Portugal had for some time been a complete English colony. The emperor, in concert with the Bourbons of Madrid, decided by the treaty of Fontainebleau, of the 27th of October, 1807, that the house of Braganza had ceased to reign. A French army, under the command of Junot, entered Portugal. The prince-regent embarked for Brazil, and the French took possession of Lisbon on the 30th of November, 1807. This invasion was only an approach towards Spain. The royal family were in a state of the greatest anarchy. The favourite, Godoy, was execrated by the people, and Ferdinand, prince of the Asturias, conspired against the authority of his father's favourite. Though the emperor had not much to fear from such a government, he had taken alarm at a clumsy armament prepared by Godoy during the Prussian war. No doubt, at this time he formed the project of putting one of his brothers on the throne of Spain; he thought he could easily overturn a divided family, an expiring monarchy, and obtain the consent of a people whom he would restore to civilization. Under the pretext of the maritime war and the blockade, his troops entered the peninsula, occupied the coasts and principal places, and encamped near Madrid. It was then suggested to the royal family to retire to Mexico, after the example of the house of Braganza. But the people rose against this departure; Godoy, the object of public hatred, was in great risk of losing his life, and the prince of the Asturias was proclaimed king, under the title of Ferdinand VII. The emperor took advantage of this court revolution to bring about his own. The French entered Madrid, and he himself proceeded to Bayonne, whither he summoned the Spanish princes. Ferdinand restored the crown to his father, who in his turn resigned it in favour of Napoleon; the latter had it decreed on his brother Joseph by a supreme junta, by the council of Castille, and the municipality of Madrid. Ferdinand was sent to the Château de Valençay, and Charles VI. fixed his residence at Compiègne. Napoleon called his brother-in-law, Murat, grand- duke of Berg, to the throne of Naples, in the place of Joseph.
At this period began the first opposition to the domination of the emperor and the continental system. The reaction manifested itself in three countries hitherto allies of France, and it brought on the fifth coalition. The court of Rome was dissatisfied; the peninsula was wounded in its national pride by having imposed upon it a foreign king; in its usages, by the suppression of convents, of the Inquisition, and of the grandees; Holland suffered in its commerce from the blockade, and Austria supported impatiently its losses and subordinate condition. England, watching for an opportunity to revive the struggle on the continent, excited the resistance of Rome, the peninsula, and the cabinet of Vienna. The pope had been cold towards France since 1805; he had hoped that his pontifical complaisance in reference to Napoleon's coronation would have been recompensed by the restoration to the ecclesiastical domain of those provinces which the directory had annexed to the Cisalpine republic. Deceived in this expectation, he joined the European counter-revolutionary opposition, and from 1807 to 1808 the Roman States became the rendezvous of English emissaries. After some warm remonstrances, the emperor ordered general Miollis to occupy Rome; the pope threatened him with excommunication; and Napoleon seized on the legations of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino, which became part of the Italian kingdom. The legate left Paris on the 3rd of April, 1808, and the religious struggle for temporal interests commenced with the head of the church, whom Napoleon should either not have recognised, or not have despoiled.
The war with the peninsula was still more serious. The Spaniards recognised Ferdinand VII. as king, in a provincial junta, held at Seville, on the 27th of May, 1808, and they took arms in all the provinces which were not occupied by French troops. The Portuguese also rose at Oporto, on the 16th of June. These two insurrections were at first attended with the happiest results; in a short time they made rapid progress. General Dupont laid down arms at Baylen in the province of Cordova, and this first reverse of the French arms excited the liveliest hope and enthusiasm among the Spaniards. Joseph Napoleon left Madrid, where Ferdinand VII. was proclaimed; and about the same time, Junot, not having troops enough to keep Portugal, consented, by the convention of Cintra, to evacuate it with all the honours of war. The English general, Wellington, took possession of this kingdom with twenty-five thousand men. While the pope was declaring against Napoleon, while the Spanish insurgents were entering Madrid, while the English were again setting foot on the continent, the king of Sweden avowed himself an enemy of the European imperial league, and Austria was making considerable armaments and preparing for a new struggle.
