La première campagne d'Andalousie (mai-juillet 1808) : violences confrontées, exacerbées, enfouies

Résumé En

The first campaign in Andalousia (may-july 1808) : confronted, aggaved, hidden violences ; The study of the first Andalusia campaign in summer 1808 can only be enriched by the contributions of historians of violence — modern or most commonly contemorary historians who mostly study the two World Wars. Addressing the practice of cruelties in the Midi from the war’s outset has long been the monopoly of sterile polemics, traceable to overtly nationalist inspiration. In the case of Andalucia, to be sure, the comparative shortage of archival source materials does pose a significant obstacle to research. However, textual analysis of the memoirs of French Imperial soldiers, supported by external evidence, permits a differentiation between the kinds of violence that were perpetrated. For the French it was a case of depredations that recurred due to the deficiencies of the Imperial logistics systems, exacerbated by the over-representation of conscripts among Duponts men ; for the Spaniards, the violence was a case of killings and then compensation. These acts of violence, rather than reflecting an underlying social malaise that was real enough (as at Valencia and doubtless at Malaga too ) are to be explained as the outcome of a traditional conception of justice, dominant in the lands of Southern Europe with their specific rituals. It is also possible to see in this violence a expression of popular religiosity that was strongly millennarian in character, and converged with the counter-revolutionary inspiration provided by the bodies that directed the insurrection, in this case the Junta of Seville.