Peninsularity and patriotism: Spanish and Britishapproaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14hisr_594 453..468
Mark LawrenceUniversity of Sheffield
AbstractThe Peninsular War until recently has failed to receive comprehensive and critical attentionfrom Spanish and British historians, their outputs having been partial, narrative and ideologicalin nature.While Spanish scholars have contested the meaning of the ‘nation’ forged during the1808–14 war so bitterly that they have been slow to establish a synthesis, British scholars havetended not to venture beyond Anglocentrism. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, however, modernhistorical methods began to change this situation. Since the nineteen-nineties a ‘new militaryhistory’ approach has influenced Peninsular War historiography, allowing, for the first time, fora ‘total’ history of the conflict.
In 1987 the Napoleonic historian Donald D. Horward, upon reading a new book on thesubject, judged that it was impossible to write a comprehensive, single-volume historyof the Peninsular War.1 Whatever its shortcomings, the book nevertheless marked animportant watershed. David Gates was not only the first British historian to attempt asurvey of the conflict in more than fifty years, he was also the first British historian notto view the entire conflict through the Anglocentric prism of Wellington’s campaigns.Instead he strove for a balanced analysis of all the armies joined in the six-year conflict.For too long, British scholars had satisfied themselves that, without the duke ofWellington’s army, Spain would never have been freed from French domination.Equally, Spanish historians had been content to believe that the small Anglo-Portuguesearmy would have been overwhelmed had not Patriot Spain’s badly mauled armies andpartisan bands repeatedly drawn the French effort away from Wellington’s Portugueseredoubt. A detached observer, however, might have thought that Britain, Spain andPortugal deserve equal congratulation as victorious allies in the long struggle againstNapoleon. But, bizarrely, until recently no-one was prepared to make this simpleand satisfying observation.The marvellous Anglo-Spanish alliance of 1808–14 was thealliance that dared not speak its name.2 As military history is both a building-blockof social, political and cultural history and a lodestar for public interest, this historicalparochialism must have been alarming. If for so long Spanish and British historians hadfailed to do justice to the military history of the conflict, how could they possiblyexplain the complex political, social and cultural dimensions of the war? The answeris ‘not very well’. For generations the Peninsular War was held hostage to the grandnarratives of both Spanish nationalists and Little Englanders.As this article will explain,
1 D. D. Horward, review of D. Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: a History of the Peninsular War, Amer. Hist. Rev., xcii(1987), 433–4.
2 Happily, Gates’s balance has since been comprehensively developed and nuanced by a growing number ofscholars, although it should be noted that there are still only a handful of British historians of wartime Spain– Charles Esdaile leading this category – and of Spanish scholars prepared to acknowledge Britain’s central rolein the struggle.
there were compelling historical reasons for both: hence the tortured development ofPeninsular War historiography in the two countries until the nineteen-fifties at the veryearliest. But this article will also explain why interested scholars finally have reason tobe optimistic. For the new generation of scholarship has allowed us, finally, to observea ‘total history’ of the conflict.
The ideological nature of Spanish historiography is hardly surprising given thefretful circumstances in which the Peninsular War took place. March 1808 sawdisaffected Spanish elites launch an uprising which ousted Carlos IV and his hated firstminister Manuel de Godoy in what was known as the mutiny of Aranjuez.This palacecoup was Spain’s first deployment of the pronunciamiento, or use of the military tochange civilian politics. The ‘people’s choice’, Fernando VII, ascended the throne onthe back of the coup, although his first reign was to be short-lived. Napoleon had tensof thousands of his troops stationed in Spain, formally as part of the Franco-Spanishalliance in the war against Portugal. Now the hammer of the Bourbons seized hischance to use force majeure. Fernando VII met with the deposed Carlos IV and theemperor at Bayonne, whereupon Napoleon forced both father and son to renounce theSpanish throne in favour of his brother Joseph. On 2 May 1808, while French troopstried to remove remaining members of the royal family to Bayonne, Madrileniansfrom all walks of life hurled themselves at the French garrison in a bloody episodewhich would become indelibly marked on national consciousness as the Second ofMay national uprising against Napoleon.
Although the French re-established control in Madrid and were unmolested in othercities they controlled to the north-east, in the rest of Spain news of both the Dos deMayo and of Fernando’s forced abdication at Bayonne provoked a rising of civiliancouncils, or juntas, which were backed by armed force and declared both loyalty tothe imprisoned FernandoVII and war on Napoleon.An easy French pacification of thecountry was checked by the Patriot Spanish victory at Bailén in July, after which theFrench retreated beyond the River Ebro while the various Spanish juntas failed toexploit the breathing space. In the winter, Napoleon counterattacked and carried allbefore him, despite the misfired intervention of a British army under General Moore.The year 1809 proved an annus horribilis for Patriot Spain, as the supreme junta failedin its attempts to organize effective resistance, and Spain’s last major field army wasrouted at Ocaña in November. As Patriot Spain’s regular armies were dispersed to theperiphery, the role of her irregular armed bands, known as guerrilleros or guerrillas,grew in importance.And the military calamity provoked political revolution. In January1810 the supreme junta was overthrown and by March a constituent parliament, theCortes, had been convened in the Patriot safe haven of Cádiz. During 1810–12, whilePatriot forces and their Anglo-Portuguese allies held the line against complete Frenchsubjugation, a group of progressive Cortes deputies – known as liberales – drove througha series of political reforms which culminated in the famous constitution of 1812. Itproclaimed that Spain belonged to the people and not the king, and that sovereignty atmunicipal level was to be vertically integrated into a unitary state.While liberal deputiesfaced down an increasingly vocal conservative opposition, Spain was being liberated bythe Anglo-Spanish alliance. By 1814 Spain was cleared of French troops, and Fernandoreturned to his throne.Winning the support of the Spanish regular army, part of whichhad been at loggerheads with the liberales, Fernando VII launched a coup d’état whichoverthrew the constitution of 1812 and reimposed absolutism.
