Historians of the Napoleonic War in Spain (1808–14) – also known as the Peninsular War or Spanish War of Independence – have highlighted its conventional and nonconventional nature – employing the term ‘hybrid warfare’ to describe the convergence of insurgent and traditional methods in conflict. While various forms of military resistance used in Spain were key to breaking the power of the First French Empire’s occupation army, the ways in which Napoleon relied on propaganda and collaborators to implement authority over a country deeply hostile to foreign rule were likewise factors in the regime’s persistence. Fighting behind enemy lines by disrupting communications, logistics, and acting against provincial authorities – insurgents eventually wore down the French through attrition in conjunction with British operations emanating from Portugal. However, Napoleon could not have successfully installed his older brother Joseph to the Spanish throne in 1808 without the active assistance of authorities in key positions – particularly in the capital and larger cities. Along with a concerted propaganda campaign, collaborators complemented the French use of conventional military practices and counterinsurgency initiatives to control the country.

Propaganda Press

Newspapers were one of the non-violent tools used to attempt to pacify the Spanish. Occupation publications like the Gazeta de Madrid, the main josefino (Joseph-supporting) organ in the capital, were introduced in cities all over the country. Napoleon himself “understood the importance of the press as the principal instrument of ideological control” in the conflict, and spent time monitoring the papers.  The Gazeta was an important French-controlled newspaper, but not the only one. In all, some thirty publications appeared in Spain during the occupation, including the Gazeta oficial de la Navarre, the Gazeta de Sevilla, the Gazeta del Sexto Gobierno in Valladolid, the Diario de Valencia, and even two Catalan-language publications to appeal to that province. The Gazeta de Madrid listed various items concerning sales, taxes, and information on regions of the empire designed to make Madrid’s citizens feel as though they were part of a larger pan-European organization. It published numerous edicts and decrees issued by Joseph, and occasionally offered information on the war when it favored the French. The Gazeta also devoted a significant amount of time excoriating the British. Although its contents were redacted by the Ministry of Police to ensure information beneficial to the Spanish opposition was not printed, events and trends in the war can be discerned from its pages. The Gazeta was one Napoleon’s main mouthpieces informing the capital’s population, and it portrayed the Bonaparte family and their reforms in a positive light.[1]

Collaborators

Another aspect of maintaining control was the use of collaborators. Many of them had no reason to question Napoleon’s continued success given his military and diplomatic record prior to 1808. With these bonafides in mind, it was Napoleon’s hope that a small but effective group of collaborators could garner enough support among Spaniards to temper resistance. Apart from the josefino leadership – which consisted mostly of higher-level clergy and statesmen – Juan López Tabar estimated in his 2001 work, The Famous Traitors, that the afrancesado (French-supporting) administration comprised of a few thousand people. Included within an important cadre of Spanish collaborators, the ministerial positions held in Joseph’s government consisted mostly of reliable Frenchmen reporting directly to Paris and the emperor. In other words, the true ruler of Spain was Napoleon. This system adhered to Napoleon’s preference for micromanaging affairs in occupied countries. Keeping the emperor’s leadership style in mind, Napoleon had little intention of allowing his brother to form an autonomous Spanish government acting independently of Paris, and once Joseph was established in Madrid reforms attempting to win over the people were introduced. Almost immediately the Inquisition was suspended in a rebuke to the authority of the church. The popularity of this move among liberals and other afrancesados is evinced by the Cortes of Cadiz’s abolition of the system in 1813. Although reinstituted by King Ferdinand VII after the war, there was widespread dislike for the institution among liberals.[2]

Disarming the population and enlisting civilians was another early strategy to prevent an insurgency, and historian John Tone affirms that those initiatives “met some success in Spain.” In areas closer to Madrid, such as New Castile and La Mancha, Joseph sent representatives “to enlist local officials… or to set up new municipal corporations.” He also attempted to create a homegrown Spanish army willing to serve imperial interests. Some of these collaborators served in regiments, while others were employed as scouts in counterinsurgency efforts in areas like northeastern Spain. However, as the war continued and the possibility of French defeat became more likely, those forces became less willing to fight their fellow countrymen.[3]

