by Tom Anderson
The Austrians, on the other hand, were smarting from the defeat and their sense of triumph at the repulse of Leroux from Vienna had been tarnished. Francis II’s indecision did not help. Though he claimed the throne of the Holy Roman Empire his father had declared ended, he feared to strike directly into Bavaria in case this antagonised Lisieux, despite the fact that Lascelles had broken with Lisieux and the French armies in Swabia had begun to face defeats in the face of the Mittelbund. This ultimately served to irreparably damage Austrian influence in Germany, particularly given the atrocities committed by Lascelles’ troops in Bavaria while Francis dithered.
Italy was a different matter. Intervention there was strongly argued for by Archduke Ferdinand, and his influence at his nephew’s court served to ensure at least a token force was sent over the Alps in both 1802 and 1803 in an attempt to occupy Venice and ultimately relieve Hapsburg Tuscany. However, in both those years the Austrians were beaten back by Hoche’s troops holding the passes – mostly levied Italians, for at that point Hoche’s charisma served to rally many to his cause, and the Austrians were a traditional enemy anyway.
However, the situation had now changed with the Rape of Rome undermining Hoche’s support from Italians. Besides, the Hapsburgs were suspicious of the rise of Naples. The southern kingdom had the Pope in its pocket – if Vienna recognised Urban IX as the Pope, and they could scarcely do otherwise without sparking damaging schisms and civil wars that would undermine Hapsburg authority. The Neapolitans were also achieving military victories against Hoche. More to the point, they had the support of the exiled governments of both Venice and Tuscany, and Tuscany was Hapsburg. Yet Grand Duke Carlo, quite understandably given Austria’s inaction, had thrown in his lot with the Bourbons of Naples and Sicily.
If they did not act now, the Austrians ran the risk of losing their influence in Italy altogether. Swathes of formerly Hapsburg territory in the north of Italy were also under Hoche’s occupation, besides. To that end, Ferdinand led a much larger army, enhanced by the seasoned veterans of the war with Turkey, over the Alps in April 1804, and this time the passes were scarcely contested. Mountain warfare was brutal work, and most of the Italians still willing to serve Hoche were of the mercenary sort who fought as a lifestyle, for plunder and convenience. They would not die hard on cold stone for Hoche or his Republic. Only Hoche’s French troops, and the few Italians who were true believers in French Republicanism, fought hard – and died.
It was a fantastic turnaround in a matter of months. Hoche continued to fight brilliantly and won almost every individual battle he fought, but he could not be everywhere. Fra Diavolo’s Kleinkriegers undermined his army’s logistics wherever they could and ambushed sentry parties in the night, slitting their throats. Soon absolutely everything had to be guarded, and there simply were not enough men. With Naples surging up from the south, and the Austrians sweeping down through the Venetian Terrafirma, Hoche knew his days were numbered.
Rather than trying to fight on, he reassembled the French core of his army and his Italian true believers at Genoa in August 1804. By that point the Neapolitans had retaken all the former Papal States and Urban IX had been blessed in the ruins of the Basilica of St Peter, with King Charles vowing to rebuild the city even more glorious than before. The Austrians had conquered the Venetian Terrafirma (much to the alarm of the exilic Venetians in Naples), the Hapsburg holdings in Milan – Hoche’s former capital – and were threatening Parma, Mantua and Lucca.
In France Lisieux, alarmed by all this, allowed Marshal Boulanger to personally lead an army into Piedmont and secure the territory as a buffer state for the French Latin Republic under military rule. Overly fearful of the French as before, Emperor Francis forbade his uncle from carrying the fight into Piedmont. But Ferdinand was in any case more interested in marching south, knowing the Italian Latin Republic was now dead and that the postwar borders might well be drawn on the battlefield now.