These traumatic six years were the birth of modern Spain. In the words of theleading British scholar of the conflict, ‘the Peninsular War was the essential fact in
454 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
the history of nineteenth-century Spain. Economically devastating, it snatched awayher world-power status whilst also guaranteeing her liberal future . . . In short, itwas the origin of practically everything’.3 But nineteenth-century Spain failed toreach consensus about what these six years of war and revolution meant. The loss ofmainland America, a process of decolonization inextricably linked with Napoleon’sattempted seizure of the Spanish motherland, was slow to dawn on Spanish elites. Nota single Latin American republic was recognized until 1836 and, as one scholar hasrecently argued, Spain failed to reinvent itself as a post-imperial state.4 Meanwhile,the memory of the political revolution inside metropolitan Spain cast a long shadow,as subsequent generations struggled either to modernize the country or to preservethe ancien régime. Such was the origin of the ‘Two Spains’. Whereas contemporaryradicals on the Left were bent on turning 1808 into a Spanish 1789,5 ‘church andking’ conservatives held that Spain had risen up against the perverted doctrines of theFrench Revolution, of which Napoleon was the logical bastard offspring.6 It was hardto find historical middle-ground. Some sort of agreement was arrived at in relationto the title of the war, which from the eighteen-thirties in Spain became generallyknown as the War of Independence (‘Guerra de la Independencia’). This Panglossianterm sidestepped the uneasy Left versus Right claim to the conflict’s identity byclosing the door neither to conservative patriotism centred on church, king andtraditional culture nor to the modern nation-building of the liberals. It also created ahalcyon memory of supposed national unity and unanimity against the foreignaggressor, reducing to a mere footnote the Anglo-Portuguese half of the victory, andpapering over the civil wars, revolutions and pronunciamientos which scarred Spain’snineteenth century and which all ironically had their causes in the very war sodescribed.7
A brazen and schematic grand narrative this may have been, but it was indisputablyappealing. For one thing, both Left and Right either implicitly or explicitly acceptedthe agency of the people in the struggle against Napoleon. For contemporary liberaleswho wrote semi-autobiographical and romantically nationalistic histories, the Spanishpeople were rising up in defence of a nation abandoned by her kings.8 Thus, thepeople had to create a constitution to bind everyone into the nation, including theking, and thereby protect the citizen and his property against arbitrary rule. Someradical firebrands even drew ill-advised analogies with the struggle of the Frenchpeople a generation earlier. For Romero Alpuente, writing in the heat of 1808, ‘Spaintoday is what revolutionary France used to be’.9 Given the prevailing Francophobia,
3 C. J. Esdaile, ‘Las consecuencias de la Guerra de la Independencia’, in La Guerra de la Independencia en el ValleMedio del Ebro, ed. F. J. Maestrojuán Catalán (Tudela, 2003), pp. 269–78, at p. 278.
4 A. Blanco,‘España en la encrucijada ¿Nostalgia imperial o colonialismo moderno?’, in Visiones del liberalismo:política, identidad y cultura en la España del siglo XIX, ed. A. Blanco and G.Thomson (Valencia, 2008), pp. 219–30.
5 Juan Romero Alpuente, El grito de la razón al español invencible (Zaragoza, 1808); Juan Romero Alpuente,Pensamientos diversos sobre la conservación y felicidad de la patria (Granada, 1814); Carlos le Brun, Retratos políticos dela revolución de España (Philadelphia, Pa., 1826).
6 José Muñoz Maldonado, Historia política y militar de la Guerra de la Independencia de España contra NapoleónBonaparte desde 1808 á 1814, escrita sobre los documentos auténticos del gobierno (3 vols., Madrid, 1833), i. 15.
7 F. Toledano González, ‘La Guerra de la Independencia como mito fundamental de la memoria y dela historia nacional española’, in La Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14), ed. A. Moliner Prada (Barcelona, 2007),pp. 548–52.
8 Conde de Toreno, Historia del levantamiento, guerra y revolución de España (Madrid, 1953);Agustín de Argüelles,Examen historico de la reforma constitucional que hicieron las Cortes generales y extraordinarias (2 vols., 1835); AntonioAlcalá Galiano, Memorias de D. Antonio Alcalá Galiano (Madrid, 1886).
9 Alpuente, El grito de la razón al español invencible, p. 19.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 455
most liberales sought more cogent legitimacy in Spain’s own imagined past. Thusthe medieval Spain of municipal autonomy and privilege, which had rebelled againstHabsburg aggrandizement during the fifteen-twenties revolt of the Comuneros,became historicist inspiration for Spanish progressives’ struggle against absolutism inthe nineteenth century and beyond. Conservative writers were more equivocal. JuanRico y Amat (1821–70) thought that Spanish guerrillas, soldiers, clergy and grandeeswere fighting to defend the world which had collapsed in 1808 and gave no thoughtto political reform.10 To the left of him, though still a conservative, was the clericModesto Lafuente, who between 1850 and 1867 wrote a remarkably readable andholistic interpretation of the war. He saw it as the culmination of the Spanish political,social and religious historical personality. His analysis presented a heroic peoplestepping in when kings were absent, and sanctified episodes of popular defence suchas the sieges of Zaragoza and Gerona, and the efforts of the ubiquitous guerrillas,making glowing comparisons with episodes in medieval and Roman Spain.11
Lafuente’s work, in pandering to romantic nationalism, offered something forpractically everyone. And in saying everything he was effectively saying nothing.
This was the paradox at the heart of nineteenth-century Spanish historiography.Liberals and conservatives, who agreed on so little, were content to fudge thePeninsular War, settling for such useful platitudes as ‘Independence’. Both foundcomfort in the belief that the Peninsular War had united Spaniards in a nationalwar of liberation against foreign aggression. They flattered themselves that thisheroism inspired subsequent Russian and Prussian resistance to Napoleon, theliberals exaggerating this claim all the more as it neatly reinforced their doctrines ofanti-militarism, nation-building and popular sovereignty.12 Thus, the question of theafrancesados, those Spaniards who collaborated with the French occupation of KingJoseph, was sidelined. Unlike the nineteenth-century Carlist Wars, formal civil warswhich divided Spaniards, the Peninsular War was seen to have united them as anation.13 Even separatism failed to break this mould. As regional nationalismsdeveloped first in Catalonia and then in the Basque country, the term ‘independence’proved all the more malleable, as it neither privileged nor penalized either the unitaryor the federalist vision for Spain, thus allowing centralizers and regionalists to breathethe same air.14 Most local and regional identities did not run counter to Spanishidentity but reinforced it.15 Certainly, during the twentieth century, Catalan nationalistswould begin to read history backwards, using their region’s economic modernity,and correspondingly advanced state of historical research, to imagine some nascentnationalism in the 1808–14 war. One distinguished Hispanist did so as recently as2006.16 But for the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth, Spanishhistoriography was generally concerned not with opening up debates about the war,but with sealing them off by resorting to appeals to patriotism, romantic Spanish
10 Juan Rico y Amat, Historia política y parlamentaria de España (3 vols., Madrid, 1861), i. 176–7.11 Modesto Lafuente, Historia general de España (Madrid, 1864).12 As the liberal prefect of Santiago lectured unruly Patriot troops during the Cortes elections of 1813, it was
‘the Spanish people, not the army, which in 1808 rose to save Europe from slavery’ (El Universal, 9 Jan. 1814).13 P. Rújula, ‘Guerra civil y pueblo en armas en los orígenes de la Guerra de la Independencia’, in La Guerra
de la Independencia Española: una visión militar (VI Congreso de Historia Militar, 2 vols., Zaragoza, 2008), i. 43–52.14 Toledano González, ‘La Guerra de la Independencia’, pp. 548–9.15 J. Moreno Luzón, ‘Fighting for the national memory: the commemoration of the Spanish “War of
Independence” in 1908–12’, in History & Memory, xix (2007), 68–94.16 R. Fraser, La maldita Guerra de España: historia social de la Guerra de la Independencia, 1808–14 (Barcelona,
2006).
