All Roads lead to Verdun: British Prisoners of War in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814

Autores/as

  • Charles Esdaile University of Liverpool

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i18.622

Palabras clave:

Napoleonic Wars, Peninsular War, prisoners of war, British Army, laws of war

Resumen

The French Revolution has generally been regarded as marking a water-shed in the conduct of war, a moment, indeed, in which the world embarked on an age of total war. This process supposedly affected eveery aspects of waging war, including, not least, the treatment of prisoners of war: according to the rhetoric of the more violent revolutionaries, and especially the Committee of Public Safety, indeed, prisoners of war were to be put to death, in which respect particular vehemence was expressed in respect of the soldiers and sailors of Great Britain. In this article, which is strictly limited to the situation that pertained in the theatre of war itself (the experiences of the prisoners concerned once they reached France are discussed by another contributor to this work), these claims will be examined via the prism afforded by the experiences of the 5,000 prisoners of war estimated to have been taken by the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Peninsular War of 1808-14, these being catalogued in some detail by the memoirs and other works produced by them in the years after the conflict. By reference to these narratives, it is possible to establish that, if it ever existed at all, the new model urged upon the French armies by the Committee of Public Safety certainly made no appearance in Peninsular-War Spain and Portugal. Prisoners of war could expect a greater or lesser degree of brutality at the moment of capture and occasionally ran the risk of being killed in cold blood, but there was little difference here with the experience of earlier conflicts, whilst the continuities remained in place thereafter: for the rank and file, in particular, conditions were rarely anything other than uncomfortable, but officers were invariably treated with a great deal of courtesy. As for the many men who were found to be wounded at the time of their capture, they were given such medical care as was available. In short, however much the men concerned may have suffered, their experiences were very much those of predecessors in earlier conflicts, the fact being that what is seen in Spain and Portugal is not the birth of a new age of barbarism but the survival of eighteenth-century norms of conduct.

Descargas

Los datos de descarga aún no están disponibles.

Biografía del autor/a

  • Charles Esdaile, University of Liverpool
    Charles Esdaile holds a personal chair in the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, and is the author of numerous books on the Napoleonic era. Chief among these are Napoleon’s Wars: an International History (Penguin Books, 2007), Peninsular Eye-Witnesses: the Experience of War in Spain and Portugal, 1808-14 (Pen and Sword, 2008) and The Wars of Napoleon (second edition; Routledge and Keegan Paul, 2019).

Referencias

ANDERSON, Martin, War and Society in Europe of the Ancien Régime, London, Fontana, 1988.

ANON., Journal of a Soldier of the Seventy-First, or Glasgow Regiment, Highland Light Infantry, from 1806 to 1815, Edinburgh, William and Charles Tait, 1819.

ANON. (ed), Les guerres de la péninsule vues par quatre témoins: témoignages sur la campagne d’Espagne et Portugal extraits du Carnets de la Sabretache, années 1899, 1902, 1908, 1920, Paris, Libraries Historique Teissedre, 1999.

BELL, David, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, Boston, Mariner Books, 2007.

BELL, David, ‘The limits of conflict in Napoleonic Europe - and their transgression’, in CHARTERS, Erica, et al (eds.), Civilians and War in Europe, 1618-1815, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2012pp. 201-8.

BLACK, Jeremy, review of D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, Boston, Mariner Books, 2007, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 765-6.

BLACK, Jeremy, European Warfare, 1660-1815, Routledge, London, 2002.

BLANNING, Timothy, ‘The French Revolution and Europe’, in LUCAS, Colin (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 173-206.

BLAYNEY, Andrew, Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France as a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814, London, E. Kerby, 1814.

BOOTHBY, Charles, A Prisoner of France: the Memoirs, Diaries and Correspondence of Charles Boothby, Capt. R.E., London, Adam and Charles, 1898.

BRETT-JAMES, Anthony, “Fraternization in the Peninsular War”, History Today, 12 (1962), pp. 354-61.

BROERS, Michael “The concept of total war in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period”, War in History, 15, (2008), pp. 247-68.

CHAMBERLAIN, Paul, “Prisoners of War in the Peninsula”, in FLETCHER, Ian (ed.), The Peninsular War: Aspects of the Struggle for the Iberian Peninsula, Staplehurst, Spellmount, 1998, pp. 131-48.

CHILDS, John, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648-1789, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982.

CLAUSEWITZ, Carl von, On War, ed. RAPAPORT, London, Penguin Books, 1968. CORVISIER, André, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789, Bloomington (Indiana), Indiana University Press, 1979.

DUCHÉ, Elodie, ‘A passage to imprisonment: the British prisoners in Verdun under the first French empire’, University of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 2014.

DWYER , Philip, ‘“It still makes me shudder: memories of massacre and atrocity during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, War in History, XVI, (2009), pp. 381-405.

ESDAILE, Charles J., Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808-1814, London, Yale University Press, 2004.

