Mata Hari... 100 years ago, within a few months, the most famous spy of the Great War was arrested, convicted and executed. Who among the readers of the Notebooks has never been interested in the history and life of this extraordinary woman, in the writings or films she inspired? But as the author of this article points out, reality has been so distorted over the years that it is difficult today to disentangle the true from the false in the journey of this adventuress.

We therefore warmly thank Lieutenant-Colonel Lahaie, a faithful contributor to the Cahiers, for restoring the truth in this article, thanks to a rigorous work of historical research.

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Three conclusions to be drawn from the Mata Hari case...

• First conclusionMata Hari was a mediocre spy, but she worked well for the Germans... In a post-war article, the former deputy head of the German S.R. wrote: "Countless fables have been invented about the German secret service; it is said to have performed the most impossible tasks and committed innumerable crimes. Cases such as that of the unfortunate dancer Mata Hari - who in fact did nothing for the German information service - have been singularly exploited. She was good for nothing. Her former trainer in Frankfurt supports this view: "H. 21 did not harm France. None of the news she sent us was usable; her information was of no political or military interest to us. Her fate is tragic since she died for nothing'. Returning to France in January 1917 - when she knew she was being watched and suspected - is moreover an attitude which shows that she was either imprudent or totally unaware of the risks she was taking... On the other hand, in a book published in Berlin in 1933, one can read "Mata Hari has done great things for Germany. She was perfectly educated in military matters. Her education had been made among the best specialists of our S.R. She was prudent and skillful. None of the men who knew her could ever conceive the slightest suspicion of what was going on with the most dangerous spy Germany had in her service". There is certainly some exaggeration in each of these opinions.... Mata Hari was certainly a courtesan, a mythomaniac, but above all a neophyte spy. Another flaw was that she was not at all loyal to her employers (whoever they were), since she was motivated solely by the lure of gain.

Ladoux finally admitted it in 1932: "Mata Hari was a soldier of Germany whom she served out of pride or hatred of our race, even more so out of interest (and, fortunately for us, without much profession). Her educator said of her dismissively that she did not render the services we expected, that she was a useless shell... a shell that does not kill!". This is, moreover, the opinion of a secret report, written as early as 1916 in Düsseldorf, which depicted her as "a spy who had never spied on anyone", and above all "overpaid for the work done"! All things considered, the spy dancer never behaved appropriately, since she was a woman who could not bear to go unnoticed. She had some of the qualities required to be a formidable agent, but she had one major flaw: she was too easily noticed wherever she went, and this was a serious threat to her safety. Its use was therefore very dangerous since, by its escapades and greed, it put itself in the position of being confused and stopped at any moment. Its incessant need for money made it an ideal prey for allied counter-espionage. In the event of an arrest, could her silence be counted on? Not at all, for she was "everything"... except faithful! In short, she brought nothing to the Berlin secret service, except complications.

A crucial and yet little-known testimony, collected by a French journalist in 1936, deserves to be quoted here, as it facilitates the understanding of certain obscure elements of this affair. One of the former members of the German S.R., stationed in Madrid during the war, said: "Not only did Mata Hari do us no favours, but I can tell you that at the end of 1916 we ourselves were considering her disappearance, convinced that she was a dupe and one of your informers. Unfortunately, she had close friendships in Germany, and it seemed risky to us to do away with her. The whole story of the telegrams deciphered by you was faked from the beginning... In fact, we set the dancer into a trap, preferring that she be shot by you rather than by us. It's an end often reserved for double agents. We burn them and have them executed by the adversary. How can you think we'd have written our telegrams so explicitly if we hadn't tried to lose the Dutch girl?"

Reporter: "They were encrypted."

The German: "Yes, but we knew that you had discovered our figure, since we had changed it a fortnight ago and the old figure was only used for that one occasion".

