by Tom Anderson
Drouet became governor-general of occupied Spain by default as the war wore on. The Nouveau Poséidon operation under Olivier Bourcier, Etienne Devilliers and the Spanish turncoat Ballesteros ultimately failed, despite a string of victories throughout 1804 and 1805. All that was necessary for the Portuguese was to hold on in the face of the Franco-Spanish advance and wait for Spanish Kleinkrieger activity to hamper and cut their enemies’ supply lines. When Naples entered the war in November 1805, King Peter IV of Portugal is attested to have jumped and punched the air. “We have them!” he cried. A Franco-Spanish conquest of Portugal was, he declared, now off the table – even though the Neapolitans would naturally become the rivals of the Portuguese in deciding the postwar fate of Spain.
Peter’s analysis proved correct; Drouet sallied forth with the French reserves (or what was left of them). 1806 opened with the Battle of Albacete, technically a tactical victory for Drouet over the Neapolitans under Pignatelli, yet a strategic failure: the Neapolitans were able to retreat, and their navy under Nelson continued to rule the Catalan coast, ensuring resupply. As 1806 wore on, the Franco-Spanish armies in Portugal reached the ends of their supply lines and were forced to retreat. General Bourcier was recalled to France in the wake of the debacle and reassigned to defending the remains of the Italian Latin Republic – known informally as the Piedmontese Latin Republic – against the encroaching Austrians.
Back in Spain, Drouet was faced with an impossible situation and withdrew all his French troops to Madrid. This is often portrayed by popular histories as a foolish hope that the Jacobin doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the country’ would be fulfilled; the truth is naturally more complex. Though King Philip VII was a weak man, particularly without the Count of Aranda to advise him, there was nonetheless the distinct chance that he might sense French weakness and seek to raise a popular Spanish rebellion against the occupiers. Drouet therefore gambled that holding Philip VII hostage would cement French rule and perhaps give him a bargaining chip to play the Neapolitans and Portuguese off against one another.
In the end of course this proved to be a forlorn hope, but it was not Drouet’s major error. This was reassigning Ballesteros to the eastern front, in the hope that a Spanish general might be able to raise popular fervour among the locals into resisting the Neapolitan advance, while Devilliers continued to command the mostly Spanish armies on the more significant western front against the Portuguese. However, an agent of General Pignatelli met with Ballesteros’ representatives and agreed with the general that the French were living on borrowed time. The choice for postwar Spain was to align with the Portuguese or the Neapolitans – and at least the Neapolitans were ruled by the Spanish Bourbons, Charles VI and VIII being the younger brother of the late Philip VI. Although the mercurial and ultra-conservative Ballesteros was loath to turn on Philip VII, he was aware that the king himself was toying with the idea of trying to overthrow the French by inspiring a popular revolt. Furthermore, he had become very resentful of working with the republican French generals and their Revolutionary ideas.
In February 1807 Ballesteros openly switched sides and the French position crumbled altogether. In April, even as France was enjoying her moment of triumph in England, Madrid fell. Devilliers had managed to evacuate along the ‘French Road’ which the French had always kept defended, but most of Drouet’s army was pocketed by the Portuguese cutting the road to the north. The Spanish capital fell to the combined Neapolitan and Portuguese armies, not without a great deal of damage. Drouet shot himself to escape a summary trial and execution, but not before he put a bullet in King Philip VII’s skull as well.
And in the end Ballesteros’ plans came to naught. According to the Felipista line of succession the throne of Spain passed to Philip’s infant son, rather mercifully called Alfonso (it would have been cruel indeed for future history students if he had been another Charles!). And Alfonso, along with the rest of the surviving royal family, fell into the hands of General Vieira and the Portuguese.
The postwar settlement for Spain would not be settled on an international level until the Concert of Copenhagen in 1810, but things were finalised in practice by March 1808. In the Treaty of Madrid (later called ‘Second Torsedillas’ by bitter Spanish nationalists), Spain, united into one kingdom since 1516, was divided once more into Castile and Aragon. The names were largely meaningless, however, since this new Aragon was far larger than the historical one, comprising almost a third of pre-war Spain.