As it transpired, the armies met in March 1805, roughly at the point where the border was drawn at the Treaty of Rome in 1806. This was a line between Ancona in the east and Orbetello in the west, partitioning the former Papal States between the two new great powers in Italy, the Hapsburgs in the north and the Bourbons in the south. Pope Urban permitted the secularisation of much of the papal lands in a move that shocked many of the other cardinals. But the Stuarts were used to trading their possessions in exchange for security, and now the last Stuart had the possessions of a prince. The Papal territory was reduced to Lazio, with the Neapolitans also having possession over the new ‘military frontier’ in the north. Sometimes the more minor states of Italy were resurrected, as in the case of Tuscany, but these were strongly vassalised to either of the two powers – Tuscany, despite having a Hapsburg on the throne, was now Bourbon in all but name as far as geopolitics was concerned. Grand Duke Carlo’s heir (the future Carlo II) hastily married Princess Carlotta of Naples in order to cement the alliance. It was a loveless marriage and there persisted a rumour for many years that Carlo II’s heir, Carlo III, was in fact the son of Horatio Nelson. The Republic of Venice was not restored, being amalgamated into the Hapsburg possessions in part as a recovery of loss of face after the Ottomans having annexed the Venetian coast of Dalmatia. The presence of the exiled Venetian fleet serving the Neapolitans thus promised to be a bone of contention between the two powers in the future.
But for now Hoche gathered the remnants of his forces in Genoa along with what was left of his fleet, and sailed to the port of Mataró, north of Barcelona, in Catalonia. There, he marched overland to Barcelona and offered his army to the French occupying forces there, gambling that Lisieux was – as always – planning a big push and would not let their previous disagreements stop him from obtaining more forces.
Lisieux bit the bullet and agreed, and Hoche’s armies were reintegrated into those of France in April 1805, with Hoche retaining his general’s rank and formally recognising Lisieux as L’Administrateur. Of course, in private Lisieux could not forgive Hoche’s betrayal. Yet according to his notions of the value of human life, it would be criminal to execute such a brilliant general who might still serve France well. To that end, Lisieux decided on a course of action not unlike that which he had used to wipe out the Jacobins – and which had, ultimately, led to this day thanks to their actions in Rome.
Find an enemy to set Hoche against, one that he would inflict plenty of damage upon, but which would probably kill him in the process. Maximum efficiency.
Lisieux’s plans moved ahead apace. But back in Naples, Horatio Nelson led the Neapolitan fleet – including the Cacafuego and its rockets – in pursuit of Hoche. Hoche was saved by a Mediterranean storm which interposed itself between his Genoese ships and Nelson’s mostly former Venetian ones. The storm delayed the Neapolitans sufficiently that they missed Hoche’s disembarkation at Mataró. Nelson learned the Genoese ships were there and attacked by night, using the rockets once more as a prelude weapon to instil terror in his opponents, and taking many prizes. But Hoche’s forces were gone, marched overland to Barcelona, and soon would return over the Pyrenees to France.
Things had now changed. Naples had not, technically, ever been at war with France, though it had fought French Jacobins under Hoche’s command. Nelson, in his zealousness to prosecute the war against the fleeing Hoche, had attacked the French occupation troops in Catalonia. This served as an inspiration to Catalonia’s own Kleinkriegers, who had disliked Spanish rule but had an even more ingrained ancestral hatred of the French, and soon attacks all over the province were taking place.
The conservative King Charles of Naples and Sicily was horrified and fearful at this escalation, but events were out of his hands. The Pope completely confused Nelson by praising his actions and suggesting another crusade was required to deliver Catalonia (maybe even all Spain!) out of French hands. It was a stupid, ridiculous plan considering Naples had only just escaped total annihilation due to Hoche’s miscalculation over Rome. It was absurdly audac
ious. Therefore, of course, it had Nelson’s unqualified support. And where the Romish Church and Englishmen agree, a mere king has little chance of stopping things.
