Agent Provocateur
Pardon My French
You give yourself for an agent provocateur. The proper business of an agent provocateur is to provoke.1
Agent provocateur made its debut in 1793, when, in search of fresh victims for the guillotine, the Enlightened engineers of the Reign of Terror employed undercover operatives to convince the clandestine enemies of Reason to resort to conspicuous forms of resistance. France, however, would suffer several revolutions and two generations of overzealous policemen, before it managed to export the expression to the English-speaking world. 2
Marvelous to say, rather than taking the direct route across the English Channel, agent provocateur reached the Anglophone world by way of a book about the inner workings of the Russian Empire, a work in which the anonymous author tells the tale of an ‘agent provocateur, who not only fraternizes with the seditious, but does all he can to goad and instigate them to acts of disorder and violence’. Soon thereafter, the expression played prominent roles in many of the translations of French works about the great disorders of 1848 that rolled off British presses in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
For much of the rest of the nineteenth century, agent provocateur followed the path laid down by its earliest appearances in English-language literature. That is, while it often appeared in stories set in places prone to revolution, it rarely ventured beyond the borders of such accounts. Thus, in 1909, an English columnist could safely observe that ‘it says something for the Anglo-Saxon race that we have no exact equivalent for the words in our language. I suppose the nark - the thief who exists amongst his brother thieves to give information to the police - is the nearest approach of British origin to the agent provocateur.’3
As late as 1929, Anglophone authors who employed agent provocateur invariably took the trouble to explain it. After that point, however, they increasingly presumed that readers understood the meaning of the expression. Indeed, during a hearing held in 1934, an American senator went so far as to describe agent provocateur as a 'well-known term’.4
In the United States, the popularity of agent provocateur owed much to Prohibition, and, in particular, to the custom, practiced by many police departments, of employing covert operatives to induce their fellow citizens to sell them potent potables. However, when the ban on the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages ended, the expression began a long retreat into tales of an increasingly distant past.
In the twilight of the twentieth century, marketeers applied agent provocateur to products - ranging from music albums to ladies’ lingerie - that, apart from being vaguely familiar, vaguely French, and vaguely naughty, had nothing at all to do with the work of undercover instigators. Recently, however, the term has acquired a secondary sense that echoes its original meaning. Thus, in addition to referring to those who tempt others to break the law, agents provocateurs describes people who commit camera-catching crimes in proximity to public gatherings, thereby giving otherwise peaceful protests the appearance of riots.
Over the years, the original pronunciation of agent provocateur has given way to a hybrid. Thus, English speakers usually say agent (or agents) as if it followed ‘news’, ‘ticket’, or ‘secret’ and provocateur (or provocateurs) as if they are LARPing as Gérard Depardieu. At the same time, Anglophone folks who write out the plural form of agent provocateur usually follow the French rule, thereby forming agents provocateurs.5
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1923 ) page 25
The cartoon, which seems to lampoon a law forbidding the hunting of rabbits, comes from Cham (Amédée de Noé) Ces petites dames et ces jolis messieurs (These Little Ladies and Handsome Gentlemen) (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867) page 24 The original caption reads ‘Laissez-moi tranquille. Je sais la loi. Vous n’êtes q’un agent provocateur.’
The Clubman (pseudonym) ‘The Agent Provocateur - Azeff’s Methods’ The Sketch (10 February 1909) page 140
United States Congress Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry (Part 21: Naval Shipbuilding) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1934) page 5973
My little jeu de mots makes use of The Garden of Eden, which Hugh Goldwin Rivière painted in 1901.