Description
The Peninsular War or Guerra de la Independencia (1808-1814), fought by allied Spanish, Portuguese and British armies against Napoleon Bonaparte’s multinational Grande Armée, was not itself a case of humanitarian intervention, but rather a traditional example of military aggression and cooperation for political ends. By invading the Iberian Peninsula and placing his brother on the Spanish throne, Napoleon sought to increase his control of the European continent and further block trade with Britain; by sending troops to support the Spanish and Portuguese in their attempts to repel the occupying forces, the British parliament hoped to unravel Imperial France and restore the old regime order. Yet the popular uprising and guerrilla war that erupted across the Peninsula because of the French invasion blurred these clear-cut lines, adding to a growing debate in contemporary British and French literature about the limits and definition of ‘civilised’ warfare. A large section of this literature denounced the Spanish guerrilleros as illegitimate, morally evil, even inhuman; another side celebrated them as patriots fighting to liberate their country. This paper is concerned with the section of literature that fell somewhere in the middle: the memoirs, novels and poems written by veterans of the campaign which attempted to find humanitarian justifications for the conflict, wrestled with the fact that atrocities had been committed by combatants on all sides, and asserted the existence of an archetypal ‘good’ soldier, who acted honourably and compassionately despite the corruption and violence around him. It argues that ideas of military humanitarianism were forming as early as the Napoleonic Wars and being circulated among broad swathes of the European and American reading population.
