Gabrielle Petit

Gabrielle Alina Eugenia Maria Petit (20 February 1893 – 1 April 1916) was a Belgian spy who worked for the British Secret Service in German-occupied Belgium during World War I. She was executed in 1916, and was widely celebrated as a Belgian national heroine after the war's end.

Life Petit was born on 20 February 1893 in Tournai to working-class parents. She was raised in a Catholic boarding school in Brugelette following her mother's early death. At the outbreak of the First World War, she was living in Brussels as a saleswoman. She immediately volunteered to serve with the Belgian Red Cross.

Petit was ultimately befriended and exposed by a German agent for Colonel Walter Nicolai and the Abteilung III b counterintelligence service, who had posed as Dutch. She was arrested by the German military police in February 1916. She was imprisoned at Saint-Gilles Prison in Brussels, tried, and convicted of espionage in wartime under German military law, with the death penalty imposed on the following 1 March. During her trial, Petit refused to reveal the identities of her fellow agents, despite repeated offers of amnesty. On 1 April 1916, Gabrielle Petit was, at the insistence of German military, shot by a firing squad at the Tir national execution field in Schaerbeek. Her alleged last words were: "I will show them that a Belgian woman knows how to die. Long live the king! Long live Belgium!". Her body was buried on the grounds there. In her native Tournai, a square was named after her. After the war several books were written and films were made about her life. The reference to Germaine Scaron stems from this commentator's family oral history. Scaron was but one of Petit's many acquaintances gathered during the two years of her active life as a British spy and Belgian heroine.

Author Kathryn J. Atwood, who included a chapter on Petit in her book, Women Heroes of World War I, wrote a 2025 novel titled The Belgian Girls based on Petit's life and wartime work.