Spain. During the Napoleonic occupation, a period of “guerrilla warfare” began, a popular monarchist and religious resistance aimed at making life impossible for foreigners without claiming defeat in battle. It was a carnage of national proportions (see Goya’s painting “The Madness of War”): prisoners nailed to church doors with their testicles in their mouths, men impaled, blinded, or mutilated in the most bizarre ways. In this gigantic slaughter, Napoleon’s armies, who had defeated every other army elsewhere, were lost. In the Spanish conflict, the French lost 250,000 men, while other estimates put the figure at 800,000, more than in the Russian Campaign. A people without an army, officers, cannons, or cavalry defeated the most powerful army in the world. It follows, for many, that when a people decides its future, no one can stop it. These considerations also inspired figures like Mazzini and Garibaldi.
