The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  Nevertheless, this same Godoy was secretly in the French pay, and, as Napoleon once cynically remarked, “The Prince of the Peace, this mayor of the palace, is the rascal who will open to us the gates of Spain.”13 He had already allowed French troops into key Spanish fortresses. Napoleon now intended to complete the work by playing upon the fathomless hatred inspired by the detested favorite and the mutual suspicion and dislike dividing the King and Heir Apparent, using both as disguises to conceal his own ulterior motives. Napoleon also had a private score to settle with Godoy, for he more than suspected him of double-crossing his French paymaster in late 1806; during the uncertain weeks before Jena, the Prince of the Peace (believing that Napoleon was about to meet his match in the Prussian army) had openly intrigued against the French connection. Napoleon soon learned of this, and after his victory had expropriated a corps of 15,000 Spaniards for service under Bernadotte in North Germany as a guarantee of future Spanish cooperation and good faith. But now, he was determined to overthrow the unreliable Godoy and replace him with a man of his own choosing. The Emperor decided to use the Prince of the Asturias as his instrument. It was not that he felt the slightest respect for the lumpish, arrogant Ferdinand; “The King of Prussia is a paragon besides the Prince of the Asturias,” Napoleon incisively wrote to Talleyrand some time later. “He is indifferent to everything, very materialistic, eats four times a day and has no ideas about anything.”14 However, he had one redeeming grace, an inveterate hatred for Godoy, and the heir to the throne was the one person in Spain who could give vent to his feelings with impunity.

  The crisis almost took place in late October 1807, when the King of Spain received proof (probably provided by Napoleon’s agents) that his son was intriguing behind his back and had him arrested for treason, but a reconciliation was effected before Napoleon could intervene. In any case, at that time Napoleon was busy in Paris and had decided to allow Godoy a little more rope by playing on his cupidity, and the Treaty of Fontainebleau followed. However, he felt certain that the moment for action was not far distant. As we have seen, the Emperor instructed Junot to spy out the lie of the land, and in January 1808, Marshal Moncey was similarly ordered “to send officers right and left to gather information with regard to the situation and the feeling of the country.” At the same time, the French press launched scathing attacks against Godoy, designed to worsen still further his relations with the Spanish “intelligentsia.” Tension slowly rose throughout February, as Napoleon accused Charles IV of bad faith regarding the proposed marriage of Ferdinand to Louise, the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte.

  “Family of Charles IV of Spain.” Goya refused to flatter his subjects in the conventional way, but painted people—however important—exactly as he saw them. Nevertheless, a measure of tact compelled him to depict one ugly princess with her face averted.

  Suddenly, on February 16, the mask was dropped and the French swung into action. Special parties of troops took possession of important positions still held by the Spaniards in several frontier towns. A combination of ruse and force was employed on all occasions. The incident at Pamplona was graphically described by Lieutenant de Castellane, serving on General Mouton’s staff. “The Spaniards did not wish to hand over the citadel to us; so a distribution of bread was ordered, and a working party called up under that pretext. The soldiers stopped on the drawbridge and began to snowball each other. The Spanish guards amused themselves watching; then, when it was impossible for them to raise the drawbridge a battalion suddenly emerged from the neighboring streets at a run, crossed the glacis and took over the citadel.”15 In similar fashion General Duhesme gained control of the castle at Barcelona on the 29th by persuading the Spanish governor to admit a convoy of French “wounded.” At a given signal, the blankets were whipped off the stretchers to reveal fully armed grenadiers. The forts at San Sebastien and Figueras also fell into French hands, and before the end of the month the French were in indisputed control of all the towns guarding the exits from the Pyrenean passes. Marshal Murat’s reinforcements were then able to pour over the mountains with complete impunity to join the forward detachments, and very soon there were 118,000 French troops on Spanish soil, comprising the full corps of Moncey, Duhesme and Dupont, supported by Bessières’ reserve.

