by Pat Shipman
On July 16, Clunet sent a request to the commissioner of the government, asking that Mata Hari might be given her blouses, lingerie, and other clothing that were seized upon her arrest. Three days later, two blouses, two corsets, a matching skirt and jacket, a pair of slippers, a pair of ankle boots, and a buttonhook were delivered to Saint-Lazare for Mata Hari. Though it does not appear on the itemized list, several reports said that on her way into the court she was wearing a jaunty tricornered hat that matched her jacket and skirt. They also commented that her blouse was rather low-cut. Since these clothes were chosen for her to wear and were not ones she had specifically requested, the symbolism of the military-style hat combined with an indelicately low-cut blouse was undoubtedly deliberate. These clothes conveyed a deeper message: Mata Hari was no better than a prostitute, and one who took neither war nor the loss of soldiers’ lives seriously.
On July 20, Mata Hari was finally freed from Saint-Lazare, only to be moved to the Concièrgerie, to be nearer the trial venue; she was accompanied by Sister Léonide from Saint-Lazare.
The trial began on July 24 at 1:00 p.m. at the Palace of Justice. Clunet notified the Dutch government of the trial on the very day it began; he was expecting no help from them, and he received none.
To get to the courtroom, in the company of a guard, Mata Hari crossed the courtyards of the Palace of Justice and entered the central building, where she climbed the impressive spiral staircase to the second floor. She was no longer glamorous and beautiful. Her hair was dirty and ill-dressed; she wore no makeup on her tired face; she had lost an unflattering amount of weight. Yet she still walked like a dancer, supply and fluidly, and held her head high and her back straight with the noble carriage that had been admired by so many men.
Mata Hari herself would have known little of the recent progress of the war at the time of her trial. She had never concerned herself with its details, except insofar as they might have affected Vadime, and she certainly received no war news in Saint-Lazare. She was probably aware that it was a very dangerous moment in history to be suspected of espionage. “Spy fever” had broken out all over Europe, and people were encouraged to look for, and report, any potentially suspicious actions. Casual remarks and such trivialities as the rearrangements of laundry on the clothesline were suspected of being evidence of sympathy with or signals to foreign powers. Foreigners were often arrested—her own experiences told her this—and questioned or imprisoned without courtesy. Travel was much more difficult, permits were always essential, and even with proper papers, foreigners were generally viewed with distrust.
The first three years of the war had gone badly for the Allied forces, and shortages caused hardships at home as well as among the troops. Wounded, crippled men, missing limbs or coughing and wheezing from gas, were becoming a sad and familiar sight in the streets of Europe. Many families had lost a son, a brother, a father, an uncle, or a cousin. Most lived in terror that the next report from the war would include heavy casualties in whatever sector their loved ones were stationed.
In Russia, conditions were so bad that Czar Nicholas II had been forced to resign in March of 1917—an unthinkable revolution. An interim government was formed, but the Russian troops, which had diverted many German soldiers to the eastern front, became disorganized and unstable. They might withdraw, collapse, mutiny, or simply run. Without the vast Russian army in the war, the other Allies feared that all of the German troops would soon be concentrated on the western front in France.
The French troops themselves were weary, weakened, and demoralized, having endured prolonged fighting and heavy losses during 1916 at Verdun. They were not confident of their ability to beat the Germans, especially if the troops now on the eastern front moved to the western front. In April and May of 1917 the French commander-in-chief, Robert-Georges Nivelle, had confidently predicted that a brilliant attack on the German line at Chemin des Dames—“the Road of the Women”—could break through in a single day and end the war.
Instead, the Chemin des Dames had been a prolonged disaster. On the first day, April 16, there had been an appalling slaughter of thousands of French and Russian troops in the Aisne Valley. Crossing the ground, they had met with a network of barbed wire that had forced them into clumps. They were mowed down by German machine guns entrenched on the plateau above the valley. Vadime was among the wounded. Hospital services had been unable to handle the numbers of wounded; some had been loaded onto trains heading to hospitals as far away as Paris. Despite his own statements earlier that the attack must be brief, Nivelle had continued to hurl troops into the battle day after day.