456 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
identity and nation-building. And this tendency became more rather than lesspronounced following the bureaucratization of the Spanish historical establishmentfrom the eighteen-sixties.17
This is not to say that the war was not a battleground beyond the pens of thenineteenth-century historians. On the contrary, both Left and Right mobilizedmemory of the war in support of their own agendas. An enduring example of thetraditionalist Right could be seen in Carlism, which found its spiritual home in thestrongly Catholic, conservative and economically stable countryside of upland Navarra.With this quiet life under threat first from Napoleonic and later from liberal reforms,Navarrese peasants proved the readiest Spaniards to rally to arms, and not just againstthe godless French during the 1808–14 war, but also against Spanish liberales during theinsurgencies of 1820–3, 1833–9 and 1872–6. Psychologically prepared to take to thehills to fight modernization, the Navarrese remembered the Peninsular War as merelythe opening stage of an ongoing conflict to defend their traditionalist universe.18
Equally, the Spanish Left proved adept at mobilizing memory of the war. For advancedLiberals and Democrats, there was no greater proof of national rebirth and sovereigntythan that provided by both the uprising of 1808 and the constitution of 1812. As theSpanish state from the eighteen-thirties was monopolized by the dynastic and patrician‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ liberal parties, radicals railed against this oligarchy byenlisting the Peninsular War as a doctrinaire and symbolic weapon, which could alsobecome the focus for physical action. This was the case on 2 May 1864, for example,when Spanish Democrats held an open-air banquet in Madrid to mark the returnof the mortal remains of one of the founding fathers of the constitution. Theirrank-and-file attended dressed as peasants, in imitation of the insurgents of 1808.And although it proved abortive, this display was also a front for an insurrectionplanned for that day.19 Thus the Peninsular War spawned compelling national mythswhich energized both the Left and Right of Spanish politics.
In fact, before the nineteen-fifties the most dynamic memories of the PeninsularWar were repeatedly to be found outside academic history. Literary attempts to turnthe war into a national epic ranged from romanticism to costumbrismo20 to the realismpenned by Benito Pérez Galdós. As befits a century dominated by myths, romanticismand political agendas, Galdós did not cite his sources, and by inserting inventedcharacters into real historical episodes he failed to demarcate between fact andfiction.21 Galdós was concerned with national truth, not historical truth.22 And incontrast to Britain, where greater literacy and a culture of writing political memoirscombined to make the wars of 1792–1815 the first literary conflict, there were fewfirst-hand accounts left by Spanish combatants and civilians which might haverivalled Galdosian national truth. Formal historical commemorations, meanwhile,unsurprisingly failed to break the nationalistic mould; indeed, both the centenary andthe 150th anniversaries reveal how it actually hardened.The years 1908–12 saw a flurryof commemorations and publications whose effect was to reaffirm the centrist,
17 R. Carr, Spain, 1808–1975 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 296–7.18 J. F. Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 294–308.19 G. P. C. Thomson, The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain: Democracy, Association and Revolution, 1854–75
(Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 212–15.20 A term which may be translated as the representation of collective Spanish identity.21 B. Pérez Galdós, Episodios Nacionales (Madrid, 1872–1912).22 S. Pinilla Cañadas, ‘Los bárbaros han llegado. Acción y movilización política en los Episodios Nacionales y
las novelas históricas de Benito Pérez Galdós’, in Los desafíos de la libertad: transformación y crisis del liberalismo enEuropa y América Latina, ed. M. García Sebastiani and F. del Rey Reguillo (Madrid, 2008), pp. 373–94.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 457
nationalistic and reassuring consensus in a Spain whose politics since the Disasterof 1898 were being torn apart by fresher, more radical forces on both the Left and theRight.23
By the nineteen-fifties, a generation of Francoism had strengthened this mould evenfurther, in a manner which privileged the conservative interpretation of the war at theexpense of the progressive, and included a certain rehabilitation of the character ofFernandoVII.Thus, a history symposium held at Zaragoza in the early nineteen-sixtiesproduced little more than the uncritical reprinting of archive material, and timewornpatriotic orations.24 It might be countered that formal commemorations, and publichistory in general, have perforce suffered from formidable political and psychologicalobstacles in Spain.Which other European country, after all, had suffered more militarycoups and civil wars than Spain? To cite the example of a better-known episode inits history, the 1931–9 Second Republic, Spanish academics did not hold a propersymposium on this subject until 1986 (another anniversary), some eleven years after thedeath of Franco; and even then it bore the rather timid title, ‘Valencia, capital of theRepublic’.Thus, both the forbidding presence of politics in history and the enduringnationalist discourse surrounding the Peninsular War created precisely the wrongclimate for innovative research.
In the meantime, while Spanish writers were caught in their own national web,British authors could barely escape their own national insularity.This observation mayseem surprising.As Richard Evans has recently argued, there are no more cosmopolitanhistorians than the British.25 But until the nineteen-fifties this was very much anAnglocentric cosmopolitanism, and during most of the nineteenth century it wasdecidedly nationalistic, and in no field more so than the Peninsular War. As severalSpanish writers have repeatedly charged, the very title which the British use, the‘Peninsular War’, implies, to put it mildly, a gentle disregard both for Spain’s war effortand its attempts at nation-building. It is easy to see why Spanish authors were for solong affronted by British perceptions of the conflict. Dismissing the Spanish role in thevictory of 1814, the Whig Edinburgh Review held that ‘no country ever did so littlefor itself under circumstances of such excitement and encouragement. It has beenliberated entirely by British valour and British enterprise’.26 This was so extremeas to smack of sour grapes. The whigs had been haplessly divided by the toryadministration’s forward policy in the peninsula, as their ranks encompassed the ardentHispanophiles Lord and Lady Holland; those who supported Wellington throughgritted teeth; sincere pacifists; some, like Lord Brougham and Vaux, who sympathizedwith Napoleon; and finally radical anti-militarists who, like Charles James Fox in1806, were slow to recognize the impossibility of concluding peace with the Frenchemperor. The tory administration, by contrast, was unequivocal in its views on theconflict.27
23 J. Ibáñez Marín, Bibliografía de la Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid, 1908); M. Gómez Imáz, Los periódicosdurante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14) (Madrid, 1910); M. Gómez Imáz, Sevilla en 1808: servicios patrióticosde la Suprema Junta en 1808 y relaciones hasta ahora inéditas de los regimientos creados por ella (Seville, 1908).
24 J. García Prado and others, Guerra de la Independencia: Estudios, i (II Congreso Histórico Internacional de laGuerra de la Independencia y su Época. Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, Zaragoza, 1964).
25 R. J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–6.26 G. Davis, ‘The whigs and the Peninsular War, 1808–14’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 4th ser., ii (1919), 113–131,
at p. 130.27 C. J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (1995), pp. 144–63; The Spanish Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland
(1791–1811), ed. Earl of Ilchester (1910), pp. 85–124; L. D. Reid, Charles James Fox: a Man for the People (1969),p. 266.