But in the end it doesn't matter why and how Mata Hari was confused... Despite her poor qualities, Mata Hari was indeed an agent of the Reich: on May 23, 1917, the dancer confessed to having passed on information to Germany in return for payment. Of course, this was not purely "military" information, just diplomatic information, bordering on "parlour gossip"... But at the time, military law condemned those guilty of "intelligence with the enemy" to the same penalty as spies, i.e. the death penalty. Mata Hari was therefore "legitimately guilty" under French military law and, as such, she was shot. This is what her defender felt, writing in 1919: "Mata Hari was not innocent, but not so guilty as to deserve death"; but the lawyer expressed his own opinion, not taking into account the reBut the lawyer expressed his own opinion, not taking into account the exceptional regime set up with the war for acts of "espionage" or "intelligence with the enemy". Let us be convinced that this was not a specific persecution in the case of Mata Hari: during the conflict, the death penalty was similarly applied to French agents discovered in Germany... For Bouchardon, on the other hand, the case was "crystal clear"; to sum it up, it was for him nothing more than a flagrant offence, a banal case of purely commercial espionage, like so many other cases of espionage.It should be remembered that the dancer's voluntary step into the ruthless world of intelligence was not disinterested. When the magistrate recapitulated the total sums received from the Germans, he came up with 34,000 francs, including 14,000 received between November 1916 and January 1917 (i.e. when the dancer was supposed to be working for France). However, these funds came exclusively from the German S.R., and could not be the price of her favours, as she liked to repeat. And when she declared that she had gone out of her way to fool Kalle, Bouchardon pointed out to her that Berlin had never reported that "H. 21" was a traitor, which is why the attaché had continued to pay her. When we know that, at the time, "good information" could be bought between 20,000 and 30,000 francs by the Germans, this tended to prove that for her employers, Mata Hari was a spy "in the norm".

This was certainly an important case for French counter-espionage because, in wartime, treason does not have the same value. Member of the S.R. At the same time, Mata Hari had agreed to work for the French, hoping to earn a million francs on her own account, but there is no greater danger than a double agent who cannot be trusted because of his venality: He can conceal the activities of enemy agents he is supposed to be fighting; he also knows which agents are under suspicion and can warn them; finally, he is in a position to surprise the secrets ofFinally, he is able to uncover the secrets of the spy service that enlisted him and communicate them to his real employer... Could the French services have taken the risk of enlisting the dancer despite everything? Certainly not, and they had no reason to do so. Mata Hari promised to pull off "the coup du siècle", but she was making up every sentence: how could she ever show the slightest confidence in her?

Even during the investigation of her trial, when she should have been "playing fair" to hope to save her head, Mata Hari lied on many points, points that - unfortunately for her - the deciphering of the German telegrams had brought to light. Firstly, she was not hired in the Reich's secret service in May 1916, since at that time she already had two missions in France to her credit; secondly, having been sent back to France by the Germans, she could only pretend to enter Ladoux's service.

For her part, Ladoux - convinced of her duplicity - pretended to hire her in order to trap her. He knew she was passing information to the Germans and could not trust her.

Without realizing it, Mata Hari put herself in danger by accepting to serve both sides out of greed. The French S.R. was convinced that the dancer had tried to deceive him... On 24 May 1917, Lieutenant-Colonel Goubet's deposition testified to this.

For Ladoux, who had not really wanted to "return" MataHari and hire her into his service, it was a matter of demonstrating that she was a major catch. He defended this point of view in order to better conceal the proposals for enlistment for which he could have been blamed; he declared that the dancer was an agent of Germany, and had been for a long time. "What surprised me," he said, "was her initial, the 'H,' which we have never encountered since the war among active agents. I was led, without being able to conclude anything, to wonder if it was not a pre-war initial.

For Bouchardon, there was little evidence, but it was weighty and supported by a whole bundle of presumptions... Among the exhibits seized from the hotel room, there was a lot of evidence that was not in the public domain.Among the exhibits seized from the dancer's hotel room, for example, was a tube containing mercury bi-iodide and potassium iodide, substances which the dancer claimed to use as a "condom", but which could be used as a developer for a secret ink. There were also Spanish tablets of mercury oxycyanide, an antiseptic available only on prescription in France. Once diluted, they constituted "a sympathetic ink that was safe from routine investigations," as one expert chemist wrote. And then there was the mail that passed through the Dutch diplomatic pouch (not "to save time", as Mata Hari claimed, but to escape postal control), as well as all those allied officers she had teased. Bouchardon suspected her of collecting confessions on the pillow and practising what is called, in this very particular environment, "horizontal espionage". In Germany, Mata Hari was undoubtedly in contact with influential people; but in wartime, it was difficult for the French C.E. to know which ones and to determine precisely what kind of relationship she had with them. There is no doubt that (given the career of the courtesan) these were short-lived, but by no means disinterested, conquests...

In a letter to Bouchardon, she tried to bargain for her release from the bottom of her cell: "If Captain Ladoux can get me to give me my immediate freedom, and the permit to leave for Holland, I will give him in a month what he has asked to know, and what I know nothing about at present: the details of the organization of espionage in France and in Paris. That is what he wants to know. Well, let him give me the opportunity to deal with it. I do not know about German secrets, but I can know them. Again, this could be a fabrication. There was no lie detector at the time.... The handwriting analysis of Mata Hari's handwriting was only done once in the 1920s. Here is what the specialist wrote about her, without knowing to whom she belonged: "One cannot trust such a versatile, restless, hectic nature, always ready to make extreme determinations. It is a reckless character who misjudges the obstacle, obscurely confident in his destiny, passionate and proud. His very exalted, exaggerated nature obliges him to gag the truth, he realizes the lie in the impulse".

