Marthe Richard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marthe Richard

Marthe Richard , actually Marthe Crompton, née Betenfeld, used. Richer, (born April 15, 1889 in Blâmont in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department , † February 9, 1982 in Paris ) was a French prostitute , pilot, spy and brief city ​​councilor of Paris. She became known as the initiator of the law named after her “Loi Marthe Richard” of April 13, 1946, by which all brothels in France were closed in the same year .

Before the First World War

Marthe pray field grew up in modest circumstances in Blâmont in Lorraine on, a few kilometers from that time to the German Reich counting Alsace-Lorraine away. Her parents were Louis and Marie-Elisabeth Betenfeld. The father worked in a brewery. In 1903 she began an apprenticeship as a trouser tailor in Nancy. She began prostitution through the garrison stationed there and the associated brothels. After a soldier reported her on charges that she had infected him with syphilis , she was entered in the national prostitute register on August 21, 1905.

At the beginning of 1907 she moved to Paris and continued her previous work there. In the same year she met the wealthy, much older fishmonger Henri Richer. Richer strove for her education and introduced her to the high society of Paris. He also enabled her to obtain a pilot's license - which she was one of the first French women to receive on June 23, 1913 - and financed her an airplane. In the near future, flying should become her passion. She joined the Stella Aviation Association and took part in flight demonstrations. She was nicknamed "l'Alouette" (the lark ) by the press . She was seriously injured in a crash landing near La Roche-Bernard in August 1913. She was in a coma for three weeks, and the accident also made her unable to have children. Nevertheless, she took up flying again. In February 1914, she was awarded a long-distance record for a flight in a Caudron G-III from Le Crotoy to Zurich, although in reality she had secretly covered part of the distance by train.

After the beginning of the First World War , she tried to take an active part in it. Together with other Stella pilots, she founded the L'Union patriotique des aviatrices françaises in 1914. Nevertheless, General Hirschauer, who was responsible at the time, did not allow her to do military service on the grounds that one was not sure whether the relevant protective provisions of the Hague Land Warfare Act would also apply to women in the event of a capture .

Richer bought a country house for himself and his companion, the “Manoir de Beaumont” in the municipality of Joué-en-Charnie west of Le Mans . Both of them spent the summer months there from 1910 to 1914. Although she was now a recognized member of the Paris Society, she was refused the requested deletion from the national prostitute register on the grounds that she had provided false personal information when she moved to Paris in 1907. Henri Richer and Marthe Betenfeld married on April 13, 1915. Shortly thereafter, Henri Richer went to war, where he succumbed to war injuries on May 25, 1916 in Massiges, west of Verdun .

Spy during the First World War

Marthe Richer met Jean Violan, nicknamed “Zozo”, through flying. Violan, whose real name was Joseph Davrichewy or Davrishishvili, was a Russian emigrant of Georgian descent. He had a direct relationship with Josef Stalin at a young age and was possibly even his half-brother. Violan flew for the French Air Force and was also active for the French secret service. Marthe Richer came into contact with Georges Ladoux through Violan .

As an intelligence officer, Ladoux had been head of the press and telegram censorship at the War Department since August 1914 . In May 1915 he took over the management of the newly founded Section de Centralization du Renseignement, which he also built. This was attached to the Deuxième Bureau , which was re-established in 1907 . Ladoux relied heavily on gaining information through female spies who were supposed to work privately with the other side's secret carriers. Ladoux gladly recruited the women needed for this patriotism from the demi-world environment .

Ladoux initially suspected Marthe Richer of spying for Germany. He assigned Violan to watch over them. They both fell in love and began a relationship. Violan managed to convince Ladoux of Richer's innocence. Ladoux then offered Marthe Richard to work for France on his behalf. At first she refused, disgusted, but then agreed after her husband's death, possibly out of feelings of revenge against Germany. After teaching her the basics of espionage, Ladoux put her on the German officer Hans von Krohn, then a naval attaché in Spain .

There are different versions of the actual events that followed. A popular reading based on the memoirs of Richards and Ladoux, published in the mid-1930s, says that she began, and possibly resumed, a love affair with von Krohn. As a result, she obtained information that she had transmitted to Ladoux using invisible ink : via a ring of German agents in France, arms deliveries to insurgents in French Morocco or submarine movements. In addition, she also offered herself to the German side pro forma as an agent, only to sabotage orders that had been placed.

Another variant says that the action went very differently and was a complete failure. Richer and Violan / Davrichewy were supposed to go to Madrid together. In the German embassy there, they should promote the spread of pacifist ideas, but at the same time try to crack the safe in the embassy. The contact with von Krohn was probably also made. Shortly thereafter, however, the two were involved in a car accident. A Russian pilot and a French woman in a car owned by the German naval attaché first attracted the attention of the Spanish and then the French press. So deprived of their camouflage, the couple had to return to Paris without having achieved anything.

