Egg-bald Marc Rucart, onetime journalist, now Minister of Justice in the Blum Cabinet, had an important announcement for humanitarians throughout the world last week. After months of private discussion the new Left Wing French Cabinet was about to correct a longstanding evil. The penal colony in French Guiana, that "abscess on the body colonial," will progressively be abolished. Within a few months, a mixed commission from the Ministries of Colonies and Justice will be sent to Guiana to recommend the details. Until the present Paris scheme matures, no more convicts will be sent out to rot in the tropics.
French Guiana is one of the oldest French possessions. Settled in 1626, it has been a French penal colony almost continuously since 1852. Half the present population (10,700) of Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, are convicts. Many thousands merely live in unbarred exile. Only a handful of the most desperate prisoners are actually confined on Devil's Island, one of the three "Safety Islands" off the Guiana Coast. Devil's Island's fame originated largely from the fact that it was there that Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned for four and one-half years. Since the days of Dreyfus, interest in Guiana and the plight of its jungle-bound, fever-ridden convicts has never diminished. To novelists and cinema producers it has been a boon.* Agitation for the abolition of the penal colony has steadily grown in France. Succeeding Ministers of Justice have always spiked the move, but Minister Marc Rucart is one French Minister of Justice who has actually seen the colony. Years ago he went out as a member of a Salvation Army junket, returned convinced that the prison colony was not only a stain on French prestige and a heavy check on the development of Guiana, but a needless expense. To support some 6,000 prisoners in torment the French Government must pay about 15,870,000 francs ($1,050,000) a year.
If Alfred Dreyfus was the best-known prisoner ever to be confined on Devil's Island, the best-known fugitive is a gaunt, grizzled onetime French newshawk named Rene Belbenoit, who in 1921 broke into the Chateau de Bel AH near Paris and stole the necklace of the Countess of Entre-meuse. Sentenced to Guiana for eight years at hard labor, he escaped and was recaptured four times. He met Novelist Blair Niles on her visit to the colony. She was able to glean from his story enough material for two books which made them both famed.
Last week, after his fifth escape, Fugitive Belbenoit was hiding in the jungles of Panama trapping rare butterflies with a long-handled net to make enough money to carry him to the U. S. Recently he appeared at the offices of the Panama American, told his story which was promptly resold to the North American Newspaper Alliance. As originally written, it began: "I, Rene Belbenoit, who have smelled the odor of human liver being cooked by escaped convicts, who have seen groups of men decapitated every month. . . ."
By the time this reached the New York Times'?, readers, it began: