“The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance…”
— Joaquim Murat, 1808
Guerrilla warfare. To any kid who’s failed a spelling bee because of one of the most misspelled words in the English language, you’re in good company. Before learning the proper spelling, I too assumed it was war that took place deep in the African jungle.
The term ‘guerrilla warfare’ is used to describe tactics adopted by small militias and individual fighters, often in Third World countries, to engage larger occupying forces in small skirmishes rather than large battles. It comes from the Spanish word “guerra”, meaning war. And though guerrilla warfare has been a key component in dozens of South American conflicts over the last century, the term guerrilla hails from the other side of the Atlantic, from a conflict that began 200 years ago in Madrid.
In 1807 Napoleon signed an alliance treaty with Spain, which effectively split the country of Portugal between Spain and France. Portugal was taken without hardly firing a shot.
The following February, however, Napoleon turned on his Spanish ally. (A history lesson not lost on Hitler.) Napoleon didn’t even need to invade Spain; for the country was already inundated with French troops who had crossed the border under the pretense of invading Portugal. Meanwhile, Spain’s troops were scattered from Denmark to Portugal, many of them on loan to Napoleon. Spain was, militarily speaking, screwed.
Add to the plot a cast of wacky feuding royals (In March, Prince Ferdinand overthrew his father King Charles IV with the support of a discontented Spanish public) and you have the makings of a full-on Peninsular War.
Napoleon ingeniously played the Spanish royal pair against each other, calling father Charles and son Ferdinand up to French Bayonne for a little ‘mediation‘. [pronounced: ‘im·pri′son·mènt’]
Come Leap Day, French troops entered Barcelona–by pretending to be a convoy of wounded–(and you wonder why the Spanish don’t trust the French?)–and took the city. The French general Murat entered Madrid the following month.
Joaquim "I'm Too Sexy For My Haircut" Murat
About this time the Madrilenos began thinking maybe their beef was not with either of their kings, but with the French. Napoleon ordered the remainder of the Spanish royal family, including Charles’ 25 year-old daughter Maria Louisa, her uncle Don Antonio, and her little brother, the preteen Francisco de Paula, to join them in French Bayonne for a little more ‘mediation’.
“The following morning had been fixed for the departure of the Queen of Etruria [Maria Louisa] and the Infante D. Francisco de Paula, and many persons, chiefly women, collected before the Palace to see them off…and some of the populace” were “determined that the last of the royal family should not be taken from them without resistance...”History of the Peninsular War (Southey)
An armed riot broke out, and Murat’s forces fired on the crowd. Soon, street fighting erupted through Madrid, focusing around the palace and the Puerta del Sol.
For a short time the Madrilenos pushed back the surprised French guards, but Murat sent in reinforcements, and quashed the outgunned Spanish rebels by nightfall.
Goya's The Third of May, 1808
On May 3, hundreds of Spanish rebels were executed by firing squad. News of the mass killings spread throughout Spain and the Spanish resistance was born. Guerrillas, referring to ‘little wars’ and the soldiers who fought them, changed the course of the Napoleonic era, not by defeating the French in large, decisive battles, but by engaging them in a steady stream of small attacks over thousands of square miles.
In February Napoleon had bragged he could take Spain with 12,000 men. He did take Spain, but he had to divert 160,000 of his troops from other battles to do it.
Napoleon called the guerrillas his ‘Spanish ulcer’. In 1813 British, Portuguese, and Spanish forces expelled French troops from the Iberian peninsula for good.
“If a man is killed in Paris, it is a murder; fifty thousand throats are cut in the East and it is a question.” –Victor Hugo
Hugo died 30 years before the Armenian Genocide of 1915, but his quote could be applied to it—just multiply by thirty.
The Armenian Genocide has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, and immediately met crushing defeats against the Russians to the north. Blaming the losses on Armenian traitors, the government conscripted mass numbers of Armenian men, removed them of their weapons, and forced them into labor camps.
The reason April 24 is chosen to memorialize the dead, is because on April 24 over 200 of the most prominent Armenian leaders and intellectuals were rounded up and arrested. Up until then Armenian arrests and executions had not been widely reported.
The following month the government announced the Temporary Deportation Law which allowed for the temporary relocation of anyone deemed a threat to national security. In September the Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation expanded their authority: land, livestock, homes, and belongings of Armenians was to become government property.
The Armenians were taken to deserts, concentration camps, and other remote locations by the hundreds of thousands. Men, women, and children were either left to starve or executed.
The Turkish government today disputes the numbers of those killed, and the extent of government involvement, claiming for example, that many of the deaths were the result of poor farming weather that coincided with the relocation.
News of the atrocities were reported in the West at the time, and even the Ottoman’s allies during WWI, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, expressed concern over the mass deportations and executions of the Ottoman Empire’s Christians.
Years later a German statesman would ask, “Who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
But he didn’t say it out of pity. It was Adolf Hitler, speaking to his generals, using it as a justification for the future invasion of Poland and the Jewish Holocaust.
Armenians Are Sent to Perish in Desert – Turks Accused of Plan to Exterminate Whole Population – People of Karahissar Massacred – NY Times – Aug. 18, 1915
