The abdication of Ferdinand, the coronation of King Joseph - Joseph Bonaparte, almost stranger than the coronation of Napoleon himself, and finally, French soldiers at every crossroads. How much more is needed for the guerrilla? “Until now, no one has told you the whole truth. It is true that the Spaniard does not stand for me, except for a small number of persons from the central junta,”his elder brother wrote to Napoleon from Vitoria from the very first stop on the way to Madrid.
The capital greeted "its" king as if it were again May 3 - the day after the mutiny. Empty streets, closed shops and shops, closed shutters and locked gates. Looking from the future, we can say that the then Spain, truly fattened by colonial wealth, but united in its faith and territorially, received from the French invasion an unexpected impetus to national revival. And it was enough for almost a hundred years, until a more energetic and greedy predator in the face of the North American States was found in the other hemisphere.
But in 1808, Napoleon could not believe for a long time that he had to deal not only and not so much with a degenerating dynasty and its entourage. The main enemy turned out to be the very armed people, from whose ranks the Spanish army, which was still too clearly inferior to the French, received regular reinforcements. Nevertheless, the French emperor longed to solve everything quickly and irrevocably, as he had done more than once in Europe.
Marx and Engels unequivocally assessed the national renaissance in Spain as a feudal reaction, just as they also assessed the partisan war in Russia. Only the German War of Independence was progressive for them, but how could it be otherwise … But in Napoleon's invasion, none of the historians, like the classics, finds anything progressive and revolutionary. Napoleon himself put himself in such a position when he was forced to go for direct aggression beyond the Pyrenees.
The signal for an uprising in the lands of Spain was given by the province, which can be considered the most ossified, in which, at the same time, not only old traditions, but also old liberties were preserved - Asturias. At one time, it was transformed into the kingdom of Leon and was the first to unite with Castile. To offer her the French "liberte, egalite …" is something beyond political myopia.
Officials sent by Murat to Oviedo to report on the May events in Madrid were simply driven out, and the local junta immediately voted on measures to protect the country from the French. By the end of May, more than 18,000 volunteers had formed a corps, which were soon joined by the Spanish regular troops, which Murat sent to Oviedo from Santander, which remained under French control.
Almost all the provinces of the country followed Madrid and Asturias. Where there were no French, juntas continued to form, swearing allegiance to the Bourbons or personally to Ferdinand VII. Zaragoza rebelled a day after Oviedo - May 25. On May 30, Galicia announced her loyalty to the Bourbons, which, however, was in no hurry to open ports for the British. Finally, on June 7, an uprising began in Catalonia, which the French traditionally considered half theirs in those years.
In a poor country, huge funds were suddenly found for donations to the army, and peace-loving Catholic priests formed entire battalions. At the same time, a number of officers and generals, not hiding their fear of the French, took command against their will. However, the shortage of personnel was completely replaced by people from the lower classes, such as the sailor Pormer, a participant in the Battle of Trafalgar, the poor landowner Martin Diaz or the village doctor Palear.
Apparently, Napoleon, who himself set propaganda on a grand scale, could not help but irritate the pamphlets and parodies circulating in Spain, where he was exhibited now as the king of hellish monsters, or even just as a beast-beast. And King Joseph from Madrid, where he was able to get only on July 20, constantly complained about complete loneliness, considering his future gloomy and hopeless. To ensure communication with their homeland, the French had to besiege Zaragoza, which became one of the centers of Spanish resistance in the occupied north of the country.
However, all this, even taken together, seemed trifles against the backdrop of convincing military victories. French marshals and generals, it seemed, finally got the opportunity to do exactly what they can do. General Lefebvre severely punished the rebellious Aragonese in the battles of Tudela and Alagon. Marshal Bessières won a beautiful victory at Medina del Rioseco on July 14, defeating the army formed in Galicia. This was supposed to save the French for a long time from the prospect of a clash with the British, who had already tried to land their regiments along almost the entire western coast of Spain and Portugal.