Pignatelli’s army sailed for Spain in October 1805, at the same time that the Portuguese and their Carlista allies were beginning to turn the tide in the west…
Chapter #60: Meanwhile in the Dementia of Spain…
“We are all shaped by the experiences of our childhood…truly, if I had not witnessed the events of those dark days in my own humble way, it would not be so clear to me – as it should be to all of you – how quixotic, how wasteful, how pointless it is to spend so many lives, stain our soil with a sea of blood, merely for an idea…”
- Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz, 1828 speech in Madrid’s Plaza del Arrabal, shortly before being forced to flee from a stone-throwing mob
*
From: “The Pyrenean War” by A.V. de la Costa (1924)—
With the surrender of Felipista Spain to the French in April 1803, the situation in the Iberian Peninsula had changed once more. The departure of the Infante Charles for the Americas, and his conniving with the Portuguese in order to give the latter free reign in Spain, lost him some of his supporters; however, pockets of Carlista sympathy remained throughout Spain, and – at least at first – the Carlistas were the natural first port of call for anyone driven to resentment by the French occupation.
In truth though, compared to their ravages in Germany, the French armies in the Peninsula were quite a light touch on the populace, save for their habit of “requisitioning” food supplies by stealing harvests. This was partly because the new generation of Republican generals active in Spain – Claude Drouet, Etienne Devilliers and Olivier Bourcier – had learned from the resentment and resistance provoked by the actions of Lascelles and his ilk, and also because Spain was a Latin country and thus not subject to most of Lisieux’s ideas of French racial supremacy. This had also been the case in Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic, though Hoche had been independent of Lisieux, until the ill-advised Jacobin attack on Rome.
The latter, which occurred shortly before the fall of Spain, provoked increased resentment against the French in conservative Catholic quarters of Spain, and the first Spanish ‘Kleinkriegers’, imitating Michael Hiedler’s resistance in Bavaria, began to appear. Rather than trying to defeat the Kleinkriegers, Drouet – who was the senior French officer and effective governor of occupied Spain – appeased their sympathisers by distancing Lisieux’s government from the action of the Jacobins, just as Lisieux himself did. Indeed Drouet went rather further than Lisieux did, openly sending his men to Catholic services (no matter that the radical deistic-atheists, those few remaining after Lisieux’s purges, had to be sent there at bayonet-point) and trying to paint the French Republicans in the same light as the popular Enlightenment Spanish ministers of the last century: liberal, statist, anti-clericalist perhaps, but still Catholic.
In this he was moderately successful; although the French suffered Spanish Kleinkrieger attacks on their less well-defended convoys and outposts throughout the occupation, the Spanish Kleinkriegers never found the same degree of popular support as their Italian or German counterparts, and never had the numbers or firepower to openly challenge French armies. Although Lisieux had his doubts about Drouet’s methods, the general got results and Lisieux, with his own interpretation of the value of human life, had to respect that.
Bourcier, who was commander of French forces in the west, was always the strongest proponent of war with Portugal. This was almost inevitable, as King Philip VII’s regime of course laid claim to all of Spain, including those areas currently under Portuguese occupation due to King Peter IV’s pre-emptive invasion. These consisted of Galicia, the strongpoint of Ciudad Rodrigo, and a few other towns along the border. Peter IV and his generals, the most senior of whom was Julio Vieira, saw control of the Hispano-Portuguese frontier as being based around the ‘Gates of Spain’, the two fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in the north and Badajoz in the south. But though the (Carlista) commander of Ciudad Rodrigo had agreed to side with the Portuguese after Charles’ declaration, the general commanding the garrison of Badajoz was a different story.
This was General Mateo María Núñez y Blanco, who was from Galicia and refused to support the Portuguese after their occupation of his homeland, despite also being a Carlista. Therefore he turned Badajoz and its environs into his own personal domain. Aware of its importance as a strongpoint and fearful that Blanco might switch sides, the Portuguese tried to besiege Badajoz in the summer of 1803, but were predictably unsuccessful, just as they had been forty years earlier with British backing during the First Platinean War. Badajoz was one of the strongest fortress cities in the world, a series of overlapping bastions on the west side, the River Guadiana on the east, and the river crossing defended by Fort San Christoval. A very powerful and well-supplied army with extensive artillery and a willingness to take heavy casualties could have taken it. The Portuguese could not, and after failing to make a practicable breach in those heavy walls, gave up and retreated.
