carried news that Georges Guingouin’s anti-Nazi partisan unit (maquis) had imposed price controls in the Limoges region. No longer could potatoes be sold for over four francs a kilo or pork for over forty; any profiteers would face “exemplary” reprisals. Seeing the Communist Guingouin’s ordinance published in the Courrier came as quite a surprise to the paper’s readers: it was, after all, still controlled by the Vichy government.

The partisan leader, whom the article called the “préfet du maquis,” had clearly become a thorn in the regime’s side: Guingouin had somehow convinced sympathetic print workers to slip his decrees into the government-controlled press some seven months before the US Army’s arrival.

Guingouin’s fame would spread quickly in the months following liberation; a 1944 film even claimed that his Limousin Communists had formed a “partisan republic” in defiance of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Elected mayor of Limoges in May 1945, the thirty-two-year-old — who was credited with founding France’s first maquis — became a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur that same summer on account of his wartime feats.