Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  Napoleon was already there, having arrived on 14 April after a tour through France from Bordeaux; he was still popular if the size of the crowds that turned out to see and greet him are anything to go by.83 At Bayonne, he took up residence in the Château de Marracq – ‘very cramped and very unpleasant’84 – about a league from Bayonne. It was summer, but it rained a good deal and the flies were a pest; ‘one couldn’t yawn without swallowing one’, noted Josephine’s lady-in-waiting. When Fernando arrived six days later, after travelling through a country in which French troops were already very present, he was received with all the pomp due his rank. If Napoleon’s public show of affection were anything to go by, Fernando could be forgiven for thinking that the warnings about his character were exaggerated. Very quickly, however, Napoleon let it be known (through Savary) that he had decided the Bourbons would no longer reign in Spain.85 One can only imagine the stupefaction with which Fernando must have greeted this announcement. Over the next week, his advisers attempted to convince Napoleon not only of the injustice of such an act, but also of how politically inept it would be. ‘The war in Spain’, warned one of Fernando’s advisors, ‘will be an indestructible hydra, which . . . may in time cause the destruction of your house.’86 The negotiations, carried out between Fernando’s representatives and Napoleon,87 stalled until the arrival of the former’s parents on 30 April, received with all the honours due a royal couple.

  The next phase of this tragi-comic farce involved Napoleon putting Fernando in the same room as his father so that a confrontation could take place. The first family reunion, on 1 May, was stormy to say the least. Carlos went so far as to hit his son during an argument while his mother demanded of Napoleon that Fernando be hung.88 When Napoleon organized another family reunion on 5 May, after receiving news of the uprising against the French in Madrid, Carlos told Fernando that he was responsible for the blood that had flowed in Madrid and that if he did not give up his right to the throne, he would be treated as a traitor. Carlos was playing into Napoleon’s hands. Rather than reconcile father and son, Napoleon insisted that Fernando abdicate in favour of his father. He did this by deploying the usual range of emotions he had developed to bully people into submission: first persuasion and entreaties, followed by threats and more threats, and then when that did not work the abandoning of all semblance of reason as he worked himself into a rage. At one point he is supposed to have told Fernando, ‘It is necessary to choose between abdication and death.’89 Eventually, Fernando acceded to the pressure and abdicated, handing back the throne to Carlos. Napoleon then insisted that Carlos abdicate, something that was much easier to accomplish, in favour of himself. Napoleon in turn gave the crown to his brother. The royal couple were placed under virtual house arrest, first at Talleyrand’s domain, the Château de Valençay, about sixty kilometres south of Blois, where Talleyrand was obliged to entertain them – Napoleon even suggested that Mme de Talleyrand could bring five or six women with her in the hope that Ferdinand would form a liaison with one of them90 – then at the Château de Compiègne, then at Mazargues near Marseilles, and finally at the Barberini Palace in Rome. Fernando stayed at Valençay, where he was to spend the rest of the war.

  It had unfolded like a family melodrama worthy of a twentieth-century soap opera.91 Murat was given the lieutenancy of the kingdom while the crisis was being sorted out. In other words, Napoleon considered himself to be above Carlos, and that he had every right to intervene in the country’s domestic problems.92

  ‘Glorious Insurrection’

  Napoleon’s intervention in Spain has been almost universally condemned, whether by contemporaries who lived through it or by historians writing about it. It is considered to be the reef upon which the Napoleonic vessel foundered.93 Napoleon believed he knew how the Spanish would react to French intervention in the dispute. In most other countries the French had entered where there was a threat of political instability and unrest. In Switzerland, Italy, Holland and parts of Germany, the French presence had been, if not welcomed, then tolerated by the local elites as it guaranteed law and order. There was no reason to think Spain would act any differently, especially since Napoleon had been a reasonably popular figure among the Spanish elites before 1808.94 The Emperor expected Spain to behave, therefore, like the other ‘great’ powers and for the whole campaign to be a walkover.95 That image was to change within a few weeks.

