Fascism and Women Spies: Agents, Agency, and the Trope of the Femme Fatale

This paper looks at the fascist experience through the lens of the women who spied for fascist intelligence services across Europe during the Second World War. I analyze the stories of five female spies who ‘stole the scene’ from their more numerous male colleagues: Bice Pupeschi and Celeste Di Porto in Fascist Italy, Mathilde Carré in Vichy France, Margarete Kahane in Nazi Austria, and Stella Kübler-Isaaksohn in Nazi Germany. By looking at press accounts and trial records, my paper shows how the public portrayals of these women fit within the long-standing trope of the femme fatale. Their stories elicited such a strong fascination that they have ended up dominating the postwar memory and imagination of WWII-era espionage, leaving the many more male informants relegated to the side. 

Fascist regimes dictated that women be mothers and housewives, not spies and informers, but they were willing to bend the rules for people who served their purpose and enforced their system of repression. But spies are not always safe tools. They have a will of their own and pursue their own agendas. These women agreed to spy for the Fascists and Nazis, but, while they subverted and betrayed the Resistance, they also fought against or asserted their power over a male-dominated world, highlighting the contradictions between the regimes’ propaganda and practice. These agents lived a fundamental tension: they achieved a degree of surprising female agency, but used it to serve totalitarian and genocidal regimes. 


Benedetta Carnaghi is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University in the UK, where she is researching a project entitled ‘Making Fun of the Fascists: Humor Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945’. She is also turning her dissertation into a book called Agents of Betrayal: A Comparative History of Fascist and Nazi Spies, 1927-1945. She was previously an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a visiting lecturer at the John S. Knight Institute at Cornell University. Carnaghi explores the history of totalitarianism from below and has examined the everyday experience of terror under authoritarian regimes in such venues as the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945.

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