Role of the Church

Support for the regime among the upper clergy in the urban areas contrasted the animous the lower clergy felt for French soldiers who confiscated their convents or monasteries to use as bases in the provinces. In the cities, the ruling classes were generally well-connected to leading ecclesiastical officials, both of whom were large land owners. These officials decided to maintain the status quo once the French regime was ensconsed. When upheavel ensued, many urban clerics became the victims of reprisals from mobs who felt betrayed. According to Tone, the willingness to work with the new conquerorers took on a regional tendency. “In general, therefore, clergy in urban areas, and in southern Spain generally, collaborated with the French more than clergy in rural areas and in the North.” However, as Tone notes it is difficult to make sweeping generalities concering ecclesiastical collaborators because the Catholic Church “was divided in its response” to the abrupt seizure of power. “Much of the church hierarchy collaborated, and even many priests and monks obeyed Napoleon when he reminded them that their mission was spiritual.” Antoine-Henry Jomini, a respected author and colonel when he served under Marshal Michel Ney during the early period of the Peninsular War, went even further by noting the importance of these ecclesiastics to the overall success of the insurgency. “Although the Spanish regency was shut up in Cadiz, it nevertheless, continued to give its orders throughout the monarchy. Priests were the staff officers who transmitted these orders”.[4]

Attempt to Temper Insurrection

On the administrative and military side of the occupation, many of the lower-level collaborators simply accepted French rule “as a fait accompli” and transferred allegiance to Bonaparte while trying to maintain some semblence of neutrality as the conflict worsened. This untenable position became increasingly difficult in regions and cities with limited protection from French soldiers. Napoleonic historian David Gates notes that survival was crucial, but “all afrancesados, once discovered, had to live with the stigma of having failed to resist the invader.” These traitors (traidores), many of whom were associated with local hierarchies in the regions outside of Madrid, had difficulty avoiding reprisals. Towards the end of the conflict, many were forced to flee to France with Joseph.[5]

With an administrative system of collaborators in place, the regime focused on controlling an unruly population and ending the revolt as quickly as possible. Newspaper propaganda and judicial reforms were benign measures, but Napoleon had his own rules for administrating conquered subjects. He urged his brother to take the reins of leadership and implement oppressive measures. He advised him to put an end to the rebellion by appointing “corregidors, and superior magistrates, whom the people are accustomed to obey,” disarm the rebels by granting pardons to those “who submit to bring their arms,” and to “issue circulars to the alcades and cures” (municipal officials) to bring them further into the government. He advised organizing a foreign regiment in Madrid composed of Austrians, Prussians, and Italians capable of displaying their prowess in the streets of Madrid “to clear off the crowd of strangers” who were swarming them.[6]

On the propaganda side of things, in 1809 before the insurgency coalesced, the Gazeta tried to cast a sympathetic tone to the May 2 (dos de mayo) riots that erupted in Madrid and elsewhere when Napoleon seized power. “With difficulty we could have imagined the disorder that reigned in Madrid, unless confirmed by the prisoners, who gave an account of the horrific spectacles presented by this capital.” By resisting “a generous enemy” the attacks on the French troops “forced them to continue the fire.” With order restored the Gazeta claimed public affairs were back to normal: “From that moment, men, women and children took to the streets safely: the shops were open until noon. All were occupied in destroying the trenches and paving the streets: the friars returned to their convents; and in a few hours Madrid presented a contrast the most extraordinary and inexplicable for those who ignore the customs of the great populations. All the inhabitants… admire the generosity of the French.”[7]

The public was informed that the previous authority enjoyed by the Catholic Church was nullified. “In this way the religious establishment in the empire is completed: the concordat has restored an inalterable peace between the throne and the altar”. In other words, the occupiers implemented the same reforms established in France – namely, the separation of church and state, and ascendance of secular rule. “The authority of the Sovereign is no longer detained in his action: the independence of the state and the church of France will no longer be threatened by foreign maxims.” To this end, the Gazeta implored its readers to ignore the dictates of the clergy and follow “their conscience, [the] inviolable asylum for the freedom of man.” These and other reforms were published daily for public consumption as the French worked to paint their occupation as a benevolent undertaking meant for the good of the country.[8]

The Gazeta also attempted to dissuade insurrection and argued that to fight meant to “discard a regeneration” of the nation itself. “The true enemies of Spain would henceforth be those who… still stubbornly stop the progress of the victories, which are the fruit of the superior talent of the Emperor of the French and of the valor of his soldiers.” Traces of revolt would be the “greatest of delusions” that could not possibly help the Spanish people but only “lengthen and increase the ordinary evils in every war, and to involve in the ruin and annihilation the sensible and innocent people.” In essence, the public was told that the Bourbons were not coming back to rule. “The establishment of a new dynasty, when in principle has the glory of arms and the justice of laws, is the spring of nations.” The Gazeta trumpeted further that the “world is reborn to the voice of the glorious leader of an enlightened dynasty, as he was devoted to the horrible storms under the dishonored scepter of the last remnants of a race molded in softness.”[9]

