FRANCE: St. PierregLaval

> Joan of Arc was (traditionally) a sweet-faced, lissome brunette who fired a disunited France and its weakling Dauphin to clear French soil of a 15th-Century invader.

> Pierre Laval is a squatty, villainous-faced old man who made political capital of his own nation’s disunity and pushed France into subservient collaboration with its 20th-Century invader.

In these disparate figures Radio Paris professed last week to find an essential likeness. On the feast day of St. Joan, harking back 500 years to British efforts to shackle France with the pro-English Duke of Burgundy, Radio Paris blatted: “In June 1940 Churchill asked Reynaud to unite France and Britain. What had been frustrated by Joan’s sublime sacrifices, Churchill and Reynaud were about to realize. To frustrate the new plan there were just two men, Petain and Laval. . . . From Charles VII to Petain, from the Shepherdess of Lorraine to the son of Auvergne, the Englishman hasn’t changed.”

Anti-Fascist Frenchmen were not long in replying. Next day the 450-foot aerial masts of Radio Paris, 130 miles south of the capital near Bourges, were dynamited. For the first time since Hitler took Paris, the principal outlet of Nazi radio propaganda in France went dead. To many a Frenchman, St. Joan seemed by that act a little more alive.