Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France.
Hill, John S.
Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s
France, by Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite. Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, Louisiana State University Press, 2010. xvii, 266 pp. $39.95
US (cloth).
On May 16, 1937 Laetitia Toureaux arrived at the Republique metro
stop with a knife in her neck. She died on the way to the hospital
without identifying her assailant. The police and the press soon
discovered that the dead woman had come to Paris from the Val
d'Aoste and lived in the Italian working-class community in Paris;
had caught the eye of and married a timid, sickly member of the French
middle class, then lost him early to lung-disease; had patched together
work during the Depression, while conducting a series of transient
love-affairs; and had supplemented her meager income by working as a
police spy during the tumult surrounding the Popular Front. The
investigation ground to a halt without identifying the killer, bur not
before leads suggested that Toureaux had been connected to a violent
secret right-wing organization that came to be known as the
"Cagoule." The authors argue that she served as a police agent
penetrating the Cagoule and that her murder originated in the
group's suspicion of her.
The Cagoule, formally the Comite secret d'action
revolutionnaire (Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action), sprang from
a late-1935 fracture within the royalist Action Francaise. Eugene
Deloncle leda handful of fascist-leaning malcontents in forming the new
group which sought to prepare for an anticipated civil war pitting right
against left. The group soon obtained ample funding from rich men
worried about a Communist march to power and opened contact with
sympathetic figures in the French military. During 1937 Deloncle's
organization obtained large quantities of weapons from the Italians,
murdered the Russian economist Dimitri Navachine and the Italian
anti-fascists Carlo and Nello Rosselli, and bombed the offices oftwo
employers' organizations in the hope that the Communists would be
blamed. The bombings brought down the police on the heads of the
leaders. Most of them ended in jail or in exile.
These events came at a particularly fraught time. The Popular Front
alliance of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals had begun to
disintegrate. War with Nazi Germany loomed while an Italian alliance
disappeared into the mist.
Most historians have derided the Cagoule as a collection of
marginal crackpots with no significant impact on French politics.
Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite beg to differ. They see the denigration of
the Cagoule as beginning with the rightwing press, which down-played its
action as part of a rhetorical struggle with the Popular Front. After
1945 the desire for national reconciliation muffled any full-scale
pursuit of justice. The authors argue that the wide range of connections
between the Cagoule and rich conservatives at the peak of French
society, the prominence of many Cagoulards and their pre-war allies
during the Occupation and under Vichy, and the contribution of the
Cagoule to the corrosive suspicion that helped bring down the Third
Republic make it far more significant than previous historians have
understood.
This is really two loosely-connected books, rather than one tightly
integrated book. The first book investigates the still-unsolved murder
of Toureaux. It is always difficult to uncover the life of an ordinary
individual, but the authors have assiduously mined the available sources
to limn Toureaux's life. The barriers to understanding the work of
a conspiratorial body are at least equally formidable. Again, the
authors have made good use of the archival and scholarly literature to
produce a very useful English-language introduction to the subject.
The book benefits from the authors' academic training as
historians of sixteenth-century France. On the one hand, they are
familiar with the micro-historical approach of extracting larger meaning
from a narrowly defined historical event through the application of
broad contextual knowledge. On the other hand, they are particularly
attuned to the importance of family and community networks, which
assists the reader in locating both Toureaux and the leaders of the
Cagoule in their social environment.
Murder in the Metro is more successful in these regards than in
others. Some of the discussion of the Cagoule is underdeveloped, even by
the standard of an introduction. A supposed "coup" of November
1937 is described only through the experience of one low-level figure
driving around all night with nothing happening. The paucity of sources
on the life of Torueaux drives the authors into the marshy ground of
speculation. For example they claim that she was an Italian fascist
sympathizer and an agent of the Italian secret service, but their source
is very weak. They speculate that the Cagoule made two attempts on her
life and that the Italian secret service took over when these failed.
Neither speculation is credible.
The book also suffers from an awkward construction. The story of
the Cagoule is sandwiched into the middle ninety-four pages of the slim
text, with a further ten pages devoted to a useful bibliographic essay.
Whenever their pursuit of Laetitia Toureaux herself slams up against the
brick wall of too few sources, the authors divert to pondering her
symbolic meaning in the press and the many connections of Francois
Mitterrand with people on the French right. This makes for disjointed
reading.
Whatever the final judgment reached on the murder of Laetitia
Toureaux, Murder in the Metro must be judged a well-written and
thought-provoking work that generously offers leads to other
researchers.
John S. Hill
Immaculata University
