The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Despite these difficulties the high spirit of the nation survived, supported by traditions of Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II, of Velásquez and Murillo, by the spread and potential wealth of Spain’s empire in the Americas and the Far East. Spanish art enjoyed a repute rivaling the Italian and the Dutch. Now the nation gathered its treasures in painting and sculpture into the Museo del Prado, built at Madrid (1785–1819) by Juan de Villanueva and his successors and aides. There, among its greatest glories, are the frightening masterpieces of the supreme painter of that age, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828).*Vicente López y Portaña handed him down to us in an uncompromising portrait fully in accord with the powerful and somber spirit who showed war in all its gory savagery, and who loved his country and scorned its king.

  Spanish literature—till civil and foreign war consumed the nation—flourished under the double impulse of Catholic scholarship and the French Enlightenment. A Jesuit priest, Juan Francisco de Masdeu, issued, in installments from 1783 to 1805, a learned Historia crítica de España y de la cultura española, which achieved integral history by weaving cultural history into the general record of a civilization.11 Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been general secretary of the Spanish Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, received from Joseph Bonaparte (1809) a commission to write a history of that institution; he thought it safer to do this in Paris, and in French (1817–18). The flowering of prose and poetry that had adorned the age of Charles III had not quite faded at his death: Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811) continued to be the voice of liberalism in education and government; Leandro Fernandez de Moratín (1760–1828) still dominated the stage with comedies that earned him the title of the Spanish Molière. During the War of Liberation (1808–14) Manuel José Quintana and the priest Juan Nicasio Gallego poured out passionate poetry to stimulate the revolt against the French.

  Till that struggle tore them apart, most of the leading writers had been won to French ideas of intellectual and political liberty; they and the Freemasons were afrancesados—Frenchified; they deplored the monarchical emasculation of the provincial cortes that had once kept Spain alive in all its parts; they hailed the French Revolution, and welcomed Napoleon as challenging Spain to free itself from a feudal aristocracy, a medieval Church, and an incompetent government. Let a masterly Spanish historian sing a powerful dirge to a dying dynasty:

  In 1808, when the Bourbon monarchy was working toward its own destruction, the political and social situation of Spain might have been summed up as follows: An aristocracy, especially the courtiers, which had lost respect for the kings; rotten politics, ruled by personal animosities and reciprocal fears; absolute lack of patriotism among the upper classes, who subordinated everything else to passions and greed; the delirious hope of the masses, centered upon a Prince—Ferdinand—who had already shown himself to be both false and vengeful; and finally the profound influence, in intellectual circles, of the ideas of the Encyclopedists and the French Revolution.12

  An earlier chapter has described, from Napoleon’s corner, the collapse of the Spanish monarchy: Charles IV (r. 1788–1808) allowed his wife Maria Luisa and her paramour Godoy to take the government out of his hands; Prince Ferdinand, heir apparent, maneuvered his father into abdicating; Godoyistas fought Fernandistas; Madrid and its environs were in chaos. Napoleon saw in the confusion an opportunity to bring the entire Peninsula under French rule and security within the Continental Blockade. He sent Murat and a second French army into Spain, with instructions to maintain order. Murat entered Madrid (March 23, 1808), and suppressed a popular insurrection on the historic Dos de Mayo—the Second of May. Meanwhile Napoleon had invited both Charles IV and Ferdinand to meet him in Bayonne, in France near the Spanish border. He frightened the Prince into restoring the throne to his father, and then persuaded the father to abdicate in favor of Napoleon’s appointee, provided Catholicism should be recognized and protected as the national religion. Napoleon bade his brother Joseph to come and be king of Spain. Joseph, unwilling, came, and received from Napoleon a new constitution for Spain, granting much of what the Spanish liberals had hoped for, but requiring them to make their peace with a chastened Church. Joseph went sadly to his new responsibilities, and Napoleon returned to Paris happy with his absorption of Spain. He had reckoned without the Spanish masses and Wellington.

