Catherine Laboubée

Catherine Laboubée was born on 4 May 1955 in Rouen, in Normandy. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother a general practitioner. She was the elder of two children; her brother Dominique was born on 16 April 1957. The family lived together in the same house, and she said there were few secrets in it, even if each had their own life. Brother and sister became rock fans in 1965, when she bought her first Beatles single, and Dominique learned to play on an acoustic guitar that had been given to her that year and that she soon gave up. By 1973 he had founded the Dogs, and the family supported the band from its earliest days, at one point lodging guitarist Antoine (Tony Truant) when he arrived in Rouen as a teenager.

She spent two years studying medicine before switching to medieval history, in which she obtained a master's degree (maîtrise). That training in medieval sources shaped her later books on the dukes of Normandy, while the medical vocabulary she grew up with allowed her, years later, to carry out medical survey work for laboratories.

After her studies she worked for two years as a supply teacher in collèges and lycées. From 1981 to 1994 she taught French, art history and general culture full time, often more than 26 hours a week, to adults preparing CAP, BEP, vocational baccalaureate and BTS qualifications in schools for disabled civilians run by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs. Her renewable contract ended in 1994. After a period of unemployment she taught BTS classes again in 1997 and 1998 and then did medical survey work for two years.

In 1999 she conceived a new project: writing memoirs for older people who wanted to leave their memories to their families. On 1 January 2000 she set up as a self-employed author and publisher under the name Aide-Mémoires. By 2008 she had written 37 books for private clients, published in small runs, and she also wrote histories for businesses and local authorities, including Mémoires darnétalaises for Darnétal and Rouen Mémoires 44 for the city of Rouen. In 2012 she founded the Rouen publishing house La Belle Saison, which published her historical saga La Belle et le Magnifique and her history of the Dogs.

Her published works include Mémoires darnétalaises (volumes 1 and 2, Darnétal town hall, 2000 and 2004); Une petite fille dans Fécamp en guerre (Bertout, 2003); Rouen Mémoires 44 (City of Rouen, 2004); Avec le sourire et le chant aux lèvres (Chomant, 2008); Cogitations d'un vieil insomniaque, with Roger Dubois (Éditions de la Rue, 2009); Suzanne Savale, résistante normande (Éditions de la Rue, 2011); La Fille de Falaise and L'Arbre en marche, volumes 1 and 2 of La Belle et le Magnifique (La Belle Saison, 2012); Too much class... Dogs, l'histoire (La Belle Saison, 2013); and Le Prisonnier de la tour (2017), on Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror. She described La Belle et le Magnifique as a literary and historical docudrama that reads like a novel but rests on the sources of Norman history.

Her brother Dominique Laboubée was the singer, songwriter, guitarist and leader of the Dogs, the Rouen band that defended raw rock and roll from 1973 to 2002. In September 2002, during the band's first tour of the United States, he collapsed on stage and died in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 9 October 2002. Catherine thought for ten years about writing the band's story, fearing that a book would close it. Encouraged by fans on social media, she spent about a year going through Dominique's documents and photographs and interviewing former members, friends and journalists, and issued an appeal for testimony from fans. Too much class... Dogs, l'histoire, titled after one of the band.s albums, was officially launched in Rouen on 11 May 2013 and combines a dense text with more than 200 photographs, unpublished documents, manuscripts and drawings. She presented it on France 3 Haute-Normandie and LCN, and the book made her the recognised guardian of the Dogs' memory in Rouen, where a square is named after her brother.

Catherine Laboubée lived in Rouen. She was very close to her brother and parents, and spoke of the complicity and squabbles of a brother and sister that lasted all their lives, minus the squabbles. Details of any marriage or children have not been made public. Friends remembered her broad smile and her curiosity; she loved history, rock music and cinema, especially the films of John Ford such as The Quiet Man. She was a member of the Société des auteurs de Normandie.

She believed that every life deserved to be told, writing that there is no such thing as a banal life and that collecting the testimony of the last witnesses keeps an era alive. As a biographer she insisted on transcribing people's words without distorting their thought, so that clients would feel they had written the book themselves. As a historian she said she scraped away at the record to find the bone and would never affirm anything without proof, while openly using imagination where medieval sources fall silent. She saw writing songs and writing books as much the same thing: sharing one's passions with others.

Her legacy lies in the memories she preserved: dozens of private family memoirs, the wartime recollections of Rouen, Darnétal and Fécamp, the published notebooks of resister Suzanne Savale, an accessible retelling of the Norman ducal family, and the definitive history of the Dogs. After her death, Rouen deputy mayor Jean-Michel Bérégovoy called her a stone of Rouen culture for history, architecture and music, and noted the dozens of messages that followed the announcement.

She received the prix Jean Lorrain from the Académie des belles lettres de Fécamp in 2003 for Une petite fille dans Fécamp en guerre, and the history prize of the town of Aumale in 2012 for La Fille de Falaise, the first volume of La Belle et le Magnifique.

She was interviewed about her books by France 3 Normandie (May 2013), France 3 Haute-Normandie's C'est à lire (25 November 2013), BFM Normandie and LCN, La Chaîne Normande (April 2014), and the Mollat bookshop at the Bayeux medieval book fair (July 2013). She was profiled by Le Café pédagogique in 2008 as an example of a teacher's second career, gave a long interview about the Dogs to Culturesco in 2018, and wrote a lockdown letter for France Bleu in April 2020.

Catherine Laboubée died on Tuesday 10 November 2026, aged 71. Her family announced her death on social media, and Paris Normandie reported it the same day as an unexpected announcement that caused deep emotion in Rouen. Her cause of death, the place of death and funeral arrangements have not been made public.