Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis | |||||||
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Episode of the French intervention in Spain 1823 by Hippolyte Lecomte | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
France Armée de la Foi | Partisans of the Cortes | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
France: 400 killed [1] | 600 killed [1] |
The "Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis" was the popular name for a French army mobilized in 1823 by the Bourbon King of France, Louis XVIII, to help the Spanish Bourbon royalists restore King Ferdinand VII of Spain to the absolute power of which he had been deprived during the Liberal Triennium. Despite the name, the actual number of troops was between 60,000 and 90,000. [2]
A minor campaign, the force comprised some five army corps (the bulk of the French regular army) and was led by the Duke of Angoulême, nephew of Louis XVIII and son of future King Charles X. The French name of the conflict is l'Expédition d'Espagne ("the Expedition of Spain").
In 1822, Ferdinand VII applied the terms of the Congress of Vienna, lobbied for the assistance of the other absolute monarchs of Europe, in the process joining the Holy Alliance formed by Russia, Prussia, Austria and France to restore absolutism. In France, the ultra-royalists pressured Louis XVIII to intervene. To temper their counter-revolutionary ardor, the Duc de Richelieu deployed troops along the Pyrenees Mountains along the France-Spain border, charging them with halting the spread of Spanish liberalism and the "yellow fever" from encroaching into France. In September 1822 this "cordon sanitaire" became an observation corps and then very quickly transformed itself into a military expedition.
The Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria and Prussia) refused Ferdinand's request for help, but the Quintuple Alliance (Russia, Britain, France, Prussia and Austria) at the Congress of Verona in October 1822 gave France a mandate to intervene and restore the Spanish monarchy. Britain protested loudly but was outvoted. On 22 January 1823, a secret treaty, from which Britain was excluded, was signed at the Congress of Verona, allowing France to intervene in Spain to help restore Ferdinand VII as an absolute monarch. With the agreement from the Holy Alliance, on 28 January 1823 Louis XVIII announced that "a hundred thousand Frenchmen are ready to march, invoking the name of Saint Louis, to safeguard the throne of Spain for a grandson of Henry IV of France". At the end of February, France's Chambers voted an extraordinary grant for the expedition. Chateaubriand and the ultra-royalists rejoiced; the royal army was going to prove its bravery and devotion in the face of Spanish liberals, fighting for the glory of the Bourbon monarchy.
The new prime minister, Joseph de Villèle, intended to oppose the war. The operation's cost just for aide was excessive, the army's organisation was defective and the troops' loyalty was uncertain. The superintendent of the military was unable to assure logistic support for the expedition's 95,000 men (as counted at the end of March) concentrated in the Basses-Pyrénées and the Landes with 20,000 horses and 96 artillery pieces. To remedy his doubts, he had to consult the munitions-supplier Ouvrard, who quickly concluded that marches in Spain were as favourable to his own interests as to those of the army, even if they would be to the detriment of the public treasury.
The organisation of the expedition's command structure posed many problems. Pro-Bourbon commanders had to be given the full chance to exercise the roles they had so recently been given by the Bourbon Restoration without compromising the army's loyalty or efficiency. The solution was to give the secondary commands to royalist former émigrés and Vendéens, and the primary ones to former generals of the Revolution and First Empire. Despite his lack of military experience, the Duke of Angoulême, whose father was heir to the throne, was made commander-in-chief of the Army of the Pyrénées, but he agreed to a role overseeing only the political direction of the expedition, leaving its military direction to Major-General Armand Charles Guilleminot, a tried-and-tested general of the First Empire.
Four of the five army corps were placed under generals who had fought for Napoleon – Marshal Nicolas Charles Oudinot, Duke of Reggio; General Gabriel Jean Joseph Molitor; Marshal Bon Adrien Jeannot de Moncey, Duke of Conegliano; and General Étienne Tardif de Pommeroux de Bordesoulle. The Prince of Hohenlohe commanded the Third Corps, the least-trusted of the five, with only two divisions and 16,000 men (as opposed to three or four divisions and 20 to 27 thousand men in the other corps).
The expedition was made up of regiments in which many of the officers, NCOs and men had been marked by memories of the Napoleonic Wars and so were disposed more kindly towards the liberals than were the French and Spanish Bourbons. The liberals hoped to dissuade the Frenchmen from fighting "for monks, against liberty". Villèle was worried at their propaganda in bars and billets, as a song by Béranger spread throughout March and April inciting the French soldiers to mutiny:
Brav' soldats, v'la l'ord' du jour: | Brave soldiers, this is the order of the day: |
On 6 April, the doubts of some and the illusions of others dispersed. On the banks of the Bidassoa, 500 liberal French and Piedmontese men faced off against the forward positions of the 9th Light Infantry Regiment. Brandishing a French Tricolour flag and singing La Marseillaise , they incited the soldiers not to cross the frontier. The King's infantrymen hesitated until General Louis Vallin rushed to them and ordered them to open fire. Several of the demonstrators were killed and the others dispersed. Many of them joined Englishmen under Colonel Robert Wilson, Belgians under Jan Willem Janssens and other French or Italian volunteers to form a liberal legion and a squadron of "liberty lancers" to fight beside the Spanish constitutional forces. The following day, on 7 April, the "100,000 Sons of Saint Louis" under the Duke of Angoulême entered Spain without opposition from the constitutional government's forces and with the support of the middle classes and part of the urban population.
