ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the social, political, and imperial crisis culminating in the events of 1808 and shows how they helped determine Spain’s military failures in the Iberian Peninsula and political failures in the Americas. Uniquely in Napoleonic Europe, Spain underwent two processes of political reform at the same time, one under French domination and the other under the Patriots. Spain’s peninsular army had been neglected in favour of the navy, as the Bourbon ‘family compact’ imagined no more threat coming from across the Pyrenees but a very lively threat coming from the oceans in the form of Britain’s Royal Navy. Tension mounted as Spain’s French ‘allies’ treacherously occupied fortresses linking Madrid with the French frontier. The years 1808–1814 had thus transformed Spain politically even more than they did militarily. Uniquely in Napoleonic Europe, Spain had been subjected to two concurrent processes of political reform.
