WAR WITH NAPOLEON
SOMETIMES THE MOST DETERMINED of invaders, equipped with strong armies and copious intelligence about its enemy, can make myopic blunders that later seem close to madness. Such, in the twentieth century, was the humiliating fate of America in Vietnam. And such, at the dawn of the nineteenth, was Napoleon’s in Spain. Compared with his Grande Armée, the Spanish armed forces were nothing in Napoleon’s eyes, a joke: riddled with nepotism and corruption, top-heavy with incompetent officers, antiquated in organization, badly equipped, ill-trained, and small. (When war broke out, Spain had 115,000 men in its army, of whom 15,000 were isolated in Denmark as a result of an old agreement between Carlos IV and Napoleon.) But the Spanish army’s worst and apparently insoluble problem was not the lack of men—Spain in the early 1800s had a population of 10.5 million from which a larger army could be raised—but the shortage of money. In the first months of the 1808 crisis, all single men and widowers between the ages of sixteen and forty were called up, but they could not be fed, shod, clothed, or even adequately armed. The plight of these ragged, barefoot conscripts was made worse after 1810, when the Spanish colonies in America revolted and the income they had provided dried up. The cavalry needed 9,000 horses but could muster only 6,000; few of its riders even had helmets, and they were outnumbered by the far better-mounted French by a factor of two or even five to one. Some Spanish artillery units were so ill-equipped that they had to use sixteen-pound cannon made from wooden staves reinforced by hoops of iron applied by blacksmiths, which naturally burst after one or two shots. At the battle of León, the Spanish general La Romana had 23,000 men against Marshal Soult’s 13,000—but only 9,000 of La Romana’s troops had firearms, and they possessed no cavalry at all. These shortages prevailed all the way down the line. Meager bread-and-water soup, gazpacho, was the best luxury the rank and file could usually expect; one Spanish general became desperate with embarrassment at Wellington’s repeated invitations to dinner, because he would have to reciprocate and, “as you know, on my table there is never anything more than bread.”1 The reason behind all this was money, or the lack of it: Spain’s national income in 1807 was some 700 million reales, and seven years later, bled white by the expense of war, it had dropped to half that amount. So the idea that the Spanish army could hold out for more than a week against the greatest war machine ever built seems unlikely; yet Spain resisted for six years. It even began its fight against Napoleon with an unexpected victory, in July 1808, at Bailén in Andalucía, when an army of 20,000 French troops—mere conscripts, not battle-hardened, and very inferior to the men of the Grande Armée—was surrounded and beaten. The Spaniards then made the idiotic mistake of herding the survivors together onto a barren coastal island and leaving them to perish from starvation and disease. This startled Napoleon into upping the ante, and treating the Spanish conflict as a national war instead of the police action he had had in mind: he at once sent in another 250,000 troops. It also started a long train of mutual atrocities: the War of Independence was not the simple scheme of French vandals and heretics versus pious, brave patriots that the Spanish made it out to be.
But apart from a defeat inflicted on the French at Bruc in Cataluña in 1808, when 4,000 French troops were routed on the slopes of the Montserrat massif by a mere 1,000 or so Catalan irregulars (the “citizen volunteers,” or sometents), Bailén did not set a pattern of Spanish victories. When army formed up against army, the French usually won the battles. Yet they did not win the war. The Peninsular campaign turned out to be as grievous a disaster for Napoleon’s Grande Armée as its failure to conquer the immense winter wastes of Russia.
Napoleon in Spain was defeated by the military genius of Arthur Wellesley, the future duke of Wellington, at the head of his English expeditionary force. But he was also beaten by the desperate collective will of the Spanish people—not the army alone but the nonprofessional soldiers as well, who invented a way of war that Napoleon’s officers and men had never encountered before.
These were the guerrillas.
The word guerrilla, one of the most common military terms in the last quarter of the past century, means “little war” and was used after 1808 to denote the struggle between bands of irregulars, or armed civilians, small and more or less spontaneously got together, against a formal State army. It was coined and first used in Spain—though the American rebels came up with it at the same time—and bequeathed to us by this popular struggle for Spanish independence two hundred years ago. At the time, since all wars were fought by professional armies—an unprofessional conflict out of uniform being merely a police action against a rebellious mob—there was no English or French word for what guerrillas did or were.