  This open violation of Spanish territory coincided with a climax in the French press’s propaganda against Godoy. At first everything went extremely smoothly. The Royal Family hesitated, not quite certain what Napoleon’s move implied, for Charles had earlier requested the Emperor to intervene in his family troubles, and so, separately, had Ferdinand. Godoy fluctuated between offering defiance and counseling immediate flight, but in the end he persuaded the King to leave his capital and head for Cadiz, prior to transferring his Government to South America. The royal party only got as far as the town of Aranjuez; news of the planned defection had leaked from court circles, and an enfuriated crowd of citizens rose in rebellion on March 17 and proceeded to blockade the King and Godoy in the palace. These disturbances spread to Madrid and proved of the greatest assistance to the French army. Napoleon’s propagandists were not slow to ascribe his intervention to a neighborly desire to restore law and order, and Murat’s entry into the Spanish capital on the 24th was greeted by cheering crowds. The French rank and file still believed that they were on their way to the Barbary Coast. “We had no idea of our destination,” recorded Castelanne. “At headquarters they still spoke publicly of our embarkation for Ceuta.”

  Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain (17681844)—Napoleon’s elder brother

  Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese (1780-1825)—Napoleon’s favorite but licentious sister

  However, the situation became increasingly complex, and Murat, “the Emperor’s Lieutenant in Spain,” soon found himself far beyond his depth. At the height of the Aranjuez disturbances, the old King had been frightened into signing a paper abdicating the throne in favor of his son Ferdinand. This news found favor in many parts of Spain, for the accession of Ferdinand VII would at least mean the eclipse of the notorious Godoy, and many hoped that the new king would prove capable of regenerating the corrupt society and freeing Spain from the trammels of its past. However, once the threat of popular violence had receded, Charles IV retracted his abdication and sent a fresh appeal to Napoleon, declaring that his renunciation of the throne had been wrung from him by force and was consequently invalid. This placed Murat in a quandary. Which ruler should he recognize? In the end he played safe and forbade his men to accord Ferdinand royal honors until further orders. In the meantime, however, Charles IV lived in abject fear of being kidnapped or poisoned.

  It was with some relief that the Prince of Berg learned that the Emperor was on his way to Bayonne. Napoleon had summoned the members of his family to a conference there; not the least of his troubles were caused by the independent and insubordinate attitudes of his own kith and kin, especially Louis, King of Holland, and the uncooperative Lucien, and it was partly in the hope of reordering his family affairs that the gathering of the Bonaparte clan had been ordained. Of course, the location was also well chosen for keeping in close touch with the development of events in Spain, and as it transpired the Bayonne conference was entirely dominated by Spanish affairs. It seemed that destiny was offering Napoleon a unique opportunity for using the current constitutional crisis in Spain to achieve his own ends. As a result, the Emperor graciously agreed to mediate in the Spanish dispute and separately summoned the contesting parties, Charles IV, Ferdinand and Godoy, to a series of meetings at Bayonne. The various parties reached the city between April 20 and 30.

  With the birds safely in the cage, Napoleon could choose between two alternatives. He might use the present opportunity to end forever the inept rule of the House of Bourbon in Spain and replace it by a regime of his own choosing; or he could set up Ferdinand, the popular idol, as a French puppet. Eventually he settled for the former course, mistakenly as it proved. The trap was cunningly laid and sprung. It was a comparatively sim
ple matter to persuade the doddering old Charles IV to reaffirm his abdication secretly, but Ferdinand proved more obstinate and refused to restore the Spanish throne to his father as required by Napoleon’s plan. The Emperor worked on his obduracy with Machiavellian cunning, alternating the offer of large bribes with threats of his sharing the fate of the Duke of Enghien. Eventually Ferdinand gave way, and restored the throne to his Father (May 6). Napoleon then promptly produced Charles’ abdication (signed in advance), which appointed the Emperor to supreme “caretaker” authority. The next day, Charles IV, his Queen and the inevitable Godoy, set out for gilded exile in France at Compiégne, while Ferdinand was sent off to harsher imprisonment at Valençay. It appeared that Napoleon had brought off a brilliant coup. “The old dynasty is worn out,” he asserted. “It is necessary for me to refashion the work of Louis XIV.”16 The whole of continental Europe now lay under his power.