  French troops were able to occupy the key cities in the country without any armed opposition, while the junta in Madrid pledged loyalty to Napoleon and his brother Joseph. If there was one thing that nobody expected – and historians have used much ink writing about it – it was the uprising of the people against their new masters. The bloody insurrection now known as the Second of May (Dos de Mayo) had been more or less planned in advance, orchestrated by sections of the Anglophile, pro-Fernando Spanish nobility, although many of the events on the day were spontaneous, supposedly triggered by an attempt to prevent the son and daughter of Carlos IV from leaving Madrid. It is also possible that the French provoked an uprising in order to ‘set an example’ by crushing the insurgents.96 As many women took part in the uprising as men. In the battles that were fought in the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta de Toledo, women from the popular districts were reportedly seen running into the French cavalry with knives and scissors in order to stab the horses’ bellies.97

  The uprising in Madrid on 2 May was the trigger for a general insurrection throughout Spain in late May and early June.98 In the days and weeks that followed, uprisings occurred in most of the major urban centres. The French response was merciless. On his own initiative, Murat ordered all prisoners taken with arms to be shot, any person owning a weapon to be arrested and shot, any assembly of eight or more people to be dispersed by gunfire, any person distributing seditious pamphlets or literature to be looked upon as an English agent and shot, and any village in which a French soldier had been killed to be burnt to the ground.99 In Madrid, the French ordered 5,000 locals, anyone they could grab, to be shot. They found a convenient place for the executions at the Prado (just outside the present Hotel Ritz), at the Church of Buen Suceso and on the Príncipe Pió hill. We can see the executioners at work in Goya’s The Third of May, considered by some to be one of his greatest paintings, even though it was probably not done until six years after the event. It is, nevertheless, a wonderful representation of human brutality and the suffering of its victims. If Murat’s troops are portrayed as faceless automatons, lined up ready to fire, the victims are caught in different poses awaiting their deaths: a monk is praying, another man covers his eyes, a defiant man in a white shirt opens his arms like Christ on the cross as if to say, ‘Here is my chest, shoot me.’

  The number of deaths resulting from the insurrection and the subsequent repression is difficult to determine. We know that somewhere between 150 and 200 French soldiers were killed by the madrileños, and that the likely number of Spanish dead was around 1,000.100 The French ran through the streets killing anyone they found armed.101 Those who resisted the French were bakers, locksmiths, shoemakers, coachmen, students, glassblowers and muleteers, according to the lists of the dead compiled afterwards, and now held at the Municipal Archive of Madrid.102 At first the Moniteur, which reported that ‘cool-headed observers’, French and Spanish, could see trouble coming, spoke of ‘several thousand of the country’s worst subjects’ killed during the repression, but later, in order to scotch any rumours about the extent of the savagery employed, the newspaper published an article claiming that those killed were ‘all rebel insurgents and common people who had rioted; not one peaceful man died, and the loss of Spaniards is not as great as it had been previously thought’.103

  The insurrection in Madrid served Napoleon’s purposes: the rebellion was integrated into a narrative surrounding the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy. The pretext used by Napoleon to justify the overthrow was that the nation was in ruins, and that this had been in part brought about by Godoy and the internal intrigues
wrought by Fernando. It was a theme Napoleon played to over the coming months and years.104 Spain, which had once ruled the world, which had once had great kings, no longer did so because its ‘government had been passed into the hands of the weak’.105 As with France and the overthrow of the Directory at Brumaire, as with the overthrow of the Bourbons in Naples, so too had Napoleon rescued Spain from the abyss. He had no other interest in intervening in Spanish affairs than ‘those of all kings and all fathers’. The argument was hardly likely to convince. Later, because of the reaction of the courts of Europe to these machinations, not to mention the reaction of the people of France – just about everyone was aghast106 – those involved in the fall of the Spanish House of Bourbon later attempted to distance themselves from it. Talleyrand, for one, whose role was not insignificant even if he was not there in person, later blamed Napoleon and referred to Bayonne as a ‘pitiful intrigue’ (intrigue pitoyable).107

