Mata Hari

Mata Hari: The Woman Who Invented Herself

Before dawn on 15 October 1917, in the moat of the Château de Vincennes, a forty-one-year-old Dutch divorcee faced twelve French soldiers. She refused a blindfold. According to the British reporter Henry Wales, who watched, she blew a kiss to the firing squad. Then she knelt without expression and fell backward, and a non-commissioned officer stepped forward to shoot her in the head. Her body went unclaimed and was given to medical study; her embalmed head sat in Paris's Museum of Anatomy until it vanished during a relocation around 1954. It has never been found. Almost nothing about her, including the name she died under, was what the world believed.

M'greet

She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle on 7 August 1876 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands, to Adam Zelle, a hat-shop owner and oil-industry speculator, and Antje van der Meulen. She had three younger brothers. The family called her M'greet. Scholars have confirmed both parents were Dutch — the persistent claims of Jewish or Indonesian ancestry are inventions, some of them hers.

Until she was thirteen the childhood was affluent and the schooling exclusive. Then her father went bankrupt in 1889, her parents divorced, and her mother died in 1891. She was passed among relatives, sent to train as a kindergarten teacher in Leiden, and removed from the school after a headmaster took an inappropriate interest in her. By eighteen she had nothing and no prospects.

Java

She answered a newspaper advertisement. Rudolf John MacLeod, a captain in the Dutch colonial army twenty years her senior, was looking for a wife. They married on 11 July 1895 in Amsterdam and sailed for Java aboard the SS Prinses Amalia in May 1897, settling at Malang. Two children followed: Norman-John in 1897 and Louise Jeanne in 1898.

The marriage was a catastrophe. MacLeod was an alcoholic who beat her and blamed her for his stalled career, and who kept a concubine with colonial society's blessing while she stayed in Toempoeng with the children. In 1899 both children fell violently ill from complications of syphilis contracted from their parents — the family blamed a servant's poisoning. Norman died. Jeanne survived to twenty-one and then died too, probably of the same cause. The couple separated on 30 August 1902 and divorced in 1906; MacLeod kept Jeanne and never paid the court-ordered support.

It was in the Indies that she found the name. Mata Hari is Indonesian for the sun — literally, eye of the day.

The Musee Guimet

She reached Paris in 1903, first riding horses in a circus as Lady MacLeod, then modelling for artists. By 1904 she was dancing. On 13 March 1905 she debuted at the Musée Guimet and became famous overnight.

The act was as much fiction as choreography. She presented herself as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, trained from childhood in sacred Indian temple dance — a fabrication of a kind common among performers of the era, executed with unusual conviction. The dance itself was a progressive removal of clothing down to a jewelled breastplate and ornaments, with a flesh-toned bodystocking beneath that she later dispensed with. Represented by the booking agent Gabriel Astruc, she worked the same moment as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and was written about in the language reserved for natural phenomena. One French journalist called her "so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms." A Viennese critic saw her as "slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal, and with blue-black hair."

Her peak lasted from roughly 1905 to 1910. By 1910 the critics had turned, calling her an exhibitionist without art. The bookings thinned after 1912. She danced in public for the last time on 13 March 1915 and moved into the profession the dancing had always shadowed, becoming a courtesan whose clients were senior officers and politicians of several nationalities.

H-21

As a citizen of neutral Holland she could cross wartime borders that were closed to almost everyone, travelling between France and the Netherlands by way of Spain and Britain. Intelligence services on all sides noticed.

In 1916 she fell hard for Vadim Maslov, a twenty-three-year-old Russian staff captain attached to the French army. When he was wounded in the Nivelle offensive and lost the sight of his left eye, she applied for permission to visit him at the front. The French Deuxième Bureau intercepted the request and made an offer: access to the hospital in exchange for espionage. Her handler, Captain Georges Ladoux, wanted her to seduce Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser's eldest son.

