[1808 - 1814] Peninsular War (War of Independence)

The year is 1808. On the dusty roads of Spain, the sun beats down on columns of marching men. Their blue greatcoats and polished brass are foreign, but their standards are those of an ally: Napoleon Bonaparte's France. To the common Spaniard—the farmer tilling his arid soil, the artisan in his cramped city workshop—these soldiers are merely passing through. The official story, spun by the bewigged and powdered courtiers in Madrid, is that they are on their way to punish Britain's stubborn ally, Portugal. It is a necessary, if slightly unsettling, inconvenience. Spain, at this moment, is a kingdom adrift. Its monarch, Carlos IV, is a well-meaning but weak ruler, more interested in hunting than in statecraft. Real power lies with his queen's favourite, the ambitious Manuel Godoy. The king's own son, Ferdinand, conspires in the shadows, eager to claim the throne. It is a court rotting from the inside, a perfect stage for the grand ambitions of Napoleon. The French Emperor, master of Europe, sees not an ally to be respected, but a prize to be taken. The charade ends in the French city of Bayonne. In a political masterstroke of breathtaking cynicism, Napoleon summons both King Carlos and Prince Ferdinand. He plays father against son, exposing their greed and incompetence, until he has bullied them both into renouncing their rights to the Spanish throne. In their place, he installs his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte. The French troops already stationed across Spain are no longer guests; they are an army of occupation. Napoleon believed he had conquered a country with a stroke of a pen. He had, in fact, ignited a nation. The spark catches in Madrid on the Second of May, 1808. The *Dos de Mayo*. When French soldiers attempt to escort the last members of the Spanish royal family out of the capital, the people of Madrid erupt. It is not an army that rises, but a city. Shopkeepers, labourers, and housewives flood the streets, armed with kitchen knives, farming tools, and raw courage. They attack the French patrols and their fearsome Mameluke cavalry, whose curved scimitars and swirling robes add a terrifying, exotic horror to the day. The reprisals are immediate and savage. The following day, the *Tres de Mayo*, hundreds of Spanish civilians are rounded up and executed by firing squad against a blood-streaked wall. The artist Francisco de Goya would later immortalize these scenes, dipping his brush not in paint, but in raw fury and despair. His canvases show us the chaos of the street fighting and the stark terror of the executions, a lantern illuminating the white-shirted innocence of a man about to die. This uprising signals the beginning of a new, horrifying kind of conflict. What followed was not one war, but two, fought simultaneously on the same ravaged landscape. First, there was the conventional war. The remnants of the Spanish regular army, often poorly supplied but fiercely proud, fought pitched battles against the French. They were soon joined by an unlikely ally: Great Britain. Red-coated British soldiers under the command of men like Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, landed in Portugal. Armed with their deadly "Brown Bess" muskets, they could stand in disciplined lines and unleash devastating volleys of fire, a "thin red line" that the French found incredibly difficult to break. But beneath this formal war of strategy and battle lines, a second, more intimate war festered. The Spanish called it *la guerrilla*, the "little war." This was the war of the ordinary person. It was fought by priests leading their parishioners, by farmers who knew every ravine and goat path, by bandits who turned their predatory skills against the invaders. The *guerrilleros* did not wear uniforms. They would appear as if from the earth itself, strike a French supply convoy or a lone courier, and then melt back into the civilian population. They made the vast, rugged landscape of Spain a weapon. For the French soldiers, garrisoned far from home, it was a nightmare. A friendly wave from a peasant could be a signal for an ambush. A shared bottle of wine could be poisoned. Every shadow could hold a man with a knife. Life for everyone was brutal. The French, frustrated by an enemy they could not see, resorted to terror. Villages suspected of aiding the guerrillas were burned to the ground, their inhabitants massacred. The guerrillas, in turn, offered no mercy. Captured French soldiers were often tortured and killed in horrific ways. Famine stalked the land as fields went unplanted and supply lines were cut. In a country already divided between a wealthy landowning aristocracy and a vast, impoverished peasantry, the war shattered what little social cohesion remained. This was the "Spanish Ulcer," as Napoleon himself would later call it. A conflict that bled his Empire of men and resources. Over the six years of war, it consumed more than 200,000 of his soldiers. Spanish military and civilian deaths may have soared to half a million, out of a population of just over 11 million. The country was being torn apart, but it refused to break. The Spanish people, fighting for "King and Country," rallied around the idea of their captive monarch, Ferdinand VII, whom they called *El Deseado*—"The Desired One." The tide truly turned in 1812. As Napoleon marched his Grand Army into the frozen wastes of Russia, he drew his best troops from Spain. Wellington seized the opportunity. His Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish army went on the offensive, winning decisive victories at Salamanca and Vitoria. By 1814, the last French soldier had been driven back across the Pyrenees. Spain had won. It had bled and starved and suffered, but it had thrown off the greatest military power in Europe. It had forged a new, fierce sense of national identity in the crucible of war. But the victory was hollow. The country was in ruins, its economy shattered, its people traumatized and divided. And when *El Deseado*, their beloved King Ferdinand VII, finally returned, he would prove to be not a saviour, but a tyrant who would plunge Spain into a new century of civil strife. The war was over, but Spain's troubles were just beginning.