By the time in May that an end to the battle had been called, roughly 187,000 French lives had been lost, along with numerous tanks and guns, which were much needed for any further offensives. Instead of an end to the war, all that had been gained at Chemin des Dames was a few hundred meters of ground. The defeat had been so costly that half of the divisions of the French army had mutinied and refused to fight. Infantrymen had refused to go up to the front for an offensive, though they had vowed to defend themselves if attacked; protest demonstrations had been held, red flags had been flown, and stones had been thrown at military transports; railroad lines had been sabotaged; and, occasionally, unpopular officers had been attacked. The Russian troops also mutinied, refusing to obey orders, because of their massive losses—about half of the First Brigade had been wounded in the Chemin des Dames—and their poor food and medical treatment.
On May 15, Nivelle had been replaced as commander-in-chief by Philippe-Henri Pétain, who had ruthlessly identified fifty-four men as ringleaders of the mutiny and summarily tried and executed them at the front line. Three hundred French mutineers were dispatched in disgrace to the prison on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. This suppressed the mutiny but left morale dangerously low. Pétain had decided not to commit French troops to offensive actions for a while; he gave soldiers more leave and their families more generous allowances and tried to improve the food for front-line soldiers. The French demanded that the Russians restore order in their brigades. When initial attempts failed, the First and then the Third Brigades were confined to a camp in La Courtine. Instead of solving the problem, the two brigades fell to fighting each other and the mutiny grew even worse.
In the summer of 1917 the entire French military establishment lived in a volatile milieu of anxiety, shame, terror, courage, despair, and optimism. Attempts to capture and convict spies were stepped up as the war turned worse, in the same way that Pétain had executed soldiers identified as “traitors” because they had not wished to join in hopeless martyrdom on the battlefield. The Allied commanders, especially the French, needed someone to blame, to punish—to defeat, as they were being defeated by the Germans.
And there she came, on July 24, the perfect scapegoat: a tall dark woman in a low-cut blouse and a hat that mocked the military establishment. She was an immoral foreigner with a sensuous walk who had shamelessly seduced men from all armies. She had not only killed Frenchmen, she had stolen them from their wives and families while they were still alive. She had lived flamboyantly and expensively—the quality of her clothes and boots was evident to any observer at the trial—at a time when ordinary people could not get enough bread to eat.
The day of the trial was close and warm, eighty-two degrees F. Mata Hari faced seven men, all from the military: Lieutenant Colonel Albert-Ernest Semprou, president of the tribunal; and the six other judges, Major Ferdinand Joubert, Captain Lionel de Cayla, Captain Jean Chatin, Lieutenant Henri Deguesseau, Second Lieutenant Joseph de Mercier de Malval, and Sergeant Major Berthommé. Most of these men were in their fifties or sixties and had had distinguished military careers. The prosecutor intent on convicting Mata Hari was Lieutenant André Mornet, a tall man with a full beard showing streaks of gray. The clerk was Sergeant Major Rivière. The only friendly face in the courtroom was that of her attorney and former lover, Clunet, whose inefficacy she had surely begun to suspect. He wa
s not nearly as familiar with the peculiarities of military law—embodied in the leather-bound tomes of the Military Code of Justice, the Code of Criminal Instruction, and the Ordinary Penal Code, which were required to be in the courtroom—as her prosecutor or the members of the tribunal.
The room was crowded with spectators and reporters, for word of the trial had leaked out. Something as titillating as the espionage trial of the notorious Mata Hari, whose dancing had thrilled so many, was not to be missed. Many of the reporters and spectators had seen her dance; all knew of her many triumphs; most would consider her a glamorous sex symbol, the epitome of seductiveness.