  The overthrow of the Spanish monarchy not only shocked the vast majority of European royal houses, because it went against the core of their political philosophy – the principle of legitimate monarchy – but also appalled many who had remained steadfastly loyal to Napoleon till then. It tarnished Napoleon’s reputation; there was a general feeling that he had done something ‘unworthy’, ‘odious’, ‘atrocious’, all words that one can find in commentaries of the time.108 Much was made of this by contemporaries who opposed Napoleon. From the start the early histories of the reign described his intervention as unjust and accused him of having deliberately provoked a crisis so that he could then step in.109 The statesmen of Europe did not understand why Napoleon should go to the trouble of overthrowing a ruling house that was already completely subservient to him.110

  ‘A Barbarous and Inhospitable Land’

  And nor did the French, who universally condemned the war in the Peninsula. Public opinion in France, already tired of the incessant warring, did not take kindly to the way in which France had become embroiled in Spain. Secret police bulletins through the summer of 1808 and from various towns and regions in France underline the degree to which public opinion was hostile to French intervention in Spain.111 This was even more the case for the military called on to fight in the Peninsula. General Hulot, who accompanied Junot into Portugal, complained that he had to fight ‘for the ambition and the pride of one family, with no benefit for France, with no glory for us!’112 Colonel Noël wrote of the ‘indignation’ aroused by the events at Bayonne and believed that Napoleon was imposing a war on France out of pride and ambition.113 There is enough material in the letters and diaries of the day to indicate a general malaise or discontent with the French involvement in Spain.114 This appeared to be a war started for the Emperor’s personal gain and was thus fought with reluctance by the officers and troops.115

  The French entered Spain in the belief that it was already ‘a barbarous and inhospitable land’.116 Their experiences were only going to reinforce that prejudice. They had been brought up on this idea since well before the Revolution. It was the remarkable brutality of the French, the wanton destruction, the ruthless butchery that turned many Spaniards, even those who had at first sympathized with the invader, against them. It was the viciousness of the Spanish, the excessive zeal and the seeming delight with which they slaughtered the invader that marked Spain as the worst field of operations a Frenchman could be posted to. Francisco Goya’s etchings and paintings of the disasters of war are damning indictments of human cruelty, even though we are not sure whether he was actually witness to any of these events. General Saint-Laurent, who commanded at Vitoria, wrote to a friend: ‘We have the whole country against us. As the Army has been without pay for a very long time, and the phrase “distribution of food” has disappeared from the dictionary, one would think we were among Vandals. Nothing is respected; the war, which has continued for too long, kills morale; it is a question of who plunders the best . . . It is enough to make one blow one’s brains out.’117 All Spaniards, according to Sergeant-Major Rattier of the Imperial Guard, hated the French.118 Maurice de Tascher, a twenty-one-year-old officer and cousin to Jospehine, wrote of the fanaticism of the Spanish, including their women. While in the town of Écija, between Seville and Granada, young girls of twelve to fifteen years of age would pass him in the street making a stabbing gesture to the throat. Another young girl told him that his head would make a nice ornament in front of her door.119

  This is not the place to go into the war in Spain and in particular the guerrilla war, treated in some recent works, nor to explore the extreme violence that underlined the struggle between the Spanish and the French, except to say that, while popular resistance to the French invasion was widespread and deep, lasting from 1808 till the French were ousted in 1814, support for the war among the Spanish was anything but enthusiastic. The impact of the guerrilla war is now thought to have been much less impressive than has traditionally been made out.120 One also has to point out that Spain was, in comparison to the rest of Europe, already a very violent country. In the 1830s for example, its crime rate was one of the highest in Europe.121 But there were other difficulties facing the French, not the least of which was the absence of Napoleon from the field. Despite his rank, General Savary was placed in overall control of military operations, something that the marshals subordinated to him could not tolerate. This was indeed one of the reasons why the French were never able to gain complete control over the country – competing interests, petty rivalries and a good deal of pride impeded the French efforts to repress what quickly became a generalized revolt. Savary, moreover, did not go about things with a light hand. He behaved like any other French general – he ordered those under his command to crush the revolt with unflinching brutality. The slightest provocation, the least bit of resistance, was met with the harshest repression. To cite but two among a never-ending list of atrocities, when some of the inhabitants of the town of Torquemada, halfway between Burgos and Valladolid, burnt an effigy of Napoleon on 6 June 1808, Marshal Bessières had the town razed. When the town of Córdoba was stormed by the French that same month, it was sacked without mercy.122 The French ambassasor to Madrid, the Comte Laforest, was embarrassed to ‘repeat all the excesses’ committed by French generals.123

