The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  At first Napoleon thought that these forces would easily suffice to restore law and order. Most of the 100,000-strong Spanish Royal Army was widely scattered in provincial garrisons and patently unprepared for effective operations, although substantial concentrated forces, perhaps in the region of 30,000 troops apiece, were stationed in both Galicia (under Blake and Cuesta) and Andalusia (under General Castaños); for the rest, Napoleon had no opinion whatsoever of local militias or popular levies. Accordingly Marshal Moncey was ordered to march on Valencia with 10,000 men, Dupont received instructions to lead a flying column of 13,000 troops to seize Seville and Cordoba and thence move on Cadiz, while Bessiéres was given the triple task of keeping the vital Madrid-Burgos-Bayonne highway under firm control, of mounting an expedition to seize Santander and thus secure the Biscayan coastline from the threat of any British sea-borne descent, and lastly of dispatching yet another column to occupy Saragossa.

  The Campaigns in Portugal and Spain, 1807-1809

  The Emperor was confident that the situation would rapidly be brought under control by these five flying columns. He also expected great things from Joseph personally, whose arrival in his kingdom, Napoleon confidently asserted to Talleyrand on June 9, “will bring about the dissipation of all these troubles, raise everybody’s spirits and lead to the universal reestablishment of law and order.”22 This, however, amounted to wishful thinking in the extreme. In the first place, the quality of Murat’s command left much to be desired; the bulk of the French forces in the Peninsula were made up of raw conscripts and allied detachments with little or no experience of war, the only real veterans being with Junot in Portugal. Secondly, many of the French battalions were ad hoc composite units made up of drafts from numbers of line regiments. Such formations developed little esprit de corps and proved difficult to administer, and these drawbacks inevitably affected their fighting performance. Thirdly, the nature of the terrain would make truly effective operations extremely difficult. The entire country was intersected by steep mountain ranges where roads were virtually nonexistent, much of the countryside was practically barren, and the whole terrain was more suited for guerilla than regular warfare. Consequently the first French effort ended in dismal failure. Moncey failed to take Valencia, and was forced to retire on Madrid albeit scattering several detachments of General Cervellon’s 17,000-strong Army of Valencia on his way back. Dupont successfully occupied Cordoba, but was soon compelled to evacuate it and fall back to Andujar. Bessiéres, after experiencing popular risings in every town he occupied, decided to abandon his march on Santander. Finally, the new revolt of the province of Aragon under the leadership of the brothers Palafox unexpectedly entailed a full-scale siege of Saragossa by General Verdier and 8,000 men. By the end of June even Napoleon was forced to admit that his initial, rather casual strategy had proved useless; the numbers of the rebels had greatly increased, and none of his columns had achieved their objectives. He admitted as much when he wrote to General Savary, who had taken over temporary command of the French forces in Spain from June 18, ten days before Murat’s departure for Naples, that “in civil war every important point must be occupied; it is not enough to march in every direction.”23 Spain was clearly not to be pacified by “police” actions alone.

  Thus Napoleon was forced to think again and devise a new scheme of operations. He found it hard to believe that the patriot armies, “led by monks,” were successfully resisting the vaunted French forces and their experienced commanders, but it appeared that the combination of Spanish pride and patriotism was an effective substitute for more sophisticated military qualities. In a lengthy note to Joseph, Napoleon described the strengths and positions of the French corps presently serving in Spain, and outlined a new strategy, giving a clear list of military priorities for the conduct of the campaign. “The object of all our efforts must be to hold Madrid—everything is there.”24 Bessiéres in Galicia was accordingly to receive full priority for a new drive on Leon and Santander—for it was only from the Biscay area that the French army’s communications running from Madrid to Bayonne could be seriously threatened. The possibility of a British landing at Ferrol or Santander could not be entirely ruled out. Next, General Dupont, operating in Andalusia with barely 13,000 under command, was to receive as much support as possible, for Napoleon felt that the severest opposition to Joseph’s rule would be encountered in the traditionalist Andalusian provinces. For the rest, every possible effort was to be made to capture Saragossa, and, last in order of importance, Valencia was to be subdued.

