Martyrdom Denied

Dust-laden shafts of sun cut through the barred windows of Bordeaux's Hotel de Ville last week and shone on grim rows of Communist faces. The comrades were out to consecrate a new party heroine martyr and saint. Raymonde Dien, a young (21), tough and unlovely Communist functionary of Tours, was up for trial on a charge of obstructing a military train bearing arms for Indo-China. The party press hailed her as the "little angel" and the "delicate heroine of peace." Some of the comrades spoke of her as a latter-day Joan of Arc, and doubtless imagined her triumphantly burned at the stake.*

Last February at a railway station near Tours, Raymonde had lain flat on her face in the path of a slow-moving train loaded with tanks. When the engineer stopped his train a mob of Communists swarmed aboard, overpowered the guards, ripped batteries and wires out of the tanks. The train was held up for nine hours.

Raymonde's was the first prosecution for "physical sabotage" under the new anti-sabotage law passed by the Assembly last March over riotous opposition from Communist deputies (TIME, March 13).

Party bigwigs from Paris, appearing as witnesses, quickly shifted from the case at hand to standard denunciations of the Marshall Plan and the atom bomb (U.S. brand). Prim in a navy pin-striped suit, Raymonde smiled, blew kisses to her husband of seven months, once fell asleep when the trial session dragged on past midnight. She admitted her crime "proudly," said she did it because "I hate war."

With seven of the eight judges concurring, Raymonde was sentenced to a year in prison. To the Communists this was dishearteningly short of martyrdom. Deflated and forlorn, they wanly sang the Marseillaise and shambled out of the courtroom.

* French Communists have recently been playing up Joan of Arc as a nationalist symbol of resistance to Anglo-Saxon (U.S.) influence in France. On Joan of Arc Day last May, Communist factory girls and housewives laid a wreath at the foot of Joan's statue in Paris.

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