An uncannily similar situation unfolded in Iraq after the American victory in 2003. American and allied forces engaged in a protracted, frustrating attempt to move Iraq toward peace and stability, and a part of the Iraqi population, led by the titular government, sided with them. Another part, probably larger, remained aloof, focusing principally on its own safety and well-being. A third part viewed the foreign forces with open hostility, while a fourth part, probably quite small, engaged in active resistance. Since these insurgents had no chance of successfully confronting the American army in pitched battles, they instead engaged in sneak attacks on small detachments or civilians, after which they immediately melted back into the population at large. Their actions made it nearly impossible for Americans to leave heavily fortified bases except in heavily fortified convoys. American soldiers complained in private about being unable to secure any territory other than that within immediate range of their guns, with the result that they needed, in the words of one Marine, repeatedly to sweep the same insurgents, or other insurgents, out of these same towns without being able to hold them.

In Spain, the equivalent of the new Iraqi government was the fragile regime of Joseph Bonaparte, supported by the self-proclaimed enlightened Spaniards known as the afrancesados (literally, the Frenchified). A large segment of the population remained aloof from the conflict entirely. Another large segment greeted the French with hostility. The guerrillas themselves probably never numbered more than 40,000.

Their effect, however, was far out of proportion to this figure. Their preferred method of attack (lacking car bombs and plastic explosives) was to descend without warning, in bands of hundreds, on small, isolated detachments of French troops — stragglers, sentries, scouts and messengers. They relied on surprise and shock, and generally retreated on meeting any serious resistance. On a single day, November 20, 1807, 80 of the 719 French soldiers crossing the Sierra de Gata en route to Portugal simply disappeared. As Miot de Melito put it melodramatically, An invisible army spread itself over nearly the whole of Spain, like a net from whose meshes there was no escape.

Rather than tracking the small, mobile guerrilla forces, the French concentrated mostly in relatively few strongpoints, leaving the rest of the country thinly occupied and therefore effectively out of their control. An entire army corps spent its time simply safeguarding the crucial road from Madrid north to France. General Honoré-Charles Reille, the French military governor of Navarre, in northern Spain, put the matter with stark eloquence in a letter of 1810: Unfortunately, in this region as in many others of Spain, our influence extends only as far as the range of our cannon….The Spanish say quite rightly that our troops are plowing furrows in the water.

The guerrillas had a complex profile. Their leaders were part military commander, part bandit-chieftain, and they took colorful nicknames: The Potter (El Cantarero), The Priest (El Cura),The Lad (El Mozo), The Grandfather (El Abuelo), The Doctor (El Medico), The Stick-in-the-Mud (El Empecinado). The social composition of the forces varied widely. Often, as historian Charles Esdaile has stressed, bands preyed as much or more on their fellow countrymen as on the French. By 1810-11, some had set up regular systems of tolls and taxations, through which even French merchants could pass unmolested as long as they paid. Many bands had their origins in scattered units of the old Spanish army, which had partly crumbled after Napoleon’s victories in 1808. And as time went on, others effectively transformed themselves into new units, complete with standard ranks, regimental organization, uniforms and even artillery (mostly seized from the French). By 1813, Francisco Espoz y Mina (Uncle Francisco, or The King of Navarre), the Basque commander of the single most successful band, had over 6,000 soldiers organized in 10 regiments, dressed in blue uniforms with breeches and jackets, armed with muskets and bayonets, and trained to fight in line and column. Yet he also continued to use established guerrilla tactics and managed to pin down as many as 38,000 French soldiers in 1812-13.

What confirmed the guerrillas in their stance of absolute enmity toward the French was religion. The massive presence of the clergy on Spanish soil noticed by French observers had a very real effect. In 1808 a full quarter of Spanish land revenue went to the Church. The population of 10 million included 30,000 parish priests and another 120,000 monks, nuns and other clergy. These men and women preached against the invaders without respite and even promised remission from divine punishment for those who fought against them. A much-used Spanish Catechism of 1808 called the French former Christians and modern heretics and insisted that it was no more a sin to kill them than it would be to kill a wild animal.

A large proportion of the French officers posted in Spain had previously confronted partisans in the Tyrol and Italy. Not surprisingly, then, the French attempted to use the same tactics that had worked against previous insurgencies: massive deployment of mobile columns to areas of guerrilla activity, the taking of hostages to ensure tranquility, exemplary punishment of villages suspected of supporting the guerrillas, swift execution of civilians captured bearing arms, and raising local auxiliary forces to take on an increasing share of the burden. The orders for summary executions, hostage taking and arson came straight from the top. Hang a dozen individuals in Madrid, Napoleon advised his brother. There’s no lack of bad sorts to choose from. Tell [Reille] to arrest the brigands’ relatives and send them to France, he wrote on another occasion. Levy taxes on the towns where the brigands operate, and burn the houses of their relatives.

