Citizen Emperor (59 page)

The invasion of the Peninsula has to be seen within a wider, international context: it was also about control of Latin America, as well as about a future partition of the Ottoman Empire.
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Napoleon annexed Tuscany, Parma, Lucca and other central Italian states in March 1807, and he annexed the Kingdom of Etruria in March 1808 as a way of controlling the ports of Taranto and Brindisi, all with a view to organizing an expedition to the Mediterranean.
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We know this is what he had in mind when he ordered Rear-Admiral Decrès to concentrate the fleet at Taranto with the aim of transporting 30,000 men in October 1808 to (possibly) Tunis, Algiers or Egypt.
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In the winter of 1807–8, Napoleon also made plans to invade Sicily, but suddenly cancelled them in favour of an expedition to reinforce the garrison at Corfu.
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Corfu was a good point from which to launch a naval invasion of Egypt.

And for that the navies of Portugal and Spain were important. One of the secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit called for the uniting of all European fleets in a concerted attack against the Royal Navy. It is an indication that Napoleon was still thinking in terms of defeating Britain, or at least of contesting its domination of the high seas. In July 1807, a combination of the French, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese fleets would have given the French numerical superiority in ships of the line.
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But in the erratic environment that was early nineteenth-century European diplomacy, circumstances could change very rapidly. In September 1807, the British again attacked Copenhagen and captured seventeen Danish ships of the line along with eleven frigates; a small number were deemed unseaworthy and burnt, but it added greatly to the British naval arsenal.
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In 1805, Sweden entered into an alliance with Britain, adding an extra twelve ships of the line, which then proceeded to blockade the Russian port of Kronstadt, disabling a further twenty Russian ships of the line.
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And as we have seen, General Junot, sent to seize the Portuguese fleet at the end of 1807, did not arrive in time; a further twenty ships (ten Russian, ten Portuguese) were lost as they either sailed for Brazil or were blocked up in Portuguese ports. Another thirty ships were lost with the invasion of Spain (including some French ships that had found harbour in Cadiz after Trafalgar), seized by the British.

In all then, nearly one hundred ships of the line were lost to Napoleon before he could get his hands on them, a figure that makes Trafalgar pale in comparison. In order to make up the losses, he launched an ambitious shipbuilding programme. The goal was 150 ships of the line, a figure he was well under way to achieving by the time he invaded Russia in 1812 and which would have given him something close to a 50 per cent numerical superiority over the British.
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Britain was never able to have more than 113 ships of the line at sea at any one time, and even then they were often badly undermanned. One could be forgiven for thinking that the French ships were poorer in quality than the British, but that was not always the case. Although reluctant to fight, because they were unable to escape the British blockades often enough to put to sea for exercise, more than a few French captains knew how to manoeuvre.
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‘A Pitiful Intrigue’

Rather than travel to Madrid, Napoleon expected the Spanish royal family to come to him, or at least to meet him halfway, on French territory, at Bayonne (a stone’s throw from Biarritz and the Spanish border). Fernando had to appear before Napoleon as a means of letting him know who was boss, a tactic the Emperor had used on previous occasions. General Savary, a sort of Mr Fix-it, who often did Napoleon’s dirty work, was sent to Madrid to persuade Carlos IV and now Fernando VII to accept Napoleon’s ‘mediation’, and to lure Fernando to a meeting outside France.
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Savary told Fernando that if he wanted to be recognized by France, he had to meet the Emperor. To sweeten the pill, and at the suggestion of Savary, Napoleon wrote to Fernando saying that he was prepared to recognize him as the legitimate King of Spain, if his father had not abdicated under duress, and that he should come to Bayonne so that they could discuss the matter.
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On 10 April 1808, much to the disappointment of the Madrilenian crowds, Fernando set out to meet Napoleon, leaving behind a
junta
(council) to govern in his absence; Carlos and Maria Luisa set out a few days later.

Napoleon was already there, having arrived on 14 April after a tour through France from Bordeaux; he was still popular if the size of the crowds that turned out to see and greet him are anything to go by.
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At Bayonne, he took up residence in the Château de Marracq – ‘very cramped and very unpleasant’
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– about a league from Bayonne. It was summer, but it rained a good deal and the flies were a pest; ‘one couldn’t yawn without swallowing one’, noted Josephine’s lady-in-waiting. When Fernando arrived six days later, after travelling through a country in which French troops were already very present, he was received with all the pomp due his rank. If Napoleon’s public show of affection were anything to go by, Fernando could be forgiven for thinking that the warnings about his character were exaggerated. Very quickly, however, Napoleon let it be known (through Savary) that he had decided the Bourbons would no longer reign in Spain.
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One can only imagine the stupefaction with which Fernando must have greeted this announcement. Over the next week, his advisers attempted to convince Napoleon not only of the injustice of such an act, but also of how politically inept it would be. ‘The war in Spain’, warned one of Fernando’s advisors, ‘will be an indestructible hydra, which . . . may in time cause the destruction of your house.’
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The negotiations, carried out between Fernando’s representatives and Napoleon,
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stalled until the arrival of the former’s parents on 30 April, received with all the honours due a royal couple.

