The consequences of this choice were disastrous. War with Britain became inevitable and cut off Spain from America, opening Spain’s colonial markets to Britain and the United States. This development threatened complete bankruptcy of the royal finances, which Godoy attempted to alleviate by the issue of state bonds and the sale of church properties—a measure that alienated conservatives. Godoy invaded Portugal with success in the War of the Oranges (1801), but the defeat of the Franco-Spanish fleet by the British at Trafalgar in 1805 and the “selfishness” of Napoleon caused Godoy to seek a rapprochement with the allies. Had Napoleon lost the Battle of Jena (1806) against the Prussians, Godoy would have joined the Fourth Coalition against him.
Godoy’s position was now extremely weak. Disliked by the court aristocracy, who considered him an upstart, he was unpopular at home. In addition, severe inflation produced great hardship among the poorer classes, and a campaign of gossip was mounted against him by those intellectuals whom he did not patronize. He now hoped, with French help, to dismember Portugal and to secure personal salvation in a principality. This curious hope was the basis of the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1807), by which Napoleon and the Spanish government agreed upon the conquest and partition of Portugal. When French troops on the way to Portugal occupied the fortresses of northern and central Spain and when Napoleon demanded territorial gains in Spain itself, Godoy’s policy was made bankrupt. It was obvious that Napoleon had lost all faith in Godoy and Spain as an ally; the “dirty intrigues” of Ferdinand, prince of Asturias and heir to the throne, against his father and Godoy led Napoleon to consider drastic intervention in Spanish affairs.
The opportunity for direct intervention by Napoleon was given by the Revolt of Aranjuez (March 17, 1808), in which the partisans of Ferdinand, an alliance of discontented aristocrats and others opposed to Godoy, compelled the abdication of Charles IV and the dismissal of Godoy. Napoleon summoned both the old king and Ferdinand VII to Bayonne, where both were compelled to abdicate. The Spanish throne was then offered to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother. The French invasion and the War of Independence, 1808–14
Joseph could count on the support of cautious, legalistic administrators and soldiers, those who believed resistance to French power impossible, and those who considered that Napoleon might “regenerate” Spain by modern reforms. These groups became convinced afrancesados, as members of the pro-French party were pejoratively called. Relying on their support, Napoleon entirely underestimated the possibility of popular resistance to the occupation of Spain by French armies. Although the uprising of May 2, 1808, in Madrid was suppressed, local uprisings against the French were successful wherever French military power was weak. The War of Independence
After the deposition of King Ferdinand, “patriot” Spain outside the control of the French armies split into a number of autonomous provinces. Resistance centred in provincial committees (juntas) that organized armies. A Central Junta at Aranjuez sought to control this nascent federalism and the local levies, and Spanish regular troops defeated a French army of inferior, ill-supplied troops under General Pierre Dupont de l’Étang at Bailén in July 1808. The French retired from Madrid. Napoleon then invaded Spain and by 1809 was in control of most of the peninsula. The Spanish regular army, led by incompetent generals, suffered defeat after defeat.
The War of Independence—or, as the English call it, the Peninsular War—became for Napoleon the “Spanish ulcer,” and he attributed his defeat in Europe to its requirements for men and money. He was defeated not by the inefficient Spanish regular army but by British troops under the duke of Wellington advancing from Portugal with the aid of Spanish guerrillas. As the main battles—Talavera (July 1809) and Vitoria (June 1813)—were fought by Wellington, the guerrillas pinned down French garrisons, intercepted dispatches, and isolated convoys.
The term guerrilla, derived from the Spanish guerra (war), was first used during the Spanish War of Independence. The guerrillas were a complex phenomenon, and they did not share a single motivation for fighting the French. Some were patriotic liberals, and others were driven primarily by their attachment to the church and fought to defend traditional institutions against French-inspired reform. The Constitution of Cadiz, 1812
The war years both recreated a patriotic spirit to cover the bare bones of Bourbon administrative centralism and resulted in the explicit formulation of a liberal ideology that was to be a dynamic factor in Spanish history. The Central Junta and its successor, the regency, were compelled to summon a Cortes in order to legitimize the situation created by the absence of Ferdinand VII, who was a prisoner in France. Conservatives conceived of this task as the mere supply of the sinews of war on behalf of an absent king. However, the Cortes, when it met at Cadiz in 1810, was dominated by liberals who wished to go beyond the mere support of the war effort and establish a constitution that would make impossible the revival of rule by a favourite like Godoy. The constitution of 1812 was to become the “sacred codex” of Latin liberalism.
The Constitution of Cadiz gave Spain a strictly limited monarchy (the king must work through his responsible ministers), a single-chamber parliament with no special representation for the church or the nobility, and a modern centralized administrative system based on provinces and municipalities. All this had little basis in the medieval precedents quoted in the debates and was inspired by the 1791 constitution of Revolutionary France. Liberal individualism inspired legislation against entail, favouring instead the sale of common lands and the individual’s right to dispose of his property as he might wish. The abolition of the Inquisition represented a mixture of historical regalism and modern anticlericalism. This measure produced a conservative reaction, as did all liberal anticlericalism through to the Second Republic in the 1930s. This reaction gave a popular underpinning to Ferdinand VII’s destruction of liberalism and all its works in 1814 (see below).
In addition to initiating a liberal tradition, the War of Independence bequeathed two problems: first, generals chafed at control by civilian juntas and on occasion overthrew them, thus initiating the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, or military revolution; second, the afrancesados, who were often of liberal inclination but were tarred with the accusation of collaborationism with the French, were left as an indigestible element within liberalism itself. Ferdinand VII, 1814–33
With the help of an army corps and of conservative sentiment that had been outraged by the liberalism of 1812, Ferdinand returned from exile in France to rule Spain as an absolute monarch. In 1820 he was forced by military sedition to return to constitutionalism during the Liberal Triennium (1820–23). For the last, “ominous” decade of his reign, he returned to a relatively enlightened form of ministerial despotism. From 1814 to 1820 Spain attempted to reestablish its rule in America and to maintain an inflated wartime army with a permanent economic deficit. The failure of liberalism