  Hardly had this plan been transmitted through Savary to the generals at the front than its order of priorities was altered. For, at the very outset of the new phase of the campaign, Marshal Bessiéres suddenly achieved a considerable success at the battle of Medina del Rio Seco over Generals Cuesta and Blake and the local patriot armies of Castille and Galicia. On July 14, parts of the divisions of Generals Mouton and Merle, totaling between them 12,000 men, successfully stormed an entrenched position on the top of a gentle slope defended by 24,000 Spaniards. It was a hot fight while it lasted, but in the end Blake’s Army of Galicia was swept away in full rout, largely because General Cuesta refused to commit the bulk of his Castillians (6,500 strong) to the fight. The blood of the French troops was by now thoroughly aroused. “Our men did not want to take any prisoners,” recalled Castelanne. “They said, ‘These men are brigands—they kill us when we march alone.’”25 The Spanish struggle was already assuming its dark undertone of atrocity and counteratrocity. The fleeing Spaniards were not followed up on this occasion, however, the French preferring to sack the town of Medina for the sake of a little loot. However within a few days they had occupied Zamora, Benavente and Leon.

  News of this welcome victory induced Napoleon to adjust his master plan. It was now safe for Joseph to proceed directly to Madrid, there to mount the steps of his waiting throne. As Galicia and much of the Biscayan coastline were now safely in Bessiéres’ hands, more priority could be accorded to General Dupont’s attack in Andalusia. “Under the present conditions,” wrote the Emperor, “General Dupont is the most important of all…. If the enemy succeeds in holding the defiles of the Sierra Morena it will be difficult to chase him out of them; it is consequently necessary to reinforce Dupont to a strength of 25,000 men….” Earlier in the same document Napoleon asserted that “If Marshal Bessiéres has been able to beat the Army of Galicia with few casualties and small effort, less than 8,000 troops being engaged, there can be no doubt that with 20,000 men General Dupont will be able to overthrow everybody he meets.”26 He was to be unpleasantly surprised; disaster lurked close ahead.

  General Dupont, a soldier of great experience with a distinguished record as a divisional commander in both the Austerlitz and Friedland campaigns, did not wholly share his master’s optimistic forecast of the outcome of affairs in Andalusia. Despite the fact that he was soon to be reinforced to a strength of about 23,000 men by the arrival of Vedel’s division, the quality of his command left a great deal to be desired, consisting as it did of inexperienced conscripts with little idea of war. He was also disturbed by the furor aroused by the sacking of Cordoba by his men, for the whole province had instantly rushed to arms, and General Castaños’ 30,000 strong “Army of Andalusia” was soon receiving massive support from the peasantry. Furthermore, General Savary proved extremely dilatory in releasing reinforcements: in the end Vedel materialized, but not the division of General Frére. However, instead of adopting the wise course of retiring to the safety offered by the passes of the Sierra Morena, General Dupont continued to linger indecisively in the plain of Andujar, unwilling to admit the failure of his mission to pacify Cordoba and Seville. This proved his undoing. Very soon his communications with Madrid were placed in hazard, and an anxious Dupont at last ordered his formations to retrace their steps towards the passes and safety. The retreat only progressed slowly, however, for the French were encumbered with 500 wagons of loot and 1,200 sick.

  Then, alarmed
by a report that a Spanish force was already holding the road through the Sierra Morena, Dupont took the fatal step of detaching General Vedel with 10,000 men, ordering him to march ahead of the main body to reopen the road at any cost. As a result a 30-mile gap developed between the two French contingents on the 18th. This was the moment Castaños and his considerable army of regulars and patriots had been waiting for. On July 19, they swept forward against the disunited French forces and, by seizing the town of Bailen, succeeded in interposing 17,000 men and 16 guns under General Redding between Dupont and the distant Vedel. At the same time, Castaños closed in upon the French rear guard from the direction of Andujar. Dupont was fairly trapped; urgent messages were sent off to recall the distant Vedel to the rescue.

