Battle of Bailén

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Bailén, fought in July 1808 near a small village by the Guadalquivir river in southern Spain, produced something Europe had not seen since 1801: a sizable French Imperial army forced to lay down its arms. General Pierre Dupont de l'Etang, commanding more than 20,000 men, surrendered to Spanish forces under General Francisco Javier Castaños in what became the first open-field defeat of a Napoleonic army. Castaños handed his sword back that morning, and Dupont reportedly said he had never lost a pitched battle in more than twenty engagements. Castaños replied that he had never been in one before in his life. That exchange captures something essential about Bailén: a supposedly invincible war machine, undone by overconfidence, plunder, thirst, and a series of miscommunications that left 17,000 French soldiers marching into Spanish captivity. How a ragged column that Napoleon expected to take a mere promenade ended up triggering the War of the Fifth Coalition against France is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. Napoleon's Spanish Gamble

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  Thousands of French troops had marched into Spain months earlier, ostensibly to support an invasion of Portugal, but Napoleon used the opportunity to move against the Spanish royal family itself. A coup d'etat backed by French support forced Charles IV from his throne in favour of his son Ferdinand VII, and then in April 1808 Napoleon removed both men to Bayonne, secured their abdications, and installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain and the Indies. On the 26th of May, Joseph was proclaimed king in absentia, his envoys receiving the formal acclamations of Spanish notables while the people of Madrid seethed. The uprising by Madrid's citizens had already broken out on the 2nd of May, killing 150 French soldiers before Marshal Joachim Murat's elite Imperial Guards and Mamluk cavalry violently stamped it out. Guerrillas poured down from the mountains and seized the main roads, delaying Joseph's entry into his new capital. Outside Madrid, the bulk of the French army, 80,000 strong, could hold only a narrow strip of central Spain. Napoleon, having little respect for Spanish opponents, decided that swift flying columns dispatched to pacify the major cities would settle the matter. He was wrong about that.

• 3. Dupont Marches South

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  Divisional-General Pierre Dupont de l'Etang received orders to lead 13,000 men south toward Seville and ultimately toward the port of Cadiz, where Admiral Francois Rosilly's fleet sat vulnerable to the Royal Navy. Dupont's corps was drawn largely from second-line forces: provisional and reserve formations originally intended for internal police duties or garrison service in Prussia, troops Napoleon's planners regarded as adequate for what they expected to be a mere demonstration. This force captured the bridge at Alcolea in their first formal Andalusian engagement, sweeping past Spanish troops under Colonel Pedro de Echarvarri, and entered Cordoba that same afternoon. The army then ransacked Cordoba for four days. A French surgeon attached to the force later described the consequences in a passage recorded by Larchey: the little army carried enough baggage for 150,000 men, with mere captains requiring wagons drawn by four mules and at least fifty wagons per battalion. The surgeon concluded bluntly that they owed their defeat to the greed of their generals. Dupont retreated toward the Sierra Morena encumbered by some 500 wagons of loot and 1,200 ill men, in sweltering heat, counting on help from Madrid that was very slow to materialize.

• 4. Spain Organizes

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  General Francisco Javier Castaños, commanding the Spanish field army at San Roque, travelled to Seville to negotiate with the Seville Junta, the patriotic assembly committed to resisting French incursions, and to coordinate the province's combined forces. Setting up a general headquarters in Utrera, Castaños organized the Army of Andalusia into four divisions under Generals Theodor von Reding, Antonio Malet, the Marquis of Coupigny, Félix Jones, and a reserve under Manuel Lapena. Coupigny's staff included a young officer named San Martin, then a captain in the Spanish Army. Reding, Governor of Malaga, would prove the most consequential of these commanders. While Dupont stalled at Andujar with his two remaining divisions, attempting to master the strategic Madrid-Seville highway, Castanos' four divisions advanced steadily from the south and guerrillas from Granada moved to block the road to the sierra. General Louis Liger-Belair, with 1,500 men, held a forward post at Mengibar on the south bank of the Guadalquivir. Dupont's defenses there inspired little confidence: the Guadalquivir was fordable at many points and open to fire from the surrounding hills. Six hundred French soldiers fell ill during a fortnight's stay from drinking the river's putrid waters.

• 5. The French Come Apart

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  General Dominique Vedel, commanding Dupont's 2nd Infantry Division, had been dispatched south from Toledo on the 19th of June with 6,000 men, 700 horse, and 12 guns to reopen communications with Dupont across the Sierra Morena. After storming a Spanish blocking force at the Puerta del Rey, losing 17 dead or wounded, Vedel pushed south and linked up with Dupont, reestablishing contact after a month of silence. But the orders Vedel carried from Madrid directed Dupont to stop his march on Cadiz and fall back northeast, waiting for reinforcements that would be freed once Zaragoza and Valencia capitulated. Those capitulations never came. Marshal Moncey had lost 1,000 men in a failed assault on Valencia's walls and withdrawn in disgust. Zaragoza shook off repeated French assaults and vowed to fight to the death. Savary, who had taken command of the French garrison in Spain and whom one account described as more distinguished as Minister of Police than as any field commander, continued issuing vague promises of reinforcements. Napoleon himself wrote lightly that even if Dupont suffered a setback, he would simply have to come back over the sierra. That confidence would prove disastrously misplaced. Over the days that followed, Vedel made a series of exhausting and counter-productive forced marches in response to false intelligence about Spanish movements, creating an enormous gap between his division and Dupont's main force that would prove impossible to close in time.