After the victory of Bessieres, Joseph Bonaparte finally arrived in the capital as king with numerous reinforcements. The siege of Zaragoza was about to end in its fall. And even if things were not very successful for Monsey, who was forced to retreat from Valencia, as well as for Duhem, who was practically locked up by the rebels in Barcelona. But the brave Dupont, one of the contenders for the marshal's baton, which Napoleon sent to "the very lair of the conspiracy" - Andalusia, broke the resistance of the defenders of Cordoba.
But it was from there, from Andalusia, that the emperor soon received the most terrible message since his accession to the throne. This was the message of the surrender at Baylen.
In the first days of July 1808, Dupont's corps was forced to withdraw from Cordoba to the gorges of the Sierra Morena, having practically no idea of the number of rebels. The general hoped to link up with reinforcements from Madrid as soon as possible and strike at the army of General Castagnos. Even in the dense environment of guerillas, the French, whose number after the arrival of reinforcements reached 22 thousand, did not get stuck in the mountains, although they lost hundreds of soldiers in small skirmishes. But they mistakenly divided forces, trying to get ahead of the Spanish divisions that went out to their communications. The distance between the units of the French army, on the map is not the most significant, was about two transitions.
General Castagnos had a force of almost 40 thousand, of which at least 15 he was able to send bypassing the French line. But at the same time, the Spaniards did not lose touch with each other and brilliantly took advantage of Dupont's unfortunate location. The commanders of Castagnos, Reading and Coupigny, swiftly moved their forces in front of Baylen, between the main forces of Dupont and Wedel's division, finally cutting them off from each other.
Dupont tried seven times to attack Baylen, but to no avail. The soldiers were thirsty, hundreds of people were scattered around the neighborhood for fear of attacks by the guerillas. In addition, due to the nature of the terrain, each Dupont attack could only be supported by one cannon. Nevertheless, twice the front of the Spaniards was almost broken. But two Swiss regiments suddenly went over to the side of the Spaniards, and Wedel never came to the rescue.
Instead, in the rear of the French, the Spanish light troops and the division of de la Peña, which came up from Andujar, occupied by Castagnos, appeared. By that time, Du Pont's troops had not only suffered huge losses, but were also so exhausted that no more than two thousand people could actually fight. The general did not continue the senseless attacks, but, probably, the French could still hold out.
However, DuPont decided otherwise and … entered into negotiations with Castagnos on surrender. It was accepted almost immediately. The "Grand Army" was no longer invulnerable, and the emperor's brother was soon forced to leave Madrid. On August 1, together with the troops of Monsey, the king set out for the Ebro River. Despite the fact that Dupont's surrender was quite honorable, Europe, almost all - Napoleonic, did not hide its jubilation.
But this is the audience - what to take from it, and Baylen became humiliation and a strong shock for the emperor himself. Explosions of terrible anger happened to Napoleon more than once, but here all the memoirists unanimously noted something different. The collapse of hopes, the rejection of grandiose plans - it is hardly worth listing everything that the omnipotent ruler of half the world had to go through yesterday.
Resistance of the Spaniards grew every day, and after a pompous diplomatic meeting in Erfurt, which was correctly renamed by contemporaries as a "meeting" of Napoleon with Alexander I, the emperor had no choice but to go for the Pyrenees. Of course, with the army. However, before that, the emperor had to endure another blow when General Junot, his personal friend, who, by the way, also relied on the marshal's baton, capitulated in Portugal.
Having received the title of Duke of d'Abrantes, this general spent six months trying to transform Portugal into a civilized but remote province of the Napoleonic empire. However, this could not last long, and not only because Napoleon, due to events in Spain, abandoned the idea of dividing the ownership of the House of Braganza with her. And not only because an additional 100 million contribution was imposed on the Portuguese.
The proud people never ceased to regard the French as conquerors. As soon as Portugal realized that it was possible to count on support not only from the British, but also from the neighbors of the Spaniards, where the junta, led by former minister Hovelanos, itself declared war on Napoleon, the country revolted. Perhaps not as violently as Spain, but Junot ended up in a real trap anyway. According to the historian Willian Sloon, "the uprising broke out so quickly and everywhere that the detachments, into which the French army was split, were forced to lock themselves in the mountains."
