Mata Hari: The Meme Grows

We can get some idea of how the Mata Hari meme has evolved over the years using Google Ngrams. The image below is for the corpus in French.

It is remarkable how the "Mata Hari" meme has been growing in the past two decades. The "blip" from 1990 to ca 1998 may be related to something different than the Dutch dancer, or to some glitch or the Google counting algorythm, but the increase in interest is clear anyway.
 
In English, the trend is less clear, but it is there:

So, what we are seeing is the slow evolution of a meme. Note that most memes do not even remotely have this kind of persistence - most memes flare up and disappear in days. A meme lasting a century is rare, and the Mata Hari one is still growing. We have to see how it will evolve and how it will affect us.

Note also how the meme has changed its polarity: up to not many years ago, the commonly accepted version was that Mata Hari had been an evil femme fatale, now we see her as an innocent victim of an ugly propaganda machine. A meme - or a myth - is like a living being, it grows, it changes, it evolves. And so does Mata Hari, her ghost is still haunting us.