  Five times that day General Dupont ordered his 13,000 troops forward in attempts to reopen the road through Bailen, but his attacks were too piecemeal to secure success, and Redding held grimly onto his positions. It appears that Dupont intended to make still further efforts to break out, but the condition of his conscripts was so bad and their morale so shaky (a brigade of Swiss mercenaries deserted to Castaños), that he decided to call off further frontal attacks and instead sue for an armistice. Following a preliminary ceasefire, negotiations proceeded for two days, and at one point were almost broken off when General Vedel made a tardy reappearance late on the 19th from the north in answer to his superior’s summons and repulsed Redding’s rear guard; unfortunately Vedel was no hero, and he later pulled his men back instead of trying to fight his way through Redding’s troops to rescue his encircled compatriots. The talks were accordingly resumed, but Dupont’s force was rapidly running out of food and water and the ultimate issue could not be long delayed. Vedel almost escaped to the Sierra Morena during the night of the I9th-20th, but then cravenly returned to Bailen to lay down his arms with his compatriots. At length on July 21, Dupont agreed to surrender both his own men and those of Vedel’s force in return for guaranteed repatriation. Two days later the famous Convention of Bailen became effective, and 18,000 French conscripts became prisoners of war. The senior officers were granted parole.

  This was an historic occasion; news of it spread like wildfire throughout Spain and then all Europe. It was the first time since 1801 that a sizeable French force had laid down its arms, and the legend of French invincibility underwent a severe shaking. Everywhere anti-French elements drew fresh inspiration from the tidings. The Pope published an open denunciation of Napoleon; Prussian patriots were heartened; and, most significantly of all, the Austrian war party began to secure the support of the Emperor Francis for a renewed challenge to the French Empire.

  Not surprisingly, Napoleon was both furious and dismayed when he heard of Dupont’s disaster. “I send you these reports for your eyes only,” he wrote to his war minister on August 3; “Read them map in hand and you will agree that there has never been anything so stupid, so foolish or so cowardly since the world began…. It is perfectly clear from Dupont’s own report that everything was the result of the most inconceivable incapacity on his part. He seemed to do well enough as a divisional commander, but he has done horribly as commander in chief….”27 Such conduct could not be forgiven. In due course Dupont was imprisoned for the duration of the war, and Vedel also underwent a period of confinement.

  In all justice, however, both Napoleon and Savary should be made to share the responsibility for the disaster. Dupont’s force, even after Vedel’s reinforcement, was patently too weak and inexperienced for the conquest of so vast and hostile an area as Andalusia, and this was indubitably the fault of the Emperor’s persistent underestimation of the true situation. Dupont can obviously be criticized for delaying at Andujar until it was too late and then deliberately dividing his command in the proximity of a numerically superior enemy, while Vedel’s slowness in returning to the main body, the ineffectiveness of his operations when he had actually reached the scene and his failure to make good his escape when occasion offered, are equally reprehensible. Nor can there be any excuse for Dupont’s amazing conduct in including Vedel’s force in his own capitulation, for the road to Madrid lay open behind his subordinate, and at least these 10,000 troops should have been salvaged from the wreck.

  Nevertheless, there was no need for Napoleon to prosecute a ruthless vendetta against the few survivors of the incident. Only a handful ever saw France again, for the Spaniards dishonored their agreement to repatriate Dupont’s forces. One who did make his way back was General Legendre, Dupont’s chief of staff. In January 1809, this officer had the misfortune to attract Napoleon’s attention during a large review at Valladolid; the parade was thereupon halted while the Emperor delivered a withering rebuke to Legendre before ordering him off the parade ground in full view of the assembled troops. The hapless officer bore little ultimate responsibility for his superior’s decision, but Napoleon ruthlessly made a public scapegoat of him to ease his own conscience.

  For several weeks after Bailen, it seemed that nothing could go right for the French in Spain. King Joseph lost little time in evacuating Madrid (he had only reached his Spanish capital on July 20) and retired northward along the road to Burgos, which Bessiéres’ earlier success against Blake had mercifully left secure. Napoleon ordered his brother to stand on the Douro river line, but Joseph and Savary continued back to the Ebro. “Well, Mr. General, you certainly bring me some fine news,” snapped the Emperor to Matthieu Dumas, Joseph’s unenvied emissary. “Can you tell me why the King of Spain has only been able to find a safe position behind the Ebro? Was he really so hard pressed that he could not halt on the Douro? To recross both rivers is tantamount to evacuating Spain!”28 Nor was this precipitate withdrawal the sole result of Dupont’s capitulation on August 13. General Verdier was compelled to call off the siege of Saragossa where the intrepid Palafox had defied every French attempt to crush the city’s spirit since June 15, and in neighboring Catalonia, General Duhesme found his troops repulsed at Gerona and then blockaded within the walls of Barcelona for the space of four long months. Well might Dumas reflect that “The unhappy business of Bailen … had, in the space of a few days, changed the position of the French army, animated the nationalist and anti-French factions, and disconcerted all the Emperor’s plans.”29

