Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was, by Napoleon Bonaparte's own admission, a wound that would not close. He called it the "Spanish ulcer." Between 1808 and 1814, France poured hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the Iberian Peninsula, won battle after battle, and still could not win. What began as a calculated move to tighten Napoleon's grip on Europe ended by draining the lifeblood of his empire. How did a war against two relatively weak Iberian nations become the crack in the foundation of one of history's most formidable military machines? Why did ordinary Spaniards, whose own armies were repeatedly crushed, keep fighting? And what did this conflict leave behind when the last French troops finally crossed back over the Pyrenees in 1814?
On the 19th of July 1807, Napoleon sent orders to his Foreign Minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, demanding that Portugal declare war on Britain, close its ports, detain British subjects, and seize their goods. The ultimatum was not really about Portugal. It was about cutting off Britain from the continent, denying the Royal Navy use of Lisbon's harbour, and severing the trade links that Britain had built through Portugal's colony in Brazil.
Portugal's regent, Prince John of Braganza, was governing in place of his mother, Queen Maria I, who was mentally incapacitated. He refused to go beyond his existing agreements. That refusal gave Napoleon all the pretext he needed. The force he assembled, the First Corps of Observation of the Gironde, was placed under divisional general Jean-Andoche Junot, who had served as French ambassador to Portugal in 1805 and knew the country. On the 19th of November 1807, Junot's troops set out from Spain, and by the 30th of November they had occupied Lisbon.
The Portuguese royal family's flight was chaotic. The Prince Regent loaded his family, courtiers, state papers, and treasure onto a fleet of fifteen warships and more than twenty transports, which set sail for Brazil on the 29th of November. Fourteen carts loaded with treasure were left behind on the docks. As one of his first acts, Junot sequestered the property of those who had fled and imposed a 100-million-franc indemnity on the country that remained.
While all this unfolded, France and Spain had quietly signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, a secret agreement drawn up by Napoleon's marshal of the palace, Géraud Duroc, that proposed to carve Portugal into three pieces: a northern kingdom for Charles II, Duke of Parma; the Algarves in the south for Manuel Godoy; and a French-administered rump around Lisbon. Spain's cooperation in the invasion rested on these promises. Napoleon had not yet shown his hand toward Spain itself.
Between 9 and the 12th of February 1808, French divisions crossed the Pyrenees and occupied Navarre and Catalonia, seizing the citadels of Pamplona and Barcelona. The Spanish government asked for explanations; the explanations did not satisfy. By the 20th of February, Joachim Murat had been appointed commander of all French troops in Spain, a force now numbering between 60,000 and 100,000 men.
On the 19th of March, the chief minister Manuel Godoy was overthrown in the Mutiny of Aranjuez and King Charles IV was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand VII. Murat entered Madrid on the 23rd of March with considerable ceremony. Ferdinand arrived four days later and asked Murat to get Napoleon's approval for his accession. Napoleon instead summoned both kings to Bayonne. On the 5th of May, under French pressure, both Charles and Ferdinand abdicated their claims to Napoleon. Napoleon then arranged for his brother Joseph Bonaparte to be named King of Spain.
The Spanish capital had been watching. On the 2nd of May, citizens of Madrid rose against the French occupation. Murat's elite Imperial Guard and his Mamluk cavalry rode into the city and crushed the uprising. The Mamelukes, wearing turbans and wielding curved scimitars, provoked memories of Muslim Spain in a population already near the breaking point. The following day, as Francisco Goya recorded in his painting The Third of May 1808, the French army shot hundreds of Madrid's citizens.
The first provincial uprisings came within weeks: Cartagena and Valencia on the 23rd of May, Zaragoza and Murcia on the 24th of May, and the province of Asturias, which expelled its French governor and declared war on Napoleon on the 25th of May. By summer, all Spanish provinces had risen. Portugal erupted in June. At Évora on the 29th of July, a French detachment under Louis Henri Loison crushed the Portuguese rebels and massacred the town's population. Joseph Bonaparte was crowned King of Spain on the 25th of July, but almost no one outside the court acknowledged it.
In August 1808, fifteen thousand British troops landed in Portugal under Lieutenant-General Arthur Wellesley, who would later become the Duke of Wellington. Wellesley moved quickly. He drove back a French detachment at Roliça on the 17th of August and defeated Junot's main force of 14,000 men at Vimeiro soon after. Then the situation became complicated. Wellesley was replaced first by Harry Burrard and then by Hew Dalrymple, who granted Junot an unmolested evacuation from Portugal by the Royal Navy under the terms of the Convention of Cintra. The deal caused a scandal in Britain. All three generals were recalled.