  Napoleon had an inkling of what was going on – he later referred to Spain as the ‘devil’s business’ that was costing him dearly124 – but he never really appreciated either the difficulties or the complexities of the Spanish theatre. He simply ordered the revolt to be put down, and was not averse to instructing some of his generals to make examples of recalcitrant populations. He returned to Paris on 14 August, suffering from what one historian has described as a kind of ‘personal euphoria’.125 One can cite the victories at Austerlitz and Jena as turning points, moments when Napoleon became even more imbued with a sense of destiny than he already was, when he believed himself invincible. Bayonne too seems to have contributed to that feeling of self-grandiosity.

  Bailén

  It is easy to look on the Spanish uprising with the benefit of hindsight, but nothing in contemporary European experience could have anticipated its depth and extent. There was every reason to believe that the generals on the ground would eventually be able to get the upper hand and suppress any resistance to French authority. Napoleon was certainly more optimistic, oblivious of the loyalty the people of Spain felt towards their royal family. He wrote to Cambacérès that ‘opinion in Spain is taking the direction I wish. Law and order is everywhere restored, and it is nowhere troubled.’126 He was quickly disillusioned. The first efforts to suppress the revolt by sending in five flying columns ended in failure, so that by the end of June Napoleon had to rethink his initial strategy. There were some initial successes when the road to Madrid was opened, which allowed Joseph to travel to the capital to assume the throne.

  Joseph set out for Madrid at the beginning of July, accompanied by a few collaborators who had served him well in Naples. Based on his experiences there, he had every intention of using
Spanish notables to help him run his kingdom. He brought with him a constitution, the first in Spanish history, which was a mixture of French and Spanish traditions. Even before he arrived, though, a vibrant and abundant pamphlet literature was being directed against both him and the French: Joseph was portrayed as a drunkard and nicknamed Pepe Botella (Joseph the Bottle); the French were depicted as ‘Jews, heretics and sorcerers’.127 Pamphlets called for liberty and independence, and portrayed Napoleon as a new Attila the Hun.128 The afrancesados countered with their own propaganda, but it was of little use.129 When Joseph entered the capital on 20 July 1809, he was greeted with indifference. The bells may have rung out, the streets and some of the windows along the way may have been decorated, commemorative medallions may even have been struck, but the people remained silent.130 The new king organized a corrida to celebrate his arrival; almost no one turned out.131 He wrote to his brother in an attempt to open his eyes to what lay before them. Napoleon curtly replied, ‘I will find the columns of Hercules in Spain, but not the limits to my power.’132

  Then came news of the disastrous military defeat at Bailén. It was not of itself a significant battle. About 21,000 French troops engaged about 27,000 Spanish regulars commanded by General Castaños on a plain covered with olive groves. The fighting took place all day in temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius, resulting in a number of men dying of heat exhaustion. General Pierre Dupont, who led the French forces badly, surrendered, in part because another general, Dominique Vedel, refused to come to his aid. Dupont was able to negotiate the repatriation of the officers, as well as their baggage, which included art works and treasures looted from Andalusia, but not of their men. When news of the surrender reached Napoleon in Bordeaux on 2 August, he was furious. Anger turned to despair and, in the middle of the night, ‘plaintive cries involuntarily came from his breast’.133 He considered Dupont’s surrender an act of cowardice – it was the first time since 1801 that a Napoleonic army had laid down its arms134 – and decided that the responsible officers should be tried for treason. When Dupont was repatriated along with five other officers, they were arrested.