The rebirth of Spain under the Bonapartes was not going to take place despite the incantations of French propaganda, and neither the new king nor Napoleon were ready to return to Madrid. “The only object of the King,” Napoleon wrote from Chamartín, “ought to be to keep Madrid. All the rest is unimportant.” Nevertheless, authorities attempted to normalize the French presence and prepare for a long Bonaparte rule. Napoleon left Spain shortly thereafter, and never returned: “The remains of the stupor with which the inhabitants of Madrid are overwhelmed are dissipating every day. And those who had concealed their furniture and precious effects, are bringing them back to their homes, the stores return to their ordinary state; the parapets and other defense preparations have disappeared already. The occupation of Madrid has been verified without disorder, and there is tranquility in all the places of this great town.”[10]

The Diaro de Madrid, another regime mouthpiece, implored for calm in the provinces by appealing to mayors, magistrates, and councilmen to reason with those who might oppose the regime. “The time so desired by all the good Spaniards has arrived that the magistrates can raise their time, speak to the people they govern, and make respect their authority hitherto unknown despised.” Time was not on the regime’s side, and the argument used to persuade was an appeal to rationality: “Blissfully arrived is the day in which the people, disappointed by themselves of the mistakes with which some ill-intentioned or deluded men had managed to hallucinate, lend docile ears to the advice of reason.” That advice was abruptly ignored, and in the spring of 1809 the Spanish launched an insurgency throughout the entire country.[11]

(1) Juan López Tabar, Los famosos traidores: Los afrancesados durante la crisis del Antiguo Régime (1803-1833) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2001), 31-33; Gazeta de Madrid, January 25, 1809 (No. 25), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. See: Biblioteca Nacional de España: Hemeroteca Digital; Miguel Artola, Los Afrancesados (Madrid: Ediciones Altaya, S.A., 1997).
(2) Tabar, Los famosos Traidores, 47; Michael Ross, The Reluctant King: Joseph Bonaparte: King of the Two Sicilies and Spain (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1976), 171. For a look at Catholic reaction to secularist French rule on a pan-European level see: Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
(3) John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 85.
(4) Tone, The Fatal Knot, 148 –9; Antoine-Henri Jomini, Life of Napoleon, with Notes by H.W. Halleck, vol. 3 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1864), 222.
(5) David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars, 1803-1815 (London: Arnold, 1997), 174-5. The reforms were exemplified in the Bayonne Statute (or Bayonne Constitution) and were meant to represent Joseph’s progressive rule.
(6) Napoleon Bonaparte, The Confidential Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte with His Brother Joseph, Sometime King of Spain, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856), 375-377. Napoleon to Joseph, Nov. 20. Napoleon to Joseph Dec. 5, 1808. Corregidors and alcades are equivalent to mayors, and curés are parish-level priests in France.
(7) Gazeta de Madrid, January 3, 1809 (No. 3). Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC): 341953.
(8) Gazeta de Madrid, January 6, 1809 (No. 6). BVMC: 341956. The Gazeta followed these proclamations with a series of “public instructions” espousing rationalism, enlightenment, and separation of church and state: “…the government and the laws, will be preserved from civil dissensions… that civil education and religious instruction walk at the same pace, although separated.”
(9) Ibid. January 14, 1809 (No. 14). BVMC: 341964; January 18, 1809 (No. 18). BVMC: 341968.
(10) Correspondence, 379-380. Napoleon to Joseph, December. 22, 1808; Gazeta de Madrid, January 7, 1809 (No. 7). BVMC: 341957. Napoleon’s time spent at Chamartín was the subject of Spanish realist novelist Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920). Galdós work, Napoleón en Chamartín, was part of his larger 46-piece work (which included theatrical performances) entitled Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes). The National Episodes were written between 1872 and 1912 and thematically begin during the French occupation of Spain. The first series of the Episodes contain ten books encompassing the period from 1805 to 1814. Some of those titles include: La Corte de Carlos IV, El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo, Bailén, Zaragoza, Gerona, Cádiz, and Juan Martín el Empecinado. The second series begins following the war.
(11) Diario de Madrid, February 1, 1809 (No. 32).