Battle of Trocadero

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The Battle of Trocadero, fought on 31 August 1823, was the decisive battle in the Spanish Civil War from 1820 to 1823 when French forces defeated the liberal rebellion and restored the rule of King Ferdinand VII.

Prelude

After the downfall of Napoleon Bonparte, King Ferdinand VII of Spain refused to adopt the liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812 and since 1820 faced a rebellion in favour of a constitutional monarchy, led by Rafael del Riego y Nuñez. The King was captured and detained at Cádiz, where the Cortes, the Spanish parliament assembled. Alarmed by these events, the other European powers convened in October 1822 at the Congress of Verona and authorized France to intervene in the conflict and restore the rule of Ferdinand, with only Britain abstaining from that decision.

Military intervention

Situation of Trocadero in the Bay of Cádiz (1888)

On 17 April 1823, French forces led by Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, son of the future Charles X, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. Among those fighting with him was Carlo Alberto, Prince of Carignano, soon to be King of Sardinia.

The French forces were welcomed by the Basques and in Catalonia. The duke dispatched a force to besiege San Sebastian while he launched an attack on Madrid, held by the rebel government, which on 23 May withdrew to Seville, Madrid's military commander secretly surrendered and fled to France, and the leaderless Madrid garrison could not keep out the French, who seized the city and installed a regent, pending Ferdinand's expected return.

The French moved south to besiege the rebels at Cádiz. The French besieged the fort of Trocadero, which controlled the access to the city. On 31 August 1823 they launched a surprise bayonet attack from the seaside, using the low tide, and took the fort. There were 400 French casualties and 500 to 600 Spanish, one-third of the garrison.

Cádiz itself held out for three weeks despite bombardments, but was forced to surrender on 23 September 1823 and handed King Ferdinand was handed over to the French. Despite a prior promise of amnesty, the king ordered reprisals against the rebels. The following years, an estimated 30,000 people were executed and 20,000 imprisoned.^{[citation needed]}

Aftermath

The Battle of Trocadero was one of the events that triggered the United States of America to proclaim the Monroe Doctrine on 2 December 1823, to safeguard the Americas against intervention by European powers.

The fall of Trocadero was commemorated in Paris, with the Place de Trocadéro, where the city was expanding to the edges of the Bois de Boulogne. Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, the victor of the battle, was honoured with the title "Prince of Trocadero".

François-René de Chateaubriand, in his Memoires, commented the Duke's military achievement: "To walk over the Spanish in one step, to succeed where Bonaparte has failed, to triumph on the same soil where the armies of that great man had a setback, to do in six months what he couldn't do in seven years, that is a trough marvel!"

In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo devoted a long aside on the battle (Volume II, Book 2, chapter 3), in which he called the battle "a fine military action" but criticized the French intervention as "undoing by her arms that which she had done by her mind" and an "outrage on the generous Spanish nation ... at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution." He also argued that the successful campaign was "fatal" to the Bourbons, as it encouraged reactionary forces to re-establish absolutism not only in Spain but also at home, which in turn provoked the July Revolution of 1830.

External links

• Le Temps des Révolutions Conquest of Trocadero (in French)
• Cadiz 1823, el ano del terror Cadiz 1823, the year of terror (in Spanish)
• Französische Invasion in Spanien 1822/23 French invasion of Spain 1822/23 (in German)
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Volume II, Book 2, chapter 3 (in English)