In early October 1808, John Moore took command of the 30,000-man British force in Portugal. David Baird arrived at Corunna Harbour on the 13th of October with a further 12,000 to 13,000 men aboard 150 transports, escorted by HMS Louie, HMS Amelia, and HMS Champion. The British also helped evacuate some 9,000 men of the Spanish Division of the North from Denmark, transporting them through Gothenburg and landing them at Santander in October 1808.
Moore pushed into Spain and planned to strike at Marshal Soult's isolated corps at Carrión. On the 21st of December his cavalry raided the French picquets at Sahagún. But Napoleon, having crushed the Spanish field armies around him, rapidly gathered 80,000 troops and marched to encircle the British army. Moore retreated to the coast. At Corunna, British troops fended off a French attack, but Moore was killed in the fighting. About 26,000 men reached Britain; around 7,000 had been lost over the course of the expedition. After depositing Moore in a grave on the ramparts, Napoleon returned to France on the 19th of January 1809. He left the campaign to his marshals and never came back.
It is from the Peninsular War that the English language borrowed the word "guerrilla," meaning "little war." The tactic emerged not because it was planned, but because it was all that remained after regular Spanish armies were repeatedly beaten in the field. Once a battle was lost and soldiers dispersed into the countryside, they became partisans who raided French supply lines, ambushed couriers, and harassed isolated garrisons across vast stretches of territory.
The French had over 350,000 soldiers in the Armée de l'Espagne, but more than 200,000 of them were deployed not as fighting units but as guards for supply lines. The guerrillas cost France enormously in men, material, and morale, while requiring only a fraction of the resources that conventional armies consumed. Later in the war, the Spanish authorities tried to bring the partisans under military discipline; many were organized into regular units, such as Espoz y Mina's Cazadores de Navarra.
The guerrillas were not simply patriots. Many were fleeing the law or seeking an income in a country where industry was at a standstill, many landowners could not pay their servants, and French restrictions had shut down normal street life. Hunger and despair drove enlistment as much as devotion to king and faith. The partisans also frightened their own compatriots; forced conscription and looting by irregular bands were common. Yet however mixed the motives, the strategic effect was profound: Spanish guerrillas kept tens of thousands of French troops pinned down across the country and made every road in Spain a potential ambush.
Wellington returned to Portugal in April 1809 with a reorganized force that now included Portuguese regiments trained by General Beresford. His first act was to turn Soult out of Porto, the country's second city, which Soult had taken in March 1809 at the cost of between 6,000 and 20,000 Portuguese soldiers dead, wounded, or captured. At the Second Battle of Porto on the 12th of May, Wellington's force retook the city. Soult escaped without his heavy equipment by marching through the mountains.
To defend Portugal, Wellington ordered the construction of the Lines of Torres Vedras, an elaborate defensive network of forts, blockhouses, redoubts, and ravelins under the supervision of Richard Fletcher. Work began in the autumn of 1809. The lines communicated by semaphore and were supported by a scorched-earth zone in which 200,000 inhabitants of surrounding districts were relocated inside the defences. When Marshal Masséna invaded Portugal in the autumn of 1810 with an army of around 65,000 men, he was driven back to the lines, found them impenetrable, and spent weeks watching his army starve. By March 1811, with supplies exhausted, Masséna retreated to Salamanca, having lost a total of 25,000 men in Portugal.
Wellington's decisive campaign came in 1812. He captured the border fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo on the 19th of January and then, in one of the bloodiest siege assaults of the Napoleonic Wars, stormed Badajoz on the 6th of April, leaving the allies with about 4,800 casualties. Afterward Wellington wrote in a letter that he greatly hoped he would never again put his troops to such a test. On the 22nd of July, at the Battle of Salamanca, Wellington defeated Marshal Marmont's army; contemporaries claimed he defeated an army of 40,000 men in 40 minutes. Marmont himself was wounded. By the 14th of August, Madrid had surrendered, and 20,000 muskets, 180 cannon, and two French Imperial Eagles were captured.
