The ‘English Wallet’ Spy Scare

Abstract

In the summer of 1793 a wallet belonging to British agent was supposedly discovered fortuitously in a provincial French town. The papers it contained purported to detail an incendiary and violent subversion plot whereby a network of British expatriate malefactors were engaged in espionage, conspiracy, sabotage, and murderous attacks. The revolutionary government in Paris decided to accord this credence. The ostensible revelation of such an unprecedented and insidious assault by a foreign-born civilian population collapsed longstanding distinctions between military and non-combatant domains, between frontline violence and behind-the-lines quiescence, and between the internal enemies of France’s civil war and the external ones of its international conflicts. Drawing on a range of theories put forward to explain the ‘English wallet’ saga, this chapter show that the episode was a hoax involving fakery of a more sophisticated kind than historians have previously believed.