This Aragon passed to Naples, and Charles VIII and VI briefly also became Charles IV in truth until his death in 1811.[79] Castile was ruled by Alfonso XII, but in his infancy a regent was required, and that just happened to be King Peter IV of Portugal. The Portuguese casually stabbed their Carlista allies in the back, which seemed like a sensible if cold-blooded idea at a time when it appeared as though the United Provinces was about to conquer the Carlistas’ Empire of the Indies. The puppet regime in Madrid also meant the Portuguese were able to hold on to the parts of Spain they had directly annexed in the early part of the war, such as Galicia.
And that is the situation that Spain unhappily found herself in for the two decades separating the Jacobin Wars from the Popular Wars. But the modern reader, particularly the non-Spaniard, may indeed think of all of this as merely a backdrop to what in hindsight is the single most important event stemming from the French defeat and retreat in 1807…
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From: “The Man and the Myth: Pablo Sanchez”, by Miguel Ayala (1970)—
There was a Catalan city called Cervera. It was a thousand years old, but had never grown very large. A century before, it had been destroyed in the First War of Supremacy and rebuilt, granted city status by King Philip V in exchange for the Cerverans’ support during the war. A university had also been built. But it remained somewhat out of the way, a relatively sleepy place for a university town.
In 1796 a new corregidor or mayor[80] was appointed, and he was Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez. He was popular among the commoners of Cervera, though the upper and middle classes had their reservations. Sanchez was a Castilian, an outsider, who had moved into the area to expand his successful printing business. His ‘new-money’ status and pragmatic approach offended the local aristocracy, while the less fortunate viewed his background as being more sympathetic to them (with some justice). The lower and middle classes were willing to look past the fact that Sanchez had been born in Castile, instead seeing this as an advantage; he would not be corrupted by ancestral connections with powerful people in the area.
Sanchez largely delivered on his early promise, improving the university and growing in popularity after exercising his devolved royal power to imprison two previously untouchable criminal leaders. By doing this he cut through the former web of deals and backhanders that had rendered Cerveran political culture so corrupt. It looked as though the corregidor would be fondly remembered in Cerveran civic history, but would have no impact on the wider world beyond that.
Then in 1797 his wife Maria conceived a son, whom Sanchez named after his grandfather Pablo.
1797 was also the year Spain, theoretically at war with Revolutionary France since 1794, stepped up the desultory battles along the Pyrenees in response to General Hoche’s occupation of Parma in Italy. Surviving local records from this time are sketchy, but it is thought by the more balanced commentators that Sanchez encouraged the people of Cervera to support the war effort against such an unholy foe by any means they could.
It seemed, though, that this was largely theoretical. After an initial scare in the first few months of the war, it appeared that the vaunted power of the Revolution would not come to Spain, and Cervera would be spared the fires of war. Sanchez returned to his work in rooting out corruption, expanding his printing business and the university in the process, and also increasing the size of his family. The young Pablo soon had three sisters.
Then in 1800 General Boulanger began to drive back the Spanish armies, and 1801 brought
the attack by Admiral Lepelley on the Catalan coast, landing troops to encircle the Spaniards led by General Ballesteros. Cervera was thus one of the first Spanish towns to come under occupation, beginning in October of that year. This came just after the townsfolk had learned that Philip VI had died and a civil war had begun.
Sanchez knew the terrors that a French army could bring. The old scars of Cervera from a hundred years before spoke of them, and that had been a conflict largely devoid of bitter ideological differences. He knew he had to do anything to prevent history repeating itself. So he went out to meet the local French garrison, led by Captain Jean Aumont, a rather lazy individual who had drawn garrison duty by default. Sanchez brought some of Cervera’s bakers and brewers with him, and soon the initially suspicious Frenchman had been softened by feasts and drunken revelry. In that moment of weakness, Sanchez bought Aumont’s support, promising to cooperate with the French and bring them more presents if they protected Cervera from any roving raiders or other French troops. Aumont agreed.