Meanwhile, King Philip VII moved his capital back from Cadiz to Madrid and, as has been mentioned elsewhere, his chief minister Saavedra was killed in the street, most probably on the orders of Drouet. Without a strong Spanish minister, the weak king became a puppet of the French. Although Drouet shared with Lisieux a love of peace and the idea that it was necessary for progress, he also appreciated Bourcier’s argument that Spain would forever seethe with resentment unless they found some enemy to unite the Spaniards against and, in so doing, forget the French. Portugal was the logical choice, given that the Portuguese had occupied Spanish land. Drouet hesitated for a while, but after an upsurge of Kleinkrieger attacks in the winter of 1803, consented.
The French drew up a plan of attack that Devilliers described as ‘French spearheads backed by Spanish shafts’, though in practice there were usually French detachments all throughout the armies to prevent desertion. Spain was hardly new to civil wars, and a hundred years earlier a French-backed king had split loyalties just as now, but rumours of Jacobin depredations like the Rape of Rome continued to inject religious and ideological reasons for soldiers to hesitate. Furthermore, most Spanish private soldiers were drawn from peasant stock, and (generally more accurate) stories about the French taking the harvest without pay, perhaps from their own families for all they knew, led to a singular lack of enthusiasm for any French-led operation among the Spanish army.
Drouet decided on a strategy which he called ‘Le Nouveau Poséidon’, inspired by the name of the three-pronged trident that had helped drive French forces deep into Austrian-allied territory in 1797. He concurred with Peter IV of Portugal about the importance of the Gates of Spain and the two southern prongs, under the command of Bourcier and Devilliers respectively, were aimed at taking Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. The northern prong’s intention was to sweep west into Galicia and then south into Portugal. After some hesitation, Drouet decided to make an ideological point by giving command of this third force to a Spanish general, Fernando Ballesteros, who had been defeated by Drouet in Catalonia the previous year. Ballesteros was a firm Felipista and a man of honour, so Drouet was satisfied with his loyalty – though, of course, he put a French watchdog, a Colonel Dominique Lenoir, in his command staff.
The 1804 campaign season thus opened with the launch of Noveau Poséidon. Peter IV concentrated his army in the north, recognising that Portugal had no real fortress city there to hold as a strongpoint. When Ballesteros’ army arrived in Galicia in April, he found the remnants of General Cuesta’s army still battling the Portuguese around Ponferrado and Valdés. Cuesta had ignored orders from Philip VII to defend Spain against the French, intent on hunting down the Carlistas – now the Infantes had departed, he fought the Portuguese, but with an army dwindling from desertion; his soldiers were even more in the dark about what was happening back in Spain than anyone else, and feared the worst.
After a force of Balles
teros’ cavalry helped save save Cuesta from being surrounded by Vieira’s armies, Ballesteros ordered Cuesta to amalgamate their forces and come under his command, as he now outranked Cuesta. However, the older man refused to recognise the promotion. Under Lenoir’s urging, then, Ballesteros first had to fight Cuesta’s remaining loyalists and kill the other general in battle at Allande in June – buying the Portuguese valuable time to regroup their forces.
Further south, Badajoz held out as defiantly against Bourcier as it had against Vieira the year before. Treachery almost struck in Blanco’s command staff, but was firmly rooted out before a plot to open the doors of the fortress to the French could succeed. Bourcier attempted to make breaches to assault, but was hampered by a lack of artillery. Recognising that French steam weapons would be of more use in the war of manoeuvre in Galicia than in the sieges, Drouet had given most of his stock to Ballesteros (or, in truth, Lenoir). That Franco-Spanish army, however, soon found themselves hampered by the mountainous terrain and the uncooperativeness of the Cugnot steam fardiers. The machines had to be taken apart, the parts moved west, ironically, in smaller horse-drawn carts, and then reassembled by a small number of overworked French engineers. Thus in the early part of the war, the Franco-Spanish realistically lacked the advantage of the French steam technology. Although Bourcier did have some more conventional Spanish artillery, problems with shot and powder convoys being raided by Kleinkriegers – the Madrid-Badajoz road passed through several areas of Carlista sympathy – meant that the siege kept starting and stopping.