And while the details change, the story of Spain in the nineteenth century continues as always, that of a country wrestling with different identities, each one trying to impose itself over the others. The masks change – no longer ‘Moors’ versus ‘Christians’, or ‘Castilians’ versus ‘Aragonese’, but ‘liberals’ versus ‘conservatives’ or ‘guerrillas’ versus ‘afrancesados’. Behind the masks, however, the players are the same, the opposing manifestations of Santiago slugging it out for domination. While from the side the third Santiago, the Apostle, watches events, increasingly moved and saddened by the horror he is forced to witness, and finding new expression for his visions.
VIOLENT CONSTITUTION
Thanks to the Bourbons, in the eighteenth century the French brought to Spain the beginnings of a centralised state. In the early nineteenth century France further aided the construction of a shared Spanish identity by providing Spaniards with a common enemy.
What in English is known as the Peninsular War in Spain is called the War of Independence. The term is misleading as it suggests a country united to defend itself with single purpose against a foreign invader. And in part this is true, but an important minority within Spain supported the French occupation of their country – and the ‘Enlightened’ thinking it brought – with the result that the struggle to eject the foreigners took on the characteristics of a civil war. It turned out to be merely the first of many which would blight the country over the next seventy years.
With the same dynasty on the throne in both Paris and Madrid, it was inevitable that the French Revolution would have significant ramifications within Spain. And so it proved to be. The fall of Louis XVI in 1789 and his eventual execution in 1793, combined with the American Revolution and War of Independence, changed the world and heralded over a century of social convulsion. Spain was affected as much as any country – in some ways even more so.
At the time the country was ruled by Carlos III’s son Carlos IV, a man generally derided as indecisive and weak-willed (and even cuckolded by his first minister). The initial Spanish reaction to events north of the Pyrenees was to join other European powers in trying to bring down the French revolutionaries, launching its own invasion from the south in alliance with Britain and Austria. With the resultant Revolutionary victory, however, the Spanish were pushed back, and French troops even crossed into the Peninsula. Peace was eventually restored, and with time geopolitical priorities prevailed: Spain renewed its old alliance with France in the face of what it saw as the greater threat of British influence in the Atlantic. The man behind this policy was Manuel Godoy, a soldier from an impoverished noble family of Extremadura who went on to become the most powerful man in Spain and even the queen’s lover (and, it is rumoured, the real father of her offspring, the future Fernando VII). Godoy’s decision backfired, however, when, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson destroyed not only the French but also the Spanish navy. An alliance with France was starting to appear less attractive. Things, however, were about to get even worse.
Portugal was Britain’s ally. And as Britain was France’s great enemy, so Portugal became a target for Napoleon. But in order to invade and subdue it, French troops would first have to cross Spain. Spain was still France’s ally at this point, and so she opened her doors. Soon as many as one hundred thousand French soldiers were stationed around the country, preparing for the invasion of Portugal.
But Napoleon had his eye on Spain itself, and believed that in Godoy he had a pliable ally in Madrid. In exchange for promised titles, the Corsican planned to extend the French border as far as the Ebro – in effect absorbing Catalonia – while palming Godoy and Spain off with bits of Portugal.
But with more and more French troops on Spanish soil, fears among ordinary Spaniards began to grow. Godoy himself could see which way things were going. In March 1808 he gathered the royal family at the palace of Aranjuez with the intention of evacuating them to safety on the other side of the Atlantic. But he was stopped in his tracks. Godoy’s many rivals, including heir-to-the-throne Prince Fernando, organised a mob to storm the palace. In the chaos, Godoy hid in an attic behind a carpet, fearing for his life. Carlos IV, relieved of his chief decision-maker, abdicated in favour of Fernando in an attempt to calm the situation. The plan worked, but only for a while. Carlos then went back on his word, insisting that he was still king.
