simply ignored his directives. Elsewhere the Emperor never allowed the
feuding of the marshals to interfere with military efficiency and endanger
operations, but in Spain he condoned a situation where the jealous baton
toting prima donnas often refused to cooperate with each other.
Napoleon compounded his mistake in allowing the marshals a free rein
by assigning some of the most rapacious of them to Spain. The one
success story was Suchet in Catalonia, but this was because of his lack of
rapacity. Where Soult and Massena pillaged and looted high and low in
their crazed quest for booty and ill-gotten gains - Soult indeed in his
barely disguised ambition for the Spanish crown came close to treason -
Suchet governed Catalonia benevolently, prevented looting and did not
use the province as a mere milch-cow. The result was that he won
considerable acceptance and support in the province and was never
defeated in battle. Even here, Napoleon could not let well enough alone,
for he prevented Suchet consolidating his grip on Aragon by ordering
him to conquer Valencia. Having completed the conquest of Catalonia in
1811, Suchet received his marshal's baton, but not before his champion at
court, Duroc, explained to the Emperor that the few setbacks he
sustained were all the fault of Joseph's incompetence.
But the greatest of all Napoleon's errors in Spain was his loyalty to
Joseph. Even when he finally saw sense and re�lized that the solution in
Spain was Joseph's abdication and the restoration of Ferdinand, his
brother managed to talk him round after a long interview when the 'King
of Spain' went to France to plead his case in person. For Frederic
Masson it was in Spain above all that Napoleon showed himself as the
'victim of the family sense, of the Corsican spirit, or primogeniture'.
Others, surely with justification, speak of a 'brother-complex', making
Napoleon absurdly weak when it came to Joseph. On St Helena he saw
the truth when he told Las Cases: 'I believe that had I been willing to
sacrifice Joseph, I would have succeeded.'
It would not be fair to conclude on Napoleon's mistakes in Spain
without mentioning an alternative view of Napoleon's involvement there,
which is that he was better informed than he seemed to be but was in
thrall to a 'domino effect' of his own imagination. According to this
jigsaw puzzle view of the Napoleonic schema, the Emperor's credibility in
Spain was on the line in a more systematic sense. Napoleon had always
had a tendency to invade country X because his thoughts were really on
country Y. So, for instance, Holland had to be invaded to secure
Belgium, Germany to secure the Rhine, Naples and Rome to safeguard
Piedmont and Lombardy, and so on. According to this view, the invasion
of Spain was supposed to overawe Austria but, when it signally fa iled to
marcin
(Marcin)
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