They were the unexpected product of a particular time and place, and at first neither side in the War of Independence—neither the regular Spanish and English forces on one hand, nor the invading French on the other—quite knew what to make of them. Some guerrillas were ordinary citizens, farmers and peasants who knew the areas they were fighting in. Others were deserters from the regular army or surviving remnants of defeated and scattered regiments. They all counted on, and generally got, the support of civilians in rural areas and villages. When it was not freely given, they enforced it. To outsiders, they seemed to be romantic banditti made flesh—and smelly, aggressive flesh at that. English reports dilated on the savagery of some guerrillas:
[Near Madrid] we observed [a guerrilla] take rather ostentatiously from his side a long, heavy-looking silk purse.… A general disgust pervaded the minds of my comrades and myself when we beheld a number of human ears and fingers … cut off from the bodies of the French whom he himself had slain in battle, each ear and finger having on a golden ring. “Napoleon,” he observed, “loves his soldiers, and so do the ravens.”2
An 1811 English account of the troops of the guerrilla leader Francisco Espoz y Mina remarked that when a man joined his band,
he is not allowed to bring anything but a pair of sandals, half-stockings, breeches, and jacket.… His arms are all rusty on the outside, but he is particularly careful to have them well cleaned within, and good locks and flints; his bayonets are encrusted with the blood of Frenchmen.… He never takes either a regular soldier, or a regular bred officer, into his corps. He says “They pretend to have too much theory”—and he sees they fail in all their attempts.3
Espoz y Mina was among the most celebrated of the guerrilla leaders, but there were many others: a British report to Wellesley sent from Lisbon in 1811 listed more than one hundred bands, varying in size from a hundred to several thousand. Juan Martín, nicknamed El Empecinado (The Stubborn One), fought at Castilla la Nueva with a force of 3,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. Operating from ambush or attacking under the cover of night, guerrilla bands did incalculable damage to the French army and its morale. Espoz y Mina, who by his own count took part in 143 battles or engagements, was able to hold up a force of 26,000 Frenchmen who would otherwise have taken part in the battle of Salamanca in 1812: “At Placentia … I made 12,000 infantrymen prisoners and put the whole cavalry to the sword.”4 The French refused to treat guerrillas as authentic soldiers. They were bandits, robbers, and murderers, and all who fell into their hands were shot or hanged. “Powerless to exterminate our troops,” Espoz wrote, “[they] began, in 1811, to wage a total war.… The same fate was reserved for those who helped the volunteers, and they carried off to France an infinite number of families.” Like begat like; the guerrillas staged reprisals of their own. “I always kept numerous prisoners,” he continued. “If the enemy hung or shot one of my officers, I would do the same by reprisal to four of his officers; for a single soldier, I would sacrifice twenty. It was thus that I managed to horrify the enemy, hoping that he would discontinue such an atrocious system, which is indeed what occurred.”5
The guerrillas fought a relentless war of attrition against the French, weakening and distracting them so that, in the end, they were less able to beat off Wellesley’s professionals.
In answer to this, Napoleon’s military authorities brought down an iron hand on the peninsula—one that Joseph Bonaparte, a decent enough man who sincerely wished to be more a Spanish monarch than a French rey intruso, was powerless to restrain. The policies that governed the French occupation and permitted its excesses were beyond his control—deliberately left so, because Napoleon did not want his mild and softhearted elder brother to get in the way of making Spain into a satellite. His generals ignored the appointed king, and levied ruthless exactions on his ever-rebellious subjects: executions without trial, mass imprisonments and deportations, confiscations of money and matériel, looting by the rank and file, a blind eye turned to rape and mayhem. And this, in turn, produced the inevitable dynamic of misery: savage resistance, followed by yet more savage reprisals. For occupying forces used to the idea of war as a series of formal battles, it was exceedingly demoralizing to survive on territory where nearly anyone, not just uniformed soldiers, could strike at you from behind the trees and vanish back into them; where every civilian sleeve contained a knife.
It was Francisco Goya’s fate and genius to become the epic poet of this process, with his etchings called Los desastres de la guerra—The Disasters of War—and his two great paintings of the first uprising against Napoleon’s troops, on May 2–3, 1808. The Disasters were not quite the first serial images by an artist of total war against a resistant civilian population; those were made in 1633, at a lesser level of detail and narrative intensity, by the French engraver Jacques Callot in eighteen plates known as the Miseries of War, in which tiny soldiers of Louis XIV are seen doing dreadful things to tiny Huguenots. But Goya’s prints are incomparably the more dramatic and varied in their narrative, more piercing in their documentary power, more savagely beautiful, and, in every way, more humanly moving: nothing to rival them has been done since, and they are the true ancestors of all great visual war reporting.
After Jacques Callot and Claude Callot, Misery of War, Musée Bargoin, Clermont-Ferrand. (illustration credit 8.1)
The will and courage of Goya’s Spain were sustained, in part, by an impenetrable ignorance and backwardness, in which blind nationalism took precedence over all the other emotions that liberalism might have had to offer. “The Spaniards,” Napoleon wrote to one of his senior officers, Marshal Bessières, “are just like other peoples, and don’t belong in a separate class.” They were, he remarked to another, “vile and cowardly, about the same as I found the Arabs to be.” He was wrong: no people is just like other peoples, though it may seem that way to its conquerors. He was quite sure that when he displayed “the words liberty, freedom from superstition, destruction of the nobility, I will be welcomed as I was in Italy, and the genuinely nationalist classes will be with me. You’ll see how they think of me as the liberator of Spain.”6
He could not have been more wrong. Napoleon had never been to Spain. He knew nothing about the country, and spoke no more Spanish than Lyndon Johnson spoke Vietnamese. Armed with the worst advice, he simply assumed that the Spaniards would embrace his brand of “liberation” in the same way that, 150 years later, the Americans fancied that Vietnam would accept their brand of democracy as the real article for them. But the Spaniards did not. Most thought of Napoleon only as an oppressor. His mistake was to suppose that Spain, like Italy and other nations of Europe, had an educated middle class open to liberal assumptions.