• 6. The Battle Itself

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  At dawn on the 19th of July, Dupont's vanguard under Brigadier Theodore Chabert made contact with Reding's leading elements just short of Bailen. Reding, who had crossed the Guadalquivir and seized the town of Bailen, reacted with what one account describes as promptitude and skill, dissolving his columns and drawing up a defensive line with 20 guns in an olive grove intersected with deep ravines roughly two miles from the French main body. Chabert, badly underestimating the force before him, charged his 3,000 men into Reding's two full divisions and was repulsed with heavy losses. Dupont then committed his troops piecemeal across three separate assaults, without massing a reserve, expecting to be overtaken at any moment by Castanos' columns approaching from the west. Brigadier Claude Francois Dupres fell mortally wounded leading a charge against the Walloon Guards on the Spanish left. On the right, French cuirassiers broke into the Spanish line and sabred the gunners, but the defenders extended their line, maintained a constant fire, and compelled the French to abandon the guns they had briefly taken. At 10:00 a.m. Dupont launched a third attack led by General Claude Marie Joseph Pannetier's brigade, reinforced by the Sailors of the Imperial Guard, numbering only 300 men but described by General Foy as troops whom no fears could ever make falter. Dupont, wounded in the hip himself, grouped his exhausted regiments around the Guard battalion in a final effort to break through. The assault pierced the first Spanish lines. But when the French needed reserves, Dupont had none, and they were forced back down the slope a third time. Dupont's Swiss regiments, formerly in Spanish service, defected with their arms to their former masters, and Castanos' force finally arrived and overtook the French rearguard along the Rumblar tributary.

• 7. Surrender and Its Consequences

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  Vedel's division arrived during the closing moves of the battle, mistaking Reding's Spaniards at Bailen for Dupont's own vanguard. A brief engagement followed in which Vedel's men took a knoll and 1,500 Spanish prisoners. But the Spanish regulars under Colonel Francisco Soler held the strongpoint at San Cristobal against all attacks, blocking any path to Dupont. Two Spanish officers approached Vedel under a flag of truce to announce that Dupont had proposed a suspension of arms. Vedel replied that he cared nothing about that and intended to attack. Only after Castanos arrived and Spanish commanders threatened to massacre the French soldiers did Dupont compel Vedel to return and lay down his arms. The surrender terms stipulated that both forces, totalling 17,000 men, would be repatriated to France. The Spanish did not honor those terms. Most prisoners were shipped first to prison hulks in Cadiz harbour, then many to the uninhabited island of Cabrera in the Balearics, where the Spanish government, barely able to supply its own armies, could not properly feed them. Cannibalism was alleged during periods when supply ships failed to arrive. On the 6th of July 1814, the remaining survivors returned to France: fewer than half of the original prisoners were still alive. Napoleon's fury fell not only on the captivity terms but on the commanders responsible. Dupont and Vedel returned to Paris in disgrace, were court-martialled, stripped of rank and title, and imprisoned at Fort de Joux. An Imperial decree dated the 1st of May 1812 prohibited any field commander from treating for capitulation and declared every unauthorized surrender a criminal act punishable by death.

• 8. Europe Takes Notice

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  News of Bailen spread rapidly across the continent. It was the first time since 1801 that a sizable French force had laid down its arms, and the legend of French invincibility underwent, as one account puts it, a severe shaking. The Pope published an open denunciation of Napoleon. Prussian patriots drew fresh inspiration from the outcome. Most significantly, the Austrian war party secured the support of Emperor Francis for a renewed challenge to the French Empire, initiating what became the War of the Fifth Coalition. The Seville Junta commemorated the victory by instituting the Medalla de Bailen. Napoleon responded by personally directing the Grande Armee across the Pyrenees in November 1808, dealing devastating blows to the Spanish forces and receiving the surrender of Madrid within a month. Fate was particularly cruel to the victors: Castanos was routed by Marshal Lannes at the Battle of Tudela in November 1808, and Reding was ridden down and trampled by French cavalry at the Battle of Valls in 1809, dying of his wounds. Marshal Soult overran much of Andalusia the following year and on the 21st of January 1810 his men recovered the French Eagles lost at Bailen from the town's cathedral. But the struggle continued for years, consuming enormous French resources in a war of attrition against determined Spanish guerrillas, and ultimately led to the expulsion of the Army of Spain from the Iberian Peninsula and the exposure of southern France to invasion by British, Portuguese, and Spanish forces in 1814. Wellington, commanding the allied forces, reportedly warned his Spanish troops before every engagement that this was not Bailen and not to attempt to make it one.