Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [191]
7
Across the Pyrenees
There are few historians who would deny the significance of the period immediately after Tilsit in the history of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was at this point that the emperor was drawn to intervene in the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula, and thereby to spark off a chain of events that are traditionally held to have had a major role, if not the major role, in the downfall of the French imperium. Why, then, did Napoleon reach out across the Pyrenees? The reasons which led him to intervene in Spain and Portugal are not entirely clear. Many authors have assumed it was always the intention of the emperor to move south, while others have suggested that the idea first entered his mind at the time of the battle of Jena. It is possible to mount a case for both positions. The former has at its heart the undeniable fact that by 1807 Charles IV had become the last representative of the Bourbon family to retain his dominions intact. As such, he was a constant reminder to the parvenu Bonapartes of their want of legitimacy and, still worse, a potential encouragement to royalist subversion. Beyond that, it might also be argued that, as product of and heir to the French Revolution, Napoleon could not but be committed to smashing the symbols of the system that it had overthrown. At least this was the opinion of Talleyrand: ‘Napoleon, seated on one of the thrones of the house of Bourbon, considered the princes who occupied the other two as his natural enemies, whom it was his interest to overthrow.’1 Another confidant of the emperor to hold this view was the commander of the Imperial Guard, Marshal Bessières. As he told one of his aides-de-camp, ‘So long as Napoleon remains in power, no European throne can be filled by a Bourbon.’2 Yet another variant on the theme came from the Conde de Toreno, a veteran of the cortes of Cádiz who wrote the standard Spanish history of the contest. According to him, the key was historical precedent and example: the French ‘had never forgotten the foreign policy of Louis XIV, and, in particular, his attempts to harness the Spanish nation to the wagon of his fortune’.3 There is some sense in this: if the policy of Napoleon remained faithful to that of Louis XIV in the Low Countries and Germany, as it did, why should this not have been the case for the Iberian Peninsula, and all the more so as Charlemagne - a figure who was a far greater influence on Napoleon than the ‘sun king’ - had also looked beyond the Pyrenees? To all this there can be added the fact that in the France of 1807, the notion of an attack on Spain was certain to enjoy wide popularity. Spain, it was said, was not just a natural zone of French influence, but a fruit ripe for the picking.
This can be described as the structuralist argument. But what of the alternative position, which might in turn be deemed the functionalist view? There is the equally undeniable fact that in the autumn of Spain had come very close to betraying her alliance with France. To explain this something must be said about Spain’s experiences in the period 1796-1807 . For the whole of this time, Madrid had been in alliance with Paris and, by the same token, usually at war with Britain. From this, however, she had gained nothing: not only had her diplomatic interests been repeatedly flouted, but her entire position as a world power had been thrown into jeopardy. The loss of much of her fleet at Trafalgar left her with few means of physically remaining in touch with her far-flung dominions, let alone keeping them under her control. Indeed, to keep any share