In a few cases, the tactics showed signs of succeeding. The tough and talented Marshal Louis Suchet, for instance, managed for a time to impose something close to peace and order in areas of the north. He did so in part through co-opting nobles and other large landowners and in part through terror. His mobile columns shot captured guerrillas and priests found with weapons out of hand. They virtually wiped the town of Saliente off the map. Suchet took hostages and tried to recruit local auxiliaries. But as the historian of his campaign in Aragon concludes: Suchet’s success was deceptive and fleeting. He had not eliminated resistance, only stunned it. It did not help that the French commanders squabbled mightily with each other and that, increasingly, they had to rely on inexperienced conscripts newly arrived from France. Above all, they simply did not have the manpower to make their tactics work — particularly as the guerrillas were killing or capturing an average of 25 French soldiers a day.

The reports filed by General Reille from the northern city of Pamplona testify with particular eloquence to the Sisyphean nature of guerrilla war for the French. From mid-1810 to mid-1811, Reille vainly struggled against the increasingly professional force of Francisco Espoz y Mina. In letter after letter, he complained about the influence of priests and monks, about the guerrillas’ swelling numbers and about his inability to force them into pitched battles or to contain them without garrisoning every major town. He bitterly chided his superiors for withdrawing troops rather than sending more. He boasted to them of the priests his men shot and the hostages they took. But it made no impression on Paris, and in April 1811, Napoleon himself chided Reille for showing little energy and leaving everything unpunished. This bolt from Olympus left the general almost speechless with shock, and he reacted by turning increasingly vicious in his tactics, until his own reports come to seem like the draft of a bill of indictment against him for war crimes. On July 8, 1811, he had 40 alleged guerrillas, held prisoner in the citadel of Pamplona, summarily shot and warned that the same thing would happen to another 170 unless the guerrillas abandoned their campaign.

Here was absolute enmity on the French side as well. And it takes little effort to imagine the sort of war that followed from the respective positions of the guerrillas and the French. Even high-ranking French officers frankly acknowledged in their memoirs the general mercilessness of the conflict. Joseph Hugo called it a guerre assassine (an assassin’s war) and explicitly likened it to the Vendée. Albert-Jean Rocca, who served under Marshal Nicholas Soult in Andalusia, wrote: The French could only maintain themselves in Spain through terror. They were constantly facing the need to punish the innocent with the guilty, of revenging themselves on the weak instead of the powerful.

One might fill volumes with the atrocities committed on both sides in this graceless war, wrote French Captain Elzéar Blaze years later. Indeed. Blaze himself recorded gruesome stories of soldiers flayed alive by the guerrillas or placed between wooden boards and sawn in two. Belgian soldiers wrote home of seeing victims of the guerrillas with their eyes plucked out, their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. French troops recounted seeing comrades literally nailed to barn doors and left to die. On the French side, General Jean-Marie-Pierre Dorsenne, the governor of Burgos, developed a ghastly reputation for torture. He made a policy of hanging the bodies of three guerrillas permanently on gallows outside his office; when relatives stole away one body in the night, he immediately ordered a prisoner executed to take the man’s place.

Whole towns could pay a terrible price for insurgency. Early in 1809, Marshal Claude Victor, operating in central Spain near Talavera, sent a detachment of 25 German soldiers through nearby villages to ask for supplies. Four of them stopped in the village of Arenas, where the inhabitants pretended to greet them with hospitality but then fell on them and killed them. According to the account left by their officer Karl Franz von Holzing, the Spanish women, before murdering the soldiers, crushed their bones and testicles and cut off their penises. Holzing himself then led an expedition against Arenas. When the villagers tried to flee, his men shot at them from a distance as if on a hunting expedition, laughing whenever their victims fell into the grass. The French then set the village on fire. Holzing recalled, with horror, how wild and uncontrolled soldiers dragged young women into the streets and raped them and, in one case, dashed a baby’s head against a wall before tossing the body into a fire in front of the shrieking mother.

As the French retreated from Portugal in the spring of 1811, after one last attempt to invade that country, their conduct evoked with particular, nauseating force what Shakespeare had called the filthy and contagious clouds / Of heady murder, spoil and villainy. The command belonged to Marshal André Masséna, the same man who had overseen the sack of Lauria 4l⁄2 years before. In the town of Porto da Mos, 200 men, women, and children were burned to death in the parish church. A German in the British service later recalled:

Subscribe Today

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

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to