Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans, and Land Pirates (review)

This book contains papers on partisan warfare in Napoleonic Europe by nine scholars who attended a conference at the University of Liverpool in September 2003. The editor, Charles Esdaile, is the leading scholar in Britain on Napoleonic Spain, and his influence lends coherence to what is a difficult topic to handle comparatively. The essays, including an introduction and conclusion by Esdaile, cover examples of partisan warfare in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Russia, and should be of interest to students of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and partisan warfare in general.

Following an introduction by Esdaile, Alan Forrest shows us how partisans were seen by the French, who, ever since the Vendée, had called them brigands, "wild beasts of the fields and woods," who were "unworthy of the name of humanity" (p. 41). Thus, the ferocity of partisan warfare flowed in part from attitudes shared by French officers before they ever encountered their imperial subjects.

What happened in northern Italy illustrates this. According to Martin Boycott-Brown, the French penchant for "ruthless plundering" (p. 60) in villages like Ombriano (p. 52) led to a peasant war in the 1790s shaped less by political and religious ideologies than by the need to survive French predation (p. 59). In contrast, writes Michael Rowe, armed resistance in the Rhineland was "out of the question, given French military power" (p. 73), but subtle forms of resistance driven by self-interest rather than "ideological considerations" did occur (p. 86).

Catalonians resisted the French from the beginning, but, according to Antonio Moliner Prada, they were not that effective (p. 110), and their efforts tended to degenerate into banditry (p. 105). Charles Esdaile and Leonor Hernández Enviz present findings for 322 Spanish guerrillas and argue, notably, that most of them were men of property rather than the destitute criminals and bandits they were represented to be by their enemies and even by some recent scholars (p. 119). This chapter represents years of painstaking work by Esdaile of the sort needed if we are to understand the partisans. Vittorio Scotti-Douglas details the various attempts by Spanish revolutionary governments to regulate, interpret, and give meaning to a guerrilla movement that resisted both regulation and ideological straight-jacketing, being related more to a defense of property and a struggle for survival than anything else (p. 154).

An essay by Emilie Delivré on anti-Napoleonic catechisms shows that they were ideologically inconsistent and not very effective. Janet Hartley argues that the literature on Russian patriotism in 1812 has paid little attention to the views of ordinary conscripts, who, she says, were not really very patriotic.

The thread uniting these diverse essays is their rejection of ideological interpretations of resistance and their focus on the daily struggles of civilians driven to resist the French out of necessity. It is a welcome addition to the literature and provides a blueprint for future comparative work on the subject.