  III. ARTHUR WELLESLEY: 1769–1807

  He would not be Wellington till 1809; till 1798 he was Wesley, though far removed from Methodism. He was born in Dublin, May 1, 1769 (105 days before Napoleon), being the fifth son of Garret Wesley, first Earl of Mornington, the English proprietor of an estate north of the Irish capital. He was sent to Eton at the age of twelve, but was called home after “three inglorious years.”13 There is no indication that he did better in sports than in studies, and he later disclaimed authorship of the now anonymous remark that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”14 He did better with tutors, but still his mother mourned, “I vow to God I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur.”15 So he was surrendered to the Army, and was sent, aged seventeen, to the Académei Royale de l’Équitation at Angers, where noble sons learned mathematics, a touch of the humanities, and much of the horsemanship and swordsplay useful to officers.

  When he had won his spurs he was appointed—through family influence or plain purchase—to be aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and to a seat in the Irish House of Commons as representative of the borough of Trim. In 1799 he was made lieutenant colonel and led three regiments in the Duke of York’s invasion of Flanders. He came back from that aborted venture so disgusted with war, mud, and titled incompetence that he thought of abandoning the Army for civil life. He preferred the violin to the barracks, suffered a succession of ailments, and impressed his brother Mornington as so deficient in ability that not much could be expected of him.16 A portrait of him, aged twenty-six, by John Hoppner made him look like a poet, as handsome as Byron. Like Byron, he proposed to a noble lady, was rejected and sampled surfaces incontinently. In 1796 he went to India as a colonel under his brother Richard, who, now Marquess Wellesley, became governor of Madras, then of Bengal, and added some Indian principalities to the British Empire. Arthur Wellesley (as the future Duke now spelled himself) won some profitable victories in these campaigns, and was knighted in 1804. Returning to England, he secured a seat in the British Parliament, proposed again to Cathey Pakenham, was accepted (1806), and lived unhappily with her until they learned to live mostly apart. She gave him two sons.

  He continued to rise from post to post, now not so much by purchase as by earning a reputation for careful analysis and competent performance. William Pitt, near death, marked him out as a man who “states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he undertakes it.”17 In 1807 he became chief secretary for Ireland in the ministry of the Duke of Portland; in 1808 he was made lieutenant general; in July he was commissioned to lead 13,500 troops and expel Junot and the French from Portugal.

  On August 1 he landed his men at Mondego Bay, a hundred miles north of Lisbon. There he received some 5,000 Portuguese allies, and a letter from the War Ministry promising him another 15,000 men at an early date, but adding that Sir Hew Dalrymple, aged fifty-eight, would accompany these reinforcements and assume supreme command of the entire expedition. Wellesley had already designed his campaign, and did not enjoy subordination. He decided not to wait for those 15,000 men, but to march north with his 18,500, and seek a battle that would decide Junot’s fate and his own. Junot, who had allowed his army to deteriorate with all the pleasures of a capital, led his 13,000 men out to meet the challenge, and suffered a costly defeat at Vimeiro, near Lisbon (August 21, 1808). Dalrymple arrived after the battle, took command, stopped pursuit, and arranged with Junot the Convention of Cintra (September 3) by which Junot surrendered all the towns and fortresses that the French had occupied in Portugal, but obtained consent for the unhindered exit of his surviving forces; the
British agreed to provide shipping for those who wished to return to France. Wellesley signed the document, feeling that the liberation of Portugal by one battle justified some British courtesies.

  This was the convention that Wordsworth and Byron, agreeing now and rarely afterward, denounced as an incredible stupidity; those released Frenchmen, if able to walk, would soon be conscripted to fight Britain or her allies again. Wellesley was summoned to London to face a court of inquiry. He was not entirely sorry to go; he did not relish the prospect of serving under Dalrymple; and—incredible as it may seem—he hated war. “Take my word for it,” he was to say after many victories, “if you had seen but one day of war you would pray to Almighty God that you might never again see an hour of it.”18 He seems to have convinced the court of inquiry that the Convention of Cintra, by dissuading further resistance, had saved thousands of British and Allied lives. Then he retired to Ireland, and waited for a better opportunity to serve his country and his good name.

