History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814, vol. 1

by William Francis Patrick Napier

These events were in themselves quite enough to urge a more cautious people than the Spaniards into action; but other measures had been pursued, which proved beyond the possibility of doubt, that the country was destined to be the spoil of the French. The troops of that nation had been admitted without reserve or precaution into the different fortresses upon the Spanish frontier, and, taking advantage of this hospitality to forward the views of their chief, they got possession, by various artifices, of the citadels of St. Sebastian in Guipuscoa, of Pampeluna in Navarre, and of that of Figueras, and the forts of Monjuik, and citadel of Barcelona in Catalonia; and thus, under the pretence of mediating between the father and the son, in a time of profound peace, a foreign force was suddenly established in the capital—on the communications—and in the principal frontier fortresses; its chief was admitted to a share of the government, and a fiery, proud, and jealous nation was laid prostrate at the feet of a stranger, without a blow being struck, without one warning voice being raised, without a suspicion being excited in sufficient time to guard against those acts, upon which all were gazing in stupid amazement.

It is idle to attribute this surprising event to the subtlety of Napoleon’s policy, to the depth of his deceit, or to the treachery of Godoy. Such a fatal calamity could only be the result of bad government, and a consequent degradation of public feeling; and it matters but little to those who wish to derive a lesson from experience, whether it be a Godoy or a Savary that strikes the last bargain of corruption, the silly father or the rebellious son that signs the final act of degradation and infamy. Fortunately, it is easier to oppress the people of all countries, than to destroy their generous feelings; when all patriotism is lost among the upper classes, it may still be found among the lower. In the Peninsula it was not found, but started into life, and with a fervour and energy that ennobled even the wild and savage form in which it appeared; nor was it the less admirable that it burst forth attended by many evils. The good feeling displayed was the people’s own; their cruelty, folly, and perverseness, were the effects of bad government.

There are many reasons why Napoleon should have meddled with the interior affairs of Spain; there seems to be no good one for his manner of doing it. It is true that the Spanish Bourbons could never have been sincere friends to France while Buonaparte held the sceptre, and the moment that the fear of his power ceased to operate, it was quite certain that their apparent friendship would change to active hostility; the proclamation issued by the Spanish cabinet just before the battle of Jena, is evidence of this feeling; but if the Bourbons were his enemies, it did not follow that the people sympathised with their rulers. The resources of the country were, it is said, already at his disposal; but that availed him little, as the corruption and weakness of the administration had reduced those resources to the lowest ebb. His great error was, that he looked only to the court, and treated the nation with contempt. Had Napoleon taken care to bring the people and their government into hostile contact first,—and how many points of contact would not such a government have afforded!—instead of appearing as the treacherous arbitrator in a domestic quarrel, he would have been hailed as the deliverer of a great people.

The journey of Ferdinand, the liberation of Godoy, and the flight of Charles, the appointing Murat to be a member of the governing Junta, and the movements of the French troops, who were advancing from all parts towards Madrid, roused the indignation of the Spanish people; tumults and assassinations had Journal of Dupont’s Operations. MSS. taken place in various parts; and at Toledo a serious riot occurred on the 23d of April; the peasants joined the inhabitants of the town, and it was only by the advance of a division of infantry and some cavalry of Dupont’s corps (then quartered at Aranjuez) that order was restored. The agitation of the public mind, however, increased, the French troops were all young men, or rather boys, taken from the last conscription, and disciplined after they had entered Spain, their youth and apparent feebleness excited the contempt of the Spaniards, who pride themselves much upon individual prowess; and the swelling indignation at last broke out.

Upon the 2d of May, a carriage being prepared (as the people supposed) to convey don Antonio, the uncle of Ferdinand, to France, a crowd collected about it, and their language indicated a determination not to permit the last of the royal family to be spirited away: the traces of the carriage were cut, and loud imprecations against the French burst forth on every side. At that moment, colonel La Grange, an aide-de-camp of Murat’s, appearing amongst them, was assailed and maltreated; in an instant the whole city was in commotion, and the French soldiers expecting no violence, were taken unawares and killed in every quarter: above seven hundred fell. The hospital was attacked by the populace; but the attendants and the sick beat them off; and the alarm having spread to the camp outside the town, the French cavalry came to the assistance of their countrymen by the gate of Alcala; while general Lanfranc, with a column of three thousand infantry, descending from the heights on the north-west quarter, entered the Calle Ancha de Bernardo. As this column crossed the street of Maravelles, in which the arsenal was situated, two Spanish officers, named Daois and Velarde, who were in a state of great excitement, discharged some guns upon the passing troops, and were immediately put to death by the voltigeurs; meanwhile, the column, continuing its march, released, as it advanced, several superior French officers, who were in a manner besieged in the houses by the mob. The cavalry at the other end of the town, treating the affair as a tumult, Memoir of Azanza and O’Farril. and not as an action, made some hundred prisoners; and by the exertions of marshal Moncey, general Harispe, Gonzalvo O’Farril, and some others, order was soon restored.

