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Friday 5 December 2008

Napoleon’s Cursed War

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Raymond Carr reviews the latest book by Ronald Fraser

In exile on St Helena, Napoleon brooded on the cause of the failure of his bid for the mastery of Europe. He confessed that ‘accursed Spain was the primary cause of my misfortunes’. Ronald Fraser’s book of over 500 pages may be seen as a commentary on this confession. Fraser made his name as the oral historian of Francoism and its opponents. Without the voices of the living, for his description of Spain from 1808 to 1814 Fraser has ransacked the archival sources and contemporary accounts. It is a fine example of what he calls history as seen from below. Whereas after Austerlitz the Austrian state survived defeat, and resistance in the Tyrol and in Naples were ‘minor surmountable regional affairs’, Spain was an exception. The state of the ancien régime collapsed and the popular resistance to Napoleon, the subject of Fraser’s book, was a formidable force. He rejects the notion of a universal national rising as a liberal myth. It was a much more complicated affair.

How had this come about? In the spring of 1808 Spain was still the ally of Napoleon. The government of Charles IV, his Queen and their favourite Godoy, an obscure hidalgo from Extramadura, allowed a French army to march through Spain to drive the British army out of Portugal. Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and the most colourful and brutal of his marshals, occupied Madrid. Meanwhile Napoleon forced the royal family to come to Bayonne, where he exploited their ‘dirty intrigues’ to impose his brother Joseph as king of Spain. As the inhabitants of the occupied countries of Western Europe, after the defeats of 1940, had to decide on whether to collaborate with Hitler’s New Order, so Spaniards had to decide whether or not to co-operate with the intruder Joseph. The collaborators in Spain were the afrancesados (Frenchfiers). They argued that to resist the military might of Napoleon’s France would plunge Spain into a war it could not win. Moreover Joseph, unlike his brother, had the interests of his new subjects at heart. He would favour the reforms that enlightened men believed would bring Spain into the modern world.

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