  IV. THE PENINSULAR WAR: III (1808-I2)

  Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain, was in multiple trouble. He labored to win a wider acceptance than that given him by a sprinkling of liberals. These favored confiscatory measures against the wealthy Church, but Joseph, already hampered by his reputation as an agnostic, knew that every move against the clergy would further inflame resistance to his alien rule. The Spanish armies that Napoleon had defeated had re-formed in scattered divisions, undisciplined but enthusiastic; the guerrilla war of the peasantry against the usurpers went on between sowing and reaping annually; the French army in Spain had to divide itself into separate forces under jealous generals in a chaos of campaigns that defied the efforts of Napoleon to coordinate them from Paris. Napoleon learned, said Karl Marx, that “if the Spanish State was dead, Spanish society was full of life, and every part of it was overflowing with power of resistance…. The center of Spanish resistance was nowhere and everywhere.”19 After the collapse of a major French army at Bailén a major part of the Spanish aristocracy joined the revolution, diverting popular hostility from themselves to the invaders. The active support of the revolt by the clergy helped to turn the movement from liberal ideas; on the contrary, the success of the War of Liberation strengthened the Church and the Inquisition.20 Some liberal elements survived in the provincial juntas; these were sending delegates to a national Cortes at Cádiz; and this was writing a new constitution. The Iberian Peninsula was alive with insurrection, hope, and piety, while Joseph longed for Naples, Napoleon fought Austria, and Wellesley-Wellington—a thoroughly modern man —was preparing to come down again from England and aid in restoring medieval Spain.

  Sir John Moore, before his death at Corunna (January 16, 1809), had advised the British government to make no further attempt to control Portugal. The French, he thought, would sooner or later carry out Napoleon’s order to make Portugal a vassal of France; and how was England to find transport, and provision enough soldiers to face the 100,000 seasoned French troops then in Spain? But Sir Arthur Wellesley, restless in Ireland, told the War Ministry that if it would give him undivided command of twenty to thirty thousand British troops, and native reinforcements, he would undertake to hold Portugal against any French army not exceeding 100,000 men.21 His government took him at his word, and on April 22, 1809, he reached Lisbon with 25,000 Britishers, whom he was later to describe as “the scum of the earth,… a pack of rascals,… a crowd who only enlist for drink, and can only be managed with the whip”;22 but they could fight lustily when faced with a choice of killing or being killed.

  Anticipating their arrival, Marshal Soult had marched 23,000 Frenchmen —doubtless themselves poor devils more familiar with taverns than salonsdown the coast to Oporto; while from the west another French army, under Marshal Claude Victor, was advancing along the Tagus. Wellesley, who had carefully studied Napoleon’s campaigns, resolved to attack Soult before the two marshals could join their forces in an attack on British-held Lisbon. Having added to his 25,000 men some 15,000 Portuguese under William Carr Beresford (Viscount Beresford to be), he led them to a point on the River Douro opposite Oporto. On May 12, 1809, he crossed the stream, and attacked Soult’s unsuspecting army in the rear in a battle that drove the French into a disorderly retreat, having lost 6,000 men and all their artillery. Wellesley did not pursue them, for he had to hurry south to halt Victor; but Victor, informed of Soult’s disaster, turned back to Talavera, where he received from Joseph reinforcements that increased his army to 46,000 men. Against these Wellesley had 23,000 Britons and 36,000 Spaniards. The hostile masses met at Talavera on July 28, 1809; the Spanish troops soon had enough, and fled from the field; nevertheless Wellesley drove off repeated French attacks until Victor withdrew with a loss of 7,000 men and seventeen guns. The British had suffered 5,000 casualties, but held the field. The British government credited Wellesley with his courageous leadership, and made him Viscount Wellington.