  Although it appeared that the Pyrenees had indeed been eliminated, the choice of a successor to the Spanish Bourbons proved no easy task. Both Louis and Lucien rejected the offer of the throne, and in the end Napoleon decided that the lot must fall on Joseph. The erstwhile King of Naples obligingly though unwillingly agreed to change thrones, and on May 6, Napoleon signed a decree appointing “his dearly beloved brother, Joseph Napoleon, King of Naples and Sicily, to the Crowns of Spain and the Indies.” Two months later the Mediterranean vacancy was awarded to Joachim Murat, Grand Duke of Berg. The vain cavalry commander and imperial brother-in-law was frankly delighted with his elevation to a throne; the son of the Gascon innkeeper had come a long way in the eventful years of his military career. Thus Napoleon kept the crown of Naples “within the family.”

  As it transpired, Napoleon’s policy in Spain proved one of his greatest blunders. Nothing turned out as intended. From the beginning he entirely misjudged the problem with which he had to deal. He never appreciated how independent the Spanish people were of their government; he misjudged the extent of their pride, of the tenacity of their religious faith, of their loyalty to Ferdinand. He anticipated that they would accept the change of regime without demur; instead he soon found himself with a war of truly national proportions on his hands.

  “May 2, 1808,” by Goya. The Madrid mob rises against the French garrison and attacks the Mamelukes and Dragoons.

  “The Firing Party,” by Goya. The French shoot the alleged leaders of the revolt of May 2—the brutal side of French rule.

  There were warnings. As early as April I a rising took place against the French troops stationed at Madrid, but General Grouchy, the military governor, was able to restore order with little trouble. On May 2, however, there was a more serious repetition when Napoleon’s order for the arrest of the remaining members of the Royal Family became known in Madrid. A huge crowd gathered in the Puerta del Sol to prevent the extradition of Don Francis, and “in an instant the mob rushed to arms and began to massacre all isolated Frenchmen throughout the city.”17 Captain Marbot, now aide-decamp to Marshal Murat, was sent off from headquarters to summon the bulk of Moncey’s troops from their camps outside Madrid, but he had to fight his way through the streets with his escort of dragoons and received a stiletto cut through the sleeve of his dolman in the process. Even when the dreaded Mamelukes of the Guard made their appearance, the rioting Spaniards refused to disperse until they had received a full-scale charge by a strong force of chasseurs and dragoons. It took three more hours to pacify the city, and by the time it was over at least 150 French soldiers lay dead, and perhaps three times as many Spaniards. Murat immediately imposed martial law on Madrid, sited batteries to sweep the main thoroughfares, and ordered courtmartial teams to seek out those responsible for the troubles. Day after day, the number of executions mounted, but the spirit of Spanish resistance continued to smolder just below the surface; the volcano was liable to re-erupt at any time.

  The lesson of this incident was that the Spanish people, much as they detested Godoy, loathed the foreigners even more. This basic fact Napoleon was slow to admit. He learned of the rising on the 5th, and at once increased his pressure on Ferdinand and the rest of the Royal Family in his determination to clear them from his path. As we have seen, he was successful in his endeavors, and a short while later, on Napoleon’s order, Murat bullied the weak Regency Junta at Madrid into offering Joseph the throne. Had Napoleon decided to set Ferdinand on his father’s throne as a French puppet, it is possible that much subsequent trouble might have been averted, but he chose to close his eyes to realities. “There was an insurrection at Madrid on 2nd May,” the Emperor calmly informed Jerome. “Two battalions of fusiliers of my Guard and four or five hundred cavalry put everything right,”18 and a little later he was still asserting that “Opinion in Spain is taking the direction I wish; law and order is everywhere restored.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, as the officers and men of his army were already discovering. Returning from Bayonne with dispatches for Murat, Marbot “found deep unrest in all the provinces I passed through, for they knew about the enforced abdication of Ferdinand VII, the people’s idol, and also knew that Napoleon intended to annex the Spanish throne; consequently an insurrection was being prepared everywhere.” Napoleon would soon find his illusions rudely shattered.

