opposition arose, the task of suppressing it would be a military walkover;
and lack of imagination in that he could not understand that other
peoples could be just as much motivated by national pride as the French
were. He failed to see the quicksands yawning before him or to intuit the
vibrancy of a nation of twelve million inhabitants in arms. By no stretch
of the imagination did the Spanish adventure answer French national
interests. It blew the notion of 'natural frontiers' sky high and emphasized
the divide between genuinely French national needs and the purely
dynastic ambitions of the Bonapartes. Economically, the chance for loot
aside, the Spanish incursion made no sense: a few businessmen looked
fo rward to seizing Iberian wool and Latin American silver, but even these
hopes proved chimerical. France had been grudgingly behind Napoleon
during the wars of r8o5-o7 but almost universally opposed this foray
south of the Pyrenees; the opposition was perhaps especially marked in
Bordeaux and the south-west of France. Above all, Spain drove a wedge
between Napoleon and the notables - those bourgeois pillars of his rule.
From May r8o8 the Emperor was on a downhill slide towards ultimate
disaster. On the second of the month there was an uprising in Madrid,
which Murat suppressed bloodily, and which has been immortalized in
Goya's painting. But this was merely the first of many outbreaks. On 20
May the pro-French Governor of Badajoz was murdered by a mob; two
days later the same fate overtook the Governor of Cartagena. On 23 May
the province of Valencia rose, on the 24th Asturias, on the 27th Seville;
Oviedo rebelled on the 24th, Zaragoza on the 25th, Galicia on the 3oth,
Catalonia on 7 June. By what seemed like chain reaction the splitting
molecule of revolution produced a mighty holocaust. Napoleon should
have realized the strength of fe eling in Spain and cut his losses but, like a
fanatic, redoubled his efforts when he had lost sight of his aim. Murat
claimed that it was the Emperor's attitude that was the cause of the
prairie-fire rapidity of the Spanish revolt. When Murat complained about
the difficulty of getting supplies, Napoleon replied impatiently that he
should live off the land and take by force whatever he wanted: he was
tired of a general who 'at the head of so,ooo troops asks for things instead
of taking them'. Murat claimed that he sat stunned when he read the
letter as if a tile had fallen on his head.
Who, then, were these Spanish revolutionaries and what were their
aims? At first the different risings were separate, manifestations of
frustrated localism, using anger about Bayonne and Madrid on 2 May as
pretexts; local grievances, expectations and disappointments found a
focus in acute xenophobia and were legitimated in anti-French propa
ganda portraying Ferdinand as 'the Desired One'. Initial resistance was
marcin
(Marcin)
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