In 1813, Wellington marched 121,000 troops out of northern Portugal: 53,749 British, 39,608 Spanish, and 27,569 Portuguese. He swung north of Jourdan's French army of 68,000, outflanked it, and drove Joseph Bonaparte's forces into the Zadorra valley. At the Battle of Vitoria on the 21st of June, Wellington's combined army met Joseph's 65,000-man force. Wellington split his attack into four columns and struck from south, west, and north, while a fourth column cut across the French rear. The French broke, abandoning all of their artillery and King Joseph's extensive baggage train. The looting of those wagons by allied soldiers delayed the pursuit long enough for much of the French army to escape.
Soult mounted a fierce counter-offensive in July, winning at the battles of Maya and Roncesvalles on the 25th of July, and pushing to within ten miles of Pamplona. He was stopped and repulsed at Sorauren on 28 and the 30th of July. Total losses during the counter-offensive were about 7,000 for the Allies and 10,000 for the French.
The siege of San Sebastián, conducted between July and September, cost the Allies around 4,000 men and the French approximately 20,000. The attacking troops, once the city fell on the 31st of August, became drunk and burned the entire city. The French garrison retreated to the citadel and held out until the 8th of September. On the 7th of October, Wellington crossed the Bidassoa into France in seven columns, and the war shifted onto French soil.
Marshal Soult led the final French withdrawal across the Pyrenees during the winter of 1813-1814, no longer receiving sufficient support from a depleted France. Napoleon, forced to strip Spain of troops for the losing campaigns in Russia and Germany, had called his intervention in Iberia the Spanish ulcer. When the Sixth Coalition defeated him in 1814, the wound finally closed. One lasting consequence was the Spanish Constitution of 1812, drafted by the Cortes of Cádiz under siege, which became a cornerstone of European liberalism in the decades that followed.
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Common questions
What caused the Peninsular War to start in 1808?
The Peninsular War escalated in 1808 when Napoleon occupied Spain, a former ally, after it had helped him invade Portugal in 1807. Napoleon forced the abdications of both King Ferdinand VII and his father Charles IV at Bayonne on the 5th of May 1808, then installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. Most Spaniards rejected French rule and rose in revolt within weeks.
Why did Napoleon call the Peninsular War the Spanish ulcer?
Napoleon called the conflict the "Spanish ulcer" because it was a drain on French resources that would not heal. Despite winning many individual battles, French forces were constantly harassed by Spanish guerrillas, their supply lines were severed, and more than 200,000 of their 350,000 soldiers in Spain were tied down guarding communications rather than fighting. The war allowed the rest of Europe to challenge Napoleon while his army was bogged down in Iberia.
What was the Battle of Bailén and why was it significant?
The Battle of Bailén in 1808 was the first open-field defeat of a Napoleonic army on a European battlefield. The Spanish army in Andalusia defeated the French force under Pierre Dupont de l'Etang, who surrendered his entire army corps, a loss of around 24,000 troops. The defeat shocked Europe, demonstrated that Napoleon's armies could be beaten, and inspired Austria to challenge France in the War of the Fifth Coalition.
What were the Lines of Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War?
The Lines of Torres Vedras were three strong defensive lines of mutually supporting forts, blockhouses, redoubts, and fortified artillery positions built near Lisbon under Wellington's orders and the supervision of engineer Richard Fletcher. Construction began in the autumn of 1809, and the lines were finished just in time to stop Marshal Masséna's invasion force of around 65,000 men in 1810. A scorched-earth zone in front of the lines stripped the surrounding countryside of food, forage, and shelter, starving Masséna's army until he retreated in March 1811 having lost 25,000 men.
What happened at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813?
At the Battle of Vitoria on the 21st of June 1813, Wellington's army of 57,000 British, 16,000 Portuguese, and 8,000 Spanish defeated King Joseph Bonaparte's 65,000-man force. Wellington attacked with four columns from south, west, and north while a fourth column cut across the French rear, forcing a rout. The French abandoned all their artillery and King Joseph's personal baggage train, and never recovered control of Spain.
What long-term consequences did the Peninsular War have for Spain and Portugal?
The war destroyed the social and economic fabric of both Spain and Portugal, and the years of fighting ushered in civil wars between liberal and absolutist factions. Revolts in Spanish America, partly inspired by the disruption of Spanish authority, led to the independence of all of Spain's colonies on the American mainland. The Cortes of Cádiz, which governed besieged Spain during the war, produced the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which became a cornerstone of European liberalism.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 2bookSpanish Guerrillas in the Peninsular War 1808–14Rene Chartrand — Osprey Publishing — 2004
- 3bookSiege of Valencia 25 December 1811-9 January 1812J. Rickard — 2020