What the French did not expect was the following: O happy gothic, barbarian and fanatical Spaniards! Happy with our monks and with our Inquisition, which, according to the ideas of the French Enlightenment, has kept us a century behind other nations. Oh, if we could only go back two centuries more! These lines, written by Spanish General Manuel Freyre de Castrillon in 1808, formed part of a smoking lava flow of broadsheets and pamphlets that answered Napoleon’s actions and helped prompt the uprisings. Some adopted a language of national hatred, depicting the French as barbaric, even inhuman: What sort of thing is a Frenchman? A being monstrous and indefinable, a being half-created. There is nobody who does not have the right to kill these ferocious animals.

This was rebellion on a massive scale. There were uprisings across the country: Barcelona, Saragossa, Oviedo, Seville, Valencia, Madrid and many more. The so-called Peninsular War would follow a twisting and complex course for more than five years. At times the French faced little opposition from regular armies, but the guerrillas were a different matter, and the number of troops Napoleon had to maintain in the peninsula testify eloquently to their importance: from 165,000 in June 1808 to more than 300,000 in October and to well over 350,000 in July 1811. Only when the Russian campaign greedily sucked men away did the number shrink, falling below 100,000 by July 1813, with catastrophic consequences. Estimates of total French military deaths in Spain vary widely, but they may have amounted to as many as 180,000.

The excesses and atrocities of the Peninsular War took many different murderous forms. There were the Madrid executions of 1808, scorched into European memory by Goya as deeply as Picasso would later scorch the name of Guernica. There were the ferocious initial reactions to the French — for instance, the massacre of as many as 330 French citizens by a mob in Valencia on June 5, 1808. And there was Napoleon’s brutal march on Madrid in the fall of 1809, in which soldiers, eager for revenge and made desperate by a lack of supplies, took to sacking even towns that offered no resistance. The churches were sacked, the streets were choked with the dead and the dying, wrote Joseph’s counselor Miot de Melito about the sack of Burgos. In fact, we witnessed all the horrors of an assault, although the town had made no defense! We may date from this period the manifest change which took place in the French army….the soldiers would no longer do anything but fight and plunder.

The most concentrated horror of the war, meanwhile, did not involve the guerrillas at all but uniformed troops involved in that classic form of Old Regime warfare, a siege. In the spring of 1808, Saragossa, a city on the banks of the Ebro River whose people had particular devotion to a basilica where the Virgin Mary had allegedly appeared on a pillar of marble, declared itself in revolt against the intruder king (el rey intruso). Saragossa was poorly fortified, with only 1,000 regular Spanish troops available to protect it, and on June 15 French General Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes attempted to storm it. But the population of Saragossa offered unexpectedly fierce resistance, spurred on by the supposed miraculous appearance of a palm tree topped by a crown in the sky above the basilica. Thousands of men and women rushed to the walls, eager to serve the virgin of the pillar. The French retreated in disorder.

On June 28, they tried again, this time under Jean-Antoine Verdier, the same man who had helped carry out the scourging of southern Italy. Once again, Saragossa beat the French back. According to legend, a Catalan girl, Augustina Zaragoza Domenech, managed to take over a cannon from her dying lover and fire it point-blank at the advancing French, saving a key strongpoint. Verdier pulled back and began a ferocious bombardment. On June 30 alone, his men fired 1,400 explosive shells into the city. The siege reached its height a month later, when shells set the hospital of Nuestra Señora de Gracia on fire, and patients and staff leapt to safety to the accompaniment of inhuman screams from helpless incarcerated lunatics. One French witness reported that the city was like a volcano as explosion ceaselessly followed explosion….The streets were strewn with corpses. Bombs and grenades knocked whole pieces of buildings into the streets, while cannonballs smashed openings in the walls for French troops. But when Verdier demanded the city’s surrender, its leaders sent back the message Guerra y cuchillo — war to the knife. A lack of troops kept Verdier from mounting a successful assault, and he finally withdrew.

Several months later, the French returned to a more heavily fortified Saragossa with a much larger force commanded by the hardened Marshal Jean Lannes. Once again the French launched a storm of fire, lobbing as many as 42,000 explosive shells into the city during December. With Saragossa overcrowded by soldiers, civilian defenders and refugees from the countryside, a typhus epidemic began, killing more than 350 people a day. In January, Lannes’ infantry began to penetrate into the city. There then began some of the worst urban combat ever seen in Europe before the 20th century. The French advanced literally house by house. According to one French account, it was necessary to mine them and blow them up one after the other, break down the partition walls and advance over the rubble. Sometimes the battle even proceeded room by room, with both sides gouging loopholes in the walls, sticking their muskets through and blazing away point-blank at each other. A third of the town became a virtually impassable maze of broken rock through which the French could navigate only by following paths cleared by their engineers and marked with stakes.

Finally, in mid-February, Saragossa surrendered. The city’s total death toll amounted to at least 50,000 — more than its prewar population. But even as the French prevailed in Saragossa, the rural guerrillas gnawed at the strength and morale of their forces and radically disrupted the administration of the country.

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