We know that the people of Madrid fought against the French on May 2, 1808. But what did they want when they took up arms? Historiography is divided on this point. In recent years, a sector of specialists has questioned the vision of an uprising in favor of national freedom against the invader. The point is that, to know why there was an uprising in the capital, we must place the insurrection in a broader context.
It all depends on the concept of Spain that is used. For some, the nation begins with the Cortes of Cádiz, in 1812. Before, one could only speak of a kingdom where sovereignty corresponded to the monarch, not to the people. Others, on the contrary, are in favor of going back to the origin of Spain, to the Catholic Monarchs or, in the most extreme position, to the Visigoths.
There are also intermediate positions, such as situating the rise of the nation-state in the 19th century and recognizing beforehand some form of collective identity, what some call “ethnic patriotism”. The question is whether this patriotism was confined to the elites or was professed by the people as a whole. Those who consider it a minority phenomenon are based on the non-existence of mass media.
According to José Álvarez Junco, emeritus professor of History of Thought and Political and Social Movements at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid, the very expression "war of Independence" was an invention after the events that does not reflect reality. To speak of independence, the country would have to have been dominated by an imperial power and that was not, in his opinion, the case.
Napoleon would have limited himself to changing the reigning dynasty in Spain, without intending to make it a dependency of France. Bonaparte himself had guaranteed his brother, Joseph I, that he could do things to his liking. Spain, therefore, did not have to fight for an independence that it already had. The people of Madrid, when they took to the streets on May 2, would not have expressed a nationalist sentiment, but rather manifested their xenophobia against the troops arriving from the other side of the Pyrenees.
Napoleon's performance, according to Álvarez Junco, had outlined a scenario that, deep down, was not very different from that of 1700, when the Bourbons succeeded the Habsburgs. In both cases, a sovereign of Gallic origin came to reign in Madrid without Spain formally depending on France.
From a completely opposite perspective, Antonio Elorza, emeritus professor of Political Science at the Complutense, points out that the documentation of the time is full of allusions to national liberation from the foreign oppressor. The term "independence" would have been used, officially, from the beginning. Thus, the Supreme Junta of Seville, when declaring war on Napoleon on June 6, 1808, demands that the French emperor “respect the sacred rights of the Nation, which he has violated, and its freedom, integrity and independence”.
On the other hand, there are other texts from those moments that point in the same direction, such as the verses in which the writer José María Blanco White extols the “brave Spaniard” and says that “his haughty love of independence grows”.
For Elorza, therefore, the denomination "War of Independence" would be fully justified: "The qualification is adequate for the fight against an invasion like the Napoleonic one that placed the territories of the Hispanic monarchy under the government of a king-delegate of the Emperor, sole center of political decision”.
According to Elorza, the nation was a central idea both in supporters of continuing with absolutism and in those of establishing liberal reforms. He wields, for example, a well-known text by the Catalan Antoni de Capmany, entitled Sentinel against the French, written in 1808: “Each province grew hopeful and shook in its own way. What would already be of the Spaniards, if there had not been Aragonese, Valencians, Murcians, Andalusians, Asturians, Galicians, Extremadurans, Catalans, Castilians, etc.? Each one of these names inflames and puffs up, and of these small nations the mass of the great Nation is composed.
Outside the Madrid uprising for whatever reasons, it is necessary to specify to what extent there was or was not unanimity. Daniel Aquillué, in Spain with honor (2023), tells us that there was no agreement. For the wealthy classes of the capital, the insurrection of the people was a nightmare that threatened the social order and brought back bad memories, such as the Esquilache mutiny in 1766 or the uprisings of the French Revolution that had put an end to the Old Regime in the neighboring country.
This fear was so strong that Ferdinand VII came to call the rebels "facciosos", without taking into account that they had taken to the streets to defend their rights to the throne.
Ricardo García Cárcel, emeritus professor of Modern History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, points out that within Spanish patriotism there were very different nuances. We would have, on the one hand, “defensive populism that had a defined national conscience”. On the other hand, we find the liberals who try to take advantage of the crisis of the war to establish a constitutional regime.
Everything can be seen in more than one way. Was the concept of Spain born as a result of the liberal revolution or was it the liberal revolution that was born from an idea of nation? We are, obviously, facing a complicated issue due to its political implications at present, in the midst of a crisis of the territorial model of the 1978 Constitution. There was a reason why Benedetto Croce, the famous Italian historian, insisted that all history is contemporary history .