458 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
Whigs and radicals were also chagrined by the failure of the Spanish Patriots to fightfor real, individual liberty, as even their most progressive achievement, the ephemeralconstitution of 1812, was authoritarian and statist in nature. When Lord Holland’syouthful correspondent Lord John Russell followed the French retreat of 1813 hereported on the liberales not in glowing terms but in the most excoriating languageimaginable, accusing the Cortes deputies of ‘betraying a noble peasantry . . . with theirlaws, no doubt good, but which nobody ever observes’, cursing ‘all the upper orders inthis country’, hoping that ‘some will be hanged at least’, and predicting that the nobleswould flock to Fernando VII if he ever returned.28 Not for the last time in history,British progressives became disillusioned looking for something in a Spanish revolutionwhich did not exist. When Fernando VII did return, the fact that the Spanish peoplenot only failed to defend their nascent liberty but also actively supported the royalistcoup pushed the whigs into a lack of appreciation of Spain’s trauma which was asungenerous as it was ignorant. True to this theme, the first substantial multi-volumeBritish history of the conflict, Napier’s War in the Peninsula, glorified British arms,exculpated the French and marginalized the Spaniards.29 Napier’s invective may beexplained by the financial clout wielded by his British and French sponsors, andperhaps even by the wounds he suffered in the conflict which would dog him withchronic pain for the rest of his life.30 Whatever his motives, so acclaimed was theBritish reception of his War in the Peninsula that any of his compatriots given to asympathetic hearing of the Spanish case found that the sands had shifted. Even thoughthe first volume of Robert Southey’s History of the Peninsular War completely acceptedthe Spanish version of events, larding its narrative with accounts of popular resistance,so severe was the censure heaped upon the poet laureate that his second and thirdvolumes were much more ‘British’ in their approach.31 Southey could have been thefirst ‘Spanish whig’ historian of the conflict, but like his fellow Romantic SamuelColeridge, who had written of the Spanish people ‘redeeming Europe’,32 he hadrenounced his youthful radicalism, having found refuge in patriotic, conservativesentimentalism. And those radicals who remained true were not about to ride tothe Spaniards’ rescue. William Hazlitt, Southey’s great detractor, grotesquely claimedNapoleon as a hero of popular sovereignty rather than the Spaniards he plunged intowar.33
Meanwhile, tory interpretations of the war were problematized by the central roleplayed by the duke of Wellington, commander of the Anglo-Portuguese army, fromSeptember 1812 generalissimo of all Allied forces in the peninsula, and subsequentlytory prime minister and peer. Wellington had a difficult relationship with PatriotSpain and Spaniards. He was prone to the sort of shrill outbursts of which his whigopponents would have been proud: ‘I’ve never known a Spaniard do anything, leastof all do anything well!’34 Although an undoubted military genius, especially in activedefence, as a commander Wellington was monomaniacal, sententious and domineering.He was generally on awkward terms with Spanish colleagues, subordinates and
28 British Library, Additional MS. 51626, John Russell to Lord Holland, 16 July 1813.29 W. F. P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, 1807–14 (1828–40).30 N. Lipscombe, The Peninsular War Atlas (Oxford, 2010), p. 22.31 R. Southey, History of the Peninsular War (3 vols., 1820–8).32 E. de Diego García, ‘Balance de un conflicto marcado por la complejidad’, in Andalucía en Guerra, 1808–14,
ed. J. M. Delgado Barrado and M. A. López Arandia (Jaén, 2010), p. 32.33 R. S. Alexander, Napoleon (2001), pp. 74, 162; William Hazlitt: the Fight and other Writings, ed.T. Paulin and
D. Chandler (2000), pp. 339–90.34 C. J. Esdaile, The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, 1812–14 (1990).
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 459
especially the liberales, who drove the Anglo-Irish aristocrat to think an authoritarianBourbon regency a lesser evil for Spain than the Cortes.35 None of this endeared himto either contemporary or twentieth-century Spanish historians, while such little loveas remained was lost by the behaviour of his brutalized army, which was all too oftenprone to drunkenness, anti-papism and even war crimes in stormed cities whichmatched those of the French in ferocity.36 And if the Spaniards had the sort of alliesthat made them admire their enemies, then the feeling was certainly mutual. CountlessBritish accounts charge the Patriots with cowardice, neglect, cruelty and religiousbigotry, the last demonstrated by their reluctance to admit Protestant casualties toconvents and cemeteries.37 Thus relations between Britain and Patriot Spain werea parable of dysfunctional alliance. Even though the alliance triumphed, Wellington’scommand snubbed so many vested and aspiring interests along the way that Britain’svital leadership until recently was virtually confined to footnotes in Spanish historiesof the conflict.38 And when Spain failed to secure from the British anything more thanan offer of mediation in the post-1810 Spanish American revolt, mutual alienation wascomplete.
Wellington, until his death in 1851, continued to be the prism through whichBritish elites viewed Spanish history and politics.When Spain descended into a bloodyseven-year civil war in 1833, Wellington’s admonition that the tiresome Spaniardsshould be offered nothing more than humanitarian mediation probably influencedPalmerston’s decision to send only limited military aid to the liberal side in theconflict.39 As Wellington lamented, ‘There is no country in Europe in the affairsof which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as Spain’, and ‘there is nocountry in which foreigners are so much disliked, and even despised, and whosemanners and habits are so little congenial with those of other nations in Europe’.40
Thus, the erstwhile generalissimo bequeathed no ‘Spanish tory’ tradition for others tofollow.This matters because until the nineteen-thirties British historians tended to bepart of, rather than alienated from, the corridors of power and patronage, not leastwhen it came to the foreign office.41 Add to this the fact that British historians weremore inclined to military history than their Spanish, or even French, peers, and theformula was set for an Anglocentric narrative which subordinated histories of PatriotSpain to British glory. Napier may have been the most extreme example of this
35 C. Santacara, La Guerra de la Independencia vista por los británicos (Madrid, 2005), p. 218.36 Esdaile, Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, pp. 24–5. For a recent sympathetic study of
Wellington’s army, see E. J. Coss, All for the King’s Shilling: the British Soldier under Wellington, 1808–14 (Norman,Okla., 2010).
37 Santacara, p. 90; M. T. Corchado Pascacio, ‘La Guerra de la Independencia en los relatos de militaresingleses’, in La Guerra de la Independencia en el mosaico peninsular (1808–14), ed. C. Borreguero Beltrán (Burgos,2010), pp. 665–72.
38 Alicia Laspra has rehabilitated Britain’s vital financial support for the Patriots (A. Laspra Rodríguez,Intervencionismo y revolución: Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–13) (Real Institutode Estudios Asturianos, 1992); A. Laspra Rodríguez, ‘La ayuda británica’, in Moliner, Guerra de la Independencia,pp. 153–82). José Cuenca Toribio has shown rare understanding of Wellington’s awkward predicament (J. CuencaToribio, La Guerra de la Independencia: un conflicto decisivo, 1808–14 (Madrid, 2006), pp. 23–67). Carlos Santacara,meanwhile, rehabilitates the strategic value of General Moore’s retreat into Galicia during 1808–9 (Santacara,p. 152).
39 J. G. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970), pp. 269–84; E. M. Spiers, Radical General: Sir George de Lacy Evans1787–1870 (Manchester, 1983), p. 101.
40 C. K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830–41 (2 vols., 1951), i. 429.41 Evans, pp. 154–234; J. Rodden, ‘On the political sociology of intellectuals: George Orwell and the London
Left intelligentsia of the 1930s’, in Canadian Jour. Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, xv (1990), 251–73, atpp. 254–5.
460 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
phenomenon, but he was also the most dominant, as most other nineteenth-centuryBritish accounts, whether attempts at general histories or personal reminiscences,effectively sank without trace.42 Some improvement finally came with Sir CharlesOman’s seven-volume A History of the Peninsular War, published between 1902 and1930, the last two volumes of which broke Napier’s spell by rehabilitating the roleplayed in the victory by the Patriot guerrilla forces.43 These volumes thus bothresurrected Southey’s abortive interest in an irregular ‘people’s war’ and went some waytowards bridging the yawning gulf that existed between British patriotism and Spanishpeninsularity.
