French secret agent who spied on the Germans for the British during World War I using the pseudonym of Alice Dubois. She was nicknamed “the queen of spies” by her English superiors.
De Bettignies had been a citizen of Lille since 1903, and when the German army invaded the city in October 1914, she decided to engage in resistance and espionage. Due in part to her ability to speak French, English, German, and Italian, she ran a vast intelligence network from her home in the North of France on behalf of the British army and the MI6 intelligence service under the pseudonym Alice Dubois. This network provided important information to the British through occupied Belgium and the Netherlands.
The network is estimated to have saved the lives of more than a thousand British soldiers during the 9 months of full operation from January to September 1915.
The “Alice” network of a hundred people, mostly within forty kilometres of the front to the west and east of Lille. She smuggled men to England, provided valuable information to the Intelligence Service, and prepared for her superiors in London a grid map of the region around Lille. When the German army installed a new battery of artillery, even camouflaged, this position was bombed by the Royal Flying Corps within eight days.
Arrested by the Germans on 20 October 1915 near Tournai, she was sentenced to forced labour for life on 16 March 1916 in Brussels. After being held for three years, she died on 27 September 1918 as a result of pleural abscesses poorly operated upon at St. Mary’s Hospital in Cologne.