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Call for papers #37

ESDAILE, CHARLES J. Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808-1814. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. xii + 272 pp. 10 illustrations.

Charles Esdaile's often revisionist studies of the Peninsular War have generated a great deal of discussion, but none has gone as far to shatter preconceptions as his latest work. For two centuries, the significant contributions of Spanish guerrillas in the allied victory over France have been irrefutable. After all, it was the Spanish people who spontaneously rose against the French occupiers on May 2, and it was the partidas, serranos, and guerrilleros whose constant activity throughout the peninsula prevented the French from controlling anything other than the ground on which they stood. At least, that is how historians have explained the Spanish War of Independence since 1814. In Fighting Napoleon, Esdaile unapologetically attempts to reexamine la guerrilla, a subject he claims has been "dominated by myth and propaganda" (ix). Although he challenges long-held, even sacred, beliefs, he has undoubtedly succeeded in his goal of generating a renewed discourse on the "little war" in the peninsula.
Esdaile argues that historians of all nationalities have accepted the concept of a Spanish "national" struggle without truly studying the composition or actual significance of the various bands of armed peasants who waged that struggle. Extensively consulting Spanish sources, including several provincial and municipal archives and dozens of contemporary newspapers, Esdaile taps into a great deal of previously under-used sources. As the title indicates, he concludes that Spanish partisans included not just the celebrated guerrillas and patriots, but also the bandits and adventurers that Napoleon's soldiers had always claimed they were fighting.
In order to understand who the many freedom-fighters were, Esdaile first challenges the very definition of the term guerrilla, which was used in various ways in contemporary writing and "can refer to a guerrilla band or to irregular operations, but it can also mean a picket of regular troops or be used to describe the use of skirmishers on the battlefield" (25). Other terms have similar problems, and bands that have often been regarded as spontaneous revolutionaries were actually structured units of the Spanish regular forces. However, what makes this study most welcome is that Esdaile has not simply condemned previous histories as shallow or incomplete. He has not destroyed the Spanish guerrilla. Instead, he has presented the often mythic figure of romantic histories in a much more human aspect. Esdaile's partisans cover the spectrum of humanity. There are indeed patriots, but there are also criminals, smugglers, and opportunists, and sometimes they are the same people.
Esdaile also contends that there was no national revolution following the May 2 uprising in Madrid. Indeed, he refutes the vision of armed Spaniards swarming to the cause with the claim that many actually were forced into the various armed bands. Some of those bands were also often composed of deserters from the Spanish regular armies who fled into the mountains and merely resorted to brigandry to survive. Often, those bands were organized by patriot authorities in the government or by Spanish elites, not by "the people." Moreover, their victims were sometimes French and sometimes Spanish; in some cases, they did as much harm to the cause as they did good by depleting supplies and ravaging the countryside in the name of la patria.
In his attempt to challenge existing historiography, Esdaile has perhaps overly diminished the effectiveness of the partisan. Although he identifies the fighters who represent the exception, he doesn't fully analyze their effectiveness or the effectiveness of the bandits and adventurers. Despite the motivations of the various Spanish bands, the result was that the French were seldom safe from attack. Esdaile is certainly correct in reexamining the character of the guerrilla struggle, but his extensive archival material does not include the French sources that could best measure the significance of the guerrillas. This is likely to be the source of further debate, and that is exactly what Esdaile wants. He expects that the book might raise more questions than it answers in what he hopes will "never [be] called the last word on the subject" (ix). There is little danger of that, as his challenging new look will surely inspire heated rhetoric from the traditionalists. Yet it is just such open discourse that forces more detailed examination and makes better historians of us all. Fighting Napoleon is great history and will unquestionably influence studies of the Peninsular War for a long time to come.

Jason R. Musteen
United States Military Academy