Peninsular Eyewitnesses: The Experience of War in Spain and Portugal 1808-1813

Napoleon's vain act of placing his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne in 1808 cost him an ally as the Spanish populace rose against their French-installed monarch. That in turn led to two invasions of the Iberian Peninsula that would ultimately cost the French army a total of 500,000 casualties—and that brought an Anglo-Portuguese army, commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, right to the French border by the end of 1813.
 
In Peninsular Eyewitnesses Charles Esdaile, a leading Napoleonic historian with a chair at the University of Liverpool, supplements his descriptions of the military aspects of those campaigns with the personal recollections of soldiers who fought in them. These memoirs come from French, British, Germans, Poles and even an American adventurer, although the author admits his failure to find one from a Portuguese participant. His purpose, it soon becomes clear, is not to write about battles or that which other authors have already described, perhaps better than he, but to show the war's terrible consequences on the fate of common people.
 
As Francisco de Goya did on canvas, so Esdaile uses his compilation of personal documents to focus on the cruelty of that war. One example is the punishment of a small village by the French governor of Avila, Abel Hugo, father of the writer Victor Hugo. The Spanish population's reaction to the French invaders brought the words guerrilla and junta into the English language. Until the rising of the people of Madrid on May 2, 1808, the conduct of the Napoleonic Wars had retained a degree of medieval chivalry. Those vestiges were swept away thereafter.
 
The author devotes special attention to the second siege of Saragosa, which became a Spanish Stalingrad. Marshal Jean Lannes began his effort to break through the Spanish defenses in the usual way by advancing his trenches until the first houses were reached. The houses were then mined and blown up, defenders and all. The French soldiers, warned when the mines were to go off, held themselves in readiness and when the explosion took place, they dashed over the ruins, killing everyone they encountered. Once they had established themselves behind what bits of wall remained, the French improvised barricades from furniture and beams, and constructed passages amid the ruins for the sappers, who would then mine the next house. When Saragosa surrendered on February 21, 1809, 54,000 Spaniards had died—fewer than 20,000 of them soldiers.
 
Readers interested in the evolution of total war in modern European history will find Peninsular Eyewitness most helpful and interesting.
 
Thomas Zacharis (ed. H.D.W.)