UCLA

"Marianne is Watching" presents a history of the institutionalization of professional intelligence and counterintelligence services in France from 1870 to 1914. As the practice of secret politics, once exclusive to the domain of royal authority, gave way to calls for greater transparency in the nineteenth century, the acceptable exercise of state secrecy shifted from leadership to professional surveillance teams. This process, which notably took place during a period of peace, not war, highlights the enduring tension between surveillance, secrecy and national defense within an ostensibly open, democratic society. Interrogating these concerns in the French case, the Third Republic appears as a regime that ultimately valued security over transparency and other freedoms. Led by the army's administration, with contributions from services within the police and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, espionage and counterespionage teams became an integral part of the French state. They carved out important roles in determining France's international policy, in policing domestic populations, and in regulating speech and expression. What began as a reconnaissance service to achieve military parity with enemies like Germany thus grew to be a professional domestic surveillance apparatus with considerable autonomy in identifying threats to the nation. The embedding of institutions devoted to secrecy had a significant effect on French fin-de-siècle society and culture by contributing to fears of competition, weakness, and decline, as well as popular ideas of citizenship and belonging. The atmosphere created by the perceived presence of foreign spies in turn gave rise to a shared mindset of desperation, paranoia, and yearning for honor and heroism. As understandings of the reality of international espionage changed, views of spies changed, facilitating the popular acceptance of the notion of raison d'état, or the idea that the state has the right to act by whatever means necessary. This study of the origins of bureaucratized intelligence shows the extent to which regimes rely on the perception of real or imagined enemies to justify the establishment of legal and social structures that permit secret state actions, even in the most open society.