Rozmówki polsko-hiszpańskie. Problemy językowe i próby ich przezwyciężenia podejmowane przez polskich uczestników hiszpańskiej wojny o niepodległość w świetle materiałów wspomnieniowych

The article presents selected mechanisms of communication between the Polish participants of the Napoleonic campaign in 1808–1812 and the local population behind the Pyrenees. The sources of information were the memoirs of Polish soldiers fighting on the Iberian Peninsula in the Grande Armée. Even though a significant part of the memoirs focuses on the military aspects of the participation of Poles in the Peninsular War, several do provide a whole spectrum of information about the daily lives of soldiers on foreign ground and many observations regarding the customs of their brothers in arms – mainly the French – as well as the local population. Among the fragments devoted to the non-military aspects of their stay on the Iberian Peninsula, the remarks on the attempts at communication – both verbal and non-verbal – between Poles and Spaniards seem to be particularly interesting. The purpose of this article is to explain why, in many situations, efficient communication could not take place in an intermediary language (French) and how the Polish soldiers dealt with lexical and grammatical structures in the previously unknown Spanish language. It is worth pointing out that language transfer is clearly noticeable – both from the native language of the soldiers (Polish) and from French, which most of Napoleonic soldiers learnt as their first Romance language.

A Women Moralising Crusade in the Peninsular War: Bishop Menéndez de Luarca and his Visit to England

The Bishop of Santander, Rafael Tomás Menéndez de Luarca, was an enthusiastic representative of the High Catholic Church in Spain between 1784 and 1819. As a declared enemy of France since the Revolution, the Napoleonic troops’ advance into Northern Spain forced him to flee into Asturias in November 1808. In May 1809 Menéndez de Luarca managed to escape to Britain, a country he considered ‘heretic’. His stay there marked a watershed in the moralising campaign he had started at the beginning of his bishopric. Back in Spain, the progressive loosening of traditional Catholic morals he found in Cádiz had, in his opinion, a negative impact on the Spanish struggle against Napoleon. Menéndez de Luarca’s concern for what he had viewe as women’s outrageous fashion while in England increased in the Andalusian city. This article aims to analyse the impact of the bishop’s English experience on the peculiar campaign he began in Cádiz in 1809 to ‘improve’ women’s conduct. His personal crusade ended up with the publication of a work with an eloquent title, Las descamisadas o envenustadas modernas españolas (1812). A critical revision of this text includes a brief socio-linguistic analysis of the term ‘descamisadas’. This study is completed with an evaluation of the civil authorities’ acceptance of the measures suggested by Menéndez de Luarca, together with their social impact.

Circulation and Transnational Memory

This final chapter examines the international scope of the Napoleonic war memoir genre. Widespread and often illegal practices of reprinting and translating veterans’ autobiographies ensured that narratives of the Peninsular War circulated extensively across borders throughout the nineteenth century, not only within Europe but also across the Atlantic, to both the United States and Latin America. Peninsular War memoirs became a transnational genre, crossing national and linguistic divides. This did not, however, result in a peaceful shared memory of the war. Instead, the reprinting and translation of memoirs was unequal, with Spanish accounts rarely reaching British and French audiences, and hostile, with foreign soldiers’ tales being severely edited and disputed by translators. This nationalistic reaction to the circulation of military memoirs laid the foundations for enduring grand narratives about what is in British history the Peninsular War, in French history the War in Spain, and in Spanish history the War of Independence.

Dead Men Telling Tales

Dead Men Telling Tales is an account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808–1814), it charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic, and from writing to publication to afterlife. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, the book challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers’ direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political motives of the authors and uncovering the large cast of characters, from family members to publishers, editors, and translators, involved in production behind the scenes. By including literature from Spain and Portugal, it also provides a missing link in current studies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, showing how the genre of military memoirs developed differently in south-western Europe and led to starkly opposing national narratives of the same war. The book’s findings tell the history of a publishing phenomenon which gripped readers of all ages across the world in the nineteenth century, made significant profits for those involved, and was fundamental in defining the modern ‘soldier’s tale’.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the key points made in the book. It emphasises that a new methodology is needed for analysing Napoleonic war memoirs, and indeed war memoirs in general, one which includes a closer consideration of the active role of veterans as authors, the material history of the book, and a comparative, transnational approach. Seen through these lenses, Peninsular War veterans’ autobiographies and the commercial publishing industry that developed around them over the nineteenth century are responsible for shaping the modern war memoir, and for laying the foundations for the mass popular appeal of tales of soldiers’ war experiences today.

Before the Ink Dries

Peninsular War veterans often faced a difficult transition back into civilian society after the conflict, receiving inadequate pay and little official commemoration. This led to a common fear, expressed explicitly in their memoirs, that their stories had not been and would not be properly told. This chapter demonstrates that many soldiers-turned-authors deliberately used their autobiographies to take issue with the academic, historical record of the war. It reveals that, in Spain, the first official history of the Peninsular War was written by a group of veterans, who helped to choose the Spanish name for the conflict: la Guerra de la Independencia. It then shows how veterans’ memoirs contributed to the creation of distinct national narratives of the war in Spain, Britain, and France, examining different representations of the ‘Other’, depictions of the guerrilla war and its leaders, and praise or criticism for the regular army.

Introduction

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was one of the most colourful and brutal campaigns of the Napoleonic period. It prompted hundreds of veterans from the armies of the participating countries (Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France) to write and publish autobiographies about their experiences. These war memoirs are well-known to historians as rich and compelling sources, but relying on them for direct eyewitness testimony about the experience of war poses significant methodological problems. Military memoirs, including those from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, tend to be written in hindsight and shaped to an unknown extent by selective or traumatised memory. They may be unrepresentative of the majority of experiences, written in very different styles and formats, published immediately after the war, or only made public decades after the author’s death. Taking these challenges as a starting point, this introductory chapter lays out a new methodological framework for ‘what to do with war memoirs’, including considering closely the identities and motives of the authors, tracing the material histories of the books themselves, and employing a comparative, transnational approach to the history of the military memoir genre. It also summarises the relevant historiography, emphasising the lack of attention so far given to Spanish and Portuguese wartime autobiography, and the long-term importance of Peninsular War memoirs as a precedent for the twentieth-century ‘soldier’s tale’.

The Language of War

This chapter provides an account of how Peninsular War memoir-writers depicted being a soldier in the early nineteenth century. It considers both positive and negative representations of the experience of war, covering themes such as daily life on campaign, comradeship, ideas of martial masculinity, the role of women, and descriptions of violence both on and off the battlefield. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which Napoleonic veterans innovated on previous war writing and contradicted broader, patriotic narratives of the conflict. In the last part of the chapter, the concept of the veteran as active, politicised author is introduced, with examples of soldiers who used their published memoirs to change or challenge national military policy.

Iberian War Writing

This chapter explores the roots of the modern war memoir genre. It debunks the enduring idea that in the early nineteenth century the Iberian peninsula did not produce military autobiographies, or any autobiographical writing at all, comparable to the output in north-western Europe. Making the argument for a broader definition of ‘war memoir’, it highlights the numerous ephemeral, polemical pamphlets (also known as manifiestos) written by Spanish veterans during the Peninsular War. It presents these military authors as ambitious, high-ranking career officers and shrewd guerrilla leaders, who used memoir-writing as a political tool to defend their actions on the battlefield, assert their suitability for command, and win popular support. In doing so, it emphasises the juridical and bureaucratic origins of Spanish life writing, dating back to colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios and an elite eighteenth-century service culture, as well as the shifts caused during the Peninsular War by the forced abdication of the king and the temporary declaration of freedom of the press.