Admittedly, Oman’s reappraisal did not yet portend a deeper British engagementwith Spain’s struggle. British writers may have been more given to acknowledgingSpain’s war effort, especially that of the Romanticism-prone guerrillas, but they did soin a patronizing and knowing manner.44 Even though the Oxbridge historians whowrote enduring survey histories of modern Europe increasingly added Spain to theirnarratives, linguistic challenges confounded any depth or innovation in their analysis,and betrayed their tendency for relying on printed French sources. Ironically, thosefew Spanish scholars of British history who existed were equally at the mercy ofthe language of the common enemy.45 What would shift both British and Spanishengagement with the Peninsular War was the decade in which Oman’s last twovolumes were read, for Spain’s nineteen-thirties opened up a series of revolution,counter-revolution and civil war which resurrected international interest in Spain.Politics triumphed over history, literally with a vengeance. To begin with the SpanishSecond Republic was hesitant to commemorate the Peninsular War because of itsassociation thus far with monarchism. Rather, such ‘objectively republican’ martyrsto Fernando VII’s Ominous Decade (1823–33) as José María de Torrijos y Uriarteand Mariana Pineda were favoured instead. The right-wing revolt of July 1936 andsubsequent civil war, however, drove the embattled Republic to recast the PeninsularWar along leftist lines. As Madrid hunkered down to the Nationalist siege during1936, the Republicans claimed the Second of May as their own, equating popularresistance against Napoleonic tyranny then with the Madrileños’s defiance of fascismnow.46 The cries of ¡No pasarán! were publicly couched in terms of the Patriots’ heroicdefence of Zaragoza and Gerona. In January 1937, after the Madrid front hadstabilized, President Manuel Azaña gave a speech in which he equated the PeninsularWar with the birth of the Spanish nation and of its desire for freedom and politicalindependence.47
Historians, like most progressive intellectuals, matched the Spanish Republicans’ideological zeal and identified with its fight as the Last Great Cause. In Spain the
42 E.g., C.W.Vane, Narrative of the Peninsular War, from 1808 to 1813 (1828);T. Bunbury, Reminsicences of a Veteranbeing Personal and Military Adventures in Portugal, Spain, France, Malta, New South Wales, Norfolk Island, New Zealand,Andaman Islands and India (2 vols., 1861); C. Leslie, Military Journal of Colonel Leslie of Balquhain (Aberdeen, 1887).One of the best collections of British Peninsular War sources may be found in the University of Liverpool’sSydney Jones Library (Special Collections).
43 C. Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (7 vols., 1902–30).44 C. J. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–14 (New Haven, Conn.,
2004), pp. 1–26.45 Symptoms of mutual incomprehension can be discerned in Anglophone treatment of ‘the Cortez’ and
‘Algeçiras’ and Spanish treatment of ‘Welinton’ and the perennially misspelt English-language sources that appearin Spanish bibliographies.
46 For further details, see V. Fernández Vargas, Memorias no vividas. Madrid qué bien resiste: la vida cotidiana en elMadrid sitiado (Madrid, 2002).
47 R. García Cárcel, ‘Las memorias de la Guerra de la Independencia’, in Delgado and López, p. 338.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 461
nineteen-thirties planted the seed of a historiographical revolution which had alreadygerminated in Britain, and which by the nineteen-fifties would rejuvenate SpanishPeninsular War scholarship through its use of the modern techniques developed by theAnnales school of ‘total history’ and, especially, of the Marxist dialectic of class struggleand historical materialism.48 As the sympathies of most of these historians were withSpain’s vanquished progressive-liberal tradition of the Left, which the 1931–6 SecondRepublic (and before) had shown to be hegemonic in its political discourse andideological in its thinking,49 it is unsurprising that the post-war generation of Spanishhistorians were much given to an ideological analysis of the nineteenth century. Asthe victorious Francoist regime was set on purging such ‘unorganic’ ideologies asnineteenth-century liberalism, the origin of which lay in the Peninsular War, frustratedhistorians now married their adaptation of modern historiographical techniqueswith a righteous sense of mission.Their modern focus on social history replaced theirforebears’ characteristically nineteenth-century penchant for military, Romantic and‘Great Man’ histories.The denouement of Francoism was thus answered by the rise ofthe progressive, politically engaged historian.50
But Franco’s victory in the civil war entailed a repressive intellectual atmospherewhich condemned most nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish history asdegenerate. During the Falangist ascendancy of the nineteen-forties, the regimepromoted the views of such Nationalist ‘martyrs’ as Ramiro de Maeztu, who hadcondemned all progressive innovations since the constitution of 1812 as the Anti-Spain,in contravention of the traditional and now reborn doctrines of original sin, hierarchy,unitary nationalism and Spain’s historic imperial mission.51 The regime saddled Spain’sfourteen universities with cátedras institucionales – military history institutes – whichduring the dictatorship allowed regime favourites to don the cloak of intellectualrespectability and legitimize Francoism in historical terms. Thus, the institute atZaragoza marked the 150th anniversary of the siege of that city by explicitly comparingthe 1808–14 war with Franco’s Cruzada, praising the gender-traditional, hearth-and-home heroism of such famous women as the siege-fighter Agustina de Aragón, andactively dismissing the importance of Wellington.52
The nineteen-fifties, however, also saw important cracks appear in this deathlyfacade. In 1950 the conservative historian of the ‘Navarra school’ FedericoSuárez-Verdeguer, in publishing his Crisis política del antiguo régimen, founded modernright-wing Peninsular War scholarship when he argued that the Spaniards who rosein 1808 did so in defence of the old order while the liberales were a conspiratorialminority dominated by French intellectual influence. The cátedras would not havedisagreed, but Suárez gave an erudite and investigative analysis which they altogetherlacked.53 Always a minority current, to some extent bolstered under Francoism by a
48 Already in the 1930s we see the Marxist discourse being developed in Spain. Thus, the writings of therevolutionary communist,Andrés Nin, reveal his analysis that Spain’s contemporary ‘backwardness’ needed to beunderstood within the Marxist paradigm of a failed ‘bourgeois revolution’.
49 For a recent study of the illiberalism of the pre-Civil War Spanish Left, see F. del Rey Reguillo,‘Antiliberalismo y democracia en la España de entreguerras’, in García Sebastiani and Rey Reguillo, pp. 221–244at pp. 221–4.
50 M. A. Cabrera, ‘Review: Developments in contemporary Spanish historiography: from social history to thenew cultural history’, Jour. Modern Hist., lxxvii (2005), 996.
51 M. Nozick, ‘An examination of Ramiro de Maeztu’, P.M.L.A., lxix (1954), 719–40.52 I. Peiró Martín, ‘Los sitios de Zaragoza y la Guerra de la Independencia en 1958: las conferencias de la
cátedra “General Palafox”’, in La Guerra de la Independencia española: una visión militar, i. 53–68.53 F. Suárez-Verdeguer, La crisis política del antiguo régimen en España, 1808–40 (Madrid, 1950).
