Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State
Deborah Bauer (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 360 pages, photos, illustrations, appendix, index.
Pop quiz: Which country invented the modern, professional intelligence service? Was it Germany, with its highly developed military staff system and master bureaucrats? Russia, needing information to thwart anti-czarist revolutionaries? Or Britain, fumbling around as usual and coming up with a workable solution by accident?
The answer is none of the above. It was France that after its disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) realized that collection of accurate information about potential adversaries in general, and Germany in particular, would be critical to national security and military success. How the French created their service, the problems they ran into, and their long-term consequences are the subject of historian Deborah Bauer’s Marianne Is Watching.
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