  There remained one more blow to fall, however, destined to shake the Emperor’s equanimity even further. In far-off Portugal, General Junot had at first proved quite capable of holding down the country but only by dispersing his army in small policing detachments. Then, early in August, came the landing of Sir Arthur Wellesley and some 9,000 British troops at Mondego Bay. At first this new development received scant notice from the preoccupied French commanders, but within a few weeks the British army made its presence very much felt. After being reinforced by a new division to a strength of 14,000 men, Wellesley marched on Lisbon and, between August 15 and 21, proceeded to inflict two checks and one full-scale defeat on Junot’s badly deployed forces. Napoleon’s favorite aide made the classic error of committing his forces into action against the redcoats and their allies in piecemeal detachments. The British therefore succeeded in driving off small bodies of French at Obidos and Roliça—though at the latter only after a very stiff fight—and then followed this up by routing General Junot and 13,000 men near Vimiero, inflicting 2,000 casualties and capturing 13 guns. Faced by the discouraging prospect of renewing the battle or being besieged within the walls of hostile Lisbon, Junot asked for an armistice, and the aged and incompetent Generals Dalrymple and Burrard, newly arrived from England to take over the command of the British expedition from the brilliant but youthful Wellesley, delightedly agreed to arrange the repatriation of Junot, 26,000 men, their weapons, equipment and loot in return for a complete evacuation of Portugal. By the so-called Convention of Cintra (signed on August 22), the French undoubtedly secured very favorable terms, and so thought the British Government, which shortly afterward recalled Dalrymple and Burrard to account for their unjustifiable leniency before a court of enquiry.


  Nevertheless, this abrupt liberation of Portugal at least served to strengthen the impression of French weakness first made by the disaster at Bailen, and in its turn the news of the new rebuff to Napoleon’s ambitions was hailed with general delight throughout much of Europe. The Vimiero episode was also of significance on two other counts. For the first time since 1794, the British Government had decided to commit a sizeable force to a full-scale continental campaign, abandoning, on the insistence of Castlereagh and Canning, its previous ineffective policy of small-scale, colony-grabbing raids. Over most of the next six years the presence of the British army in the Peninsula was to prove a most important factor in sustaining Spanish and Portuguese popular resistance against the French and thus imposing a ceaseless drain on French resources. Secondly, the battle of Vimiero demonstrated that British linear tactics, properly handled, could prove more than a match for the vaunted French attack in column by using reverse slope positions and screens of light infantry to conceal the main positions.

  The combination of these setbacks in Spain and Portugal—almost a third of his army in the Peninsula were now casualties or in the process of being repatriated to France—forced Napoleon into taking two very important decisions. It had at last been brought home to him that the war could only be won by transferring veteran forces from Germany to stiffen the shaken and much-reduced Army of Spain, and by his own personal intervention at their head. “I see that everybody have lost their heads since the infamous capitulation of Bailen,” he remarked. “I realize that I must go there myself to get the machine working again.”30 Accordingly, he issued preliminary orders for the transfer of the corps of Victor, Mortier and Ney from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, and set about clearing his own hands of outstanding business ready for a personally directed campaign in Spain. He would probably have been wiser to cut his losses by deciding to restrict his Spanish venture to a permanent occupation of the Ebro line and the country to its north, but such an admission of political and strategic defeat was out of the question for a tyrant; Napoleon’s personal pride and international reputation were already too much involved in the Iberian struggle. Typically, he tried to blame his difficulties on Great Britain. “The hideous leopard contaminates by its very presence the peninsula of Spain and Portugal,” he grandiloquently proclaimed to his army. “Let us carry our victorious eagles to the Pillars of Hercules….”31