Now, after Tilsit, the Grande Armée had no continental commitments beyond garrison duty and some anti-guerrilla activity in Calabria. ‘[I] did not invade Spain in order to put one of [my] own family on the throne,’ Napoleon was to claim in 1814, ‘but to revolutionize her; to make her a kingdom of laws, to abolish the Inquisition, feudal rights, and the inordinate privileges of certain classes.’67 He hoped that the modernization formula that seemed to have gone down so well in Italy, Belgium, Holland and the western parts of the Rhine Confederation might also reconcile Spaniards to his rule. There was a good deal of post facto rationalization in all of this of course, but he did genuinely expect his reforms to be popular with some classes in Spain, and to an extent they were. Denying that he wanted her vast Latin American treasures, he said that all he needed was 5 million francs a month to Frenchify Spain (pour la francifier).68 Despite these aspirations, however, this was to be a dynastic war, unlike any of his previous ones, and in that sense it represented a break from the Revolutionary Wars of the past.
On March 21 Charles IV withdrew his abdication on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it had been made under compulsion.69 Two days later, Murat occupied Madrid with 50,000 men of Moncey’s and Dupont’s corps. Initially all seemed quiet, even after Ferdinand had arrived in Madrid to wild scenes of welcome the next day. Ferdinand was under the impression that Napoleon wanted only Godoy’s removal from office, and on April 10 he left Madrid bound for a conference with Napoleon near the Spanish border at Bayonne, where his parents were also headed separately. On his way to Bayonne ordinary Spaniards took off their jackets and placed them under the wheels of his carriage in order to ‘preserve the marks of a journey which occasioned the happiest moment of their lives’, assuming – as did Ferdinand himself – that Napoleon would recognize him as the rightful king of Spain.70
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Napoleon arrived in Bayonne on April 15, 1808 and installed himself at the nearby Château de Marracq, where he was to remain for over three months with a detachment of the Imperial Guard bivouacked on the lawn. On the battlefield he always sought to take advantage of his opponents by striking at the hinge point where their forces were weakest: now he would do the same in his negotiations with the Bourbons. Charles and María Luisa’s hatred for their son Ferdinand, and his for them, was much greater than any feelings any of them had for him. He was perfectly willing to intrude on that highly dysfunctional family’s private grief, and as he had 50,000 men stationed in Madrid neither side could reign without his support. This enabled him to engineer a truly remarkable construct.
Under the terms of a series of agreements at Bayonne, Ferdinand would cede the crown of Spain back to his father Charles IV, on condition that Charles should then immediately cede it in turn to Napoleon, who would then pass it to his own brother Joseph.71 Meanwhile, Godoy was spirited out of Spain by Murat, to the delight of María Luisa who could now be with him, and it seemed that yet another country had fallen into the lap of the Bonaparte family. ‘Unless I am mistaken,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand on April 25, ‘this tragedy is in Act Five; the denouement will soon play out.’72
He was wrong: only the second act was about to begin. On May 2, with rumours leaking from Bayonne and by this stage expecting the worst, the people of Madrid (madrileños) rose in revolt against Murat’s occupation, killing about 150 of his men in the insurrection known as El Dos de Mayo.73 As in Pavia, Cairo and Calabria, the French brutally suppressed the uprising. They were not, however, facing a united national uprising in Spain. In some regions, such as Aragon, there was very little opposition to French rule; in others such as Navarre, there was a great deal. The Cortes in Cadiz found it just as difficult as Joseph would do to raise taxes or impose conscription.74 Spain was of such a size that in the provinces that did rebel, regional insurgent governments (juntas) could be set up around the country and France had to fight a war against both the regular Spanish army and local guerrilla bands.
The French started by besieging Girona, Valencia, Saragossa and other strategically important cities – indeed there were more sieges undertaken in the Peninsular War than in all other theatres of the Napoleonic Wars put together.75 Thus even while Calabria was still not pacified, Napoleon undertook the occupation of another, far bigger territory in which much the same factors were in play: bad communications, fanatical Catholic priests, a hardened, primitive peasantry, a Legitimist Bourbon monarchy with a far better claim to the people’s loyalty than the Bonaparte candidate, and every prospect of easy resupply by the Royal Navy. Spain had been easily defeated by France in 1794–5 and Napoleon assumed that in the absence of any Spanish general and army of any distinction, it would happen again. Despite the experience of Calabria, he had not learned how effective a guerrilla insurgency can sometimes be against even the most powerful and well-disciplined army. It didn’t help that Napoleon interfered with his generals’ fighting of the war in Spain after he left, moving units from places where they had become familiar with the terrain, and sending orders to officers that arrived only after they had been made irrelevant by events.