And so for the next few years Cervera was free from the terror that many Spanish towns and villages experienced in the civil war. Aumont and his subordinates fitted in convivially enough, though many in the town looked at their red-and-blue uniforms[81] darkly and muttered to themselves. The fact that the French supported Philip VII rather than trying to impose a republic did mean that Cervera’s people at least gave them grudging acceptance.
It was in this atmosphere, peaceful yet tense, like the odd pressure in the calm before a storm, that Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz grew up. The boy had only been four when the French had come, and even in his youth his father is recorded remarking that he was having problems trying to explain to Pablo who the French were and where they had come from. Aumont’s company was one of the more traditional-minded in the French Republican Army – doubtless why they were near the back – and there was a visible social division between those of educated middle class background and those conscripted from the dregs of society. The exact wording may be apocryphal, but in 1803 Pablo is thought to have said “Señor Aumont is more like you, Papa, than he is like Private Darrieux, or you are like the street ruffians here.” And thus a six-year-old childishly enunciated the ideology that would one day engulf the world in flames.
Then came 1807.
The French were in full retreat. Even little Cervera knew of the rumoured Neapolitan landings, these exotic English commanders, and the Portuguese successes. By May the French were pouring even from Catalonia, and the rumour got out that Drouet had killed the King.
The Cerveran people, suppressed in their resentment of the French for so long, were motivated in their actions partially by fear of being seen as collaborators. Partially they were egged on by those who had lost power thanks to Sanchez, back when the French Revolution had been nothing but a storm on the horizon. Regardless of their reasons, the people rose up, and Cervera once more burned. This time from within.
Aumont, recognising that a retreat would leave his men strung out and easy prey for Kleinkriegers, grimly decided to set up a defensive position in Sanchez’s big house. He sought to drive off the maddened townsfolk who now burned their once-hero in effigy. He hoped that they would calm down in the face of bullets and let the French withdraw.
And in so doing, he forgot the lessons of more than a decade before. The Bastille, and L’Épurateur.
Nothing stopped the fury of the mob. The house was taken, the French were hacked down with the makeshift agricultural weapons of any peasant revolt. The greater losses of the townsfolk to the more professional French soldiers – though the latter’s training had suffered from the years of peace – only drove them to greater depths of revenge. Sanchez’s throat was slit in the main square. The house, however, was not set alight, as it might have been. How might history have been different if it had? The mob contented itself with shaving, branding and humiliating Sanchez’s wife and daughters, then driving them off into the mountains and out of history.
But what of his son?
Little Pablo hid in a cupboard and escaped in the confusion. Ten years old, what could he understand of all this? It seemed so meaningless. It wasn’t as though Aumont’s French had ever broken their side of the deal. They had never turned on the Cerverans. Nor had they asked for unreasonable things, like the favours of the town’s daughters.
So why had the townspeople been angry enough to do such horrible things to his Mama, his Papa and his sisters?
Because the faraway Drouet had killed the equally faraway King Philip? A Frenchman had killed a Spaniard, and therefore all Spaniards must kill Frenchmen.
It was so… so meaningless…
Pablo Sanchez wandered aimlessly. He fell in, ironically, with a group of Kleinkriegers, who thought nothing of recruiting lost children to their cause. He even shot at and helped loot the corpses of a few retreating French soldiers, the last of the army to withdraw. Through it all, he was emotionally numb, an empty shell of a boy following orders without thinking, eating mechanically, staring blankly into the starry sky at night.
And then, a few years later, he snapped.
Chapter #72: A More Perfect Union?
“…just as Pascal dubbed it in his great work, it was the Moment of Hope… all but the youngest of our comrades-in-arms remember that time, and the knowledge that there was the chance to grasp our birthright, to forever end the subjugation of our common land to the whims of foreign powers and the tyranny of our own petty rulers.
That chance was missed and the moment passed. Let us now grasp this second chance with all our might. It would be foolishly optimistic to expect a third.”
