WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Micheline Richard Toureille died two years ago on April 3, 2020, of the effects of the coronavirus, at the Williamstown Commons Nursing Home in Williamstown, in her sleep, surrounded by her loyal caregivers, after several days of telephoned goodbyes with her family and friends. 

As was the life of her late husband, Marc H. Toureille, who she met at the age of 11 and who predeceased her in 2016,  her life had been shaped by catastrophic world events, social awareness, simple pleasures, and love of family and community.

She was born in the city of Lunel in the south of France, on Dec. 1, 1928, the youngest daughter of French Protestant (Huguenot) parents Gaston Richard (a railway conductor) and Elise Julia Etiennette Sizard (a teacher). 

As a Huguenot, she faced daily discrimination because she was from a small and historically persecuted religious minority. When she was ten, France was invaded and conquered by Nazi Germany. She lost a brother to a Nazi forced-labor camp and came of age living under the rule of collaborators and Nazi tyrants. Her future father-in-law, a Huguenot minister, risked his life and his family's lives by saving hundreds of French Jews (as documented by Williamstown author Tela Zasloff) and so became one of too few Christians who escaped shame by resisting evil. In 1950, she followed her fiancé to the United States. 

They were wed on April 8, 1950, in Williamstown, where they became naturalized U.S. citizens, parents of two children, and pillars of the First Methodist Church for more than six decades.  She first found employment at the General Cable plant on Water Street, where she confronted gender-based wage discrimination, industrial injury, and was, at one point, fired because of her husband's efforts to unionize the plant's workers. She was subsequently recruited by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute--where she remained for the rest of her working life--to help organize its art library, particularly its French holdings.  

A proponent of life's simplest pleasures, which included French food and wine, she was never happier than when she was with her husband, her two children, her four grandchildren and her two great-grandchildren.

 

Throughout her life, she remained a fiercely passionate and outspoken advocate for the rights of working people and minorities.  She was at her husband's side when her late father-in-law was honored at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at the U.S. Holocaust Museum's 20th-anniversary ceremony in Washington DC, where his actions were lauded by former President Bill Clinton and Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel. 

Accordingly, she was horrified by the later resurgence of racism and xenophobia in the United States.  A few weeks shy of her 90th birthday, and days before the 2018 mid-term election, she wrote in the Berkshire Eagle that she had never dreamed that her adopted country, the country that had liberated her native country from racist tyrants, would someday have a president who would say that there were good people on the neo-Nazi side, demonize refugees, and try to deny the constitutional right of citizenship to children born here to immigrant parents.  Noting that her American-born friends were telling her that they had never seen anything like this before, she wrote that "I tell them that I have seen 'this' before — in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, where 'good' people sold out their neighbors, immigrants, and their morals in the name of getting better jobs...If you don't vote to resist this evil here, shame on you." 

In her final months, she spoke out for the rights of working people, against Russian oppression, and against the inaction of the then-President to fight the spread of a virus that, ironically, ultimately silenced her voice forever. She did not live to see the results of the 2020 presidential election.

She is survived by her children, Elizabeth Anne Mason (Raymond "Masie" Mason) and Pierre Richard Toureille (Diane Kupelian); grandchildren, Heather Mason Herod (Jonathon Herod), Lindsey Lee Mason (Mark Mariano), Andrew Raymond Mason, and Marc Vahe Toureille; her great-grandchildren Kylie Herod, Owen Herod, Isabella Mariano, and Isla Mason; and her many family members in France, including cousins, nieces, nephew, and their children and grandchildren, who were always close to her in her heart, even if many thousands of miles away.  

FUNERAL NOTICE: A memorial service will be held sometime later in 2022, the time and place to be determined in accordance with the course of the pandemic.  In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Southern Poverty Law Center or the North Adams Friendship Center Food Pantry