In the course of the contact with von Krohn, she was able to elicit some secret information about German submarines , but not the hoped-for map of German submarine bases in Spain. In Madrid she also had contact with Margaretha Geertruida cell, called Mata Hari . During the course of 1916, both lived temporarily in the Palace Hotel in Madrid. The Deuxieme Bureau had already noticed Mata Hari as a potential spy for the other side in mid-1915. Richer probably didn't have an assignment to watch her.

There is little reliable information about her further activities in the intelligence service area. Richer did not have a role in influencing the war. Overall, she was entrusted with various assignments from June 1916 to September 1917.

Adoration as a war heroine

After the end of the war, Richer stayed in Paris. She began to fly again and came into contact with British citizens. It was through this that she met Thomas Crompton, then Finance Director of the Rockefeller Foundation in France. Both married in 1926. Through this marriage she became a British citizen and lost her French passport, as dual citizenship was not permitted under French law. After Crompton's sudden death in 1928, she moved to Bougival , west of Paris. A monthly pension from the Rockefeller Foundation of FF 2000 enabled her to lead a prosperous life.

In 1932 a new development began. Georges Ladoux, her former commanding officer, began a few years after his retirement to publish his experiences and experiences from his intelligence work during the First World War in several books. These works, some of them autobiographical, but also heavily interspersed with fictional elements, were to lead to the secret services and their actors being portrayed in a glorifying, downright heroic manner. The public gratefully accepted these representations, although they were nowhere near reality. Ladoux traded as an author under the name “Commandant Ladoux”, on the title page his role as the former head of the secret service was explicitly mentioned, the books were laid out as a series under the title Memoires de Guerre Secrete .

If he had initially dealt with the events surrounding Mata Hari, a second volume followed in the same year in which Marthe Richer played the central role. Even if he called her “Marthe Richard” in the book, it was clear from a number of clear indications who was meant. Marthe Crompton, as she was now officially called until her death, initially considered taking action against the publication, but then decided instead to claim part of the royalties and write a book about herself and her activities during this time. At first it appeared under her previous name Marthe Richer, but she soon took on the surname Richard, by which she was to remain known from then on. Further books by Ladoux on other incidents from the espionage environment were to follow, after his death in 1933, according to other sources published in 1936, then published on behalf of his widow. Richard's fame, in turn, increased when she received the Légion d'honneur on January 17, 1933. The fact that she received it on behalf of her late husband Thomas Crompton, to whom the order had been awarded posthumously, did not bother her. Nevertheless, there were also voices criticizing the fact that a former prostitute was allowed to receive such an award.

In the following time Marthe Richard gave numerous lectures about her work for the French secret service. Finally, her previous life was filmed in 1937 under the title Marthe Richard au service de la France by Raymond Bernard , among others with Erich von Stroheim as a German officer and Edwige Feuillère in the title role. Richard published two more books about their adventures until the outbreak of World War II.

The Law Loi Marthe Richard

Even if a lot about Richard's role during the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht and her relationship to the Resistance , organized crime , the Vichy regime and the occupation troops was and is unclear, after the end of the war she was regarded as a heroine of the resistance, as a "héroïne des deux guerres ”. This reputation enabled her to gain a seat on the Paris City Council on the list of the conservative Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) in 1945 . She immediately caused a stir with her demand that organized prostitution, and thus all brothels, be banned. A speech she gave on December 10, 1945 led the Prefect of the Seine department , to which Paris belonged, to issue an ordinance a short time later, according to which all brothels had to be closed within three months.

Encouraged by this success, Richard started a campaign with others with the aim of enforcing this nationwide. Here, too, it was successful: on April 13, 1946, the French parliament, with a majority of MRP and the Communist Party, passed the law with the number 46-685, which in future was to be associated with the name Richards and, as a result, all around 1,400 French brothels , including around 180 in Paris, had to be closed. In addition to health-political and moral aspects, the fact that brothels were considered centers of “horizontal collaboration” during the occupation played a role in the decision. The law also contained provisions on other areas of organized prostitution: Public contact was prohibited, penalties for pimping were tightened, and the national prostitute register, dating back to Napoleon's time , was closed. Prostitution, on the other hand, remained legal in itself.

