Annette Finley-Croswhite

`Murder in the Metro': Masking and Unmasking Laetitia Toureaux in 1930s France

Toureaux, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old woman wearing a striking green suit, a white hat and gloves, left a bal musette named L’Ermitage in the Paris suburb of Charentonneau and walked briskly towards a bus stop. Approximately twenty-four minutes later, she entered the Porte de Charenton metro station and made her way across a quay crowded with holiday-makers fresh from the nearby Parc de Vincennes. She took a seat in an empty firstclass car while the other passengers crammed into the second-class cars. At promptly 6:27 p.m., the train left. When it arrived forty-five seconds later at the Porte Dorée station, the doors of the car opened on a shocking sight: a French military dentist and his companion entered the car and found Toureaux slumped in her seat, bleeding profusely, a nine-inch dagger buried to its hilt in her neck. She died before she reached the hospital, without naming her assailant, and left the Parisian police with a perplexing mystery on their hands. In the absence of any witnesses or physical evidence other than the knife, a standard ‘Laguiole’, it was a mystery they never officially solved. The Police Mobile section of the Sûreté Nationale immediately took French Cultural Studies, 14/1, 053–080 Copyright

Nazi Medicine, Tuberculosis, and Genocide

This chapter explores the connections between Nazi medicine, tuberculosis (TB), and genocide. TB was deeply enmeshed in Nazi ideology of racial purity and viewed as a marker of genetic inferiority. In Germany in the 1930s, people with TB were stigmatized, prohibited from marrying, forced to undergo sterilization, and eventually euthanized in the so-called “mercy-killings.” Once the war began, the Nazis used TB as a form of biological warfare. Nazi doctors euthanized TB sufferers throughout Germany and the eastern occupied lands or used TB as a convenient excuse to kill those they deemed “life unworthy of life,” such as the Jews, whether they actually had TB or not. They conducted torturous medical experiments on children and adults in ill-conceived attempts to find a TB vaccine or effective TB medications. The Nazi state also stimulated TB epidemics. Crowded living conditions in the ghettos and camps, poor sanitation, and near starvation diets contributed to the spread of the infectious disease. When the Allies liberated the camps in Germany and Austria at the end of the war, TB was the most serious infectious disease they faced. This chapter argues that the Nazi state used TB as a justification for murder and targeted disease by eradicating people.

Lighting the Fuse: Terrorism as Violent Political Discourse in Interwar France

During 1936–1937 France experienced elevated levels of violence in the form of terrorism that historians have tended to overlook, opting to leave most discussion of terrorist activities to political scientists. This paper examines the use of terrorism in 1930s France by one of the most notorious and understudied groups of political radicals on the far right, the Comite Secret d’Action Revolutionnaire or Cagoule, whose members perpetrated terrorist acts in interwar France as part of their unsuccessful bid to overthrow the Popular Front government of Leon Blum. Former Cagoulards regrouped during the war to achieve their political goals in a reincarnation known as the Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire (Pour la Revolution Nationale) or MSR.1 The MSR reprised many of the same terrorist tactics they had employed in the interwar period, and against many of the same targets. The Cagoulard leadership (and, subsequently, that of the MSR) consisted of extremists expelled from the right-wing Action francaise in 1935 for advocating direct action in favour of the ‘National Revolution’. These extremists argued that mainstream leaders of the French right were all talk and no action, and criticised in particular the failure of the Action francaise to take advantage of the violent anti-parliamentary street riots of 6 February 1934 to overthrow the Republic.2

Henry IV and the Diseased Body Politic

This chapter reveals how the experience of ordinary people and their suffering was incorporated into a political language that proposed a variety of methods to combat disease. The poor and the sick had very little opportunity in their lives to alter their personal situations, their incorporation into the larger rhetorical dynamic of the diseased state not only gave meaning to their particular plights but also created narrative possibilities in which preachers, pamphleteers, political leaders, and Henry IV offered solutions for the return of peace to the realm and thereby the end of much physical suffering. Since the elimination of disease and the return to good health were goals that all people understood in the early modern world, the use of the language of disease and death also acted as a rallying cry for the return of peace. Keywords: Henry IV; language of death; language of disease; preachers; royalist pamphleteers

Henry IV and the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589-1610

Acknowledgements Introduction: 1. France in the 1580s and 1590s 2. Brokering clemency in 1594: the case of Amiens 3. Henry IVs ceremonial entries: the remaking of a king 4. Henry IV and municipal franchises in Catholic League towns 5. Henry IV and municipal franchises in royalist and Protestant towns 6. Clientage and clemency: the making of municipal officials 7. Urban protest in Poitiers and Limoges: the pancarte riots 8. Municipal finance and debt: the case of Lyons Conclusion: Henry IV, urban autonomy and French absolutism Bibliography Index.