The Styrous® Viewfinder: Alec B. Francis

Mata Hari ~ 1905

photographer unknown

Today is the birthday of Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, better known as Mata Hari, she was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I and executed by firing squad in France.

Her powers of seduction as a spy made her name synonymous with the femme fatale. Her story has inspired books, films, and other works. Later biographers argue that she was convicted and condemned because the French Army needed a scapegoat, and that the files used to secure her conviction contained falsifications. Some have even stated that she could not have been a spy and was innocent.

She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle but took the name MacLeod on July 11 (a prominant date in my life), 1895, when she married Dutch colonial army captain Rudolf MacLeod, who was living in the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia). The marriage enabled Zelle to move into the Dutch upper class and placed her finances on a sound footing. She moved with her husband to Malang on the east side of the island of Java, however, the marriage was a disappointment. MacLeod was an alcoholic, physically abused Zelle, and blamed her for his lack of promotion. He openly kept a concubine, a socially accepted practice in the Dutch East Indies at the time. When he was posted to Medan, Zelle remained in Toempoeng at which time she took the name Mata Hari, the word for "sun" in the local Indonesian language (literally, "eye of the day").

At MacLeod's urging, Zelle returned to him, but in 1899, their children fell violently ill from complications relating to the treatment of syphilis contracted from their parents.

electron micrograph

of Treponema pallidum,

the bacteria that cause syphilis

The couple divorced in 1906, Zelle was awarded custody of their daughter, Jeanne and Rudolf was legally required to pay child support but never did. Once when Jeanne visited him, he did not return her to her mother. Zelle did not have the resources to fight the situation and accepted it, believing that while Rudolf had been an abusive husband, he had been a good father. Jeanne later died at the age of 21, possibly from complications related to syphilis.

Louise Jeanne ("Non") Mac Leod - 1903
photographer unknown

In 1903, Zelle moved to Paris, where she performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod. By 1904, Mata Hari rose to prominence as an exotic dancer. She was a contemporary of dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, leaders in the early modern dance movement, which around the turn of the 20th century, looked to Asia and Egypt for artistic inspiration.

Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting her body, she captivated her audiences and was an overnight success from the debut of her act at the Musée Guimet on March 13, 1905. She brought a carefree provocative style to the stage in her act, which garnered wide acclaim. The most celebrated segment of her act was her progressive shedding of clothing until she wore just a jeweled breastplate and some ornaments upon her arms and head.

Mata Hari ~ 1906

photogrpher unknown

She was never seen bare-chested. Early in her career, she wore for her performances a bodystocking that was similar in color to her skin, but that was later omitted. Her act was successful because it elevated erotic dance to a more respectable status and broke new ground in a style of entertainment for which Paris was later world famous. She posed for provocative photos and mingled in wealthy circles. Since most Europeans at the time were unfamiliar with the Dutch East Indies, she was thought of as exotic, and her claims were accepted as genuine.

One enthusiastic French journalist wrote in a Paris newspaper that she was "so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms." One journalist in Vienna wrote after seeing one of her performances that she was "slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal, and with blue-black hair" and that her face "makes a strange foreign impression.

She became the long-time mistress of the millionaire industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet, who had founded the Musée. Entertainers of her era commonly invented colourful stories about their origins, and she posed as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, pretending to have been immersed in the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood. She was photographed numerous times during this period, nude or nearly so. Some of these pictures were obtained by MacLeod and strengthened his case in keeping custody of their daughter.

By about 1910, myriad imitators had arisen. Critics began to opine that the success and dazzling features of the popular Mata Hari were due to cheap exhibitionism and lacked artistic merit. Although she continued to schedule important social events throughout Europe, she was disdained by serious cultural institutions as a dancer who did not know how to dance.

Her career went into decline after 1912. On 13 March 1915, she performed in the last show of her career. She had begun her career relatively late as a dancer and had started putting on weight. However, by this time, she had become a successful courtesan, known more for her sensuality and eroticism than for her classical beauty. She had relationships with high-ranking military officers, politicians, and others in influential positions in many countries. Her relationships and liaisons with powerful men frequently took her across international borders. Before World War I, she was generally viewed as an artist and a free-spirited bohemian, but as war approached, she began to be seen by some as a wanton and promiscuous woman, and perhaps a dangerous seductress.