  Scarcely three weeks after the abortive insurrection in Madrid, spontaneous troubles broke out in widely separated parts of Spain, almost simultaneously. Between May 20 and 27, the pro-French governors of Badajoz, Cartagena and Cadiz were assassinated, and three provincial juntas., those of Valencia, the Asturias and Seville, began to raise armies of patriots, openly sending messages of defiance to Napoleon. By June 10, every province was arming. These widespread disturbances inconveniently coincided with a serious illness afflicting Napoleon’s “lieutenant in Spain”—the Grand Duke of Berg. Even more significantly, the junta of Seville appealed through the governor of Gibraltar for British assistance. Their request did not fall on deaf ears. By the end of June the British Cabinet had decided to send Sir Arthur Wellesley and an army to their aid and it was not long before the Royal Navy was giving practical evidence of its power to influence events in Spain. A squadron spirited away General La Romana’s Spanish Corps from Gothenburg under the very nosés of Bernadotte’s forces occupying North Germany and repatriated the 15,000 regular troops to their motherland; then, in mid-July, French naval shipping in Cadiz was seized in another well-executed British operation.

  From the beginning, Napoleon underestimated the severity of the military task facing him. “If I thought it would cost me 80,000 men I would not attempt it, but it will cost me no more than 12,000,”19 he blandly asserted. Clearly, on occasion, delusion and false optimism were beginning to cloud his brilliant mind. Not only had he stirred up a hornet’s nest by offending Spanish pride and national susceptibilities; he had also afforded his most inveterate opponent, Great Britain, the chance of emerging from isolation, giving her soldiers the opportunity of fighting on the Continent not as an isolated raiding force but as an army surrounded by a friendly and fanatically Francophobic population. The combination of naval aid and the support of a disciplined and highly trained British army was to help convert a series of poorly coordinated and badly led Spanish risings into a serious war, destined to cost Napoleon the lives of a quarter of a million men.

  57

  BAILEN AND VIMIERO

  Although he tended to disregard the true gravity of the situation, Napoleon at least recognized that “soonest mended is soonest ended.” It is clear that at first the Emperor believed that the generals already on the spot could crush the revolts with small effort in a short space of time; he wrote to the Tsar from Bayonne on June 3 that “Spanish affairs will keep me here for another month.”20 His initial idea was to send out “flying columns” to seize the initiative and overawe the disaffected areas. “In this kind of war retrograde movements are never any good,” he advised Bessiéres on the 16th; “Such movements are dangerous enough in regular warfare; in a national rising they never
should be employed.”21 A few demonstrations of force should suffice to bring Spain to heel—just as they had served to keep the fellahin and Mamelukes in check ten years earlier in Egypt.

  By the end of May, the dispositions and strengths of the French troops in Spain were roughly as follows. The 80,000 men of the main French army were holding a narrow triangle of Spanish territory running from the bases of Pamplona and St. Sebastian to an apex at Toledo. Murat, though incapacitated by illness., had established headquarters at Madrid, with Marshal Moncey’s 30,000 troops in its immediate vicinity. Further south were the 24,000 men of General Dupont’s corps, stationed along the banks of the Upper Tagus. Well to the north of the Spanish capital were the forces of Marshal Bessiéres, 13,000 of them garrisoning Old Castille, and the remaining 12,000 (under General Verdier) occupying parts of Aragon. In addition to the main army, two formations were serving on detachment in more distant parts of the Peninsula; the first of these comprised Junot’s Army of Portugal, 25,000 strong, currently close to Lisbon; the second was made up of 13,000 troops under General Duhesme, operating in Catalonia from his base at Barcelona. In all, therefore, the French disposed of some 120,000 men in Spain and Portugal.