Just a few years after the law came into force, Richard spoke out in favor of reopening the brothels. For this she was awarded the unofficial “Prix du Tabou” in 1951. In the early 1970s she reaffirmed that she had thought about the issue and was no longer against reopening brothels as long as the women working in them were not kept like slaves. With regard to the processes that led to the passing of the law, she described herself as a tool in the hands of others as early as 1951 and named in particular the MRP politician Léo Hamon and her leader during the time of the Resistance, a Madame Lefaucheux. It may also play a role that she was in a relationship with a pimp at the time in question and had private problems with him, which she hoped to solve through this law. About the law itself, she said she was wrong.

Since the law was passed, there have been repeated attempts to re-authorize brothels, but also considerations to tighten the provisions and e.g. B. To prohibit prostitution completely. More recent biographies assume that Richard, due to her status as a heroine, was instrumentalized by both the MRP and abolitionists in order to get a political majority for their moral ideas. Even for the brilliant speech that initiated the enactment of the law and which did not fit in with her usual demeanor, it is assumed that it came from someone else's pen. The MRP politician Pierre Corval is suspected to be the author. The law itself and its effects remained controversial in the period that followed. Richard himself campaigned in the following years for Paris prostitutes to be "recognized as a kind of public welfare worker".

Later years

Richard's political career was short-lived. After it turned out that as a British citizen she should not have been elected to the city council, she resigned from this body in 1946. In the following period she expressed herself in public again and again, occasionally contradicting itself and especially on questions of sexuality, and also published several books.

Richard died on February 9, 1982. Her grave is in the Columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris , Division 87, just above that of her second husband, Thomas Crompton.

controversy

While Richard's role as the heroine of the nation was largely uncritical in the interwar period, this changed with her political commitment in 1946. On December 19, 1946, Pierre Bénard , editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Canard enchaîné , wrote that there was no electricity, no coal, no wine, no potatoes and many people had no roof over their heads, nevertheless the city council, at Richard's instigation, spent two sessions dealing with the question of the abolition of the brothels.

Increasingly, their past was now being questioned. The difficulty was that the knowledge of the actual circumstances was largely limited to the descriptions that Richard and Ladoux had given themselves. It was precisely these reports, however, that were not only intended as descriptions of facts, but were intended to exaggerate one's own merits. For dramaturgical reasons, the film also deviated significantly from the actual circumstances. Independent evidence, however, was and is still in short supply today. Ladoux himself had not been alive for many years. Violan said in 1947 that Richard was an impostor ( une imposteuse ). To make matters worse, it was definitely in the interest of certain circles to discredit Richard for political reasons. A case against Richard for theft of jewelry and stolen goods was discontinued in 1955 without result. In this context, Inspector Jacques Delarue from the Sûreté prepared an extensive dossier on Richard, which, although invalidating the allegations made in the proceedings against Richard, otherwise did little to shed light on Richard's background.

In February 1971, Charles Chenevier, a former deputy director of the Criminal Investigation Department, publicly questioned the accuracy of the interwar accounts on a television broadcast. After Chenevier then dealt with Marthe Richard in his book La Grande Maison in 1976 in a chapter entitled The Spy Who Came Out of the Warm and Did n't Exist (L'espionne qui venait du chaud et qui n'existait pas ), the court obtained the confiscation of the book. In further editions, only the first letter of the surnames of those involved was allowed to be mentioned.

For the reasons mentioned, Richard's actual role has not yet been conclusively clarified. In recent literature, their achievements are viewed with great skepticism. In some cases, hypotheses were also put forward such as that she had to do with the unexpected death of her second husband Thomas Crompton, without there being any reliable evidence for this.

Works

  • Marthe Richard: Ma vie d'espionne, au service de la France . Les Éditions de France, Paris 1935.
  • Marthe Richard: Espions de guerre et de paix. Les Éditions de France, Paris 1938.
  • Marthe Richard: Mes dernières missions secrètes. Espagne 1936-1938 . Les Éditions de France, Paris 1939.
  • Marthe Richard: Fair face . SLIM, Paris 1947.
  • Marthe Richard: Appeal of sex . Éditions du Scorpion, Paris 1951.
  • Marthe Richard: Mon destin de femme . France loisirs, Paris 1974.

