She is remembered as one of history’s greatest femme fatales, a cunning, double-crossing spy who was responsible for the deaths of up to 50,000 men. Yet, historians now are rejecting this idea, as evidence points overwhelmingly to Mata Hari being another woman whose reputation has been exaggerated and sensationalised by men and by the media. It is true that Mata Hari was a stripper who had numerous liaisons with powerful men—often irrespective of their alliances—and she may have also been briefly involved in espionage. But was she really that deadly, or was she instead just the scapegoat France needed at the time?

Before Mata Hari the dancer existed, there was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, a Dutch girl born into an affluent family where she was well provided for. To take a glance at her early childhood, is it doubtful anyone would have guessed the path her life would take, but when Margaretha was 13, her father went bankrupt. Shortly after, her parents divorced, then her mother died two years later in 1891, then her father remarried and abandoned his children. Margaretha and her three younger brothers were split up and sent to live with various family members; she ended up with her godfather.

Margaretha then began training to become a kindergarten teacher, but the headmaster made advances on her and she was removed from the position. She subsequently fled to her grandfather in The Hague, but she was not fully content there either. At 18, she answered a lonely hearts advertisement and married Captain Rudolf MacLeod, a move which would, at least, secure her financial situation and her place in the Dutch upper-class. The couple moved to Java in Indonesia, as that was where MacLeod was serving.

But things did not look up. MacLeod was 21 years Margaretha’s senior and he was a violent drunk to boot. He physically abused Margaretha, whom he blamed for his lack of promotion, and he openly kept mistresses. They did have two children, Louise Jeanne and Norman-John, but tragedy struck when Margaretha woke one night to screams, and found both her children in agony.

The family claimed the children’s illnesses were from a vindictive nanny poisoning them, but it’s more likely that they were suffering complications from inherited syphilis, which MacLeod had contracted. Norman died as a result, and though Jeanne survived the childhood incident, she also had an early death at the age of 21.

Margaretha was then thrown into (more) turmoil. She separated from MacLeod in 1902 which the divorce finalised in 1906, and she was awarded custody of Jeanne, but MacLeod refused to pay child support. More shockingly, some time later, he refused to give the girl back to Margaretha after a scheduled visit, and, lacking the finances to fight, Margaretha had to accept the situation.

She was penniless, and on top of that she was a divorcée and a mother whose children had been taken from her. While today we are able to be sympathetic towards her, contemporary society was not so forgiving.

Margaretha had a passion for life, however, and so she pulled herself up and moved to Paris, where she emerged, phoenix-like, as the exotic dancer Mata Hari.

“I wanted away, to live life like a colourful butterfly in the sun.”

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (Mata Hari)

Meaning ‘eye of the day’ in Malay, Mata Hari was stylised as a princess from the East who had trained from childhood to perform these slow, sensuous dances, which were passed off as sacred ritual. All of which, of course, was complete nonsense, but Europe at the time was fascinated by such ‘exoticism’, and Mata Hari became a sensation.

Of course, her false background was hardly unusual; many entertainers created stories for themselves. Mata Hari’s particular appeal was the eroticism of her dances and the fact that she was one of the first to so eagerly break into this style of performance, for which Paris would later become famous. She was described by a French reporter as ‘so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms’.

The dancing alone brought in a lot of money for Margaretha, but she was also smart enough to target rich, older men to seduce and make her patrons. Less smart in an increasingly tense Europe was taking on lovers of any nationality, which was something that would cast a great deal of suspicion on her when the First World War broke out.

Mata Hari’s fame was relatively brief. She was a contemporary of dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, and she had begun her career later in life than was the norm for dancers, and as she aged, she began to put on some weight and appeared to lose the exotic beauty which had attracted men to her in the first place.

Her last performance was in 1915, but her career had been in decline since 1912, at which point she had established herself as a courtesan. Many of her affairs were with high-ranking military men—clearly, she had a type.

The Netherlands remained neutral during the war which meant that Margaretha was able to cross borders (mostly) freely. When she travelled to France in December 1915 to visit her then-lover, a Russian pilot, she was questioned by British authorities—the Aliens Act of 1914 meant that any foreigners attempting to enter Britain and its waters could be stopped.

They found nothing blatantly incriminating on Margaretha, but her life as a courtesan became a liability, as did her flippancy towards authority. She was at times uncooperative and was open about the fact that she was visiting a lover—this instantly marked her out as a ‘dangerous’ woman and someone who had no care for the rules of society.

Thus, she became a watched woman.

When her lover was injured and blinded in one eye in 1916, Margaretha wanted to raise funds to support him (and, naturally, herself). Thus, she accepted an assignment to spy for France, as those in command thought she would be perfect for such work with her connections to German higher-ups. 

As the story goes, Margaretha then leaked information to the Germans, directly causing thousands of deaths. 

In reality, it seems that she gained very little worthwhile information for the French and she was stitched up by Germans sending false messages in a broken cypher talking about Margaretha being a spy for them. Interestingly, Margaretha did admit to taking 20,000 francs to spy for Germany, but she never actually carried out the assignments. Not that France believed her.

Her trial was a farce; she was convicted and sentenced in less than 45 minutes. Evidence against her—of which there was nothing of any real value—was twisted to implicate her. For example, she said that she had taken money from a German soldier in exchange for sex; this was then depicted in court as espionage money.

There was basically no chance that she was emerging from the trial a free woman. France were losing the war badly and they needed a scapegoat—they found that in Mata Hari, creating out of her the oriental villainess who seduced men then stabbed them in the back.

And, if this sounds far-fetched, it should be noted that the man who had recruited Margaretha as a spy, Captain Georges Ladoux, was later accused of working for the Germans himself. Similar to Margaretha, there was little to no evidence against him; the difference is, Ladoux’s case was dropped as a result.

Margaretha appealed to the French President for clemency but none was forthcoming. She was executed by firing squad on 15th October 1917, aged 41, labelled by her accusers as ‘the greatest woman spy of the century’—an obvious lie, but one that has unfortunately stuck. She is now Mata Hari, the femme fatale whose deviancy and ‘otherness’ led her to an early grave.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle—Mata Hari—died bravely, refusing a blindfold and blowing a kiss to her killers.

British reporter Henry Wales witnessed her execution; he wrote a sensationalised account of her death which can be read here.

Sources:

• ‘Tinker Tailor Seductress Spy: Untold Story of ‘double Agent’ Mata Hari Whose Sexual ‘depravity’ Led to Her Execution; The Dutch ‘secret Agent’ Is Often Portrayed as a Femme Fatale — but Is a Misunderstood Character, Scottish Historian Mary Craig Tells Mirror Online’, Daily Mirror (London, England) (MGN Ltd, 2017)
• White, Rosie, ‘‘You’ll Be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale‘, in The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, ed. by Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 72-85
• https://www.biography.com/performer/mata-hari
• https://www.prisonersofeternity.com/blog/mata-hari-femme-fatale/