• Second conclusion to shoot about the Mata Hari case.: even though the dancer was a celebrity, she was convinced "of intelligence with the enemy and - just like other convicts - she was shotWould it have been tolerated by the French population to spare her just because she was a celebrity, when others, anonymous, had been shot? Why would she have been given special treatment at a time when French leaders were saying loud and clear that the time had come for a stiffening of the grip, the only guarantee of victory? The cocardier novelist Louis Dumur, a contemporary of this affair, wrote: "The defeatist hurricane that lifted France was still blowing. Could it be supposed that when suspects were thrown into Paris at the war councils and unfortunate soldiers guilty of having given in at a moment of failure were shot behind the front lines (sic.), could it be believed that the spy, caught in the act and unanimously condemned by her military judges, had a single chance to escape her punishment?"

At the end of the training, Bouchardon said to the dancer, who was anxious to go to trial, "It is better not to do it now; last month (June 1917) we went through some hard times. Strikes, mutinies in the army. The wounds are not closed and spirits are still warm. Do not be in a hurry". The thesis of the "conspiracy" carried out at the rear, a thesis that was spreading, required of course to strike hard, at the precise moment when theUnion was disintegrating, and while the French army was convalescing after the failure of the Nivelle offensive and the crisis of the mutinies. It is no coincidence that, one month after the execution of Mata Hari, Clemenceau came to power on a programme that had gone to extremes. This painful and cruel backdrop, born after three years of war, is very real, but it does not in any way explain the fate of the dancer, as some historians have written. Certainly, more than ever at the end of 1917, it was important for the government to prove that the rear supported the front, and that the capital was not just a "hideout", as the "Poilus" tended to believe.

By 1917, Mata Hari was well known to most people. She was, moreover, the only spy for whom a passionate public - because of her gallant and artistic notoriety - wondered whether she had deserved death, or whether the council of war had not been mistaken in ruling too quickly on her fate... Some historians (always the same ones) claimed that they had wanted - with the help of the newspapers - to make the dancer a scapegoat whose immolation, demanded and awaited by the French, could establish the reputation of the services of C.E. For the latter, it was necessary to strike opinion and show their effectiveness. With Mata Hari, Ladoux had everything to gain: she was the "ripe fruit" that any propaganda service would have dreamed of seeing fall. However, this thesis is inaccurate, since the press was only informed of Mata Hari's arrest at the end of the investigation into her trial. It was only on 24 June 1917 that Le Petit Parisien published an article on the trial in progress, and then it was the turn of other newspapers. One journalist, who did not believe in the guilt of the woman he portrayed as "a half-brained half-mondaine" wrote: "Mata Hari, a spy! This, really, does not seem possible".

A note was sent on 24 July to warn the press that the trial of the case would be held behind closed doors, in accordance with article 113, paragraphs 3 and 4, of the Code of Military Justice: "The proceedings shall be public on pain of being declared null and void; nevertheless, if such publicity appears to be dangerous to public order and morals, counsel orders that the proceedings shall be held in camera. In all cases, the judgement shall be pronounced in public; counsel may prohibit the reporting of the case; such prohibition shall not apply to the judgement". Thus, if there had really been a desire to make the Mata Hari case a media manipulation, the newspapers would have been warned well in advance so that the capture of the spy would be used to make the case for C.E.'s services. The secret services' policy on the communication of information to the press was not subject to these considerations; it had not changed since 1916 and will not be subject to any exception, even for Mata Hari... A note, transmitted from the Commission to the Council of Ministers in December 1999, states that the secret services' policy on the communication of information to the press was not subject to these considerations.A note, transmitted from 1916, stigmatized the danger of allowing the reasons for the death sentences of spies to be published, and regretted that the warnings issued to the "General Directorate for Relations with the Press" on this subject were ineffective. Another note of June 1916 recalled: "In order not to hinder the investigation of cases, the newspapers should keep silent about the arrest of persons suspected of espionage and war smuggling. But, unless the military justice system gives a reasoned opinion to the contrary, sentences may be allowed to be published".

