resulting from Napoleon's Continental System and (particularly on the
part of the Church and the landowners) resistance to the kind of socio
economic changes the pro-French faction wanted to introduce. The
Bayonne coup, though often cited as the cause of the uprising, was the
occasion rather than the deep motor of insurrection. Napoleon's lack of
imagination was palpable. He seems to have assumed that 1808 in Spain
could simply be a rerun of 1789 in France, with a nascent bourgeoisie
eager to seize power; just a little social analysis would have revealed to
him that this enlightened faction of Spanish bourgeoisie was too small to
serve as the social basis of state power.
For anyone who cared to look at Spain with an unjaundiced eye there
were clear and ominous signs of things to come. England's aim was to see
that the insurrection did not splinter into warlordism, so London backed
the formation of a national junta under Jovellanos, which issued
pronunciamentos at Seville and Cadiz, declaring war on France in the
name of Ferdinand VII. After some hesitation, the British also decided to
send a 9,ooo-strong army to the Peninsula under General Arthur
Wellesley and to supply the revolutionary juntas through Gibraltar.
Napoleon was soon disabused of his notion that pacifying Spain was a
mere police operation. Bessieres won a victory over the rebels at Medina
del Campo in Galicia on 14 July, which allowed Joseph to enter Madrid,
but the new king was taken aback by his icy reception and wrote about it
in some alarm to his brother. But the French failed to take Zaragoza in
Aragon; in Catalonia General Duchesne was bottled up in Barcelona; in
the south-east, to Napoleon's fu ry, Money fell back from Valencia to
Ocana.
Worse was to fo llow. Napoleon gave the task of conquering Andalucia
to General Dupont and a corps of conscripts. Dupont moved down from
Toledo, with Cadiz as his objective, and sacked Cordoba. But then
everything went wrong. Half-starved after the severing of its supply lines,
heavily outnumbered by the rebels and suffering the burden of Dupont's
'horrible generalship' (Napoleon's phrase), this 19,000-strong army
surrendered to the junta forces under Castafios on 22 July at Bailen, at
the fo ot of the Sierra Morena. This was the first defeat of the Emperor's
troops in open country but it was scarcely a victory over the elite of
Austerlitz, as the Spanish imagined. In panic Joseph quit Madrid and
skulked on the French border.
Already the war was acquiring the savage character that would make it
infamous in the annals of man's inhumanity to man. After Bailen the
Spanish violated the terms of capitulation by leaving 1o,ooo troops to
perish on a barren island because, as they put it, they saw no reason to
marcin
(Marcin)
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