Gayle and Annette have what can only be described as an exceptional friendship.  They met almost forty years ago as first-year graduate students in the history department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.  Rivals briefly, it made more sense to form a team, and so began a partnership steeped in serious scholarship, mutual respect, and endless travel.

In April of 1984 Annette showed up at Gayle’s door in Rouen, France.  Both were just beginning the dissertation phases of their doctoral work in French history.  Within days of Annette’s arrival, the two set off on what would become the first of many trips across France. Taking a bus to Lillebonne in Normandy, they stumbled onto the grounds of a local chateau and ended up being invited in for tea and cookies.  It seemed a grand adventure and established a precedent, for unlike other American graduate students who stayed close to Paris, Gayle and Annette wanted to know la France profounde.  Their devotion to travel by any means, on foot, in trains, taxis, and rental cars, led them on treks across the country exposing them to the geographic, linguistic, and gastronomic differences that make each province of France so unique.  Along the way, they made deep friendships with the people they encountered who enriched their experience of French life, history and culture.  During the ensuing decades, Gayle and Annette taught history at their respective universities, but devoted their summers to the discovery of France and all the delights it had to offer, from the majesty of Paris to the beauty of the tiniest village and all chateaux in between, and of course the archives, where they indulged their passion for historical research.  

In 1997, after they were both tenured and established scholars, Gayle and Annette decided to undertake a historical project together. Intrigued by the 1937 slaying of Laetitia Toureaux, the first person ever murdered in the Paris metro, the story seemed too good to pass up.  They had no idea what a controversial topic they had selected or the numerous roadblocks they would encounter as they plunged into the murky, sometimes violent world of the mysterious Madame Toureaux and 1930s France.  The documents surrounding Toureaux’s murder had been sealed for 101 years, and it took the intrepid researchers seven years before the French ministry of culture and select archivists would admit the police files even existed let alone grant them access to the classified material.  Persistence paid off, and the story provided rich material for Gayle and Annette’s interest in creative non-fiction grounded in historical fact and serious scholarship; it offered the perfect subject-matter for a book that could appeal to the general public and read like a novel. Murder in the Métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France was published in 2010.

Gayle and Annette’s fascination with the Cagoule, an extreme right-wing political organization that was one of the first modern terrorist groups, did not wane after the publication of Murder in the Métro. Early on serious scholars of French history had mocked them and their re-evaluation of the Cagoule.  Those scholars had bought into the right-wing propaganda of the 1930s that protected the Cagoule by diminishing their threat. In other words, they read the fake news and believed it. Gayle and Annette were determined to expose the real threat the clandestine organization posed to the 1930s and its emergence as a legitimate political party in 1940, the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire that supported both the establishment of Vichy and collaboration with the Germans during World War II.  They chose the murder of former interior minister and socialist leader Marx Dormoy as their next vehicle for historical analysis.  Dormoy was a true patriot who refused to vote Pétain full power in the days following the fall of France and paid for his devotion to democratic principles with his life when Cagoule/MSR operatives placed a time bomb under his bed that blew him up on July 26, 1941.  Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France was published in 2020.

It’s unusual for best friends to write books and articles together.  On the one hand, there is the sheer excitement of travelling around the country in pursuit of adventure.  Couple this with the long hours spent in archives shifting through thousands and thousands of documents and the long conversations required to make sense of it all.  On the other hand, there was the maturation of two women who confronted tremendous sexism and classism in academia as young scholars and yet who bonded together to support each other through all of life’s personal and professional joys and hardships. Whatever legacy they leave on paper in the form of published work pales in comparison to the sisterhood they formed long ago, a relationship that continues to this day into its fourth decade.  Most importantly, they have managed to have tremendous fun along the way!