…Spies and secret agents have, of course, been used throughout history, and individual spies have sometimes been ennobled or otherwise honored for their work. But the spy’s profession has almost always and everywhere been regarded with contempt. “Espionage is never tolerable,” wrote Montesquieu. “The necessary infamy of the practitioner establishes the infamous nature of the practice.”
—France had one unsurpassed master of intrigue in the famous person of Joseph Fouché, who spied rampantly on his social and professional contacts alike. Fouché remained as permanent minister of police during four consecutive regimes: directory, consulate, empire, and the restored monarchy.
During this period, Switzerland became a place of intensive intelligence activity by Britain, mostly against France. In 1794 the new charge d’affaire of Great Britain was the newly arrived William Wickham (1761–1840), for whom his diplomatic work in Bern was a cover. Wickham’s main activity was to collect information about France and to lead various royalist organizations, which acted inside France as well as abroad. In particular, Wickham organized invasions of royalist armies into France, one of which was the Quiberon Bay invasion of 1795; the effort failed within one month.—click image for source…
The one example of a society in which spies seem to have enjoyed social esteem is hardly encouraging. According to the French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, the incorrigibly expansionist rulers of the ancient Aztec empire habitually used merchant travelers to spy on neighboring states, much as the CIA is said to use American firms, multinationals operating abroad or the Russians and Chinese use trade delegations. In recognition of their services members of the Aztec merchants’ corporation were honored as “uncles” of the emperor.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars gave the secret agent a role of unprecedented importance and produced a number of figures, more or less closely connected with the espionage world, whose lives today may strike us as romantic. However, with the possible exception of Wellington’s secret intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Colquhoun Grant, they seldom looked particularly romantic. And it was, once again, an American writer, James Fenimore Cooper, who first endowed the spy figure with an intriguing aura of romance. ( to be continued)…
—In 1777, long before the advent of sex change operations, Charles d’Eon de Beaumont abruptly changed his gender. Soldier, royal censor, diplomat, and spy, d’Eon was a famous figure in pre-revolutionary France. At a young age he became a member of the King’s Secret, a network of spies in the service of the French king. After fighting in the Seven Years War against the Prussians, he received the cross of Saint Louis, raising him to the rank of chevalier. Another stint as a spy, this time in London, kept the Chevalier fourteen years away from France.—click image for source…
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