When Life Imitates Art: Éric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004) As a Primer for Real-Life Politics

Abstract

This article examines the striking parallel between plans that were discussed in the CIA in 2017 to kidnap and possibly murder Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the abduction and murder eighty years earlier in Paris of the head of the White Russian army in exile by the NKVD. The latter, one of the most notorious episodes in the history of espionage and counterespionage in the French capital during the interwar years, was fictionalized by Éric Rohmer in his 2004 film Triple Agent. Fusing the actual events of those years—the Popular Front government in France, the Stalinist Terror in Russia, and the build-up to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939—with a tragic personal story, Rohmer exposed the human dramas without which the rival intelligence services could not have been as effective as they were. The events of the 1930s are long past, and even the Cold War years of the 1960s and 1970s have receded into the distance. But as this article shows, and Éric Rohmer’s film reminds us, the cloak- and-dagger game of spies and counterspies has not changed that much, the technologies of contemporary intelligence warfare notwithstanding.