The First Revolt of Nations.[24]
The New Rôle of Spain — Guerrilla Warfare — The French Cowed — The Capitulation of Baylen — The French Retreat from Spain and Portugal — Complaints of King Joseph — Napoleon's Exasperation — Imperialist Sentiment in France — The Emperor's Determination — The Spirit of Prussia — The Work of Stein — The Revolution in Turkey — Austria's Anxieties — War Feeling at Vienna — Napoleon Turns to the Czar — Alexander's Hesitancy — Napoleon's Misrepresentations — Austria Warned — Talleyrand and the Czar — Napoleon's Allocution at St. Cloud.
Thus far in the history of Europe all politics had been in the main dynastic. The nations having been consolidated under powerful houses, it was the reigning family which seemed to constitute the national entity, not the common institutions, common speech, common faith, common territory, common aims, and common destiny of the people. Spain, like Italy, had a clearly marked national domain, and, in spite of some striking differences, a fairly homogeneous population. It was fitting and not entirely unnatural that the land of the Inquisition, the land of ignorance, the land of intolerance, the land, in short, which had sunk the lowest under absolutism, should begin the counterrevolution which, checking the excesses of Napoleon and the French Revolution in their disregard for nationality, ushered into the world's forum the nation and national sentiment as the strongest force of the nineteenth century.
This was exactly what happened in Spain. Napoleon's strategy had laughed at the military formation of Frederick the Great's system; the guerrillas of Spain laughed at the formations of regular warfare in any shape. They rose to fight, and dispersed for safety, leaving their smarting foe unable to strike for lack of a billet. The occasional successes of the Spanish regulars showed, moreover, that the generals were not entirely ignorant of Napoleon's own system. When Joseph entered Madrid the whole land was already in open rebellion, except where French force compelled a sullen acquiescence in French rule. The long inactive, sluggish ecclesiastics suddenly seemed to feel the vigor to resist and the power to lead. They joined the insurgents, and invoked the orthodoxy of the nation so as to inflame the passions of the masses against the persecutor of the Pope. Irregular and undefined as were the elements of the uprising, it was nevertheless essentially a popular movement; as Napoleon himself later admitted, it was the people themselves who refused to ratify his new institutions, and who declared for Ferdinand VII. The sequel furnished ample illustration of this fact: the mountaineers of Asturias rose in united rebellion; the inhabitants of Cartagena threw open their arsenals to the volunteers of the neighborhood; the citizens of Saragossa beat off their besiegers, while those of Valencia first massacred the French who took refuge in their citadel, and then repulsed Moncey in a desperate conflict. When the Spanish leaders ventured into an open battle-field they were defeated; on the other hand, when they kept the hills and fought like bandits they were victorious.
So quick and general was the Spanish rising that the various French army divisions shut themselves up for safety in whatever towns they could hold: pretending to defy the national guards, who seemed to spring from the ground without, they were in reality awestricken before the wrath of the armed citizens within. A quick burst of Spanish anger, a sharp stab of the Spanish poniard—the frequency of such incidents began to create a panic among the French boy-soldiers. The seizure and sack of a city had for years been a traditional amusement of the grand army, connected in Italy and Germany with little or no loss of life, and enhanced by the acquisition of enormous booty. The young conscripts, who had heard the oft-told tale from their fathers' lips, found to their bitter disappointment that in Spain a sack meant much bloodshed and little, if any, booty. Sometimes the tables were more than turned. A French squadron put in at Cadiz to coöperate with a force despatched by Napoleon, under pretense of resisting an invasion threatened by the English, but really for the purpose of terrorizing southern Spain. The arrival of the troops having been delayed by the outbreak of rebellion farther north, the townsfolk of that ancient city rose and seized the fleet. The corpses of French soldiers, wherever found throughout the country, were mutilated by the furious Spaniards, and the wounded received no quarter.
At the end of May, Murat was in Madrid as commander-in-chief, with Moncey as his lieutenant; he had thirty thousand troops. Junot was in Portugal with twenty-five thousand. Bessières had twenty-five thousand more, half in Old Castile under himself, half in Aragon under Verdier. Duhesme commanded the thirteen thousand who were in Catalonia; Dupont stood on the Tagus near Toledo with twenty-four thousand more. In the first weeks of June four different skirmishes occurred between the French regulars and the insurgents in different parts of the country. Verdier at Logroño on the sixth, Frère in Segovia on the seventh, Lefebvre at Tudela on the eighth, and Lasalle near Valladolid on the twelfth, had all dispersed the hordes opposed to them. By the middle of the month a regular advance was ordered. It took the form of dispersion for the sake of complete occupation. While Lefebvre laid siege to Saragossa, Moncey started for Valencia with ten thousand soldiers, Dupont for Andalusia with nine thousand, and Bessières's division was distributed throughout Castile up to the walls of Santander, which closed its gates and prepared for resistance. Owing to the defiant attitude and desperate courage of the people, every one of these movements was unsuccessful, each failing in its own special purpose. Cordova was captured, but it had almost instantly to be abandoned. At once Napoleon changed his carefully studied but futile strategy, and determined to concentrate the scattered columns on the critical point, wherever it might be. By this time Palafox and others of the Spanish leaders had shown great ability as generals. The danger now was that a Spanish army would seize Madrid, and thither the French army must betake itself. On July fourteenth Bessières successfully overwhelmed the opposition made at Medina de Rio Seco by the Spaniards under La Cuesta and the Irish general Blake. The only corps left exposed was that of Dupont, to whom reinforcements had been promptly despatched; but the Spaniards under Castaños caught his army, now twenty-five thousand strong, in the mountain pass of La Carolina, among the Sierra Moreña mountains, and on July twenty-first forced him to capitulate at Baylen, where his whole corps laid down their arms.
