Battle of Bailén
The Battle of Bailén was fought in 1808 between the Spanish Army's Army of Andalusia, under General Francisco Javier Castaños and the French Imperial Army's 2nd Gironde Observational Corps under Divisional-General Pierre Dupont de l'Étang. The first open-field defeat of a Napoleonic army, the battle's heaviest fighting took place near Bailén, a village by the Guadalquivir river in the Jaén province of southern Spain.
In June 1808, following the widespread uprisings against the French occupation of Spain, Napoleon organized French units into flying columns to pacify Spain's major centres of resistance. One column under Dupont was dispatched across the Sierra Morena and south through Andalusia towards the port of Cádiz where a French naval squadron lay at the mercy of the Spanish. The Emperor was confident that with 20,000 men, Dupont would crush any opposition encountered on the way, despite most of them being inexperienced new recruits. Events proved otherwise when Dupont and his men stormed and plundered Córdoba in July. General Castaños, commanding the Spanish field army at San Roque, and General Theodor von Reding, Governor of Málaga, travelled to Seville to negotiate with the Seville Junta—a patriotic assembly committed to resisting the French incursions—and to turn the province's combined forces against the French. Upon learning of the approach of a larger Spanish force, Dupont fell back to the north of the province. Sick and burdened with wagons of loot, he unwisely decided to await reinforcements from Madrid. However, his messengers were all intercepted and killed and a French division under General Dominique Vedel, dispatched by Dupont to clear the road to Madrid, became separated from the main body.
Between 16 and 19 July, Spanish forces converged on the French positions stretched out along villages on the Guadalquivir and attacked at several points, forcing the confused French defenders to permanently reposition and re-organize their troops. With Castaños pinning Dupont downstream at Andújar, Reding's troops successfully crossed the river at Mengibar and seized Bailén, interposing himself between the two wings of the French army. Caught between the troops of Castaños and Reding, Dupont attempted in vain to order his troops to break through the Spanish line at Bailén in three bloody and desperate charges, suffering 2,000 casualties, including himself wounded. With his men short of supplies and without water in the sweltering heat, Dupont entered into talks with the Spanish.
Vedel's army finally arrived, but it was already too late. In the talks, Dupont had agreed to surrender not only his own but Vedel's force as well even though the latter's troops were outside the Spanish encirclement with a good chance of escape; a total of 17,000 men were captured, making Bailén the worst defeat suffered by the French in the entire Peninsular War. Under the surrender terms, the men were to be repatriated to France, but the Spanish did not honor the terms and transferred them to the island of Cabrera, where most died of starvation.
When news of the catastrophe reached Joseph Bonaparte's court in Madrid, the result was a general retreat to the Ebro, abandoning much of Spain to the insurgents. France's enemies throughout Europe celebrated this first major defeat inflicted on the hitherto unbeaten French Imperial Army. "Spain was overjoyed, Britain exultant, France dismayed, and Napoleon outraged. It was the greatest defeat the Napoleonic empire had ever suffered, and, what is more, one inflicted by an opponent for whom the emperor had affected nothing but scorn."—tales of Spanish heroism inspired Austria and showed the force of nationwide resistance to Napoleon, setting in motion the rise of the Fifth Coalition against France.
Alarmed by these developments, Napoleon decided to personally take command of the Spanish theatre and invaded Spain with the Grande Armée. They dealt devastating blows to the Spanish army, recapturing lost territories and occupying Madrid by November 1808, before turning their attention to Austria. The struggle in Spain continued for many more years. Enormous resources were committed by the French to a long war of attrition waged against determined Spanish guerrillas, ultimately leading to the expulsion of L'Armée d'Espagne from the Iberian Peninsula and the exposure of southern France to invasion in 1814 by British, Portuguese and Spanish forces.
Background
The Spanish conventional warfare had started with the Battles of El Bruch.Months before, thousands of French troops had marched into Spain to support a Spanish invasion of Portugal orchestrated by Napoleon, who used the opportunity to initiate intrigues against the Spanish royal family. A coup d'état, instigated by Spanish aristocrats with French support, forced Charles IV from his throne in favour of his son Ferdinand VII, and in April, Napoleon removed both royals to Bayonne to secure their abdication and replace the Spanish Bourbon line with a Bonapartist dynasty headed by his brother Joseph Bonaparte.
However, none of these policies sat well with the Spanish masses, who declared their loyalty to the deposed Ferdinand and revolted at the prospect of a foreign ruler. The uprising by the citizens of Madrid broke out on 2 May, slew 150 French soldiers, and was violently stamped out by Marshal Joachim Murat's elite Imperial Guards and Mamluk cavalry. Joseph's entry into his prospective kingdom was delayed as guerrillas poured down from the mountains and seized or threatened the main roads.
On 26 May, Joseph Bonaparte, in absentia, was proclaimed King of Spain and the Indies in Madrid, his envoys receiving the acclamations of the Spanish notables. The madrileños, however, were indignant; Spanish soldiers quietly withdrew to insurgent-held villages and outposts outside the city, and only Murat's 20,000 bayonets kept the city in order.
