The Potter, the Priest and the Stick in the Mud

David A. Bell

Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War by Ronald Fraser
Verso, 587 pp, £29.99, April 2008, ISBN 978 1 84467 082 6

In March 1962, the German far-right intellectual Carl Schmitt visited Spain. It was a homecoming of sorts, for while Germany now shunned this brilliant jurist, who had given enthusiastic support to the Nazis, the land of Franco still revered him (he spoke fluent Spanish, and his daughter was married to a prominent Franquista). Schmitt was there to give lectures at Pamplona and Saragossa in connection with something apparently remote: the 150th anniversary of Spain’s 1808-14 War of Independence against Napoleon. But he insisted on the continuing relevance of this struggle by Spanish and British forces to expel French invaders from Spanish soil: the War of Independence, he declared, marked the beginning of a key form of modern warfare – ‘guerrilla’ or ‘partisan’ war, in which combatants refuse to recognise each other’s legitimacy, fight without restraint, and finally achieve a condition of pure conflict that Schmitt called ‘absolute enmity’. His Theory of the Partisan (the title under which the lectures appeared in print) formed a corollary to his ‘concept of the political’, in which politics itself ultimately reduces to the stark dichotomy of friend and foe. Schmitt traced a line from Spain to later guerrilla movements, including Mao’s peasant insurgency in China and the resistance of France’s right-wing OAS terrorists to Algerian independence.

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Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008 » David A. Bell » The Potter, the Priest and the Stick in the Mud (print version)
Pages 18-20 | 3458 words

Letters

From Ronald Fraser

David Bell is setting up straw men to tilt at in his review of Napoleon’s Cursed War by imposing his own Napoleonic diktats on the book, whose sole theme, as a cursory glance at the foreword would show, is to explain ‘the common [Spanish] people’s initiatives and responses to the war’ (LRB, 6 November).

Along the way, he damns me for not damning other historians, British and Spanish, for their ‘provocative’ arguments. I prefer an analysis of documentary evidence to the academic sport of the jugular. No one reading the book could subscribe to Charles Esdaile’s blithe myth (though I don’t mention it) that Spain experienced no popular uprising at all, since ample documents, which I cite, demonstrate the urban populace’s participation in the anti-Napoleonic risings and the massive plebeian volunteer enlistments to the ‘patriot’ army in 1808. As for Spanish historians who subscribe to the other myth, created for political reasons in the risings’ immediate aftermath, that the revolts were the plebs’ spontaneous expression of an innate patriotism, there is sufficient documentary evidence to show that they were orchestrated, when not actually ‘subsidised’, by small groups of Fernando’s educated supporters, who played on the labouring classes’ xenophobia and fears should Napoleon take over Spain.

My own ‘blithe excursion’ into the counterfactual – that Spaniards might have been better off accepting Napoleon’s regime – was, as Bell acknowledges, an off-the-cuff answer to a journalist’s specific question; nowhere does such a statement appear in the book. And his claim that such is implicit in my comment about Josef Bonaparte as ‘one of the truly honourable (though ineffectual) protagonists’ of the war is an implication he makes, not I. These are hardly the sources a self-respecting academic historian would be expected to use to indict the ‘limits’ of the book ‘as history’. (While on the subject of ‘Josef’, this spelling does not suggest my ‘lack of comfort’ with French, but the reviewer’s lack of comfort with the documents of the period: the Bonaparte king signed all his Spanish decrees as ‘Josef’.)

Because the French were not bent on a ‘revolutionary transformation’ of Spanish society, much of the Spanish population could ‘remain aloof’ from the war, Bell and Esdaile argue. As in any war involving civilians, great numbers of them were anything but ‘aloof’: they were trying desperately to save their lives and food stocks from the imperial army’s (and the guerrillas’) depredations. Many obviously wished the whole thing would end: indeed, I chronicle this through rises in birth and marriage rates in 1810-11. But there is no satisfying the chronically dissatisfied.

Ronald Fraser
Valencia