In the north, Hohenlohe's 3rd Corps (reinforced in July by Lauriston's 5th Corps) forced General Morillo to retreat before rallying his troops. The French were left in control of the rural parts of Navarre, Asturias and Galicia; however, lacking siege equipment, they were unable to blockade the towns, where the liberals continued to resist for several more months. The city of A Coruña surrendered on 21 August, Pamplona on 16 September, and San Sebastián on 27 September. To the east and the southeast, General Molitor pushed back General Francisco Ballesteros into Aragon, pursuing him as far as Murcia and Granada, winning an engagement at Campillo de Arenas on 28 July and forcing his surrender on 4 August. At Jaén, he defeated the final columns of Rafael Riego, who was captured by the Absolutists on 15 September and hanged in Madrid on 7 November, two days before the fall of Alicante. In Catalonia, Moncey managed to quell General Mina's regular and guerrilla forces, with Barcelona surrendering only on 2 November.
More decisive operations spread across Andalusia, since it was the site of Cádiz, transformed into the Constitutionalists' provisional capital and thus the French force's main strategic objective. It contained the Cortes and the imprisoned king and was defended by a garrison of 14,000 men. At first Riego, then Generals Henry Joseph O'Donnell, Count of La Bisbal, Quiroga and Miguel de Álava led the action. Access to the city was protected by the batteries of Fort Santa Catalina and Fort San Sebastian to the west, Fort Santi-Pietri to the east and above all by the fortified peninsula of Fort de Trocadéro, where Colonel Garcés positioned 1700 men and 50 guns.
Under the command of General Étienne Tardif de Pommeroux de Bordesoulle, soon joined by the Duke of Angoulême and Guilleminot, the infantry of generals Bourmont, Obert and Goujeon, the cavalry of Foissac-Latour, the artillery of Louis Tirlet and the engineers under Guillaume Dode de la Brunerie took up positions before Cádiz from mid-July. Forced to use several naval divisions for surveillance of Spain's Atlantic and Mediterranean ports and coasts (held by the Constitutionalists), the French navy was able to spare only a small squadron of 10 ships under Counter-Admiral Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin to blockade the city. That proved too small a force for Hamelin to succeed in this mission and so on 27 August he was replaced by Counter-Admiral des Rotours, then by Duperré, who arrived only on 17 September, with meagre reinforcements.
On 31 August the French infantry assaulted Fort de Trocadero and successfully captured it at the cost of 35 killed, 110 wounded (with 150 dead, 300 wounded, 1,100 captured among the garrison), turning its powerful guns towards Cádiz. On 20 September, Fort Sancti-Petri fell in its turn in a combined army–navy operation. On 23 September, the guns of the Sancti-Petri and Trocadero forts and of Duperré's fleet bombarded the town and on 28 the constitutionalists adjudged the town lost. Thus, the Cortes decided to dissolve itself, give back absolute power to Ferdinand VII and hand him over to the French. On 30 September Cádiz surrendered and on 3 October more than 4,600 French troops landed at its port. The French army fired its last shots in Spain at the start of November. On 5 November, the Duke of Angoulême left Madrid and re-entered France on 23 November, leaving behind an occupying force of 45,000 men under the command of Bourmont. Spain was then progressively evacuated, but the French withdrawal was fully completed only in 1828.
France's role in aiding to Ferdinand was key. The liberals thus negotiated their return in exchange for Ferdinand's oath to respect the Spanish laws. However, on 1 October 1823, feeling bolstered by French forces, Ferdinand broke his oath and again repealed the Constitution of Cádiz and declared null and void all the acts and measures of the liberal government.
The war also seriously disturbed Spanish efforts to crush the independence struggles in Hispanic America. The last Spanish forces in mainland South America were defeated in the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824.
Although the goals of the military campaigns in Spain were completely different, François-René de Chateaubriand, foreign minister in France's Villèle government (from 28 December 1822 to 6 June 1824), contrasted the expedition's successful aid in restoring the Spanish royalist with Napoleon's failure of subjugating and conquering Spain in the Peninsular War:
Striding across the Spains, succeeding where Bonaparte had failed, triumphing on the same soil where a great man's arms had suffered setbacks, doing in six months what he was unable to do in seven years, was a true miracle! [3]
During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the carabineros of Republican Spain were nicknamed "The Hundred Thousand Sons of Negrín". [4]
The Second Bourbon Restoration was the period of French history during which the House of Bourbon returned to power after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. The Second Bourbon Restoration lasted until the July Revolution of 26 July 1830. Louis XVIII and Charles X, brothers of the executed King Louis XVI, successively mounted the throne and instituted a conservative government intended to restore the proprieties, if not all the institutions, of the Ancien régime. Exiled supporters of the monarchy returned to France but were unable to reverse most of the changes made by the French Revolution. Exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, the nation experienced a period of internal and external peace, stable economic prosperity and the preliminaries of industrialization.