Outside the capital, the French strategic situation deteriorated rapidly. The bulk of the French army, 80,000 strong, could hold only a narrow strip of central Spain stretching from Pamplona and San Sebastián in the north through to Madrid and Toledo to the south. Murat, stricken in an outbreak of rheumatic colic which swept the French camp, quit his command and returned to France for treatment: "the Spanish priests would have rejoiced if the hand of God had been laid on him whom they called the butcher of the 2nd of May." General Anne Jean Marie René Savary, a man "more distinguished as Minister of Police than as any field commander", arrived to take command of the shaky French garrison at a critical hour.
With much of Spain in open revolt, Napoleon established a headquarters at Bayonne on the Spanish frontier to reorganize his beleaguered forces and redress the situation. Having little respect for his Spanish opponents, the Emperor decided that a swift display of force would cow the insurgents and quickly consolidate his control of Spain. To this end, Napoleon dispatched a number of flying columns to throttle the rebellion by seizing and pacifying Spain's major cities: from Madrid, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessières pushed northwest into Old Castile with 25,000 men and sent a detachment east into Aragón, aiming to capture Santander with one hand and Zaragoza with the other; Marshal Bon Adrien Jeannot de Moncey marched toward Valencia with 29,350 men; and General Guillaume Philibert Duhesme marshalled 12,710 troops in Catalonia and put Gerona under siege. Finally, Divisional-General Pierre Dupont de l'Étang, a distinguished division commander, was to lead 13,000 men south toward Seville and ultimately the port of Cádiz, which sheltered Admiral François Rosilly's fleet from the Royal Navy.
War reaches Andalusia
Dupont's corps primarily fielded of second-line forces of a distinctly unimpressive character. These second-line troops, originally raised as provisional or reserve formations, had been intended either for internal police services or garrison duty in Prussia—evidence that Napoleon intended the Spanish campaign to be "a mere promenade." This force approached Córdoba in early June and in their first formal battle on Andalusian soil, captured the bridge at Alcolea, sweeping past the Spanish troops under Colonel Pedro de Echávarri that attempted to block their progress. The French entered Córdoba that same afternoon and ransacked the town for four days. However, in the face of increasingly menacing mass uprisings across Andalusia, Dupont decided to withdraw to the Sierra Morena, counting on help from Madrid.The French retreated in the sweltering heat, burdened with some 500 wagons of loot and 1,200 ill. A French surgeon remarked: "Our little army carried enough baggage for 150,000 men. Mere captains required wagons drawn by four mules. We counted more than 50 wagons per battalion, the result of the plunder of Córdoba. All our movements were impeded. We owed our defeat to the greed of our generals." "Récit du Docteur Treille" in Larchey, p. 1: "Notre petite armée avait plus de bagages qu'une armée de 150,000 hommes. De simples capitaines et des civils assimilés à ce grade avaient des carrosses à quatre mules. On comptait au moins cinquante chariots par bataillon; c'étaient les dépouilles de la ville de Cordova. Nos mouvements en étaient gênés. Nous dûmes notre perte à la cupidité des chefs." General Jacques-Nicolas Gobert's division set out from Madrid on 2 July to add weight to Dupont's expedition. However, only one brigade of his division ultimately reached Dupont, the rest being needed to hold the road north against the guerrillas.
Reinforcements across the Sierra
Napoleon and the French strategists, anxious about their communications with Bayonne and wary of a British descent upon a Biscayan coast already in open revolt, initially prioritized operations in the north of Spain. In mid-June General Antoine Charles Louis Lasalle's victory at Cabezón simplified matters tremendously; with the Spanish militias around Valladolid destroyed and much of Old Castile overrun, Savary shifted his gaze south and resolved to reopen communications with Dupont in Andalusia. Apart from the menace in the north, Napoleon was most anxious to secure the Andalusian provinces, where the traditional, rural peasantry was expected to resist Joseph's rule. On 19 June Vedel, with Dupont's 2nd Infantry Division, was dispatched south from Toledo to force a passage over the Sierra Morena, hold the mountains from the guerrillas, and link up with Dupont, pacifying Castile-La Mancha along the way.Vedel set out with 6,000 men, 700 horse, and 12 guns, joined during the march by small detachments under Generals Claude Roize and Louis Liger-Belair. The column raced across the plains, encountering no resistance, although stragglers were seized and cut down by the locals. Reaching the sierra on 26 June, the column found a detachment of Spanish regulars, smugglers, and guerrillas with six guns under Lieutenant-colonel Valdecaños blocking the Puerta del Rey. Napier assigns a strength of 3,000 men to the Spaniards, but claims their colonel defected to Vedel. Vedel's troops stormed the ridge and overran the enemy cannon, losing 17 dead or wounded. They then pushed south over the mountains toward La Carolina. The next day they encountered a detachment of Dupont's troops preparing to attack these same passes from the south side. With this junction, communications between Dupont and Madrid were reestablished after a month of silence.