Film adaptations

literature

Web links

Commons : Marthe Richard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon : A l'occasion des 60 ans de la loi Marthe Richard: un peu d'histoire ( Memento of the original of July 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pointsdactu.org archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. dated April 21, 2006 (French), requested on April 12, 2011.
  2. ↑ Le Manoir de Beaumont on the website of the municipality of Joué-en-Charnie. Retrieved May 14, 2012 (French).
  3. ↑ a b Simon Sebag Montefiore : The young Stalin. S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2007, S. ISBN 3-10-050608-1 .
  4. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Géorgie et France: Joseph Davrichewy (1882-1975), révolutionnaire, aviateur, agent de contre-espionnage et écrivain . Article about Davrichewy on the website of the Eastern Europe information portal Colisee. Retrieved May 7, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.colisee.org
  5. ↑ Mike Pearce: On the Many Names of Zozo. Cross and Cokade International, Vol. 40/3, autumn 2009. Excerpt , PDF, 500kB. Retrieved May 7, 2012.
  6. ↑ a b c Gundula Bavendamm: Spies and secret services. Lecture on the occasion of a symposium on the First World War in the German Historical Museum in May 2004. Digital version of the abstract at Clio-online , PDF, 9kB, as well as a short summary in the newsletter of the AK Military History , Volume 23, No. 2 from 2004, p. 45. Digital version , 2.3MB, both accessed on May 4, 2012.
  7. ^ Bref historique des services français, depuis 1871 on a website on the history of the French secret services. Retrieved May 8, 2012 (French)
  8. ↑ Uncritical account of Marthe Richard's life on a website about spies. Retrieved May 14, 2012
  9. ^ A b c Douglas Porch: The French Secret Services. Frarrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1995, ISBN 0-374-15853-3 , pp. 129 ff.
  10. ↑ a b c Call of the sexes. In: Der Spiegel, issue 4/1952, January 23, 1952. Retrieved on May 1, 2012.
  11. ↑ Sam Waagenaar: Mata Hari. The first true report about the legendary spy , p. 307 ff. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1985, ISBN 3-404-61071-7 (former title: She called herself Mata Hari. Image of a life, document of a time ).
  12. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: image of the title page of the first volume , jpg file. 528kb. Retrieved May 16, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.livre-rare-book.com
  13. ^ Commandant Ladoux: Les chasseurs d'espions; Comment j'ai fait arrêter Mata Hari. Éditions du Masque, Paris, 1932.
  14. ↑ Commandant Ladoux: Marthe Richard, espionne au service de la France . Librairie des Champs-Elysées, Paris 1932.
  15. ↑ a b Image of her grave slab on a Dutch website.
  16. ↑ Illustration of the title page , jpg file, 134kb. Retrieved May 16, 2012.
  17. ↑ Information in the French National Library and in the Système universitaire de documentation (sudoc)
  18. ^ Margaret H. Darrow: French women and the First World War. ISBN 1-85973-366-2 or ISBN 1-85973-361-1 .
  19. ^ Martyn Cornick, Peter Morris: The French Secret Services: A Selected Bibliography . Transaction, New Brunswick 1993, ISBN 1-56000-111-9 . P. 24 ff.
  20. ↑ a b Marthe Richard au service de la France in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  21. ↑ Images from the film and a brief summary on a private website. Retrieved May 16, 2012. (French)
  22. ↑ Law No. 46-685 of April 13, 1946. Available in digital form in the Official Gazette of the Togo Territory, which at the time belonged to France, from June 1, 1947, p. 467. PDF, 3MB, accessed on May 2, 2012.
  23. ↑ a b Stefan Ulrich: France wants to ban love that can be bought . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 8, 2011. Accessed May 4, 2012.
  24. ↑ a b Je suis pour la réouverture ( Memento of the original from September 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Combat , January 1, 1952. Retrieved May 3, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lekti-ecriture.com
  25. ↑ a b page no longer available , search in web archives: Bring Back the Brothels? Article in Time Magazine, November 9, 1970. Retrieved May 3, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / time-demo.newscred.com
  26. ^ Angus McIntyre: Richard, Marthe. In: Melissa Hope Ditmore (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Vol. 2. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, London 2006, ISBN 0-313-32968-0 , p. 402.
  27. Jump up ↑ Dance for Tolerance . In: Der Spiegel, issue 17/1948, April 19, 1948. Retrieved on May 1, 2012.
  28. ↑ Qu'il n'y a pas d'électricité. Il n'y a pas de charbon. Il n'y a pas de vin. Il n'y a pas de pommes de terre et les sinistrés attendent toujours un toit (...). Fuyant ces déprimants débats, les conseillers municipaux parisiens consacrent deux longues séances à discuter de la suppression des maisons closes (177 dans la capitale, autour de 1500 en France). Mme Marthe Richard, l'espionne bien connue a ouvert le débat!
  29. ↑ The mentioned chapter on a website about her hometown Blâmont. Retrieved May 18, 2012 (French).
  30. ↑ Marthe Richard in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Richard, Marthe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Betenfeld, Marthe (maiden name); Richer, Marthe (temporary name after marriage)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician and prostitute
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Blâmont
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1982
PLACE OF DEATH Paris