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## The Deuxième Bureau in Context
The organization that recruited Josephine Baker — France’s military intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau — was one of Europe’s oldest formal intelligence organizations, with a history that stretched back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the traumatic defeat that ended it.
That defeat, which resulted in the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the humiliating siege of Paris, produced a French national obsession with intelligence failure and intelligence reform. The French military’s intelligence section was reorganized and professionalized in the following decades, and by the late nineteenth century the Deuxième Bureau had developed into a sophisticated organization with networks of agents across Europe.
The Bureau’s most famous case in the pre-war era was also its most disastrous: the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to Germany based on evidence that the Deuxième Bureau had partly fabricated and partly misread. The affair, which consumed French political life for more than a decade and divided the country into bitterly opposed factions, exposed the Bureau’s institutional antisemitism, its willingness to manipulate evidence, and the specific dangers of intelligence organizations operating without adequate oversight or accountability.
By 1939, the Bureau had been reformed multiple times, but the institutional culture and the specific challenges of intelligence work in the context of a Germany that had been comprehensively rearming since 1933 were shaping its operations. Jacques Abtey, who recruited Baker, was part of a Bureau that understood that the conventional intelligence assets — male agents, formal networks, traditional cover stories — were not sufficient for the intelligence task France faced.