In late 1916 she went to Madrid and met the German military attaché Major Arnold Kalle, apparently offering French information for money. In January 1917 Kalle radioed Berlin about the useful work of an agent designated H-21, whose biography matched hers precisely. The French intercepted the messages — in a code the Germans knew the French had already broken. The German intelligence chief Walter Nicolai had reportedly grown exasperated that she supplied nothing but Paris gossip about the sex lives of French politicians and generals. The likeliest reading is that Berlin disposed of a useless asset by handing her to the enemy.

She had been detained once before, in November 1916 aboard the steamer Zeelandia at Falmouth, where Sir Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard questioned her at length; he recorded in his 1922 book *Queer People* that she eventually admitted working for the Deuxième Bureau. The full transcript is at Kew.

Trial

She was arrested on 13 February 1917 at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs-Élysées and tried on 24 July, accused of causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. Her interrogator and then prosecutor, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, dismantled the Javanese-princess story and used the fact that she was a white Dutchwoman as proof of a "dubious and dishonest character." She admitted taking 20,000 francs from a German diplomat and former lover, insisting it was compensation for belongings the Germans had seized; Bouchardon called it her fee.

Her counsel, the veteran international lawyer Édouard Clunet, was forbidden to cross-examine prosecution witnesses or to question his own. Maslov, embittered by his injury, refused to testify and told her he did not care whether she was convicted; she fainted when she learned it. Bouchardon argued her sex was itself evidence: "Without scruples, accustomed to making use of men, she is the type of woman who is born to be a spy."

She never confessed, despite what the newspapers printed afterward. To the Dutch Ambassador she wrote: "My international connections are due [to] my work as a dancer, nothing else. Because I really did not spy, it is terrible that I cannot defend myself." At trial the line attributed to her was blunter: "A harlot? Yes, but a traitoress, never!"

Why Margaretha Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that she was not a genius of espionage — she was, by nearly every serious modern assessment, incompetent at it. What she possessed, to an extraordinary degree, was a talent that had no name in 1905 and has one now: she invented a persona, marketed it, and made the world believe it against all available evidence. A bankrupt provincial Dutchwoman with a dead child and a violent ex-husband arrived in Paris in her late twenties with no training, no money and no connections, and within two years was the most talked-about performer in Europe, sustaining a fabricated identity as a Hindu temple dancer through hundreds of performances and interviews. That is a feat of sustained imaginative discipline and psychological reading — knowing precisely what a Belle Époque audience wanted to believe about the East, and becoming it.

The counter-case is severe and it killed her. The persona was fragile because it was false, and when a prosecutor pulled the thread the whole thing unravelled into evidence of deceit. The anthropologist Pat Shipman has written that "the evidence is quite strong that she was completely innocent of espionage," comparing her 1917 celebrity to Marilyn Monroe's in the 1960s — far too famous to be any use undercover. Norman Polmer and Thomas Allen called her "naïve and easily duped." The historian Julie Wheelwright noted that "she really did not pass on anything that you couldn't find in the local newspapers in Spain," and identified exactly why she died: "an independent woman, a divorcée, a citizen of a neutral country, a courtesan, and a dancer, which made her a perfect scapegoat for the French, who were then losing the war." The Canadian historian Wesley Wark put it plainly: "They needed a scapegoat, and she was a notable target for scapegoating." Her creative brilliance and her fatal blindness were the same faculty.

Legacy

France executed her in the spring and summer of the Great Mutinies, when the army had nearly collapsed after the Nivelle offensive and the nation needed someone to blame. In October 2001 the Dutch Mata Hari Foundation used declassified MI5 documents to petition for exoneration, arguing that "maybe she wasn't entirely innocent, but it seems clear she wasn't the master-spy whose information sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths." In 2017, a century after the firing squad, the French Army declassified the 1,275 pages of her sealed trial file. A century of novels and films had already made her name a synonym for the seductress-spy — the most successful character she ever created, and the one she could not survive.