462 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
benign political climate, the Navarra school nonetheless held its own under bothdictatorship and democracy, basing its conservative analysis on modern historicalmethods.54 At the same time Miguel Artola Gallego made the modern breakthroughfrom the Left. His study of the taboo subject of the Spaniards who collaborated withKing Joseph, Los Afrancesados, advanced beyond the comfortable notion of a minorityof falsely enlightened elites to show the social structure of Josephine Spain.55 As itwas impossible for a progressive like Artola to publish on the recent civil war, it wassignificant that his Afrancesados recast the Peninsular War along civil rather than nationallines. When Artola turned his attention to Patriot Spain, he did so using Marxistsocial history which subordinated the Peninsular War to the wider discourse ofSpain’s nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois revolution’, thereby establishing the ideologicalframework for a generation of Spanish Peninsular War historians of the Left.56 Thisgeneral post-war Marxist hegemony of nineteenth-century Spain persisted until thenineteen-nineties, when the works of Jesús Cruz made the case for social continuityand reproduction rather than rupture and revolution.57
The Cold War ascendancy of Marxist historiography in Spain was both a boonand a liability as far as Peninsular War scholarship is concerned. On the one hand, itoffered a socio-political analysis which had been wanting; on the other hand, thissocio-political analysis merely substituted one ideological approach for another, fornow the military side to the war was interesting only to the extent that it revealedpotentially revolutionary social forces. The singularly ideological nature of Spanishhistoriography surpassed the usual drawbacks evident in contemporaneous ‘newmilitary history’ approaches to other conflicts which, in applying insights fromanthropology, psychology and sociology, have often demilitarized the study of war.58
In the Spanish case, this paradigm shift has had an impact above all on the followingfour areas: Bailén, the juntas of 1808–9, the constitution of 1812 and, most profoundly,the famous guerrilla war. As the ideological interpretation of these subjects hasbeen challenged by revisionist, contingency-based analyses, they form the basis for thesubsequent socio-political analysis in this article.
With regard to Bailén, the role played in this Patriot victory by both the junta ofSevilla and an irregular group of civilian volunteers (garrochistas) has been exaggeratedby post-war Spanish historians of the Left. Whereas nineteenth-century historianspresented the victory in patriotic terms, the Artola generation claimed it asrevolutionary, in much the same way as historians explained French revolutionary‘people’s war’ successes against old regime armies during the seventeen-nineties.Thus,Artola attributed the Bailén victory to nothing less than the ‘first national army’, callingit a triumph for ‘the people in arms’.59 This interpretation has endured. For theAndalucían historian Manuel Moreno Alonso, writing as recently as 2008, Bailén was
54 E.g., J. L. Comellas García-Llera, Los primeros pronunciamientos en España, 1814–20 (Madrid, 1958);J. L. Comellas García-Llera, El trienio constitucional (Madrid, 1963); J. L. Comellas García-Llera, Historia de Españacontemporánea (Madrid, 1988); F. Suárez-Verdeguer, Las Cortes de Cádiz (Madrid, 2002).
55 M. Artola Gallego, Los Afrancesados (Madrid, 1953; 1976). For a forthcoming warfare and society study, seeC. J. Esdaile, The Bonaparte Kingdom of Spain (Knoxville, Tenn., forthcoming).
56 M. Artola Gallego, Los orígenes de la España contemporánea (Madrid, 1959); M. Artola Gallego, La burguesíarevolucionaria (1808–74) (Madrid, 1974); J. Fontana, La crisis del antiguo regimen (1808–33) (Barcelona, 1979).
57 J. Cruz, Gentlemen, Bourgeois, Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural Persistence among the SpanishDominant Groups (Cambridge, 1996); J. Cruz, Los notables de Madrid: las bases sociales de la revolución liberal española(Madrid, 2000).
58 European Warfare, 1815–2000, ed. J. Black (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 1–3.59 M. Artola Gallego, La España de Fernando VII (Madrid, 1999), p. 293.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 463
nothing less than the ‘Spanish Valmy’.60 Ironically, this is true. Just as the 1792 Frenchvictory was due neither to a national army nor to the people in arms, so was Bailéna recognizably eighteenth-century engagement. Sober military analysis lays bare thetoken rather than decisive participation of the garrochistas (‘barely a hundred chargedinto the French ranks, of whom only twenty-four returned’),61 while even sympatheticstudies of the civilian junta of Sevilla cannot help but reveal how its jockeying elitesexaggerated and exploited for all its political worth their limited logistical role in thevictory.62 Even though the Patriots, thanks to Bailén, stymied the French, they alsostymied themselves, as the growing liberal opinion in the juntas incorrectly seized onthe victory as evidence that militarization was unnecessary.63
Similar revisionism can be seen to have reached the juntas. In the eyes of ‘Artolahistorians’ these were the institutional repositories of such revolutionary impulses asexisted, the only dispute being the extent of their radicalism.Whereas some identifiedthem as advanced expressions of bourgeois revolutionaries bent on modernization,64
most saw their radicalism as inchoate and inarticulate.65 But all agreed that thejuntas were harbingers of Spain’s political modernity, often seizing on isolated appealsfor municipal autonomy, made in the famous 1809 Consulta al país, as evidence of theorigin of progressive, representative politics.66 This teleological interpretation has beencountered by the empirical approaches of both British and Spanish historians whohave stressed the role of contingency rather than ideology. In this regard Esdaile hasshown the juntas to have been a vehicle for existing elites to exempt themselves fromthe demands of the war, while Pedro Rújula has argued that the priority of the juntaswas to maintain the existing social order, and the conduct of the war, therefore, wassecondary, even negligible, in their considerations.67 The substantial narrative offered inMoreno Alonso’s study of the vainglorious supreme junta of Sevilla brings the readerto much the same conclusion.68
This contingency-based understanding of the war, however, must jostle with aSpanish historical establishment which still favours the longue durée of intellectual,institutional and otherwise ‘high-political’ discourse of ideas and their antecedents.Thus, the revolutionary years 1808 and 1809 and the reactionary denouement of 1814continue to dominate Spanish histories, the years of ‘deep war’ often being elided,and readers having to make do with start- and end-heavy narratives.This phenomenonof the ‘missing middle’ is particularly pronounced in the recent surge of Spanishpublications inspired by the conflict’s bicentenary.69 As post-Civil War Spanish
60 M. Moreno Alonso, La batalla de Bailén: el surgimiento de una nación (Madrid, 2008).61 Á. Sanz Arroyo, ‘La batalla de Bailén’, in Delgado and López, p. 136.62 M. Moreno Alonso, La junta suprema de Sevilla (Seville, 2001), pp. 119–20.63 C. J. Esdaile, The Peninsular War: a New History (2002), p. 110.64 Republicanos y repúblicas en España, ed. J. A. Piqueras Arenas and M. Chust Calero (Madrid, 1996).65 Artola, España de Fernando VII, pp. 291–351; A. Moliner Prada, Revolución burguesa y movimiento juntero
en España (Lleida, 1997); Crisis del antiguo régimen y revolución liberal en España (1789–1845), ed. I. Castells andA. Moliner Prada (Barcelona, 2000), pp. 41–59.
66 J. García Fernández, El origen del municipio constitucional: autonomía y centralización en Francia y en España(Madrid, 1983), pp. 216–19.
67 Esdaile, Peninsular War, pp. 110–215; P. Rújula, ‘Guerra civil y pueblo en armas’, in La Guerra de laIndependencia española: una visión militar, i. 43–52.
