The Trial of Mata Hari

The case

On the morning of 13 February 1917, French police went to the Élysée Palace hotel on the Champs-Élysées and arrested a Dutch woman of forty named Margaretha MacLeod. Most of Europe knew her as Mata Hari. She had come to Paris in 1903 with almost nothing, and by 1905 was dancing in a jewelled costume in the library of the Musée Guimet, billed as an initiate of the temple dances of Java. The act made her famous. The persona was invented: she was born Margaretha Zelle in Leeuwarden in 1876, the daughter of a hatter.

Her early life had been hard. Her father's business failed, her mother died, and at eighteen she married Rudolf MacLeod, an officer in the Dutch colonial army twenty years her senior, whom she met through a newspaper advertisement. In the Dutch East Indies the marriage was violent and unhappy, their infant son died, and after their return to the Netherlands the couple separated in 1902. Although she was granted custody of their daughter, the girl ended up in her father's care. By the time war broke out in 1914 her career as a dancer was fading and she lived largely as a courtesan, moving between the capitals of Europe and men of rank in several armies.

Holland was neutral, so she could travel. In 1915 or the spring of 1916, while she was living in The Hague, a German consular official, named in accounts as Kroemer or Cramer, gave her 20,000 francs and bottles of invisible ink and asked her to gather information in Paris; German records gave her the agent number H-21. She later said she had taken the money as compensation for furs and luggage seized in Berlin at the outbreak of war, and had thrown the ink away.

In Paris in the summer of 1916 she fell in love with Vadim Maslov, a young Russian captain serving in France. When he was wounded and treated near Vittel, behind the front, she needed a pass to visit him. The officer who could arrange it, Captain Georges Ladoux of French counter-intelligence, proposed that she spy for France instead, and she agreed, naming a fee of a million francs that was never paid. The idea was that she would exploit her pre-war acquaintance with the German crown prince.

In late 1916 she travelled to Madrid, where she cultivated the German military attaché, Major Arnold Kalle, and passed what she learned to the French. From December, Kalle sent a series of radio messages to Berlin about agent H-21 in a code the French were known to read, and with details that pointed straight at her. Many historians think the Germans had decided she was useless and were deliberately exposing her. French intelligence intercepted the messages and treated them as proof.

She was questioned for months in the Saint-Lazare women's prison by the examining magistrate Pierre Bouchardon, who regarded her as a born spy. Her trial before the Third Council of War in Paris on 24 and 25 July 1917 was held behind closed doors. Her elderly counsel, Édouard Clunet, had only a week to read the file. Maslov, questioned during the investigation, distanced himself from her, and the news broke her. The prosecution, led by André Mornet, presented her as a spy whose work had cost many lives. After a short deliberation the seven judges convicted her unanimously on all eight charges and sentenced her to death. France was reeling from the failed spring offensive and mutinies in its army that summer, and the press made much of the case.

President Raymond Poincaré declined to pardon her. Before dawn on 15 October 1917 she was taken to the military ground at Vincennes, outside Paris, and shot by a firing squad of twelve soldiers. Witnesses said she refused a blindfold.