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‘Grapeshot and the bayonet cleared the streets,’ Murat reported to Napoleon from Madrid.76 After the insurrection was over, Murat had groups of peasant insurgents shot by firing squad, in scenes later immortalized by Francisco Goya which can today be seen at the Prado. Years later, Napoleon’s secretary inserted into his memoirs an entirely forged letter, purportedly written by Napoleon to Murat from Bayonne on March 29, 1808, urging caution and moderation.77 Generations of historians fell for this Bonapartist fraud before the truth was discovered, despite Napoleon not having arrived in Bayonne until April 15. A letter that Napoleon genuinely did write to Murat, however, on the Dos de Mayo, read: ‘I will give you the kingdom of Naples or of Portugal. Give me your answer immediately as this must happen in a day.’78 (Luckily for him, Murat chose Naples, as within three months a British army had arrived in Portugal.)
Although the Dos de Mayo revolt certainly had patriotic, anti-French, anti-atheist and pro-Ferdinand aspects to it, there were also issues of class, land ownership, military desertion, smuggling, regionalism, anti-conscription lawlessness, anti-clericalism, food shortages and a collapse in trade that made the coming war vastly more complex than the simple narrative of a struggle between grasping French invaders and heroic Spanish resisters, though there were undoubtedly elements of that.79 A few of the militarized bands fighting the French – such as those of Juan Martín Díez in Guadalajara and Francisco Espoz y Mina in Navarre – were well organized, but many were little more than bandit gangs of the kind Napoleon had suppressed in France as First Consul, and that any government would have had to act against. As in any guerrilla insurgency, some of the partisans were motivated by patriotism, others by revenge for what were undeniably atrocities, others by opportunism, and several bandit groups preyed on their fellow Spaniards. The Imperial Guard’s Captain Blaze found many villages in which the local people simply didn’t differentiate between the French army and Spanish brigands.80
When the news of the Dos de Mayo arrived from Madrid, Napoleon decided to expedite the very outcome that the rioters had most hoped to avoid. On May 6, after an hour-long ceremony in which everybody – even the poor old gouty and rheumatic Charles IV – was kept standing, Ferdinand VII signed the Treaty of Bayonne, abdicating in favour of his father.* Charles, keen that his hated son shouldn’t succeed him, two days later handed over all his rights to Napoleon and requested asylum in France.81 Writing to persuade Joseph to accept the throne, Napoleon said: ‘Spain is not Naples; it has eleven million people, a revenue of more than 150 million francs, without counting the immense colonial revenues and the possession of “all the Americas”. It is a crown that installs you in Madrid three days from France, which covers one of her borders. Naples is at the end of the world.’82 Later he would repent at leisure, saying ‘I committed a great mistake in putting that fool of a Joseph on the Spanis
h throne.’83 When Joseph was crowned in Madrid in July, Murat took over his Neapolitan crown, and Louis and Hortense’s eldest surviving son, the three-year-old Prince Napoléon-Louis, filled Murat’s place as Grand Duke of Berg.
