Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808-1814 (review)

It is odd that for a war largely fought in Spain, and in which the largest number of participants were Spanish, there has been so little presented in English on the Spanish perspective. Charles Esdaile, of Liverpool University, has made it his mission to end such a paradox. In his new study, Fighting Napoleon, he focuses on one aspect of the Spanish struggle to rid their lands of the French—the guerrilla war. More specifically he examines the guerrillas themselves and attempts to assess their impact on Napoleon's occupation and occupying forces.

The question of who made the most decisive contribution to the ejection of Napoleon's troops from Spain has been a running historical sore. The historiography of the conflict has certainly been dominated by Wellington's victories and historians writing in English have tended to dismiss the Spanish contribution. With one important exception—the guerrillas. How the guerrillas achieved their reputation of being the only effective Spanish resistance to the French is rooted in the British disdain for Spanish regular troops (an attitude largely shared by the French) coupled with the achievements of these partisans in what was, in many regions, pure insurgency warfare.

Esdaile's study is welcome on many levels. He provides the human element in the history of the guerrillas bands although, as yet, no real general history of the activities of the Spanish guerrillas exists in English. He also sweeps away the romance of the heroic guerrilla and replaces it with a much more complex picture of partisans, bandits, smugglers, and deserters. Some were patriots, some were motivated by revenge, whilst others were opportunists and preyed on their compatriots. Thus a picture emerges in which guerrillas can be seen as liberators, parasites, and an unwelcome diversion of scarce military resources. His challenge to the mythology which surrounds the guerrillas is effective, persuasive, and makes use of a staggering array of primary source material. The argument that the author then develops, that insurgency warfare in Spain was not as effective, in military terms, as has previously been asserted, is going to be more controversial. As well as fixing themselves firmly in the psyche of every French soldier crossing the Pyrenees into the peninsula, the partisans imposed immense physical burdens on the occupying forces. It might have been the case that some bands were ineffective, and that needs saying, but the underlying fact that the French were forced to fight in hostile territory almost everywhere they went is a crucial element in understanding why the French were defeated in the Peninsular War and I am not convinced by Esdaile's arguments in this case.

The debate as to why the French were defeated in Spain and Portugal, although they managed to suppress revolts in La Vendée and the Tyrol, must continue and Fighting Napoleon is an important step in the right direction. It is highly recommended. Hopefully, more Spanish and Portuguese material will be translated and add further to our understanding of the war the Spanish remember as the war of independence.