LEGACY OF GLORY: The Bonaparte Kingdom of Spain 1808-1813

by Michael Glover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1971

In 1809, shortly after being fobbed off as King of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, in a rare moment of lucidity wrote to his brother, the Emperor: ""Your glory will not avail you in Spain. I shall fail and the limits of your power will be exposed."" The words, unheeded, were to prove prophetic: the Spanish ulcer became the soft underbelly of Napoleon's schemes of Continental hegemony. Less spectacular than the debacle of Moscow, Spain was more insidious, wasting 600,000 men in futile stand-off against Wellington and placing a crippling strain on the resources of the Grand Armee. Glover's history of the ill-fated Bonaparte kingdom moves surefootedly through the diplomatic and military quagmire surrounding the deposition of the Spanish Bourbons; justly, he stresses the key role of the Peninsular War -- generally treated as a military sideshow -- in the final victory of the Allies. Unfortunately, he is much less expansive on the guerrilla aspects of the Spanish war and the tangle of feudal and clerical loyalties which precipitated the indigenous and fanatical opposition to Il Re Intruso, ""the uninvited king."" Immunized by economic and intellectual backwardness, the Spanish preferred their own despotic incompetence to the enlightened constitutionalism proffered by Napoleon. Unlike the German ""Wars of Liberation"" whipped up by intellectuals and government officials, the Spanish resistance was a genuinely popular phenomenon with a broad social base, a quixotic blend of Church-and-King patriotism and impassioned regionalism -- all of which Glover glosses in favor of the broad configuration of European power politics and Napoleonic ego. Valuable for historians of the Napoleonic Wars, this would have been a better book were the Spanish themselves not treated exclusively as pawns.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION