What I Am Reading: "Murder in the Métro" by Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite

I meant to finish off September with this academic true crime story relating to the interwar period and the rise of fascism, but a library snafu delayed me a few days into October. Of course, my idea of a pulpier read as a cap on the fascism topic for the time being happened to be very studiously academic, c’est la vie.

Laetitia Toureaux was an Italian immigrant to France, an upbeat factory worker by day and a private detective and film noir femme fatale by night. She was the first person to be murdered on the Paris Métro, stabbed in the neck while seemingly alone in a first-class car traveling between two stations in May of 1937. Her murder, while officially unsolved, is believed by most historians to be the work of the Cagoule ("cowl"), a far-right terrorist group that has been dismissed by most histories as an ineffective fringe group. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite seek to advance a slight change in the analysis of the murder, and encourage a more serious assessment of the Cagoule.

The two professors are early-modern historians, who discovered this 20th-century subject accidentally on a trip to France in the '90s. They recount how difficult it was to access documentation on the subject, as they were discouraged by archivists and slow-walked by authorities. This was the first book to tackle the subject directly, it had only appeared ephemerally in other works. A very academic work, the book approaches the subject from several different angles: Laetitia Toureaux as a prism reflecting the anxieties of French culture at the time, the effectiveness of the Cagoule, and their place in French historical memory.

Toureaux, age 29, was an immigrant from the Valdôtain region of Italy; this is the downhill of the Alps on the French side, thus an area isolated from much of Italy and more French culturally. Toureaux was an ambitious social climber, and married the son of a French industrialist. Though romance across class barriers was tacitly accepted, marriage was not, and Toureaux gained little social cache from the marriage; her husband died in 1929. Interested in a life beyond working-class marriage and motherhood, Toureaux spent many of her evenings in the bal musettes, blue collar nightclubs featuring dancing and accordion music. Eventually, she branched out into some minor detective work, tailing subjects and passing messages. Among other jobs in the gig economy, she worked for Georges Rouffignac’s detective agency. Despite the antifascist leanings of her home region, Toureaux and her family leaned to the right, and eventually fell into work with the Cagoule, often as a courier of documents to the Italian fascists.

The Cagoule was a small group of far-right extremists who popped up in response to the election of the Popular Front government in 1936; and committed several bombings and assassinations, as well as a considerable amount of gunrunning. They had a few thousand members and an upper-class leadership, overlapping with larger and more established right-wing groups in what these early-modern historians liken to a patron-client relationship of medieval cities (membership was overlapping and secretive enough that many prominent right-wing politicians would be accused; when Édouard Daladier was asked at Pétain’s trial if the latter was a member, he only shrugged). The Cagoule intended to launch an uprising against the government by provoking the Communists into a fight (their rank-and-file membership were told that they were arming to fight alongside the government against a Communist uprising). Their efforts to carry out their coup were unsuccessful, and after they were exposed by the police, the right-wing media crafted a narrative that they were an un-serious group that the Blum government and its Minister of the Interior, Marx Dormoy, had blown out of proportion. This narrative was subsequently swallowed by historians. Many of Cagoulards were released from prison when the war with Germany came; some proceeded to serve in the Resistance, while some of the leadership were Vichy officials or direct collaborators. After the war, they were finally tried for their various crimes (not the Toureaux murder), though most received a suspended sentence.

Laetitia Toureaux was an informer to many different factions in the politically charged France of the Popular Front: she worked with the Cagoule, with the Italians directly, for her private clients, and also passed information to the police. Eventually, as the Cagoule planned the assassination of the antifascist Italian activists Carlo and Nello Rosselli, they seem to have decided that Toureaux was a liability, despite her affair with Gabriel Jeantet, the group's main theoretician. Toureaux seemed to want out of her dangerous predicament, and to have offered information to the police. The killing is believed by most historians to have been committed by Jean Filiol, one of the group's main thugs; but Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite believe that it was too clean, and was more likely committed by a professional Italian assassin, working closely with the Cagoule (who had botched two previous attempts). Theorizing on the logistics of the murder is kept to a minimum after initial discussion of it's mysterious nature; and is far less of a subject of interest to the authors than in, for example, the other interwar unsolved murder book I have read, Midnight in Peking by Paul French.

On top of this narrative, there is a lot of analysis. The Toureaux murder was a tabloid sensation at the time, especially as the press discovered her nocturnal activities. The murder was a lightening rod for French concerns about gender, and womens' evolving social roles outside of the home. Coverage of this and other crime stories provided readers with a titillating glimpse into dangerous lower-class lives, while allowing an affirmation of bourgeois morality in the grim fates of subjects such as Toureaux. She herself avidly consumed such media, and seems to have taken romantic inspiration from it for her own career path, thus feeding the cycle. Amid many other theories, some in the media did connect her death to Cagoulard activities such as the Rosselli murders, the murder of Dimitri Navachine, a centerist Russian emigre thought to be a leader in the “Synarchie” (a conspiracy theory about a globalist takeover), and sabotage of planes meant for the Spanish Republicans, all of which the Cagoule committed. After Georges Rouffignac, her employer, downplayed Toureaux's skills and seriousness at her work, it was unclear in the media how professional of a detective she was. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite believe that her gender in fact served Toureaux well in her work; and her life and identity was affected more by her ethnic and class status, as these connections were what made her valuable as a spy and were the source of the income that could have improved her status.

When discussing the Cagoule, the book covers a few interesting aspects of French history at the time. Despite their few bombings and assassinations, the Cagoule was most successful at arms trafficking, a widespread activity in the '30s. The arms industries were largely nationalized, and their trade was treated as an extension of diplomacy. (I found an interesting side-note to chase down: the Belgian government's desire to help the Spanish Republicans). The Cagoule was well-funded by industrialist money, but their firepower was what brought the heat down on them. They were rolled up after their failed attempt to ignite a Communist coup in November, 1937. The police knew about them for most of their lifespan, but had finally decided that they couldn't be contained or controlled.

As noted, many members were released for fighting duty as the war started. Many played roles in the Vichy regime, such as Joseph Darnand, who became the leader of the Milice, the Vichy paramilitary group. Two, including leader Eugène Deloncle, formed the MSR (Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire), a pro-Nazi group that even brought the Nazi heat after their unsanctioned synagogue attacks. One post-Cagoule terrorist attack carried out by former members was the assassination of Marx Dormoy, held in Vichy custody at the time.

This wartime history is used by the authors to urge renewed consideration of the Cagoule as a serious force. Though they never brought their coup about, they were successful terrorists who made the left and its government take their efforts to overthrow it seriously. Historiographically, the French spent a few decades analyzing the '30s through the "immunity thesis," stating that France's democratic culture and institutions made it immune to the rise of fascism that consumed Italy and Germany. Now that this has fallen out of favor, and now that the Cagoulards who had successful postwar careers (and their descendants who did the same, including intimates of François Mitterrand) have aged out of power, the authors think it is time for further examination of the subject. They chose to accomplish this through their book on Laetitia Toureaux, an interesting figure who should receive more recognition as an example of evolving French womanhood who was bound up in these important events.