Which it did not, and never had.
Goya’s Spain was about as intellectually backward as a nation can be. But its backwardness sustained its resistance: all the mass of Spaniards had to hold on to was a belief in their ser auténtico, their “true identity” as Spaniards. This was not an idea, still less a constellation of ideas, but a faith. What they understood—all they understood, one is tempted to say—was nationalism, that most primitive and compelling form of difference. They were pre-ideological, and this one passion held them together. Though Catholicism was practiced all over Europe, there was something peculiarly nationalist about its Spanish form; Christ had died for the whole world, but more for Spain than anywhere else. Consequently Spain, unlike Italy or Germany, contained very little with which the large progressive promise of Napoleon’s power to conquer but reform could interlock. To many in the northern nations he took over, he had the aspect of a rather complex deliverer: on one hand, a military genius with a strong autocratic bent; on the other, a man who replaced old autocracies with new constitutions, created liberal systems, and practiced his belief in human renovation. But in Spain, except to the ilustrados, he was a ravening monster and nothing more.
This was the particular message of the Spanish Church, which feared the French and especially loathed Napoleon. To the clergy, France was the rats’ nest of atheism and freethinking, and whatever was bad for it was good for God and his vicars on earth. Catholicism, especially in Spain, had not forgotten and would never forgive the French anti-clericalism of the eighteenth century, memorably expressed in Voltaire’s call écrasez l’infâme (“Wipe out the infamy,” meaning the Church) and culminating in the attacks on clerics and the seizure of Church property during and after the days of the Terror.
Now that Napoleon was not only the generalissimo but the absolute emperor of this diabolic state on the other side of Spain’s mountain border, whose soldiers and agents were busy with the conquest of Spain—and, not incidentally, with the seizure and looting of Church property—it was hardly surprising that the official Church view of him, trumpeted in a thousand village sermons, was that he was evil prepotent: the Emperor of Hell, easily conflated with the mythical Antichrist himself. In English popular culture, “Boney” was demonized too:
Baby, baby, he’s a giant,
Tall and black as Monmouth steeple,
And he breakfasts, dines, and suppers
Every day on naughty people.
Baby mine, if Boney hears you
As he gallops past the house,
Limb from limb at once he’ll tear you
Just as pussy tears a mouse.
There he was a bogey to frighten children. In Spain he was worse: he terrified adults at the core of their religious being. The obsessive tone of the Church’s response to Napoleon is captured in one of the popular printed catechisms of the day, a question-and-answer outline of the positions good Catholics should take on moral matters:
“Who is the enemy of our happiness?”—The Emperor of the French.
“Who is this man?”—A villain, ambitious, the source of all evil, the end of all that is good, the summation and storehouse [depósito] of all vices.
“How many natures does he have?”—Two: one diabolic and the other human.
“From what origin does he come?”—From sin.7
And so on, and so forth. The Church’s anti-Napoleonic diatribes naturally had more impact on the pueblo, the common people, than on the tiny elite of educated ilustrados, for the former were apt to believe everything their priests said while the latter did not, and most ilustrados saw in the ideas of Napoleon the possibility of relief from the Church and the Bourbons. Besides, being realists, they did not think that Napoleon could possibly lose. For a Spaniard to be an afrancesado, a sympathizer and even a collaborator with the French, in 1808 was by no means a necessarily dishonorable thing. It was not like collaborating with the Nazis in 1943. There was every reason for an intelligent person of moderate views and a European outlook to believe that Napoleon would bring better days of government with him. Some of them regarded the Napoleonic Code as a legislative masterpiece and wanted it, or something based on it, for their own country. In 1808 Napoleon had abolished the Inquisition and feudalism, suppressed two thirds of Spain’s religious foundations, and knocked away much of the ideological underpinning of its absolute monarchy. To some Spaniards this was a historic advance. To others, it was an atrocious intervention. Unfortunately, there were always more of the latter opinion than of the former, and since the whole country was at war, it was difficult to make any reforms stick. So many ilustrados thre
w in their lot with Napoleon that at the end of the war, when he was at last driven out of Spain, no fewer than twelve thousand liberal Spanish families voluntarily went into exile, preferring life anywhere across the Pyrenees to persecution under the restored rule of the archreactionary Bourbon Fernando VII.
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