The next phase of this tragi-comic farce involved Napoleon putting Fernando in the same room as his father so that a confrontation could take place. The first family reunion, on 1 May, was stormy to say the least. Carlos went so far as to hit his son during an argument while his mother demanded of Napoleon that Fernando be hung.
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When Napoleon organized another family reunion on 5 May, after receiving news of the uprising against the French in Madrid, Carlos told Fernando that he was responsible for the blood that had flowed in Madrid and that if he did not give up his right to the throne, he would be treated as a traitor. Carlos was playing into Napoleon’s hands. Rather than reconcile father and son, Napoleon insisted that Fernando abdicate in favour of his father. He did this by deploying the usual range of emotions he had developed to bully people into submission: first persuasion and entreaties, followed by threats and more threats, and then when that did not work the abandoning of all semblance of reason as he worked himself into a rage. At one point he is supposed to have told Fernando, ‘It is necessary to choose between abdication and death.’
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Eventually, Fernando acceded to the pressure and abdicated, handing back the throne to Carlos. Napoleon then insisted that Carlos abdicate, something that was much easier to accomplish, in favour of himself. Napoleon in turn gave the crown to his brother. The royal couple were placed under virtual house arrest, first at Talleyrand’s domain, the Château de Valençay, about sixty kilometres south of Blois, where Talleyrand was obliged to entertain them – Napoleon even suggested that Mme de Talleyrand could bring five or six women with her in the hope that Ferdinand would form a liaison with one of them
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– then at the Château de Compiègne, then at Mazargues near Marseilles, and finally at the Barberini Palace in Rome. Fernando stayed at Valençay, where he was to spend the rest of the war.

It had unfolded like a family melodrama worthy of a twentieth-century soap opera.
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Murat was given the lieutenancy of the kingdom while the crisis was being sorted out. In other words, Napoleon considered himself to be above Carlos, and that he had every right to intervene in the country’s domestic problems.
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‘Glorious Insurrection’

Napoleon’s intervention in Spain has been almost universally condemned, whether by contemporaries who lived through it or by historians writing about it. It is considered to be the reef upon which the Napoleonic vessel foundered.
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Napoleon believed he knew how the Spanish would react to French intervention in the dispute. In most other countries the French had entered where there was a threat of political instability and unrest. In Switzerland, Italy, Holland and parts of Germany, the French presence had been, if not welcomed, then tolerated by the local elites as it guaranteed law and order. There was no reason to think Spain would act any differently, especially since Napoleon had been a reasonably popular figure among the Spanish elites before 1808.
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The Emperor expected Spain to behave, therefore, like the other ‘great’ powers and for the whole campaign to be a walkover.
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That image was to change within a few weeks.

French troops were able to occupy the key cities in the country without any armed opposition, while the
junta
in Madrid pledged loyalty to Napoleon and his brother Joseph. If there was one thing that nobody expected – and historians have used much ink writing about it – it was the uprising of the people against their new masters. The bloody insurrection now known as the Second of May (Dos de Mayo) had been more or less planned in advance, orchestrated by sections of the Anglophile, pro-Fernando Spanish nobility, although many of the events on the day were spontaneous, supposedly triggered by an attempt to prevent the son and daughter of Carlos IV from leaving Madrid. It is also possible that the French provoked an uprising in order to ‘set an example’ by crushing the insurgents.
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As many women took part in the uprising as men. In the battles that were fought in the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta de Toledo, women from the popular districts were reportedly seen running into the French cavalry with knives and scissors in order to stab the horses’ bellies.
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The uprising in Madrid on 2 May was the trigger for a general insurrection throughout Spain in late May and early June.
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In the days and weeks that followed, uprisings occurred in most of the major urban centres. The French response was merciless. On his own initiative, Murat ordered all prisoners taken with arms to be shot, any person owning a weapon to be arrested and shot, any assembly of eight or more people to be dispersed by gunfire, any person distributing seditious pamphlets or literature to be looked upon as an English agent and shot, and any village in which a French soldier had been killed to be burnt to the ground.
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In Madrid, the French ordered 5,000 locals, anyone they could grab, to be shot. They found a convenient place for the executions at the Prado (just outside the present Hotel Ritz), at the Church of Buen Suceso and on the Príncipe Pió hill. We can see the executioners at work in Goya’s
The Third of May
, considered by some to be one of his greatest paintings, even though it was probably not done until six years after the event. It is, nevertheless, a wonderful representation of human brutality and the suffering of its victims. If Murat’s troops are portrayed as faceless automatons, lined up ready to fire, the victims are caught in different poses awaiting their deaths: a monk is praying, another man covers his eyes, a defiant man in a white shirt opens his arms like Christ on the cross as if to say, ‘Here is my chest, shoot me.’

The number of deaths resulting from the insurrection and the subsequent repression is difficult to determine. We know that somewhere between 150 and 200 French soldiers were killed by the
madrileños
, and that the likely number of Spanish dead was around 1,000.
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The French ran through the streets killing anyone they found armed.
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Those who resisted the French were bakers, locksmiths, shoemakers, coachmen, students, glassblowers and muleteers, according to the lists of the dead compiled afterwards, and now held at the Municipal Archive of Madrid.
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At first the
Moniteur
, which reported that ‘cool-headed observers’, French and Spanish, could see trouble coming, spoke of ‘several thousand of the country’s worst subjects’ killed during the repression, but later, in order to scotch any rumours about the extent of the savagery employed, the newspaper published an article claiming that those killed were ‘all rebel insurgents and common people who had rioted; not one peaceful man died, and the loss of Spaniards is not as great as it had been previously thought’.
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