Semprou asked the accused to state her full name, date and place of birth, civil status, profession, and address. Mata Hari did so, with dignity. The court was then officially convened. The first action was taken by Mornet, who requested that the courtroom be cleared of spectators for reasons of security, since it was anticipated that state secrets would be discussed. He also asked that publication of the trial record be prohibited. After some discussion among the tribunal members, these motions were granted. Guards removed everyone from the room save the accused, the tribunal, the attorneys, and other necessary officials, and kept spectators ten meters from the doors, so they could not overhear the proceedings. Major Émile Massard, in his memoirs, claimed he was also present as the representative of Governor Dubail, but his presence is not mentioned in documents. Bouchardon also claimed to have witnessed the trial, but his presence is not recorded.
The only available accounts of the trial are the official judgment (now declassified), which does not detail the lines of questioning; a letter about the trial written after the fact by Captain Jean Chatin, one of the judges; and eyewitness accounts written years later by Bouchardon and Massard, who may not have been present at the trial. Massard and Bouchardon report exchanges with Mornet that are sometimes identical to or at least closely parallel to those during Mata Hari’s interrogation. Either Mornet followed Bouchardon’s questions very closely, and Mata Hari’s responses were sometimes word-for-word repetitions, or those “eyewitness accounts” are based on the interrogations and not the trial itself.
Captain Chatin’s letter about the trial was reproduced by Massard in his memoirs. Chatin’s words reveal the impression of Mata Hari that was given to the tribunal judges during the trial. First he congratulated Massard on facing up to someone who suggested that Mata Hari had been unjustly convicted.
On what is this person [basing his conclusion]?…Well, me, I relied on the proofs that I had in my hands, and on the confessions of this vile spy, to affirm that she caused to be killed about 50,000 of our children, not counting those who found themselves on board vessels torpedoed in the Mediterranean upon the information given by H21 no doubt.
Moreover, it must be remembered that H21 was in Germany, in July 1914, the mistress of a German prince, and that after she was justly condemned to death, no recourse or pardon was to be given, so evil was her cause.
No evidence could have been presented about how Mata Hari caused the death of fifty thousand children, or the torpedoing of ships, because Bouchardon had uncovered none. As for the German prince whose mistress Mata Hari allegedly was in July 1914, he was the policeman Griebel—hardly a prince.
Bouchardon’s report on the questioning of Mata Hari was presented to the court by the prosecution, including his conclusion that she was a “born spy.” Mornet’s subsequent questioning must have been designed to bring out precisely those points that Bouchardon had emphasized in his report: that Mata Hari was immoral and highly sexual; that she spent a great deal of time with officers from various armies; that she traveled during wartime; and that she accepted money from men, some of whom were involved in espionage.
Mornet called five witnesses.
The first was Inspector Monier, one of the two who had tailed Mata Hari all over Paris for so many months. He certainly testified about her extravagant ways and the many influential men she was seen with, but he could not supply any damning evidence of espionage because he had been able to uncover none. Police Commissioner Alfred Priolet testified about her arrest and the items seized from her hotel room, none of which constituted evidence of espionage.
Then Captain Ladoux and his superior, Colonel Goubet, presented their view of Mata Hari and her enrollment as a spy for France as a clever means of unmasking her as a German spy. In Goubet’s words, she was “one of the most dangerous that counter-espionage ever captured.” Mornet almost certainly asked Mata Hari why she had not confessed to Ladoux that she had already accepted money from Kroemer to spy for Germany when Ladoux asked her to spy for France. She repeated that she had done nothing for Kroemer or the Germans—that she regarded the twenty thousand francs as reimbursement for her seized furs—and that it would have been foolish of her to tell Ladoux about this. She wanted Ladoux to trust her and give her a big mission for France, both to help the French and, more important, to give her sufficient funds to support Vadime for the rest of their lives together.
Ladoux must also have testified extensively about the H21 telegrams, since he was the main expert on this subject. Much more plainly than anything else, these telegrams, if they were genuine, identified Mata Hari as a German agent. Further, if his testimony followed his depositions, Ladoux would have denied that he ever recruited Mata Hari as a spy for France or gave her a mission, falsehoods that destroyed the credibility of her version of events. If the head of the Deuxième Bureau swore that Mata Hari had never been a spy for France, then her activities as a double agent were reduced to simply being a single agent, for Germany. Ladoux’s testimony constituted the primary evidence that Mata Hari was engaged in espionage for Germany.
