Labourbe, Jeanne Marie

Born Apr. 8, 1877, in Lapalisse, department of Allier, France; died Mar. 1, 1919, in Odessa. Organizer of the French Communist Group in Moscow; participant in the Civil War of 1918-20. Member of the Communist Party from October 1918. Daughter of a peasant.

Labourbe came to Russia in 1896 in search of work, was a teacher in the city of Tomashov, and joined the revolutionary movement in 1903. In 1918 she worked in the Central Federation of Foreign Groups of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), was secretary of the French Communist Group, and helped found the Third International Club, whose members conducted revolutionary work among foreign soldiers and sailors. A leader of the Foreign Collegium of the Odessa underground committee of the Ukrainian CP (Bolshevik) in February 1919, Labourbe conducted agitation among French soldiers and sailors. She was shot by the French counterintelligence service together with other members of the Foreign Collegium. Labourbe’s name, V. I. Lenin pointed out, “has become well known to the whole French proletariat and has become a slogan of the struggle … against international imperialism” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 39, p. 391).