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Spain The Napoleonic Era
Charles IV (r. 1788-1807) retained the trappings of his
father's enlightened despotism, but he was dominated by
his
wife's favorite, a guards officer, Manuel de Godoy, who at
the
age of twenty-five was chief minister and virtual dictator
of
Spain. When the French National Assembly declared war in
1793,
Godoy rode the popular wave of reaction building in Spain
against
the French Revolution and joined the coalition against
France.
Spanish arms suffered repeated setbacks, and in 1796 Godoy
shifted allies and joined the French against Britain.
Godoy,
having been promised half of Portugal as his personal
reward,
became Napoleon Bonaparte's willing puppet. Louisiana,
Spanish
since 1763, was restored to France. A regular subsidy was
paid to
France from the Spanish treasury, and 15,000 Spanish
troops were
assigned to garrisons in northern Europe.
Military reverses and economic misery caused a popular
uprising
in March 1808 that forced the desmissal of Godoy and the
abdiction of Charles IV. The king was succeeded by his
son,
Ferdinand VII (r. 1808; 1814-33). The French forced
Ferdinand to
abdicate almost immediately, however, and Joseph
Bonaparte,
Napoleon's brother, was named king of Spain. A large
French army
was moved in to support the new government and to invade
Britain's ally, Portugal, from Spanish soil. The
afrancesados, a small but influential group of
Spaniards
who favored reconstructing their country on the French
model,
welcomed the Bonapartist regime.
To ingratiate himself with the afrancesados,
Joseph
Bonaparte proclaimed the dissolution of religious houses.
The
defense of the Roman Catholic Church, which had long been
attacked by successive Spanish governments, now became the
test
of Spanish patriotism and the cause around which
resistance to
the French rallied. The citizens of Zaragoza held out
against
superior French forces for more than a year. In Asturias,
local
forces took back control of their province, and an army of
Valencians temporarily forced the French out of Madrid.
The War
of Independence (1808-14), as the Iberian phase of the
Napoleonic
wars is known in Spanish historiography, attained the
status of a
popular crusade that united all classes, parties, and
regions in
a common struggle. It was a war fought without rules or
regular
battlelines. The Spanish painter, Goya, depicted the
brutality
practiced on both sides.
The British dispatched an expeditionary force,
originally
intended to occupy part of Spanish America, to the Iberian
Peninsula in 1808. In the next year, a larger contingent
under
Arthur Wellesley, later duke of Wellington, followed.
Elements of
the Spanish army held Cadiz, the only major city not taken
by the
French, but the countryside belonged to the guerrillas,
who held
down 250,000 of Napoleon's best troops under Marshal
Nicholas
Soult, while Wellington waited to launch the offensive
that was
to cause the defeat of the French at Vitoria (1813).
Data as of December 1988
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