Two witnesses that Mornet wished to call, Vadime de Massloff and Lieutenant Hallaure, were unable to attend the tribunal. Mata Hari must have been relieved not to have to face Vadime and hear him deny loving her. The trial proceeded without them, but their depositions were read aloud.
Mornet closed his summation with a theatrical pronouncement that would have played well on the stage: “The evil that this woman has done is unbelievable. This is perhaps the greatest woman spy of the century.”
The tribunal was adjourned at 7:00 p.m. Accompanied by a guard, Mata Hari made her way back to the Concièrgerie and Sister Léonide. On July 25 the tribunal was convened again at 8:00 a.m.
Clunet was invited to present his defense and called various influential men as witnesses.
Jules Cambon of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mata Hari’s former lover who had helpfully thought up the stratagem to delay the Dutch government from learning about her imprisonment, testified that she never asked him about military or diplomatic affairs.
Another potential witness was Alfred Messimy, who had been minister of war when war was declared. He had spent some idyllic days and nights in Mata Hari’s company. Though summoned to court, Messimy did not appear. His wife—who signed herself boldly “Andrée Messimy, née Bonaparte”—sent a letter to Semprou stating that her husband was ill with rheumatism and had never met Mata Hari in any case. It seemed that marital considerations prohibited Messimy’s testifying on Mata Hari’s behalf. Messimy’s name was not mentioned in court; he was only identified as M——y, a cabinet minister, when some of his letters to Mata Hari were read out in court. Messimy’s categorical denial of an affair with Mata Hari led to the widespread presumption that the lover in question was Louis Malvy, the minister of the interior, whose subsequent political career was damaged as a result.
Henri de Marguérie, a lover since the time of Mata Hari’s debut in Paris, courageously came to court to testify for her. During his first wartime visit to Paris in 1915, he recalled, “Madam did not ask me a single question” about politics or military matters. “You well know she is not a spy!” he reproached Mornet, according to one account. Mornet feigned incredulity that he had spent three days in Mata Hari’s company in 1915 and yet never once discussed the war, the obsession of the day. “We spoke of
art, Indian art,” de Marguérie insisted. “Nothing had ever spoiled my good opinion of this lady.”
His assertion tallied well with the depositions from Hallaure and Vadime—and, though they were not presented, with depositions from dozens of other men. In addition to her beauty, part of Mata Hari’s appeal to the war-weary men she entertained was precisely that: she did not speak of war, she spoke of music, art, theater, books, anything to help them forget the horrors they had endured and had yet to endure. Men on leave from the front did not want to discuss the hell from which they had come; they wanted peace, magic, pretty women, and music. Men in positions of importance who were charged with ordering soldiers to their deaths, or calculating how long a regiment might hold an impossible position, felt the same, no doubt.
Clunet’s quiet reasoning as he pointed up the flaws and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case was certainly heard. Doubtless he argued for Mata Hari’s rather different interpretation of numerous events. But his impassioned words made little impact on the members of the tribunal compared with the lurid accusations hurled at Mata Hari by the prosecution.
By the end of July 25 the evidence had been presented and the arguments heard. Massard reported that, during Clunet’s summation, he watched Mata Hari transform herself, as an actress does, from a mere woman to “a siren with strangely compelling charm.” She smiled brilliantly at the judges, and Colonel Semprou asked if she had any closing words with which to defend herself. “My defense is to speak the truth. I am not French. I have the right to have friends in other countries, even those at war with France. I remain neutral. I count on the good hearts of French officers.”
She seemed confident, though this attitude was probably mere performance. Where was the evidence that she had harmed France? Where were the secrets she was supposed to have passed? Why should the officers of France turn against her, when so many French officers had loved her?