The Mata Hari affair was even too extensive for the taste of the secret services: on 29 July 1917, they sent this note to the Minister's office concerning its treatment by the newspapers: "The publicity given to the details of this affair is detrimental to the execution of the service of C.E.". On 6 August 1917, while the dancer had appealed to the Supreme Court, the War Department's "Press Section" responded to the counter-espionage complaints: "It is difficult, in practice, to get the newspapers, even with advance notice, to remain completely silent on matters of espionage and counter-espionage, especially when a conviction has been handed down, as was the case with the Zelle woman, known as Mata Hari". Yet the censors were particularly attentive: one of them wrote: "Mata Hari: the sound of her execution is heard periodically; we've heard it more than ten times". Thus - and contrary to what some people claim - the circumstances in which the dancer was confused caused an excess of discretion. This is understandable: during the trial, the possibility for the French to decipher the secret enemy telegrams was a crucial piece of information; therefore, it had to be kept absolutely secret. The French - who were unaware of the will of the S.R. - were not aware of this. It should be remembered that it was not until the end of April 1917 that Ladoux transmitted to Bouchardon the text of the 14 telegrams compromising Mata Hari, and again he did so because, for lack of evidence, she could be released. At the trial, Paul Painlevé - Minister of War - took the trouble to point out the imperative need to maintain this hidden advantage. On May 3, Ladoux again made clear to Bouchardon the importance of keeping silent on this point, since the breakthrough of the code had already made it possible to arrest spies and should make it possible to arrest others. At the same time, maximum discretion had to be maintained about those who, on a daily basis, in France and abroad, worked in counter-espionage investigations, whether they were police or military. On October 15, 1917, the censorship services were finally ordered to ban all misappropriated photographs that might be taken during the execution of the dancer. It should be remembered that there was no photographer on the scene, and that the photographs circulating here and there are only post-war reconstructions.

• Third and final conclusion: the one that literature and cinema have tried to present as "the most representative spy of the 20th century".was above all an adventurer and a prostitute... In the eyes of those who judged her, Mata Hari was "a girl of little virtue"...Her visits to Paris in 1915-1916 had again been an opportunity for her to prostitute herself in establishments in the Étoile district to make up for the always difficult ends of the month, as testified by the doctor of the Prefecture of Police who met her in these circumstances. Let us recall that Marguerite Zelle was a woman who had made libertine life a way of life. Wherever she went, this provocative woman was preceded by her sulphurous reputation... And besides, in 1917, her charm came less from her person than from the idea that people had of her (and the perfume of scandal that surrounded her). For the jury that convicted her, she was the ideal spy, using her charms to betray better. She was a perfect match for all the stereotypes on the subject... Let us recall that among the officers who formed the 3rd council of war, there was ^{a guard who was a} member of the 3rd council of war.publican guard and a gendarme, representatives of a corps one of whose missions was precisely "the repression of prostitution", in particular as a "measure to combat espionage".

Moreover, for a population that had been suffering and deprived since 1914, Mata Hari represented easy life. She also embodied Germany's attempt at moral ruin against the French soul... A foreigner, she came (moreover) from Holland, a neutral country that was hated by the French because it secretly supplied Germany, thus thwarting its economic blockade and weakening. No feeling of pity could therefore intervene in its favour. Even before his judges, Mata Hari did not keep a low profile. She was proud, with a very exaggerated idea of herself. Worse: she displayed an immoderate desire to shine in society for what she was, i.e. a courtesan. Now, this behaviour - which was contrary to the bourgeois morality of her time - was considered odious by most people... The doctor of the Paris Police Prefecture, present at the execution, heard this sentence, just after the shooting: "She was a rascal, we did well to get rid of her." And he wrote in his memory: "It can be said that the end of the dancer did not take any new victims from the world, but at least it put an end to the execrable career of this devious and cruel woman. As Bouchardon said, as Mata Hari's lifeless body was removed from the firing post, "Even innocent, she had to disappear. In 1953, however, the ex-captain, anxious to justify his past actions, wrote in his Memoirs: "Feline, supple and artificial, used to playing with everything and everyone without scruples, without pity, always ready to devour fortunes - should her lovers, ruined, burn their brains - she was ʺl 'spy néeʺ and she made it clear". In 1947, the public prosecutor Mornet declared to a journalist: "In what was reproached to Mata Hari, there was nothing to whip a cat". He added: "She was by no means this demonic character that some people have said, a sort of genius of espionage and evil, nor was she the innocent person wrongly condemned for I do not know what reasons of State. A courtesan, a simple courtesan, like so many others, but bitter for gain!".

Mata Hari, a subtle mixture of genres, it seems, to the point where, in the end, it is no longer easy to remember, in the collective unconscious, the real reason for her death sentence: espionage or depravity?

Lieutenant-Colonel, doctor in history, Olivier LAHAIE was for several years head of the history and geography department at Saint-Cyr after a stint in the army's Historical Service. He is currently serving at the Centre d'études stratégiques de l'armée de Terre; he is also an associate researcher at the Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan School Research Centre.