After night-fall, the peasantry of the neighbourhood came armed and in considerable numbers towards the city, and the French guards at the different gates firing upon them, killed twenty or thirty, and wounded others, some few were also crushed to death or lamed by the cavalry in the morning.

In the first moment of irritation, Murat ordered all the prisoners to be tried by a military commission, which condemned them to death; but the municipality interfered, and represented to that prince the extreme cruelty of visiting this angry ebullition of an injured and insulted people with such severity. Murat admitted the weight of their arguments, and forbade any executions on the sentence; but it is said that general Grouchy, in whose immediate power the prisoners remained, exclaiming that his own life had been attempted! that the blood of the French soldiers was not to be spilt with impunity! and that the prisoners having been condemned by a council of war, ought and should be executed! proceeded to shoot them in the Prado; and forty were thus slain before Murat could cause his orders to be effectually obeyed. The next day some of the Spanish authorities having discovered that a colonel commanding the imperial guards still retained a number of prisoners in the barracks, applied to the duke of Berg to have them released. Murat consented to have those prisoners also enlarged: but the colonel getting intelligence of what was passing, and being enraged at the loss of so many choice soldiers, put forty-five of the captives to death before the order could arrive to stay his bloody proceedings[4].

Such were nearly the circumstances that attended this celebrated tumult, in which the wild cry of Spanish warfare was first heard; but as many authors, adopting without hesitation all the reports of the day, have represented it sometimes as a wanton and extensive massacre on the part of the French, at another as a barbarous political stroke to impress a dread of their power, I think it necessary to make the following observations.

That it was commenced by the Spaniards is undoubted: their fiery tempers, the irritation produced by passing events, and the habits of violence which they had acquired by their late successful insurrection against Godoy, rendered an explosion inevitable. But if the French had secretly stimulated this disposition, and had prepared in cold blood to make a terrible example, undoubtedly they would have prepared some check on the Spanish soldiers of the garrison, and they would scarcely have left their hospital unguarded; still less have arranged the plan so that their own loss should far exceed that of the Spaniards; and surely nothing would have induced them to relinquish the profit of such policy after having suffered all the injury. Yet marshal Moncey and general Harispe were actively engaged in restoring order; Manifesto of the council of Castile. Page 28. and it is certain that, including the peasants shot outside the gates, the executions on the Prado and in the barracks of the imperial guards, the whole number of Spaniards slain did not amount to one hundred and twenty persons, while more than seven hundred French fell. Of the imperial guards seventy Surgical Campaigns of Baron Larrey. men were wounded, and this fact alone would suffice to prove that there was no premeditation on the part of Murat; for if he was base enough to sacrifice his own men with such unconcern, he would not have exposed the select soldiers of the French empire in preference to the conscripts who abounded in his army. The affair itself was certainly accidental, and not very bloody for the patriots, but policy induced both sides to attribute secret motives, and to exaggerate the slaughter. The Spaniards in the provinces, impressed with an opinion of French atrocity, were thereby excited to insurrection on the one hand; and, on the other, the French, well aware that such an impression could not be effaced by an accurate relation of what did happen, seized the occasion to convey a terrible idea of their power and severity; but, while it is the part of history to reduce such amplifications, it is impossible to remain unmoved in recording the gallantry and devotion of a populace that could thus dare to assail the force commanded by Murat, rather than abandon one of their princes; such, however, was the character of the lower classes of Spain throughout this war; fierce, confident, and prone to sudden and rash actions, they had an intuitive perception of all that was great and noble, but were miserably weak in execution.

The commotion of the 2d of May was the forerunner of insurrections in every part of Spain, few of which were so honourable to the actors as that of Madrid. Unprincipled villains hailed this opportunity of directing the passions of the multitude, and, under the mask of patriotism, turned the unthinking fury of the people against whoever it pleased them to rob or to destroy: pillage, massacres, assassinations, cruelties of the most revolting kind were everywhere perpetrated; and the intrinsic goodness of the cause was disfigured by the enormities committed at Cadiz, Seville, Badajos, and other places, but chiefly at Valencia, pre-eminent in barbarity at a moment when all were barbarous! The first burst of popular feeling being thus misdirected, and the energy of the people wasted in assassinations; lassitude and fear succeeded to the insolence of tumult at the approach of real danger; for it is one thing to shine in the work of butchery, and another to establish that discipline which can alone sustain the courage of the multitude in the hour of trial.