To keep him under Napoleon’s control should the Spanish people reject the Bayonne arrangements, Ferdinand stayed at Talleyrand’s country estate at Valençay, which he allowed his supporters to characterize as a kidnapping and imprisonment.* When the dashing twenty-eight-year-old colonel of his Guard, Don José de Palafox, suggested that he try to escape, Ferdinand said he preferred to remain there doing his embroidery and cutting out paper patterns.84 (When he did return to Spain, in the spring of 1814, he cancelled all of Napoleon’s liberal reforms and even reintroduced the Inquisition.) ‘The King of Prussia is a hero compared to the Prince of the Asturias,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand; ‘he is indifferent to everything; very materialistic, eats four times a day and hasn’t got a single idea in his head.’85 Napoleon asked Talleyrand to make sure that Ferdinand enjoyed Valençay. ‘If the Prince of the Asturias became attached to a pretty woman there will be no harm,’ he wrote, ‘especially if she can be depended upon.’86 So affected was Ferdinand by what is today known as Stockholm Syndrome that he wrote to Napoleon in November 1808 to congratulate him on a French victory over the Spanish army at the battle of Tudela, and once again tried to solicit marriage with a Bonaparte. His father Charles IV travelled first to Marseilles and then went to live quietly in Rome for the rest of his life. Although Napoleon agreed to pay the Bourbons a pension of 10 million francs per annum, he ensured that it was all refunded by Spain, and as early as July 1808 was writing to Mollien: ‘There is no rush in paying the King of Spain’s pension – he is not short of cash.’87
For all the criticism that was to fall upon Napoleon for his Spanish heist, it is often forgotten that during the same year Tsar Alexander simply took Finland from Sweden in a short but equally illegitimate war. ‘I sold Finland for Spain,’ as Napoleon said, but he got the worst of the deal.88 He hadn’t needed to make explicit threats against anyone or even really to fight at all for the Spanish throne to fall into his hands, but his error was to believe, as he told Talleyrand in May, that ‘The Spaniards are like other peoples and not a race apart; they will be happy to accept the imperial institutions.’ Instead, they dubbed Joseph ‘El Rey Intruso’ (the intruder king), and even before he entered Madrid there were full-scale insurrections in Biscay, Catalonia, Navarre, Valencia, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, León, the Asturias and part of both Castiles, and many Iberian ports were handed over to the Royal Navy. Napoleon’s impatience got the better of him. As Savary later admitted: ‘We rushed the outcome of the affair, and we didn’t show enough consideration for national self-esteem.’89
On June 2 Napoleon brought together as many Spanish grandees at Bayonne as he could muster in order to ratify the first written constitution of the Spanish-speaking world.90 This abolished privileges and the Inquisition, preserved the national parliament (Cortes) with three estates and established Catholicism as the country’s sole religion. It certainly appealed to those pro-French collaborators, largely from the liberal, enlightened, middle and professional classes, known as the josefinos or afrancesados (Francophiles), but they made up only a small minority of the population of what was then very much still a rural, illiterate, economically backward, ultra-Catholic and reactionary country. (Seats on Spanish town councils had been hereditary until 1804 and the Inquisition was still in operation.)
‘I seized by the hair the chance Fortune gave me to regenerate Spain,’ Napoleon later told one of his secretaries.91 Perhaps one of the reasons he expected the Spanish to co-operate with his regime was that his own father had been just such a pro-French collaborator; if so he ought to have recalled his own youthful hatred of the French occupying Corsica, and to have seen Spain as Corsica writ large. Even Napoleon’s chamberlain and admirer Bausset had to admit that the constitution was received ‘with a silent and equivocal indifference’ in French-occupied Spain but with ‘bitter contempt’ everywhere else.92
On May 25 the fortified medieval city of Saragossa, the capital of Aragon, rose in revolt under the command of Colonel Palafox, who had escaped from France dressed as a peasant. He had only 220 men and the Spanish equivalent of £20 6s 8d in the treasury, but nonetheless he declared war on the French Empire.93 Although on June 8 at Tudela General Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes had flung aside a force commanded by Palafox’s elder brother, the Marquis of Lazán, by the time he tried to storm Saragossa a week later with 6,000 men he was rebuffed with 700 casualties; the first siege of the city of 60,000 people began. When Lefebvre-Desnouettes demanded Palafox’s surrender with two words, ‘La capitulation’, Palafox replied with three: ‘Guerra al cuchillo’ (War to the knife).94
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Although one of Napoleon’s primary reasons for invading Spain had been to try to secure the Spanish navy so that the dream of invading Britain could be resuscitated, on June 14 Admiral Villeneuve’s successor, Admiral François de Rosily-Mesros, was forced to surrender to the Spanish army that small part of the French fleet – six ships – moored at Cadiz that had not been sunk or captured at Trafalgar.* Napoleon suffered another blow on June 25 when he heard that Archduke Charles had ordered a 150,000-man levy to be raised in Austria. He had Champagny warn Vienna that his army was still 300,000 strong, but it had no effect. A month later he told Jérôme: ‘Austria is arming; she is denying it; she is therefore arming against us . . . If Austria is arming, we should too . . . There’s no grudge between Austria and me, I ask nothing from her, and the only reason I’m arming is because she is.’95