  Nevertheless his support in the War Ministry was weakening. The victory of Napoleon at Wagram (1809), and his marriage with the Austrian Emperor’s daughter (March, 1810), had ended the Austrian fealty to England; Russia was still an ally of France; and an additional 138,000 French troops were now available for service in Spain. Marshal André Masséna, with 65,000 men, was planning to lead them out of Spain to the definite conquest of Portugal. The British government informed Wellington that if the French again invaded Spain he would be excused if he withdrew his army to England.23

  This was a crucial moment in Wellington’s career. Withdrawal, however permitted, would tarnish his record unless some major future victory, not to be reckoned upon, could lend glamour even to his defeats. He decided to risk his men, his career, and his life on one more throw of the dice. Meanwhile he had his men build, from the Tagus through Torres Vedras to the sea, a line of fortifications twenty-five miles north of his base at Lisbon.

  Masséna began his campaign by capturing the Spanish stronghold of Ciudad Rodrigo, and then crossed into Portugal with 60,000 men. Wellington, commanding 52,000 Allies (i.e. British, Spanish, and Portuguese), met him at Bussaco (north of Coimbra) on September 27, 1810. In the battle he lost 1,250 in dead and wounded; Masséna lost 4,600. Nevertheless Wellington, feeling that he could not rely, like Masséna, on reinforcements, retired to the Torres Vedras fortifications, ordered a policy of “scorched earth” as his army retreated, and waited for Masséna’s army to grow hungry and disappear. It did. On March 5, 1811, Masséna led his starving men back to Spain, and yielded his command to Auguste Marmont.

  After a winter of resting and training his men, Wellington took the initiative, marched into Spain, and with 50,000 troops attacked Marmont’s 48,000 near Salamanca on July 22, 1812. Here the wholesale execution cost the French 14,000 casualties, the Allies 4,700; Marmont gave way. On July 21 King Joseph, with 15,000 soldiers, had left Madrid to go to Marmont’s aid; en route he learned of Marmont’s defeat. Not daring to return to the capital, he led his army to Valencia, to join a larger French force there under Marshal Suchet. He was followed in chaotic haste by his court and officials and some 10,000 afrancesados. On August 12 Wellington entered Madrid, and was welcomed ecstatically by a populace that had remained immune to French charm and Napoleon’s constitution. “I am among a people mad with joy,” Wellington wrote to a friend. “God send my good fortune may continue, and that I may be the instrument of securing their independence.”24

  God hesitated. Marmont reorganized his army behind the fortifications of Burgos; Wellington besieged him there; Joseph marched from Valencia with 90,000 men to face the Allies, Wellington retreated (October 18, 1812) past Salamanca to Ciudad Rodrigo, losing 6,000 men on the way. Joseph reentered Madrid, to the grim displeasure of the populace and the delight of the middle class. Meanwhile Napoleon was shivering in Moscow, and Spain, like the rest of Europe, awaited the result of his gamble for a continent.

  V. RESULTS

  Even at this resting point in the Peninsular War, some results had taken form. Geographically, the
largest result was that the South American colonies of Spain and Portugal had freed themselves from their weakened motherland, and had begun their own lusty and unique career. All Spain south of the Tagus had been cleared of French troops. Militarily Wellington had proved that France could not take Portugal—and probably could not hold Spain—without risking the loss of all her conquests east of the Rhine. Socially, the popular resistance, however chaotic, had achieved a victory for the peasantry and the Church. Politically, the provincial juntas had won back some of their old power of local rule; each had built its own army, minted its own coinage, formed its own policy—even, in some cases, signing a separate peace with Britain. And most significantly of all, the juntas had sent delegates to a national Cortes, with instructions to formulate a new constitution for a new Spain.

  This supreme Cortes, fleeing from French armies, had met first on the Isla de León in 1810; when the French withdrew, it moved to Cádiz; and there, on March 19, 1812, it promulgated a proudly liberal constitution. Since most of the delegates were good Catholics, Article XII declared that “the religion of the Spanish nation is and shall perpetually be Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, the only true religion. The nation protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other [religion] whatever”; however, the constitution abolished the Tribunal of the Inquisition, and restricted the number of religious communities. In nearly all other matters the Cortes accepted the leadership of the 184 delegates from the middle class. Most of these called themselves “Liberals”—the first known use of the term as a political designation. Under their lead the Constitution of 1812 rivaled the Constitution of 1791 in revolutionary France.