Welcome back to Femme Fatale Friday on White Rose of Avalon my Darlings! This week, I have chosen a truly fatal female, one that is known best to us as Mata Hari. She was a double agent and spy during the First World War, then simply called the Great War. Her famous death has cemented her as an icon of female spies!
She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1876, and later took her husband’s last name of MacLeod. She was of Dutch birth and at age 18, she answered an ad placed in a paper by Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf MacLeod, who was looking for a wife. This is how she came to move to the Dutch East Indies to marry and live with her husband. The marriage was a horrible one, with Rudolf being abusive, and after trying to reconcile, the couple eventually divorced, with Margaretha gaining custody of their remaining child, a daughter, after having lost their son.
Now, it was in 1903 that she moved to Paris and much of her story as we know it would unfold. She began by working as a circus performer, riding a horse, using the stage name Lady MacLeod and working as an artist’s model. This quickly led to her gaining prominence as an exotic dancer within the year! Her fame in the world of dance was of a more taboo nature than expected in her time. This was the time when Burlesque began to gain some popularity, making her style of dance even more sought out. She was renowned for how flirty, promiscuous, and willing to show her body she was during her act! After beginning to appear at the Musee Guimet, she became a long-time lover of the millionaire founder of the Musee, Émile Étienne Guimet. It was around this time that she began posing as other people, first pretending to be a Javanese Princess. The fictitious origins that she used for her act even led to fans developing their own theories about Mata Hari’s actual origins! Her career began to decline around 1910 as imitators began to appear on the stage, the decline became steeper by 1912, and her last performance was in 1915.
It was around this time, with the burgeoning of the Great War, that she began her career in espionage. She was in an intense love affair with Captain Vadim Maslov, who was badly wounded fighting for the French in 1916. The only way that she could see her ailing lover was to agree to be a spy for France, agreeing to this with the agents from Deuxième Bureau, she was able to visit her lover. As she already had a connection to the Germans, having performed for high-ranking officials as Mata Hari before retiring from dance, and was from a generally neutral country, she made for an ideal spy! Later, she would meet with high-ranking German officials, apparently offering to share French secrets in exchange for money. This is how she became famed as a double agent! It was when she shared more gossip than actual intel on the French government that she was exposed as a double agent working for Germany by her German contacts, wanting to be rid of her.
She was put on trial in France for her selling of State Secrets to Germany. She is said to have said this at trial “A harlot? Yes, but a traitoress, never!” Of course, she would be convicted of the crimes that she was accused, whether or not she was guilty. Most of the public believes that she was guilty, but others state that she was a scapegoat and that she was executed as a cover-up. Either way, she was executed by a French firing squad on October 15, 1917. Her memory is seared into the public consciousness as a famed spy and double agent! One of my favorite references to Mata Hari comes from my favorite television show of all time, Charmed. There is a season six episode where my favorite character, Phoebe, is possessed by the ghost of Mata Hari. It is an entertaining episode that first made me research Mata Hari when I was young!
I hope that you have enjoyed reading a bit about this woman accused of causing many a death via espionage. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is Mata Hari. I found the image on https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/MataHari.
Further Reading/Watching
- Mata Hari: The True Story by Russell Warren Howe
- https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mata-hari-executed
- https://time.com/4977634/mata-hari-true-history/
- Charmed (1998)