This Day in European History (Goya and the Peninsular War)

May 3, 1808—French invading troops under the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte summarily executed 5,000 civilians in Madrid in reprisal for a sniper attack. Though he stayed quiet for several years about the atrocity, painter Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes eventually created The Third of May 1808, part of a series of paintings and prints that masterfully evoked the nightmarish chaos of modern war.

Though starting out as a portrait painter of the aristocracy and the Spanish royal family, Goya had in the last 15 years turned to increasingly dark, phantasmagoric imagery. Some of this might have stemmed from the deafness he experienced following an illness in 1793, and the alterations of tranquility and hyperactivity that followed it; but some resulted from the convulsions experienced by the Spanish society and government in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The painter was about to discover how very dangerous it could be to live in a time of revolution, when constantly shifting loyalties meant artists were forever endangered.

The worst occurred after Spain’s Charles IV abdicated the throne in March 1808. With his empire now swelling to 130 departments in several countries, and with Austria, Prussia and Russia being elbowed aside by his armies, Napoleon was the master of the continent. As such, he felt that good government started at home, which is why he installed his little brother Jerome as the King of Westphalia and his sister Caroline as queen of Naples. Now he proposed to do the same with his oldest brother. He felt he was in a prime position to do so because he had moved more than 100,000 of his troops through the country on the pretext that they were only there to support the invasion of neighboring Portugal.

Joseph Bonaparte had served in the wars under his brother, and had even undertaken delicate diplomatic missions on his behalf to the U.S., Austria, Britain and the Vatican. Desiring to reward sister Caroline and her husband, his general Murat, Napoleon decided that Naples was just the thing for them. This meant he had to shuffle Joseph someplace else. With the abdication of Charles, Napoleon thought Spain might make a nice consolation prize. His ever-amenable older brother went along.

Joseph’s would-be subjects wouldn’t, though. The populace went after the French troops in ways that surprised their emperor and general. The resulting Peninsular War became the rallying point for opponents of the French empire, and was where Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, first made his fame as Napoleon’s most dangerous military foe.

During the six years before the war ended, Goya’s position was uneasy, shifting under the pressure of events. In October 1808, he had recorded the “glorious deeds” of the citizens of Saragossa against the French army. Late the next year, however, with Joseph Napoleon occupying the throne for what seemed like the foreseeable future, he had taken up a commission from the city of Madrid to paint the Spanish monarch, and executed some other members of the French regime as well. By 1812, with the French temporarily expelled from French but threatening to come back (which they did that December), Goya left his prints and paintings to his son Javier, just in case Napoleon returned.

Cut to 1814. A new ruler was on the throne of Spain, Ferdinand VII. The new regime was asking questions about what its principal citizens had done during the recent unpleasantness with the little fellow from France. Goya fell under their eye. To placate them, the painter received permissions to paint two large canvases, The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, both now hanging in Madrid’s Prado.

The second of these is particularly vivid, as he showed captured Spanish guerrillas on Principe Pio hill, on what was then the outskirts of Madrid. One man, in a white shirt, has his arms thrust upward, eyes wide open in terror; his comrades can hardly bear to look at him, for they know that they will die soon, too. The inhumanity of the French executioners is heightened by the fact that we can’t see their faces at all, in contrast to the anguish so evident on those of their victims.

Equally remarkable were 82 prints called the Disasters of War series, created from 1810 to 1820. They remained unpublished in his own country until 1863. After that, Edouard Manet lavished high praise on them, and Goya’s fame rose.

By 1824, Goya had grown so tired of repression in his native Spain that he left for France (now safely without the Bonapartes), on the grounds of medical health. He remained there until his death four years later.