- Wilhelm Brüning, 1834 speech
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From: “Heart of Iron: Der Führer” by Joachim Lübke (1959 Bundesdeutsch original, 1962 English translation)—
…initial front of the Jacobin Wars, at least geographically, had been between France and Austria. The reasons were far deeper than the obvious casus belli, that the Revolutionary regime had phlogisticated Princess Marie-Antoinette to death, she who had been born Maria Antonia of the House of Hapsburg. There was certainly widespread outrage both among the public and the ruling classes of Austria and to a lesser extent throughout the Holy Roman Empire, but colder and more pragmatic concerns underlaid the war. France and Austria had been on-again off-again allies since the Diplomatic Revolution. The defeat of Prussia in the ensuing war had changed matters somewhat, as Austria no longer had a powerful enemy within the Empire, but this was followed by the Russian realignment under Peter III and Austria being snubbed in the War of the Polish Partition. Though the Hapsburgs would have liked to limit French influence in the Empire, the French alliance was therefore still vital in the face of growing Russian power to the east and the possibility of skirmishes with the Ottomans flaring up into something greater.
The Revolution had replaced Austria’s relatively reliable and ideologically consistent – Catholic, absolutist – ally with a radical and unknowable regime, and the Hapsburgs had seen a quick strike as necessary to restore the ancien régime before its replacement could become established. However, when the Revolutionary army failed to collapse as badly as the Austrians had hoped, and competent generals such as Pierre Boulanger emerged from the woodwork, the conflict became a wretched slog with no prospects of quick victory. In 1796 it expanded in scope to Italy while at the same time closing in Flanders with Charles Theodore’s shift to neutrality, eliminating the most obvious axis of advance for the Austrians. This bought precious time for the Republic to consolidate its position and promote its proven officers.
1797 saw the launch of the Poséidon Offensive by France, which put Austria on the back foot in Italy but nonetheless concluded with an Austrian army encamped at Nancy and ready for a second thrust into the heart of France. 1798 however saw Austria hamstrung by events, with the Russian Civil War expanding into the Great Baltic War and thus leading both Saxony and Brandenburg to withdraw their armies from the war with France. Though the A
ustrians enjoyed limited successes under Archduke Ferdinand in Italy, their centre was annihilated when France launched the Rubicon Offensive and blew through Swabia. The shock execution of the Badenese ruling family and the effects of la maraude on the Swabian countryside led to many smaller German states in turn withdrawing their forces from the united effort out of paranoia of their homelands’ security, a chain reaction which soon made Austrian claims to Imperial unity a joke.
After the destruction of Regensburg and Ferdinand IV’s declaration of the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the French had been on the verge of taking Vienna in 1799 before being stopped at the gates by General Mozart and retreating. But the leaderless French army fractured – a large Jacobin part under the firebrand Fabien Lascelles which created the tyrannical Bavarian Germanic Republic, and a smaller ‘Cougnoniste’ faction under Philippe St-Julien which retreated north and wintered in the Bohemian city of Budweis. St-Julien had intended to attempt to return to France by 1800, but the new Lisieux Administration’s rumoured purges led him to concerns about officers of Robespierre’s regime being suspect. Besides, his men enjoyed being little tin gods ruling their own scrap of Bohemian countryside as a private fiefdom.
Following the victory at Vienna, Austria was in a position to drive the French from Hapsburg land, but an attack by the Ottomans later on in 1799 led the inexperienced new Archduke (and claimant Emperor) Francis II to throw everything in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to absorb all of Venetian Dalmatia before the Ottomans could get there. The quixotic attack by Austria on Ottoman vassal Wallachia in 1801, combined with the failure to obtain Russia as an ally, meant that the Austro-Turkish War ground to a miserable halt in 1803, with Austria having lost some territory in the Balkans to Constantinople. Far more importantly, this perceived abandonment of responsibilities by the other German lands – particularly considering the impact of Lascelles’ terror in Bavaria – meant Austria had lost her once commanding position in what had once been the Holy Roman Empire.