During World War I, the Netherlands remained neutral. As a Dutch subject, Zelle was thus able to cross national borders freely. To avoid the battlefields, she traveled between France and the Netherlands via Spain and Britain, and her movements attracted attention. During the war, Zelle was involved in an intense romantic-sexual relationship with a 23-year-old Russian Staff Captain of the 1st Special Infantry Regiment, Captain Vadim Maslov, serving with the French, whom she called the love of her life.

Mata Hari - 1915
photographer unknown

In April 1916, Maslov was wounded fighting in the ill-fated Nivelles Offensive to capture the German controlled fortified Brimont mountain range, losing the sight in his left eye. Rushing to his aid, Zelle was met by agents from the Deuxième Bureau, who told her that she would be allowed to see Maslov if she agreed to spy for France. Before the war, Zelle had performed before the Crown Prince Wilhelm, eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II and nominally a senior German general on the Western Front. The Deuxième Bureau believed she could obtain information by seducing the Crown Prince for military secrets. The Bureau offered Zelle one million francs if she could seduce him and provide France with good intelligence about German plans. In November 1916, she was arrested and taken to London; she eventually admitted to working for the Deuxième Bureau. In January 1917, a transmitted radio messages to Berlin described the activities of a German spy code-named H-21, whose biography closely matched Zelle's that it was obvious they were one and the same. This development proved to the Deuxième Bureau that Mata Hari had communicated the names of the six spies to the Germans. On February 13, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs Elysées in central Paris. She was tried on 24 July, accused of spying for Germany and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. Although the French and British intelligence services suspected her of spying for Germany, neither could produce definite evidence against her.

Following the failures of the Nivelle Offensive and massive strikes, France was badly shaken by the Great Mutinies of the French Army in the spring of 1917. The country was close to collapsing from war exhaustion. Having one German spy to blame for everything that went wrong with the war was convenient for the French government, and Mata Hari seemed the perfect scapegoat.

Zelle wrote letters to the Dutch Ambassador in Paris. "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." A difficult moment for Mata Hari during the trial occurred when her lover Maslov—by now deeply embittered as a result of losing his eye in combat—declined to testify for her and told her that he did not care whether she was convicted. Her defense was denied permission to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses or to examine his witnesses directly. The prosecution saying: "Without scruples, accustomed to making use of men, she is the type of woman who is born to be a spy."

Zelle was executed in the moat of the Château de Vincennes, by a firing squad consisting of 12 French soldiers just before dawn on October 15, 1917. She was 41, According to an eyewitness account by British reporter Henry Wales, she was not bound and she refused a blindfold and defiantly blew a kiss to the firing squad.

The body of Mata Hari was not claimed by any family members and was accordingly used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris. In 2000, archivists discovered that it had disappeared, possibly as early as 1954, according to curator Roger Saban, during the museum's relocation. Her head remains missing. Records dated 1918 show that the museum also received the rest of the body, but none of the remains could later be accounted for.

The Mata Hari sealed trial and other related documents, a total of 1,275 pages, were declassified by the French Army in 2017, one hundred years after her execution.

The largest-ever Mata Hari exhibition opened in the Museum of Friesland on October 14, 2017, one hundred years after her death.

The Canadian historian Wesley Wark stated in a 2014 interview that Mata Hari was never an important spy and the French military failures had nothing to do with her: "They needed a scapegoat, and she was a notable target for scapegoating." The British historian Julie Wheelwright stated: "She really did not pass on anything that you couldn't find in the local newspapers in Spain." Wheelwright described Zelle as "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. She was held up as an example of what might happen if your morals were too loose." The American historians Norman Polmer and Thomas Allen said she was "naïve and easily duped", a victim of men rather than a victimiser.

The reports that following her execution claimed she had admitted to spying for Germany, Mata Hari actually made no such confession.

The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale and she has been the subject and basis for dozens of books and films.

In 1931, a film Mata Hari, Directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Ramon Novarro, Lionel Barrymore, C. Henry Gordon, Alec B. Francis. With Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Lewis Stone. A semi-fictionalized account of the life of Mata Hari, an exotic dancer who was accused of spying for Germany during World War I.

In 2002, Warren Zevon references her in his song, Genious, from his album, My Ride's Here.