This was an awful blow, for Madrid was thereby rendered untenable. The Emperor gave orders to retreat behind the Duero, and directed Bessières to keep open the connection with Junot by way of Valladolid. In fact, he began to appreciate his task, for he warned his generals against any system of cordons in dealing with such an enemy, useful as a string of posts might be in checking smugglers; and besides this change of plan, there were indications that he would himself soon take charge in Spain. There was need of this, for his generals and boy-soldiers did not stop to hold the Duero; evacuating Madrid, they never halted until they were behind the Ebro, in what they considered a kind of French borderland. The siege of Saragossa was abandoned, and Duhesme evacuated Catalonia. Junot's situation was thus rendered most precarious, for when Wellesley landed early in August with fourteen thousand English troops, and found that the junta of Corunna had no need of him, he promptly advanced against the invaders of Portugal. Having driven in the French outposts on the seventeenth, four days later he attacked and defeated Junot at Vimeiro. At the very height of the contest, when victory seemed already secure, Burrard, a superior officer, arrived to assume command. This reduced Wellesley to the rank of an adviser, and, his advice not being taken, Junot escaped to the strong position of Cintra, whence, although entirely cut off from his base in Spain, he was able to dictate his own terms of surrender. He and all his troops had a free return by sea to France, but Portugal was to be evacuated.
Napoleon was at St. Cloud, near Paris, when the news of this disaster arrived. To some extent he was already aware of the situation. He knew that the Spaniards would not keep any stipulations they made, claiming that no faith was due to a hostile army which had entered their country under the guise of allies—an army, moreover, which stole the sacred vessels from the sanctuaries of their churches, and would not keep its promise to restore them. The letters of Joseph, who was now utterly disenchanted, had for some time been but one string of bitter complaints. He had asked the Emperor whether an end could not be made to the organized pillage of the churches, and had told him that the movement in Spain was as irrepressible as that of the French Revolution, emphasizing his hopelessness by the suggestion that if France had raised a million soldiers, Spain could probably raise at least half as many. He said, too, that men talked openly of assassinating him; that he had no friends but the scoundrels, the honest men and patriots being on the other side. "My generals," was the Emperor's comment on this querulousness, "are a parcel of post-inspectors; the Ebro is nothing but a line; we must resume the offensive at Tudela." "I have a spot there," he said, pointing with his finger at his uniform. To calm his brother's fears, he replied that the whole Spanish matter had been arranged long before with Russia; that Europe recognized the change as an accomplished fact; and that the priests and monks were at the bottom of all the trouble, stirring up sedition, and acting for the greedy Inquisition. "There is no question of death, but of life and victory; you shall have both.... I may find in Spain the Pillars of Hercules, but not the limits of my power." True to his old principles, Napoleon refused to "call off the thieves," as Joseph besought him, and declared that, according to the laws of war, when a town was captured under arms pillage was justifiable.
These were all brave words, but the Emperor was in the last stage of exasperation. The letters he wrote at the time betray something of the unutterable pain he felt. No one but himself could really know the difference to him: his glory was smirched, his Oriental plans and his scheme for peace with England were indefinitely postponed, his impatient ally was again put off, while Austria and Prussia were encouraged to revolt. Was the vast structure he had so laboriously erected now to fall in one crash at his feet? The news of Junot's surrender was further embittered by the receipt of information that the Spanish troops under General La Romana, which had slyly been posted first in Hamburg, and then sent to Denmark as Bernadotte's advance-guard, had at last revolted, and were embarking on English ships for home in order to join the movement of national redemption. By this disaster the demonstration against Sweden promised to the Czar was made impossible. This accumulation of misfortunes—defeat before Valencia, defeat before Saragossa, disaster and surrender at Baylen, disaster and disgrace at Vimeiro, retreat from Madrid, desertion of the Duero as a line of defense, exchange of the offensive for a weak defensive, and loss of the whole Iberian peninsula except the strip behind the Ebro—all this was shameful and hard to bear. Nevertheless, under favorable conditions the situation might have been retrieved. The conditions, however, were most unfavorable. The example and success of Spain were daily giving new comfort to Napoleon's enemies both in France and abroad.
For the present, however, France might be trusted. The people as a whole had become imperial to the core. The republicans and royalists were so diminished in numbers, and so silenced by the censorship, that they were virtually impotent. The real ability of the country was no longer in retreat, but in the public service; the administration, both financial and judicial, had every appearance of solidity, and the industrial conditions were so steadily improving that the most enterprising and intelligent merchants began to have faith in the ultimate success of the Continental System as a means of securing a European monopoly to French manufactures and commerce. The perfect centralization of France kept the provinces in such close touch with Paris that there was no open expression of discontent in any part of the country. The people were not well informed as to the facts, and they were slow to apprehend the significance of what they learned. By this time the Emperor was France, and whatever he did must be well done. The gradual infusion of the military spirit into the masses had made them passive and obedient. There had been, they knew, some unpleasant troubles beyond the Pyrenees, but the season was not over, and before winter the Emperor's discipline would no doubt be successful. The grand army now pouring out of Germany across France into Spain evidently meant serious business, but there could be no doubt of the result.