Fortunately for Napoleon, Russia remained faithful to the alliance and engagements of Tilsit. The emperor Alexander had at that time a fit of enthusiasm and affection for this powerful and extraordinary mortal. Napoleon wishing to be sure of the north, before he conveyed all his forces to the peninsula, had an interview with Alexander at Erfurt, on the 27th September, 1808. The two masters of the north and west guaranteed to each other the repose and submission of Europe. Napoleon marched into Spain, and Alexander undertook Sweden. The presence of the emperor soon changed the fortune of the war in the peninsula. He brought with him eighty thousand veteran soldiers, just come from Germany. Several victories made him master of most of the Spanish provinces. He made his entry into Madrid, and presented himself to the inhabitants of the peninsula, not as a master, but as a liberator. "I have abolished," he said to them, "the tribunal of the Inquisition, against which the age and Europe protested. Priests should direct the conscience, but ought not to exercise any external or corporal jurisdiction over the citizens. I have suppressed feudal rights; and every one may set up inns, ovens, mills, fisheries, and give free impulse to his industry. The selfishness, wealth, and prosperity of a few did more injury to your agriculture than the heats of the extreme summer. As there is but one God, one system of justice only should exist in a state. All private tribunals were usurped and opposed to the rights of the nation. I have suppressed them. The present generation may change its opinion; too many passions have been brought into play; but your grandchildren will bless me as your regenerator; they will rank among their memorable days those in which I appeared among you, and from those days will Spain date its prosperity."
Such was indeed the part of Napoleon in the peninsula, which could only be restored to a better state of things, and to liberty, by the revival of civilization. The establishment of independence cannot be effected all at once, any more than anything else; and when a country is ignorant, poor, and backward, covered with convents, and governed by monks, its social condition must be reconstructed before liberty can be thought of. Napoleon, the oppressor of civilized nations, was a real regenerator for the peninsula. But the two parties of civil liberty and religious servitude, that of the cortes and that of the monks, though with far different aims, came to an understanding for their common defence. The one was at the head of the upper and the middle classes, the other of the populace; and they vied with each other in exciting the Spaniards to enthusiasm with the sentiments of independence or religious fanaticism. The following is the catechism used by the priests: "Tell me, my child, who you are? A Spaniard by the grace of God.—Who is the enemy of our happiness? The emperor of the French.—How many natures has he? Two: human and diabolical.—How many emperors of the French are there? One true one, in three deceptive persons.—What are their names, Napoleon, Murat, and Manuel Godoy.—Which of the three is the most wicked? They are all three equally so.—Whence is Napoleon derived? From sin.—Murat? From Napoleon. —And Godoy? The junction of the two.—What is the ruling spirit of the first? Pride and despotism.—Of the second? Rapine and cruelty.—Of the third? Cupidity, treason, and ignorance.—Who are the French? Former Christians become heretics.—Is it a sin to kill a Frenchman? No, father; heaven is gained by killing one of these dogs of heretics.—What punishment does the Spaniard deserve who has failed in his duty? The death and infamy of a traitor.—What will deliver us from our enemies? Confidence in ourselves and in arms."
Napoleon had engaged in a long and dangerous enterprise, in which his whole system of war was at fault. Victory, here, did not consist in the defeat of an army and the possession of a capital, but in the entire occupation of the territory, and, what was still more difficult, the submission of the public mind. Napoleon, however, was preparing to subdue this people with his irresistible activity and inflexible determination, when the fifth coalition called him again to Germany.
Austria had turned to advantage his absence, and that of his troops. It made a powerful effort, and raised five hundred and fifty thousand men, comprising the Landwehr, and took the field in the spring of 1809. The Tyrol rose, and king Jerome was driven from his capital by the Westphalians; Italy wavered; and Prussia only waited till Napoleon met with a reverse, to take arms; but the emperor was still at the height of his power and prosperity. He hastened from Madrid in the beginning of February, and directed the members of the confederation to keep their contingents in readiness. On the 12th of April he left Paris, passed the Rhine, plunged into Germany, gained the victories of Eckmühl and Essling, occupied Vienna a second time on the 15th of May, and overthrew this new coalition by the battle of Wagram, after a campaign of four months. While he was pursuing the Austrian armies, the English landed on the island of Walcheren, and appeared before Antwerp; but a levy of national guards sufficed to frustrate the expedition of the Scheldt. The peace of Vienna, of the 11th of October, 1809, deprived the house of Austria of several more provinces, and compelled it again to adopt the continental system.