However, it was not the Portuguese partisans who slammed the mousetrap, but the British who arrived in Portugal. General Junot became the first victim of the English General Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, who then defeated several more Napoleonic generals and marshals in Spain in five years. Wellesley, not receiving permission from the Spaniards to unload in A Coruña, landed with a 14,000-strong corps at the mouth of the Mondego River. This is about halfway from Lisbon to the Port, and the British could immediately beat the scattered French troops in parts.
Junot set up a screen, slowly retreating with battles in the direction of Cape Rolis, and began to concentrate troops on the position at Vimeiro. Gathering together about 12 thousand, he attacked the combined forces of General H. Dahlrymple, which included Wellesley's 14-thousand corps, which had another 6 thousand Portuguese in reserve. The very ones that Junot had recently gladly enlisted in the special legion of the Great Army. All French attacks were repulsed, and they retreated in perfect order to the Torres-Vedras line, which had not yet been turned into powerful defensive lines.
At this time in Lisbon, the population at any moment could raise an uprising, not so much following the example of the Spaniards, but in anticipation of the British corps of General Moore, who was hastily ferried from Sweden, where, by the way, he fought with the Russians. Junot practically found himself in a blockade, without provisions and ammunition, which no longer came from the capital. Junot had no chance of joining the main forces of the French who had retreated across the Ebro, and, like Dupont in Baylen, he clearly lacked self-control, although he threatened the British commander to burn Lisbon and fight to the last.
Junot was not too inclined to bargain; General Kellermann, who helped him, did it better. But after all, General Dahlrymple offered Junot much more honorable terms of surrender than Dupont, and the British did not even directly call it surrender, preferring the soft term "convention". Not only French officers and generals, but also soldiers were able to return to France with weapons and in full uniform.
Junot actually saved 24 thousand soldiers for Napoleon, who received a truly unique combat experience. They were taken to Quiberon Bay by British ships, but at La Rochelle, Junot received a letter from Napoleon full of reproaches, ending with a devastating conclusion: “A general like you should either die or return to Paris as master of Lisbon. As for the rest, you would be the vanguard, and I would come after you. " Napoleon did not hide his disappointment when he spoke about this to one of his closest friends: "I do not recognize a person who has been trained in my school."
Nevertheless, the general was not demoted, was not put on trial, but never received the marshal's baton. And in England, the convention was immediately considered unprofitable and were even going to bring to justice not only the commander, but also General Wellesley, along with his colleague Burrard. However, the very fact of victory still outweighed the discontent, and Wellesley, as the direct triumphant of Vimeira, was solemnly acquitted in the parliamentary commission. Generals Dahlrymple and Burrard had to be content that they were "not directly convicted of dereliction of duty."
It was time for Napoleon to urgently fulfill the decision to advance, which had matured after Baylen. However, the main forces of the army were located in Germany, not allowing the Austrians, Prussians or Bavarians to breathe. On a date in Erfurt, the emperor, among other things, tried to shift control of Vienna and Berlin to a new ally - Russia. Alexander demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Prussia, and at the same time he loaded Napoleon with a proposal to divide Turkey, hoping to get the coveted Constantinople.
Napoleon was in a hurry, but in the end, according to the terms of the convention signed by the two sovereigns (again this "soft" term), of course, secret, the Russians took a neutral position towards Austria. This, despite all the secrecy, became immediately known in Vienna, which allowed the Habsburgs next spring to get involved in a new fight with France.
Napoleon returned to France, where the seven corps of his Grand Army were already assembled under the command of the best of the best. Lannes, Soult, Ney, Victor, Lefebvre, Mortier and Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Of these, only Saint-Cyr will become a marshal a little later, already in Russia, and there are also those who are fighting for the Pyrenees. The army set out on October 29. The march to the Spanish border took only a few days.
The end follows …