In the confusion, Napoleon stepped in, offering to resolve the issue. Carlos and Fernando both agreed to travel to Bayonne for an audience with the emperor. Once they crossed the border and were in French hands, however, Boney played his hand. Neither man, he simply informed them, would henceforth be king of Spain; he was handing the crown to his elder brother Joseph.
With one deft move the Bourbons were simply removed from the picture – for the moment. Neither Carlos nor Fernando could refuse. Fernando, in fact, revelled in his forced exile and quickly settled into a life of French luxury, playing billiards with his friends, being pleasured by the string of ‘actresses’ which his host sent his way, and writing sycophantic letters to Napoleon asking if he could become his adopted son (the emperor never agreed).
Meanwhile, back in Spain, a lot of people were less happy about the situation.
Large numbers of Napoleon’s troops had walked into Spain without a shot being fired. Many Spaniards, intellectuals for the most part, actively supported their presence as an important step away from the corrupt absolutism of the Bourbons. But they were outnumbered. The majority hated the idea of foreigners in control, and wanted no change at all. These Spaniards were about to disrupt Napoleon’s plans for a takeover of their country, no matter how ‘Enlightened’ it might be.
It’s possible that if the French hadn’t imported the idea of a centralised state to Spain in the first place, the reaction in 1808 and the subsequent war would have taken on a quite different flavour, one in which – like the War of Spanish Succession a hundred years before – regional identities and separatist tendencies could have been exploited. But ‘Spain’ was becoming a singular kingdom rather than the collection of loosely connected countries it had been under the Habsburgs. It had the symbols of political unity: its own flag and national anthem. And now, in addition, it had a singular common enemy. As embodied in the shape of Santiago Matamoros, Spanish identity is forged around a negative, around what the Spanish are not. But by the early 1800s the traditional ‘Others’ had gone: Jewish and Moorish cultures had both been eradicated. Now, however, into the gap stepped a new ‘them’: the French. And the Spanish War of Independence – the Peninsular War – began.
The war originated in a mass, spontaneous, unorganised reaction against the French takeover. The conflict sparked into life on 2 May 1808. The true extent of what the French were doing was still unclear at that point, but Carlos and Fernando were absent and French troops were now stationed in Madrid. Two young Bourbon princes were still in the capital and Napoleon wanted to get them out before announcing his coup. But when word leaked that the boys were being smuggled away, the people of Madrid rose up, no longer in any doubt about French intentions. The rebellion was violently suppressed: the French cavalry, including Mamluke mercenaries from Egypt, charged at the mob. Summary executions followed through the night and into the following morning. For a moment it seemed as if Napoleon might prevail.
Yet brief and unsuccessful as it was, news of the Madrid uprising sparked similar movements around the rest of the country. The French were unable to extinguish them: the war itself had now begun.
The Peninsular War gave the world two new words: ‘guerrilla’ and ‘liberal’. And, arguably, saw the establishment of the first concentration camp: the Balearic islet of Cabrera became a makeshift prison for captured French soldiers. Of the 9,000 men sent there, only 3,600 survived. Cabrera preceded the British concentration camps of the Boer War by almost a hundred years. ‘Guerrilla’ comes from the Spanish meaning ‘little war’, describing the nature of much of the conflict: this was unorthodox fighting which, despite a num
ber of set-piece battles, involved much skirmishing and ambushes by Spanish irregulars against the occupation force. As with the Americans in Vietnam one hundred and fifty years later, the French were never in total control of the country: any territory not directly in their hands was effectively held by the guerrilleros – guerrilla fighters who in some cases were little more than small bandit gangs. These were, however, very effective, and sometimes managed to create standing armies by absorbing soldiers from the Spanish army who deserted to fight the invaders.