This period was remarkable for the new character of the struggle. It began the reaction of Europe against the empire, and announced the alliance of dynasties, people, nations, the priesthood, and commerce. All whose interests were injured made an attempt at resistance, which at first was destined to fail. Napoleon, since the peace of Amiens, had entered on a career that must necessarily terminate in the possession or hostility of all Europe. Carried away by his character and position, he had created against the people a system of administration of unparalleled benefit to power; against Europe, a system of secondary monarchies and grand fiefs, which facilitated his plans of conquest; and, lastly, against England, the blockade which suspended its commerce, and that of the continent. Nothing impeded him in the realization of those immense but insensate designs. Portugal opened a communication with the English: he invaded it. The royal family of Spain, by its quarrels and vacillations, compromised the extremities of the empire: he compelled it to abdicate, that he might reduce the peninsula to a bolder and less wavering policy. The pope kept up relations with the enemy: his patrimony was diminished. He threatened excommunication: the French entered Rome. He realized his threat by a bull: he was dethroned as a temporal sovereign in 1809. Finally, after the battle of Wagram, and the peace of Vienna, Holland became a depot for English merchandise, on account of its commercial wants, and the emperor dispossessed his brother Louis of that kingdom, which, on the 1st of July, 1810, became incorporated with the empire. He shrank from no invasion, because he would not endure opposition or hesitation from any quarter. All were compelled to submit, allies as well as enemies, the chief of the church as well as kings, brothers as well as strangers; but, though conquered this time, all who had joined this new league only waited an opportunity to rise again.
Meantime, after the peace of Vienna, Napoleon still added to the extent and power of the empire. Sweden having undergone an internal revolution, and the king, Gustavus Adolphus IV., having been forced to abdicate, admitted the continental system. Bernadotte, prince of Ponte-Corvo, was elected by the states-general hereditary prince of Sweden, and king Charles XIII. adopted him for his son. The blockade was observed throughout Europe; and the empire, augmented by the Roman States, the Illyrian provinces, Valais, Holland, and the Hanse Towns, had a hundred and thirty departments, and extended from Hamburg and Dantzic to Trieste and Corfu. Napoleon, who seemed to follow a rash but inflexible policy, deviated from his course about this time by a second marriage. He divorced Josephine that he might give an heir to the empire, and married, on the 1st of April, 1810, Marie-Louise, arch-duchess of Austria. This was a decided error. He quitted his position and his post as a parvenu and revolutionary monarch, opposing in Europe the ancient courts as the republic had opposed the ancient governments. He placed himself in a false situation with respect to Austria, which he ought either to have crushed after the victory of Wagram, or to have reinstated in its possessions after his marriage with the arch-duchess. Solid alliances only repose on real interests, and Napoleon could not remove from the cabinet of Vienna the desire or power of renewing hostilities. This marriage also changed the character of his empire, and separated it still further from popular interests; he sought out old families to give lustre to his court, and did all he could to amalgamate together the old and the new nobility as he mingled old and new dynasties. Austerlitz had established the plebeian empire; after Wagram was established the noble empire. The birth, on the 20th of March, 1811, of a son, who received the title of King of Rome, seemed to consolidate the power of Napoleon by securing to him a successor.
The war in Spain was prosecuted with vigour during the years 1810 and 1811. The territory of the peninsula was defended inch by inch, and its was necessary to take several towns by storm. Suchet, Soult, Mortier, Ney, and Sebastiani made themselves masters of several provinces; and the Spanish junta, unable to keep their post at Seville, retired to Cadiz, which the French army began to blockade. The new expedition into Portugal was less fortune. Masséna, who directed it, at first obliged Wellington to retreat, and took Oporto and Olivença; but the English general having entrenched himself in the strong position of Torres-Vedras, Masséna, unable to force it, was compelled to evacuate the country.