68 Moreno, Junta suprema de Sevilla, pp. 119–20, 176–84, 251–60.69 E.g., Cuenca Toribio; E. Martínez Ruiz, La Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14): claves españolas en una crisis
europea (Madrid, 2007); R. García Cárcel, El sueño de la nación indomable: los mitos de la Guerra de la Independencia(Madrid, 2007); E. de Diego García, España: el infierno de Napoleón (Madrid, 2008). Some British historians havealso followed this approach (e.g., R. Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War,1808–14 (2008)).
464 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
historians have been averse to military history, and as the middle years of thePeninsular War saw the juntas dissolved and the French military ascendancy peak inJanuary 1812, they have therefore sought other ways of bridging the chronological gap,above all by undertaking exhaustive theoretical and political studies of the reformsof the liberales, especially the constitution of 1812. They have thus privileged therole played by the besieged Patriot provisional capital of Cádiz.70 More to the point,they have endowed modern historiography with an institutional interpretationof the Patriot struggle which has been simply breathtaking in its disavowal of theexperience of warfare.The importance of the constitution has been exaggerated evenwith regard to subsequent political modernity, and certainly in relation to narratives ofthe Peninsular War. In part this reflects the ongoing political engagement of Spanishscholars (several of the liberales, including the author of the constitution, Agustín deArgüelles, were themselves historians). Just as early nineteenth-century liberales strove invain to catechize the constitution through ceremony, altar and newspaper,71 which hasled one non-Hispanist to note its ‘fetishistic properties quite out of proportion toits real significance’,72 so have the Artola generation of historians given the documentprivileged, theoretical and Cádiz-centred treatment, proving reluctant to adjust theirgaze to political grass-roots level.
That said, revisionist studies, particularly in recent years, have undermined this‘fetishism’. In 1988 two generally institutional histories of Peninsular War politicswere published, which nonetheless revealed that constitutional oligarchs werevirtually unimpeachable, even when citizens protested corruption and other forms ofmalpractice.73 Having come at a time when Spanish democracy had only very recentlyfound its feet, this research helped to guide historians away from the comfortablenotion that the constitution of 1812 provided a blueprint for parliamentary democracy.Quite apart from its racialism, authoritarianism, five-stage indirect electoral system andotherwise anti-democratic nature74 (which led the contemporary self-exiled dissenterJosé María Blanco White to denounce it as ‘overly abstract’ and ‘making sense only toa liberal class of students, literati, merchants and officeholders’),75 the constitution,as later studies have revealed, was rendered meaningless by the social reality ofSpain. Thus, research in liberated Aragón has shown the constitution to have been anon-entity, as reforms at municipal level allowed ‘everything to change in order toremain the same’.76 Local studies in the Basque country, and the current author’s ownresearch in southern Spain, have likewise shown that the constitution strengthened theposition of existing local elites (known as caciques), who enlisted it as a shield against
70 For the best recent study of Patriot Cádiz, see J. Aragón Gómez, La vida cotidiana de la Guerra de laIndependencia en la provincial de Cádiz (Cádiz, 2005).
71 For a discussion of the decidedly limited success of anti-Napoleonic political catechisms, see E. Delivré,‘Pen and sword: political catechisms and resistance to Napoleon’, in Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots,Partisans and Land Pirates, ed. C. J. Esdaile (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 161–80.
72 A. Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871 (1999), p. 214.73 Town halls had the power to punish ‘slanderers’ if they were ‘proved wrong’ (P. Chavarri Sidera, Las elecciones
de diputados a las Cortes Generales y Extraordinarias (1810–13) (Madrid, 1988), p. 15). A more elaborate analysis ofhow the constitution empowered municipal oligarchs against villagers can be found in M. Lorente Sariñena,Las infracciones de la Constitución de 1812: un mecanismo de defensa de la constitución (Madrid, 1988).
74 Women, servants, foreigners (even naturalized ones), gypsies, cloistered monks and nuns, non-residentsoldiers, non-whites and anyone without a known occupation were denied the vote ( J. de Estebán, Lasconstituciones de España (Madrid, 1981), pp. 45–96).
75 M. Moreno Alonso, Blanco White: la obsesión de España (Seville, 1998), p. 470.76 F. J. Maestrojuán Catalán, ‘El período liberal y el regreso de Fernando VII’, in Maestrojuán, Guerra de la
Independencia, p. 238.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 465
the sort of social change that the Artola historians were desperate to impute.77 Theconstitution has been de-fetishized still further by recent studies of what we may termthe ‘vicissitudes of the Peninsular War’ – riotous soldiers and guerrilla bands, starvation,occupations and counter-occupations – which made even the most basic facets ofconstitutional governance, let alone elections, virtually impossible.78 Yet despite – orperhaps because of – its ephemeral and unworkable nature, the constitution ofCádiz continues to dazzle several Spanish historians who are determined to find in itthe ‘pinnacle of Spanish liberal expression’79 and a teleological shortcut to a betterhistorical reality.
Similar contingency-based revisionism may be observed in the question of thePatriot guerrilla war. Both nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives defendedthe Patriot guerrillas as the heroic incarnation of either national sovereignty orthrone-and-altar traditionalism. Even though some conservative historians like MuñozMaldonado and Gómez Arteche allowed their contemporary fears of ‘popular agency’Carlism and threats to the rights of property respectively to include a sideways lookat the Patriot partisan war, there was no Spanish equivalent of Napier’s invective.80 Asthe regular Spanish army earned so little glory in the Peninsular War, the exploits ofthe guerrillas thus rescued Spanish patriotism, and this in a fashion with which anineteenth-century Europe addicted to Romanticism could easily identify. But themost dynamic histories of the guerrillas came with the advent of the politicallyengaged historians, not all of whom were Spanish. Even though the Marxist historianEric Hobsbawm offered no empirical evidence, he nonetheless asserted the guerrillas’objectively social-revolutionary role as primitive rebels or ‘social bandits’.81 Equally, forJuan Pérez Garzón, the guerrillas of the Peninsular War and beyond were disinheritedpeasants forced by the liberal property revolution to become rural insurgents.82
The Artola historians in general have proved ready to accept the orthodox notion thatthe guerrillas were the armed will of the Spanish people, ennobled by the constitutionof 1812, and hence nothing less than physical proof of the advent of popularsovereignty.The most important and nuanced example of this progressive narrative hasbeen offered by Ronald Fraser, who, in mobilizing unrivalled demographic data, hasbreathed life into the otherwise obsolescent doctrine of the ‘people’s war’.83
Despite this, the orthodox notion that Patriot Spain waged a people’s war againstNapoleon has been deconstructed since the nineteen-nineties by both Spanish andBritish scholars.84 But whereas serious Spanish historians have admitted that the
77 C. Rubio Pobes, Revolución y tradición: el país vasco ante la revolución liberal y la construcción del Estado español,1808–68 (Madrid, 1996), pp. 10–78, 333–4; M. Lawrence, ‘Popular radicalism in Spain, 1808–44’ (unpublishedUniversity of Liverpool Ph.D. thesis, 2008), pp. 9–67.
78 F. J. Maestrojuán Catalán, Ciudad de vasallos, nación de heroes (Zaragoza: 1809–14) (Zaragoza, 2003), pp. 316–25;J. A. Pérez Juan, ‘Un proceso electoral en plena Guerra de la Independencia’, in La Guerra de la Independenciaespañola: una visión militar, ii. 203–10.
