John Tone recounts the dramatic story of how, between 1808 and
1814, Spanish peasants created and sustained the world's first
guerrilla insurgency movement, thereby playing a major role in
Napoleon's defeat in the Peninsula War. Focusing on the army of
Francisco Mina, Tone offers new insights into the origins, motives,
and successes of these first guerrilla forces by interpreting the
conflict from the long-ignored perspective of the guerrillas
themselves.
Only months after Napoleon's invasion in 1807, Spain seemed ready
to fall: its rulers were in prison or in exile, its armies were in
complete disarray, and Madrid had been occupied. However, the
Spanish people themselves, particularly the peasants of Navarre,
proved unexpectedly resilient. In response to impending defeat,
they formed makeshift governing juntas, raised new armies, and
initiated a new kind of people's war of national liberation that
came to be known as guerrilla warfare. Key to the peasants'
success, says Tone, was the fact that they possessed both the
material means and the motives to resist. The guerrillas were
neither bandits nor selfless patriots but landowning peasants who
fought to protect the old regime in Navarre and their established
position within it.
from the book: "That unfortunate war destroyed me; it divided my
forces, multiplied my obligations, undermined my morale. . . . All
the circumstances of my disasters are bound up in that fatal
knot.--Napoleon Bonaparte on the Spanish war