The Spanish people, who only weeks before had greeted French armies with fanfare, rose in a general uprising against the French assault on Spanish sovereignty. All across Spain, civilians took up arms and began throwing the French out of their towns and villages. Spanish civilians and remnants of the Spanish army seized French ships in Spanish ports. On May 2, 1808, a mob of nearly 180,000 angry Spaniards marched on the garrison of 36,000 French in Madrid. The French were on the run across Spain as the security situation rapidly spun out of control. Napoleon had boasted before the campaign that 12,000 men could capture Spain. However, by the summer 1808, twice that many men were dead, the French had been handed their first defeat since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, and over 160,000 French soldiers were streaming into Spain to put out the growing fire.

Napoleon took personal command of French forces in Spain and, in a lightning campaign, returned his brother to the throne, crushed the Spanish army, and drove the British out of Portugal. However, Napoleon had to return to Paris at the beginning of 1809 to deal with a new threat from Austria. In his absence, the British returned to the peninsula and joined forces with the reconstituted Spanish and Portuguese armies.

After the return of the British, the war settled into a bloody equilibrium. The French tried in vain to engage in conventional warfare of the style that had been so successful on the rest of the continent, but the outmatched British and Spanish regulars refused to give the French the decisive battle they craved. While the Anglo-Spanish coalition avoided the decisive blow that would end their resistance, a crippling guerilla insurgency was boiling across occupied Spain.

The heart of insurgent resistance was the Montaña region of Navarre in northwest Spain, home of the largest, most organized guerilla army during the war. The culture of this mountainous region centered on landholding farmers. Under Charles IV, this region had been semi-autonomous and very different from the rest of Spain. First, its people spoke a different language–Basque. The region also had a stable local government which offered a level of political freedom that was unheard of in much of Europe. Women were able to own and pass on property. The region had a high percentage of aristocrats and clergy, but these titles were more honorific than indicative of real social distinctions. If there was any source of discord in Montañan society at all, it was primogeniture–the firstborn son inherited all of his father’s wealth while the younger children inherited nothing.

Initially, the French had huge numbers–over 100,000 men–in Navarre and had little trouble with the province. France was able to secure the lowlands of Ribera and the provincial capital of Pamplona without incident. The province, traditionally hostile to the central government in Madrid, did not participate in the general uprisings seen in the rest of Spain. However, when the French moved into Montaña and tried to impose their rule, they provoked a violent reaction from the populace. A huge pool of young, disenfranchised men, victims of primogeniture, formed the core of an insurgency that would frustrate French ambitions in Spain for the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars.

The French in Navarre oscillated between periods of brutal repression and total inaction, during which the insurgency grew even more powerful than before. The strong, local ties that had governed Montaña for centuries proved impervious to French terror tactics. The average Basque farmer in Montaña knew that the French would one day leave, but the powerful patriarchs of the region would remain long after the French were gone. The French army could never supplant the authority of the local elites.

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