Napoleon assumed that even if Joseph wasn’t welcomed as a saviour-reformer in Spain, he could always defeat the Spanish army in the field, and indeed on July 14 Bessières did defeat Captain-General Don Gregorio de la Cuesta and the Spanish Army of Galicia at the battle of Medina del Rioseco. Yet only eight days later a catastrophe befell French arms when General Pierre Dupont surrendered his entire corps of 18,000 men, 36 guns and all his colours to General Francisco Castaños’s Army of Andalusia after being defeated at the battle of Bailén. When the Royal Navy, which had not been party to the surrender terms, refused to repatriate Dupont’s army back to France as promised by Castaños, his troops were despatched to the Balearic isle of Cabrera, where more than half were starved to death, though Dupont and his senior officers were allowed home.96
The news of Bailén reverberated around Europe; it was France’s worst defeat on land since 1793. Napoleon was of course completely livid. He court-martialled Dupont, imprisoned him in the Fort de Joux for two years and stripped him of his peerage (he had been a count of the empire), later saying, ‘Out of all the generals who served in Spain, we ought to have selected a certain number and sent them to the scaffold. Dupont made us lose the Peninsula in order to secure his plunder.’97 While it was true that Dupont’s army was loaded down after sacking Córdoba, few French generals could have escaped the trap Castaños had set for him. Nonetheless Napoleon insisted that Cécile, the wife of General Armand de Marescot who had signed the capitulation, be dismissed as one of Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting, ‘no matter how innocent she may be’. At a Tuileries reception he grabbed the wrist of General Legendre, who had also signed it, demanding, ‘Why didn’t this hand wither?’98
‘He seemed to do everything very well at the head of a division,’ Napoleon wrote to Clarke of Dupont, ‘he has done horribly as a chief.’99 It was a problem that was to recur so frequently with Napoleon’s subordinates that Napoleon himself has been blamed for it, accused of being so controlling as to stifle initiative. On occasion he reproached himself for the fact that most of his lieutenants, even marshals, seemed to perform at their best only when he was present. Yet besides being ordered into Andalusia, Dupont had not been inundated with orders. ‘In war, men are nothing, but one man is everything,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph on August 30.100 Long interpreted as
an egotistical expression of heartlessness towards his own troops, this was in fact written in reference to Dupont, in a letter full of self-criticism: ‘Up to now we had to look for examples of this only in the history of our enemies; unfortunately today we find it in our own midst.’ Far from being a paean to his own genius, it was in fact a recognition that a bad leader could bring disaster.
‘You should not think it anything extraordinary to conquer a kingdom,’ Napoleon had written to Joseph before he heard the news of Bailén. ‘Philip V and Henri IV were obliged to conquer theirs. Be gay, and do not allow yourself to be affected, and do not doubt that things will finish better and more quickly than you think.’101 Joseph scuttled out of his capital only eleven days after he arrived, fleeing 135 miles north to Burgos. The sieges of Girona and Saragossa were raised on August 14 and 16; Bessières withdrew from the Portuguese border, and large numbers of troops began to be diverted to Spain from the rest of the Empire. ‘The army is perfectly organized to tackle the insurgents,’ Napoleon told Joseph on August 16, ‘but it needs a head.’102 Of course that should have been him, but back in June he had arranged to meet Tsar Alexander for another conference in September, so even a letter from Joseph asking for permission to abdicate, which sent Napoleon into another fury, didn’t persuade him to go to Spain. He would not appear there for another three months, during which time the situation steadily worsened.
While Joseph huddled in Burgos, Napoleon who had left Bayonne on the night of July 22, visited Pau, Toulouse (where he visited the Canal du Midi), Montauban, Bordeaux (where he received the news of Bailén on August 2), Pons, Rochefort (where he visited the prefecture, dockyards, arsenal and hospital), Niort, Fontenay (where he visited the new town of Napoléon-Vendée which he had ordered to be built three years earlier), Nantes (where he attended a ball at the Rouge Chapeau Circus with Josephine, who had come to join him), Saumur, Tours, Saint-Cloud (where he went hunting and had a heated 75-minute discussion with the Austrian ambassador Metternich about Austrian rearmament), Versailles (where he watched the ballet Vénus et Adonis) and the Tuileries (where he met the Persian ambassador). At the supposedly model town of Napoléon-Vendée he was so furious that the houses had only been built from mud and straw that he took out his sword and drove it into one of the walls up to the hilt, before sacking the builder responsible. In Toulouse he asked to see the man who had built a bridge over the Midi canal. In the course of questioning the engineer-in-chief who presented himself, Napoleon realized that although he was hoping to take the credit, he couldn’t have built the bridge, so he told the prefect, M. Trouvé, to produce the real bridge-builder, to whom he said, ‘I’m happy that I came myself, otherwise I’d not have known that you were the author of such a fine work, and would have deprived you of the reward to which you’re entitled.’ With a poetic justice found all too rarely in history, he then gave the bridge-builder the engineer-in-chief’s job.
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