The result was the Battle of Bailén, the first time Napoleon’s forces were defeated in open field in a major engagement. Victory gave an enormous morale boost for the anti-French cause, but also came close to destroying it: on hearing the news, Napoleon decided to strengthen his forces on the Peninsula, despatching his Armée d’Espagne of nearly three hundred thousand men to ‘pacify’ the rebellious Spaniards. It was a disaster for Spain: Napoleon’s men ransacked the country as levels of violence were stepped up. To this day the scars of the conflict can be seen, with cannonball craters in old city walls, and many national monuments razed to the ground. Napoleonic troops were responsible for the destruction of Sahagún, once the most powerful monastery in Spain and headquarters of the Cluniac order (whose mother monastery in France had also been destroyed during the Revolution). And as is inevitable in a guerrilla war, atrocities became common, with civilians drawn into – and often participating in – the escalating violence. But it wasn’t a simple question of ‘Spaniards’ against ‘French’: los afrancesados, Spanish supporters of Napoleonic rule, were often targeted by the rebels, identified by their French styles of dress or mannerisms.
Some of the most graphic depictions of the violence appear in the work of the most important artist to emerge from the time, Francisco Goya. The events which sparked the war led to two of his masterpieces, the Dos de mayo and the Tres de mayo. But perhaps more interesting from a historical point of view are his series of prints Los desastres de la guerra – The Disasters of War, a work which acts as a mirror by reflecting back at his fellow Spaniards the ambiguity of a civil war that was never declared as such, and the deeply uncivil nature of the conflict. Like Cervantes and Velazquez before him, in Goya we can feel the presence of the third face of Santiago, the Spain which watches from a distance the incessant struggles between his two other manifestations, between the Pilgrim and the Slayer. But now the humour of Don Quixote and the clear reflection of Las Meninas have gone, replaced by something darker. The Spain Goya is reflecting back through his art is one of pain and despair, of grotesque violence, perpetrated not only by the invading French soldiers, but by his own countrymen against each other. A sense of hope present in the work of Cervantes and Velazquez is beginning to wane. The mirror has become tarnished.
Today, Goya is regarded as the first ‘modern’ painter. He is one of Spain’s artistic greats, a cultural giant produced by the same country that gave the world Averroes, Alfonso X, St Teresa and so many others. And the torch that he ignites later inspires not only painters throughout the Western world, but that other towering Spanish artist, Picasso, whose masterpiece Guernica, which owes so much to Goya, would later act as a prescient mirror reflection from Spain’s twentieth-century conflagration of the horrors about to occur all over the globe in a Second World War.
In the end, Napoleon was defeated by a combination of guerrilla warfare and the intervention of the British under Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Lord Wellington. Irregular action wore the French down, but their army still needed to be defeated in traditional fashion on the battlefield, and this combination of tactics eventually drove the invader out in 1813. Joseph Bonaparte – known as José I in Spanish history – fled Madrid, in many ways a victim of the rapacious French troops he had been powerless to control. With him went as many as twelve thousand Spanish families into exile, supporters of his moderate reform programme, and fearful of retributions which would inevitably come with the establishment of the new regime. This was headed by the wretched Fernando VII, who now returned to Spain like a Messiah.
With Napoleon’s defeat in the Peninsula, Spain once again showed itself to be ahead of the curve: the Battle of Bailén broke Napoleon’s air of invincibility, and the Corsican himself later blamed his Spanish venture for his eventual fall.
The unfortunate war in Spain ruined me [he wrote on St Helena]. All my reverses originated there. [It] destroyed my reputation throughout Europe . . .
The Spanish reaction against the French hadn’t only expressed itself in the form of irregular warfare, however. In a hugely significant move, middle-class intellectuals and free-thinking clerics had mobilised during the conflict to set out their own ideas for how ‘Spain’ – still a nascent political entity – should be shaped once the invader had been removed. The result was the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, the brainchild of a group of some three hundred ‘liberals, centrists, army officers and ecclesiastics’ who managed to congregate from most areas of the country in the one place which resisted the French assault, the ancient Herculean city of Cádiz.
