ABSTRACT
Guerrillas in Spain from the Peninsular to the Carlist War The Spanish guerrilla gave the Peninsular War its most enduring image, and it is an image which has equated the Spanish ‘people’ with the guerrillas fighting, and defeating, the occupying French army. The Peninsular War gave the English language the term ‘guerrilla’, meaning ‘small war’, but it certainly did not invent the phenomenon. The Dutch used irregular resistance against the Spanish Empire in the Eighty Years War, while even peninsular Spain itself saw significant episodes of popular resistance during the War of Succession (1701-1714) and during the War of the Pyrenees (1793-1795).1 But the Peninsular War was certainly on a different scale: the ‘small war’ became truly ‘big’. No part of French-occupied Spain outside of the major urban centres was far from some degree of irregular resistance, while some areas of the country, especially Navarra, were far more under the sway of the guerrillas than under the French. It was also big because the guerrilla phenomenon reverberated across far more dubious militancies linked to pillage, murder, and banditry.