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François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who influenced French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, published posthumously in 1849–1850.
Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Joseph Marie Anne Séraphin, 1st Count of Villèle, better known simply as Joseph de Villèle, was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister in the 1820s. He was a leader of the Ultra-royalist faction during the Bourbon Restoration.
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The Ultra-royalists were a French political faction from 1815 to 1830 under the Bourbon Restoration. An Ultra was usually a member of the nobility of high society who strongly supported Roman Catholicism as the state and only legal religion of France, the Bourbon monarchy, traditional hierarchy between classes and census suffrage, while rejecting the political philosophy of popular will and the interests of the bourgeoisie along with their liberal and democratic tendencies.
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Louis Antoine of France, Duke of Angoulême was the elder son of Charles X and the last Dauphin of France from 1824 to 1830. He is identified by the Guinness World Records as the shortest-reigning monarch, reigning for less than 20 minutes during the July Revolution, but this is not backed up by historical evidence. He never reigned over the country, but after his father's death in 1836, he was the legitimist pretender as Louis XIX.
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Events from the year 1823 in France.
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Diego Vicente Cañas Portocarrero, 7th Duke of Parque, also known as Vicente María de Cañas y Portocarrero, was a Lieutenant-General and a Spanish military leader during the Peninsular War. He commanded the Spanish forces defeated at Alba de Tormes.
Events in the year 1823 in Spain.
Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte, Count of Torrijos, a title granted posthumously by the Queen Governor, also known as General Torrijos, was a Spanish Liberal soldier. He fought in the Spanish War of Independence and after the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand VII in 1814 he participated in the pronouncement of John Van Halen of 1817 that sought to restore the Constitution of 1812, for which he spent two years in prison until he was released after the triumph of the Riego uprising in 1820. He returned to fight the French when the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis invaded Spain to restore the absolute power of Ferdinand VII and when those triumphed ending the liberal triennium exiled to England. There he prepared a statement which he himself led, landing on the coast of Málaga from Gibraltar on December 2, 1831, with sixty men accompanying him, but they fell into the trap that had been laid before him by the absolutist authorities and were arrested. Nine days later, on December 11, Torrijos and 48 of his fellow survivors were shot without trial on the beach of San Andres de Málaga, a fact that was immortalized by a sonnet of José de Espronceda entitled To the death of Torrijos and his Companions, Enrique Gil y Carrasco's A la memoria del General Torrijos, and by a well-known 1888 painting by Antonio Gisbert. "The tragic outcome of his life explains what has happened to history, in all fairness, as a great symbol of the struggle against despotism and tyranny, with the traits of epic nobility and serenity typical of the romantic hero, eternalized in the famous painting by Antonio Gisbert." The city of Málaga erected a monument to Torrijos and his companions in the Plaza de la Merced, next to the birthplace of the painter Pablo Picasso. Under the monument to Torrijos in the middle of the square are the tombs of 48 of the 49 men shot; One of them, British, was buried in the English cemetery (Málaga).
The Urgel Regency was an interim government, or interregnum, expressly authorised by Fernando VII towards the end of May 1822.
The Royalist War was an armed conflict that took place in Spain during the last year and a half of the Liberal Triennium. It began in the spring of 1822—there is no agreement among historians about the exact moment of its beginning—with the extension of the actions and the number of royalist parties that had already been acting since the spring of 1821 with the purpose to reestablish the absolute power of king Ferdinand VII. They were confronted by the constitutional armies that defended the liberal regime established after the triumph of the Revolution of 1820. Its fundamental setting was Catalonia, Navarra and Basque Country and in the first phase the royalist forces were defeated and were forced to take refuge in France. The war took a definitive turn in favor of the royalists when on April 7, 1823, the invasion of the French army of the Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis began, which had the support of reorganized Spanish royalist troops. in France and of the royalist parties that had managed to survive the constitutionalist offensive. On September 30, 1823, King Ferdinand VII was "liberated" from his "captivity" and the next day he abolished the Constitution of 1812 and restored absolutism.
The Duke of Angoulême at the Taking of Trocadero is an 1828 oil-on-canvas painting by the French painter Paul Delaroche. Combining elements of portraiture and history painting, it shows Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême during the Battle of Trocadero on 31 August 1823.
The siege of Pamplona took place in 1823 during the French invasion of Spain. The city of Pamplona in Navarre was besieged by the French Army and successfully taken. It was one of the more notable actions of the campaign along with the Battle of Trocadero.