Cádiz (the siege of 1810–1812)

Cádiz sits at the tip of a narrow tongue of land jutting into the Atlantic in south-western Andalusia, joined to the Isla de León, today's San Fernando, only by a sandy isthmus further south. In the Peninsular War that position makes it a case apart: it is the great southern stronghold that Napoleon's army never took, and the one place where the part of Spain that remained free had a government, a fleet and an open harbour. The overall story of the conflict is told in the entry on the Spanish War; this one is concerned with a siege that never turned into an assault, and with what remains of it in the city.

It all began in early 1810. After the Spanish defeat at Ocaña on 18 and 19 November 1809, the road into Andalusia lay open, and French troops under Soult pushed into the province as far as Seville. The remnants of the Spanish army fell back on Cádiz, where the country's authorities joined them. The siege began on 5 February 1810 under Marshal Victor, after a summons to surrender had been refused. The garrison, some two thousand men at the outset, was soon reinforced by further Spanish troops and then by British and Portuguese contingents.

The word siege has to be used with care. Victor could close off only one side of the place: the sea remained in the hands of the Royal Navy, which brought in food and reinforcements, and the French batteries built around the bay, from Puerto Real to Chiclana, fired from too far away to do real damage. The besiegers themselves were short of food and ammunition, so much so that in 1811 their guns could fire only once or twice a day, and the guerrilla harried their rear: escorts of a hundred and fifty to two hundred men had to accompany couriers and convoys. The British historian Michael Glover judged the siege "largely illusory", since the French were themselves besieged on the Guadalquivir plain.

The Allies tried several times to break the blockade. One of these expeditions led to the battle of Barrosa on 5 March 1811, near Chiclana: Victor's troops were beaten by an Anglo-Spanish force, but the victory had no sequel and the siege was not lifted. It took until 1812. On 22 July Marmont's defeat at Salamanca (Arapiles) threatened to cut the Army of the South off from the rest of Spain, and Soult ordered Andalusia evacuated. On the night of 24 August 1812, after bombarding the city until morning, the French destroyed their guns and withdrew. The Allies recovered a large number of pieces, some thirty gunboats and great stocks of supplies.

Yet the essential story of Cádiz lies less in its walls than in what they sheltered. The Spanish government had taken refuge there, and the Cortes, first convened on the Isla de León in September 1810, afterwards sat in the city itself, where the former oratory of San Felipe Neri was one of the meeting places. These assemblies, which also included deputies from the occupied provinces and representatives of Spanish America and the Philippines, worked in the shadow of Napoleon's own proposal: the statute imposed at Bayonne in 1808 by the Emperor on his brother Joseph (see Bayonne). To a charter granted from abroad, the Cortes answered with a constitution of their own.

It was ratified on 19 March 1812, the feast of Saint Joseph, which earned it the nickname "la Pepa". For its time the text is strikingly bold: it affirms the sovereignty of the nation, separates the powers, proclaims freedom of the press and of enterprise, abolishes corporate privileges and the fueros, and founds a constitutional monarchy in which an indirect suffrage extends to nearly all men. It departs from liberalism on one notable point only: the Catholic religion remains the only one permitted. Ferdinand VII, on his return in 1814, abrogated the constitution; it was restored during the Liberal Triennium of 1820 to 1823 and served as a reference for later Spanish constitutions as well as for those of Spanish America.

This entry therefore carries a paradox. Napoleon never saw Cádiz, from which Villeneuve's fleet had sailed in 1805 on its way to Trafalgar (see Trafalgar), and he never took it; yet it was largely in reaction to his Spanish policy that the city became the cradle of Hispanic liberalism.

The memory of 1812 now occupies the Plaza de España, north of the old town, where the Monument to the Constitution of 1812, also called the Monument of the Cortes, stands. Designed for the centenary by the architect Modesto López Otero and the sculptor Aniceto Marinas, and completed in 1912, it combines allegories of War, Peace, Agriculture and Industry, reliefs devoted to the resistance of the people of Cádiz, and, at the top, columns in the form of female figures bearing the book of the constitutional code. In this solemn ensemble, whose pale stone blends it into the gardens of the square, one grasps better what Cádiz chose to remember of the siege: less the French guns than the political act that they failed to prevent.