When Revolutionary France declared war on the Austrian empire in the spring of 1792, its leaders promised a short, sweet and victorious campaign. Instead, 1792 marked the beginning of a long, grinding, hideously bloody series of wars that would drag on in every state in Europe and last, with scant interruption, until the final defeat of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

These wars marked something fundamentally new in Western history, and collectively deserve the title of the first ‘total war. Long before 1792, the major European powers had fought with each other at regular intervals, but those conflicts were remarkably limited in scope. The armies tended to avoid large-scale battle. Noncombatants could hope for relatively merciful treatment. Enemy officers dealt with each other as honorable adversaries. The major powers and their armed forces were still dominated by hereditary aristocracies, and war retained the feel of an aristocratic ritual. It was not play-acting by any means, but earlier wars proceeded according to a fairly strict code of aristocratic honor.

The French Revolution marked a sudden and dramatic break with this tradition. Revolutionary France overthrew the country’s aristocracy along with its king and queen, and brought in new men (including the young and talented Bonaparte) to lead its armed forces. By 1793, its leaders were calling for total military mobilization of the population. Not only would young men go into the army, but women, old men and even children would turn their energies to the war effort, producing weapons, uniforms and supplies. France declared that its opponents were not honorable adversaries but enemies of the human race who amounted to nothing more than criminals.

The result was a steady escalation of horror that did not stop even after the high point of revolutionary radicalism had passed in France itself, and after Napoleon took power there in 1799. The figures speak for themselves: More than one-fifth of all the major battles fought in Europe between 1490 and 1815 took place in the 25 years after 1790. Before 1790 only a handful of battles had involved more than 100,000 combatants; in the 1809 Battle of Wagram, largest in the gunpowder age to date, involved 300,000. Just four years later the Battle of Leipzig drew 500,000, with fully 150,000 of them killed or wounded. During the wars, France alone counted close to a million war deaths. In the process, France carved out for itself the greatest empire seen in Europe since the days of the Caesars, but lost it again in a stunningly short time.

Among the most hideous novelties of the period was the spread of vicious insurgent campaigns against French occupying forces that the French themselves tried to murderously suppress. The first such campaigns took place in France itself, involving struggles by traditional Catholics and Royalists against the Revolutionary government. But as French rule spread like an inkblot over the map of Europe, more such episodes followed: in Belgium, in Italy, in the Tyrolian Alps of Austria. The worst of all occurred in Spain, where the War of Independence of 1808–14 set a new standard of horror in European warfare, and bequeathed a new word to European languages: guerrilla, from the Spanish for little war. It was in Spain that the French army’s brutal campaign to suppress those guerrilla wars revealed fully the ugly face of the new total war.

During much of the early Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Spain was allied with France. But as the years went by and Napoleon claimed the title of emperor, he contemplated overthrowing Spain’s Bourbon dynasty, which he blamed for the disaster in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, where the combined French and Spanish fleets were decimated by the British under Lord Nelson.

To top things off, the conduct of the Spanish royal family lurched embarrassingly between melodrama and farce. For years the lumpish, mentally unstable King Carlos IV had effectively surrendered power to a favorite, Manuel Godoy, who was generally known to be the lover of Queen Maria Luisa. Fernando, the royal couple’s 23-year-old son and heir, was a vain, ignorant bigot who had conspired against his father and written to Napoleon to enlist his help. In October 1807, these letters came to light, and the king put his son under arrest.

Godoy was meanwhile seeking to placate his French patron. The same day Fernando was arrested, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, under whose secret terms a French army could cross Spanish territory en route to its invasion of Portugal, which had defied the Continental Blockade that Napoleon had imposed in an attempt to strangle British trade. In November General Jean-Andoche Junot crossed the Pyrenees with 28,000 troops, which overcame weak Portuguese resistance and stumbled into Lisbon in early December. The Portuguese ruling family fled to its colony of Brazil.

Napoleon continued to reinforce his army in Spain until, by the spring of 1808, it had reached a strength of nearly 120,000. Resorting to ruses, these troops peacefully occupied important Spanish fortresses. Marshal Joachim Murat made a flamboyant entrance into Madrid on horseback, accompanied by trumpeters, drummers, lavishly uniformed cavalry and 97 turbaned Egyptian Mamelukes, a living relic of the Egyptian expedition. Murat, who was Napoleon’s brother-in-law, hoped that the emperor might give him the crown of Spain, and his upbeat reports to Paris served this ambition. Your Majesty, he wrote Napoleon at one point, is awaited here like the Messiah. A slight exaggeration, to say the least. But initially, few Spaniards saw the French as invaders.

Prior to Murat’s arrival, supporters of the conspiratorial son Fernando rioted at the royal residence of Aranjuez, forcing Manuel Godoy’s dismissal and King Carlos’ abdication. But Napoleon refused to recognize Fernando’s ascension and instead summoned both father and son to meet with him. In the meantime, the Spanish population had finally grown anxious about the swelling French presence, and when rumors spread that Murat had abducted a Bourbon prince, an uprising took place in Madrid. The French suppressed it amid gory street fighting, and the next day firing squads summarily executed hundreds of prisoners. The painter Francisco de Goya later devoted two of his most brilliant works to these two days in May. One painting highlighted the small number of Mamelukes in the French force, so as to evoke Spain’s long struggle against Islam. Another offered a phantasmagorical tableau of implacable soldiers taking cold aim at an illuminated, Christlike victim. The paintings made the Dos de Mayo and Tres de Mayo iconic dates of the Spanish War.

Meanwhile in Bayonne, just over the French border, Napoleon insisted that both Carlos and his son abdicate in his favor, alternately cajoling, threatening and bursting into fits of sheer rage. Napoleon had utter contempt for Fernando in particular. He is so stupid I have not been able to get a word out of him, he wrote to his counselor Talleyrand. Whether you scold him or praise him, his face remains blank.

In the short term, the threats worked. Father and son both surrendered their rights and departed for exile in France. The emperor then played a game of musical thrones, ordering his brother Joseph to trade Naples for Madrid and giving Murat, a former grocer and army private, the lesser but nonetheless royal reward of southern Italy.

The confidence and scorn that Napoleon’s men felt as they poured into Spain in the late spring of 1808 were breathtakingly vast. Surely, they believed, this corrupt and somnolent country could pose no serious resistance to the greatest empire since Rome. To judge from their letters and memoirs, imperial soldiers and administrators mostly seemed to have the same impressions: the dirty, poor and old-fashioned appearance of Spanish houses, the profusion of monastic robes in the streets, the dark and wild look of the men, who all seemed lice-ridden. Napoleon’s men condemned the Spanish as weak and archaic in equal measure.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to