79 Castells and Moliner, p. 41.80 Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, pp. 1–26.81 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (1962), pp. 146–8; E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies
in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1974), pp. 13–26.82 J. S. Pérez Garzón, Milicia nacional y revolución burguesa: el prototipo madrileño, 1808–74 (Madrid, 1978),
pp. 10–89, 217, 260.83 R. Fraser, La maldita Guerra de España: historia social de la Guerra da la Independencia, 1808–14 (2006); R. Fraser,
Napoleon’s Cursed War (2008).84 In terms of this revisionist approach mention must also be made of the U.S. historian John Lawrence Tone
whose 1990s study argued that only the social conditions of upland Navarra allowed the Patriot guerrillacampaign to be based on genuine popular support (J. L.Tone, The Fatal Knot: the Guerrilla War in Navarre and theDefeat of Napoleon in Spain (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994).
466 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
opportunistic and ignoble motivations of the guerrillas were at least as important astheir idealistic and patriotic impulses, they have stopped short of really questioningcivilian support for their irregular resistance.85 On the contrary, Miguel Artola, ina recent praxis-based article, reaffirmed popular support as an essential preconditionwhich defined the ‘revolutionary’ and ‘total’ war against Napoleon.86 The BritishNapoleonic historian Charles Esdaile, on the other hand, has posed the mostfar-reaching challenge to that heady brew of peninsularity, Romanticism and politicswhich for so long has kept the Patriot guerrilla war at the centre of SpanishPeninsular War identity. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Esdaile has exposednot only the non-political (revolutionary or otherwise), contingent and subjectivemotivations driving those men who led or joined the guerrilla campaign, but also,more importantly, the indifferent and even hostile civilian attitude to their irregularresistance.87 Thus, the people were not part of the Peninsular War. Popular resistance,barring a few exceptions, really was brigandage.88 Rather the Spanish regular army,poorly regarded by Spanish progressives then and since, and despised by British andFrench combatants alike, maintained an enduring resistance against appalling odds ingrowing, imperfect and strategically vital co-ordination with its Anglo-Portugueseallies, while such guerrilla campaigns as really wore out the French were achieved bythe formal militarization of their operatives.89 Although this revisionism should notbe considered the ‘last word’ on an intrinsically complex matter, it remains to bechallenged in substance, not least because the latest surge in Spanish publications hastended to recycle the orthodox ‘people’s war’ theme, sometimes in a highly assertiveand uncritical manner.90
Esdaile has also wrenched military history away from the Anglocentrism whichcontinues to dominate several British narratives of the Peninsular War.Although DavidGates’s Spanish Ulcer established this welcome development in the nineteen-eighties,his work lacked the depth, breadth and innovation which might have come fromextensive empirical research. Otherwise, such popular British writers as Ian Fletcherand Ian Robertson, despite their other valuable contributions (especially in terms ofbiographies and geography respectively), have been marked by their passive, and inthe case of the latter explicit, exclusion of the Spanish half of the Allied victory.91
Robertson is an heir to Napier in his partiality. While he rightly points out therepeated and sometimes virtually hostile incompetence with which the Spaniardstreated their British allies, he shows little appreciation of Spanish grievances, nor of theimpossible socio-political pressures which blighted the Patriot war effort and whichonly new military history approaches can address. More to the point, Anglocentricwriters overlook the fact that even ill-disciplined and maladjusted forces can account
85 A. Moliner Prada, La guerrilla en la Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid, 2004); F. L. Díaz Torrejón, ‘Elmovimiento guerrillero en la Guerra de la Independencia’, in Dirección General de Relaciones Institucionales,La Guerra de la Independencia (1808–14): el pueblo español, su ejército y sus aliados frente a la ocupación napoleónica(Ministerio de Defensa, 2007), pp. 107–25.
86 M. Artola Gallego, ‘La guerra de guerrillas’, in Borreguero Beltrán, pp. 357–66.87 Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon.88 Esdaile, Popular Resistance, pp. 1–22.89 C. J. Esdaile, The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War: the Causes, Experience and Consequences of Military
Humiliation (Manchester, 1988); Esdaile, Peninsular War; Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon.90 E.g., F. Martínez Laínez, Como lobos hambrientos: los guerrilleros en la Guerra de la Independencia, 1808–14
(Madrid, 2007).91 For King and Country: the Letters and Diaries of John Mills, Coldstream Guards, 1811–14, ed. I. Fletcher
(Staplehurst, 1995); I. C. Robertson, Wellington Invades France: the Final Phase of the Peninsular War, 1813–14 (2003);I. C. Robertson, A Commanding Presence: Wellington in the Peninsula, 1808–14 (Stroud, 2008); Lipscombe.
Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14 467
for the lion’s share of an invading army’s casualties. According to widely acceptedstatistics compiled by the late nineteenth-century French historian Aristide Martinien,70 per cent of all French Peninsular War officer casualties were sustained in actionsin which no British troops were present, with 50 per cent caused by Spanish regulararmies and 20 per cent by such irregular episodes as guerrilla activity, prison breaks,riots and murders.92 Yet, it remains moot to predict when a sea change may occur inpopular Anglocentrism.Taking as a measure the success of Bernard Cornwell’s famousSharpe novels and subsequent television series (in which Spaniards only play bit-parts),it would seem clear that academic new military history approaches need to developfar greater momentum in order to effect a shift in British popular reception of thePeninsular War. In fairness to the British, several contemporary Spanish militaryhistorians repay their allies in kind. In this regard, the most egregious Anglophobe isthe franquista retired army officer Juan José Sañudo Bayón, whose study of the 1811battle of La Albuera unfairly and inaccurately misrepresents British participation, andthis in a manner which has sadly influenced subsequent Spanish histories.93 Althoughby no means all franquista military historians shared Sañudo’s myopic nationalism,94 theAnglophobic discourse remains strong among their generation.
In conclusion, then, this article has sought to explain how and why generations ofBritish patriotism and Spanish peninsularity conspired to make equitable histories ofthe Peninsular War impossible. Even today, residual nationalism in both Britain andSpain can still make the lot of the British Hispanist, or the Spanish Anglicist, a thanklessone. But this article has also shown how and why Peninsular War scholarship in bothcountries has been transformed since the second half of the twentieth century. Thehighly faulty, classically nineteenth-century discourses of Romanticism, nationalismand ‘Great Man’ narratives were replaced by less faulty and ideologically drivensocial histories. These, in turn, have been improved since the nineteen-ninetiesby contingency-based, empirical ‘new military history’ studies of the conflict. Theongoing popularity of crudely nationalistic ‘classical’ military histories in bothcountries, however, means that the new military history needs to continue putting thesociety back into war in addition to putting the war back into society. Nevertheless,Donald D. Horward’s unhappy admonition that the Peninsular War could not beaddressed in a single volume has now happily been answered, and not by one volume,but by many.
92 J. Planas Campos, ‘La contribución británica en la Guerra de la Independencia: una aproximacióncuantitativa’, Trienio: ilustración y liberalism, liv (Madrid, 2009), 5–21.
93 J. J. Sañudo Bayón, La Albuera 1811 ¡Glorioso campo de sufrimiento! (Madrid, 2006).94 E.g., J. Priego López, Guerra de la Independencia (6 vols., Madrid, 1972).
468 Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808–14
