Marianne Is Watching. Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State

Abstract

Of the many organizational problems that damaged the French army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, French strategist pinpointed their failure to anticipate and to react to the Prussian German enemy. Therefore, the upgrade of military intelligence became a priority in the French army’s post-1870 restructuring. However, as Deborah Bauer emphasizes in her important and perceptive book, the ambitions of military intelligence exceeded its role as a battlefield force multiplier. Army intelligence was also designed to become a major pillar in the Third Republic’s ambitious state building process, one which also shaped the evolution of police and diplomatic intelligence. French military intelligence reorganization took place in the context of the ever more conflicted domestic mass politics and the changing face of battle. The exponential growth of armies and navies in the imperial age prior to 1914 gave the term ‘arms race’ its original meaning. The fact that the French army’s reorganization post-1871 was halting and piecemeal, impacted by political volatility, by justifiable fears among republican politicians of entrenching an anti-republican Praetorian elite, as well as by an accelerating sense of national decline following the 1870 debacle, made military reform a disputatious, incremental and uneven process.