It was entirely appropriate that the Constitution of 1812 should be drafted in the three-thousand-year-old city given Heracles’s role as the mythological founder of Spanish civilisation.1 The document became the cornerstone of the modern Spanish state, the text against which all other Spanish constitutions (and there have been a few) are measured. Apart from three very brief periods, however, the 1812 Constitution, known affectionately in Spain as La Pepa,2 was not implemented. But following the example already set in the US, it was an attempt to create a country around a set of ideas, to find common cause based on ‘reason’ around which Spain could unite. And those ideas were ‘liberal’ in the sense of the times in that they espoused a constitutional monarchy, free enterprise, freedom of the press, votes for men of means over the age of twenty-five, and the right to own property. Freedom of worship, however, was not allowed, nor were rights for women addressed. Nonetheless, it was a radical step, the first written constitution in European history, which went on to inspire similar documents in Norway, Portugal and Mexico over the next few years, as well as the Italian liberal movement. In fact, the word ‘liberal’ arrives in other European languages in its political sense from the Cádiz conclave.
One of the things which makes the 1812 Constitution special in Spanish history is that it was written by men from almost all parts of the country. In response to the French invasion, clandestine local parliaments – juntas – had been set up in opposition to the new regime. At most other times in the country’s past, the breakdown of central authority has a centrifugal, fracturing effect. During the Peninsular War, however, given the common enemy, the mood was uniquely different. The authors of the Constitution were deputies from the various regional bodies who managed to smuggle themselves through occupied territory to reach Cádiz and take part in the Cortes Generales. That they risked their lives to get there is a sign of how significant the occasion was, for there was an overwhelming desire to lay the foundations for a united Spain in which the Spanish people themselves – not their kings – held the country together: sovereignty, under the terms of the document, lay in the ‘nation’, not in the monarchy. If the supporters of José I sought reform under the French model, then the Cádiz deputies were inspired more by ideas emanating at the time from Britain and the English-speaking world.
La Pepa is another example of illuminated Spanish ideas in the midst of darkness. As Averroes established Western rational thought in the face of Almohad religious fundamentalism, and St Teresa and St John of the Cross wrote of their heavenly visions against the paranoid depths of the Inquisition, so out of the destruction and violence of the Peninsular War emerges the 1812 Constitution, another Spanish vision which would go on to have great impact around the world. In the decade that followed – the 1820s – almost all Spain’s foreign possessions broke away; La Pepa ignited the spark which led to their eventual independence with the simple and powerful idea that people, not monarc
hs, were the basis of nations.
But just as Averroes’s rationalism went on to have greater influence outside his own culture than within, so the ideas of Cádiz had only a limited impact within Spain itself. One version of Santiago had shown his face, with new ideas and an open mind. But he had the other Santiago to contend with. This time the Slayer appeared in the shape of the very man in whose name the new Constitution had been written: Fernando VII.
1 The document still referred to Spain in the plural, with Ferdinand as ‘rey de las Españas’. The first mention of ‘the Spanish nation’ was not until the Constitution of 1869, while a subsequent Constitution of 1876 referred to King Alfonso XII as, for the first time, ‘king of Spain’, singular.
2 It was signed on the Feast of San José – St Joseph – Pepa being the shortened feminine version of José.
A FERNANDO TO END ALL FERNANDOS
Spanish history has produced its fair share of ogres, but Fernando VII is among the worst. And like the monsters in fairy tales, he didn’t just have an evil character, but was physically repulsive as well. His prominent forehead, huge nose, depressed upper lip and exaggerated chin made even the later Habsburgs appear handsome, and have led some to conclude that he suffered from a genetic disorder known as Crouzon syndrome. He was also obese, had terrible halitosis brought on by constant cigar smoking, went prematurely bald, had small, devious eyes and was afflicted with gout from eating too much red meat. That’s not all: Fernando also had a complaint which led to hypertrophy of the genitals, making intercourse generally difficult and painful for his partners; it took him over a year to consummate his first marriage. In fact his bride, María Antonia of Naples, almost fainted the first time she clapped eyes on the ‘monstrous’ royal member.
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