ESDAILE, Charles J., Outpost of Empire: the French Occupation of Andalucía, 1810-1812, Norman (Oklahoma), University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

ESDAILE, Charles J., The Peninsular War: a New History, London, Allen Lane, 2002.

ESDAILE, Charles J., The Wars of Napoleon (second edition), Abingdon, Routledge, 2019.

GLEIG (ed.), George, The Light Dragoon, London, Henry Colburn, 1855.

GLOVER, Michael, “The courtesies of war”, History Today, 28 (1978), pp. 469-75.

HAGEMANN, Karen, ‘Francophobia and patriotism: anti-French images and sentiments in Prussia and northern Germany during the anti-Napoleonic Wars’, French History, 18 (2004), pp. 404-25.

HAYTHORNTHWAITE, Phillip, “Carrying on the war as it should be: fraternization”, in

FLETCHER, Ian (ed.), The Peninsular War: Aspects of the Struggle for the Iberian Peninsula, Staplehurst, Spellmount, 1998, pp. 115-30.

GOUGH, Hugh, ‘Genocide and the Bicentenary: the French Revolution and the revenge of the Vendée’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), pp. 977-88.

JORDAN, David, Napoleon and the French Revolution, Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012.

HEWITSON, Mark, ‘Princes’ wars, wars of the people or total war? Mass armies, and the question of a military revolution in Germany, 1792-1815’, War in History, 20 (2013), pp. 452-90.

HOWARD, Michael, War in European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.

HUTT, Maurice, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution: Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790’s, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

JACOB, William, Travels in the South of Spain in Letters written AD1809 and 1810, London, J. Johnson and Co., 1811.

JONES, Harry, “Seven weeks’ captivity in San Sebastían in 1813”, in Maxwell, Edward (ed.), Peninsular Sketches by Actors on the Scene (London, 1845), II, pp. 287-92.

KENNEDY, Catriona, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland, Houndmills, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013.

KINCAID, John, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, London, T. and W. Boone, 1830.

LARPENT, George (ed.), The Private Journal of Judge-Advocate Larpent attached to the Headquarters of Lord Wellington during the Peninsular War from 1812 to its Close, London, R. Bentley, 1853,

MACBRIDE (ed.), Mackenzie, Sergeant Nichol: the Experiences of a Gordon Highlander during the Napoleonic Wars in Egypt, the Peninsula and France, Leonaur, London, 2007.

MARKHAM, J. David, ‘Wellington’s lost soldiers: British POW’s -Part I’, Royal United Services Institution Journal, 144 (1999), pp. 83-89.

MARTÍNEZ-RADIO, Evaristo, ‘Los prisioneros de guerra en el siglo XVIII y la humanidad el el infortunio’, Verbum: Analecta Latina, 17, (2016), pp. 18-54.

MORIEUX, Renaud, The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.

OMAN, Charles (ed.), “A prisoner of Albuera: the journal of Major William Brooke from 16 May to 28 September 1811”, in OMAN, Charles, Studies in the Napoleonic Wars, London, Methuen, 1929, pp. 175-206.

OMAN, Charles, A History of the Peninsular War, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1901-30.

O’SIOCHRU, Micheal, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland, London, Faber and Faber, 2008.

PLANAS CAMPOS, Jorge, “La contribución británica en la Guerra de la Independencia: una aproximación cuantitátiva”, Trienio, 54, (2009), pp. 5-21.

PLANK, Geoffrey, Rebellion and Savagery: the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the British Empire, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

SCHUR, Nathan, Napoleon and the Holy Land, Greenhill Books, London, 1999.

SECHER, Raymond, A French Genocide: the Vendée, Notre Dame (Indiana), University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

SHERER, Joseph, Recollections of the Peninsula, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1825.

STRACHAN, Hew, “The Nation-in-Arms”, in BEST, Geoffrey (ed.), The Permanent Revolution: the French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789-1989, London, Fontana, 1988, pp. 49-74.

STURT, Charles, The Real State of France in the Year 1809 with an Account of the Prisoners of War and Persons Otherwise Detained in France, J. Leslie, London, 1810.

TALLETT, Frank, War and Society in Early-Modern Europe, 1495-1715, Abingdon, Routledge, 1992.

WEDGEWOOD, Cecily, The Thirty Years’ War, London, Jonathan Cape, 1938.

WEDGEWOOD, Cecily, The King’s War, 1641-1647, London, William Collins and Son, 1958.

WHINYATES (ed.), Frederick, Diary of Campaigns in the Peninsula for the Years 1811, 12 and 13 written by Lieutenant William Swabey, an Officer of E Troop (present E Battery), Royal Horse Artillery, Woolwich, Royal Artillery Institution, 1895.

Descargas

Publicado

2020-06-08

Cómo citar

All Roads lead to Verdun: British Prisoners of War in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814. (2020). Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 9(18), 109-132. https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i18.622

Artículos similares

41-50 de 309

También puede Iniciar una búsqueda de similitud avanzada para este artículo.