The Peninsular War and the Dos de Mayo Uprising
Madrid rises against French occupation, and Spain's guerrillas invent a new kind of war
Quick facts
- Location
- Madrid and the Iberian Peninsula
- Date
- 1808-1814
- Key figure
- Joseph Bonaparte, installed as King of Spain
- Artistic record
- Francisco Goya's Disasters of War (81 etchings, published 1863)
What happened
After occupying Madrid in March 1808 and forcing the abdication of the Spanish Bourbons to install his brother Joseph Bonaparte as king, Napoleon badly misjudged Spanish patriotism. On 2 May 1808, the people of Madrid rose against the French occupation in the Dos de Mayo Uprising, and French forces crushed the revolt the next day with mass executions that the painter Francisco Goya later depicted in his Disasters of War etchings and his paintings The Second of May and The Third of May 1808. The Spanish scored an early victory at Bailen in July 1808, the first major defeat of a French Imperial army, and years of irregular fighting followed in which Spanish and Portuguese guerrillas, from the Spanish word for war, guerra, tied down hundreds of thousands of French troops without ever fielding an army that could win a set battle.
Why it matters
The war gave the word guerrilla to military vocabulary and showed that occupied civilians waging irregular war could bleed an empire even while losing every conventional battle. By 1812 the French had over 350,000 soldiers in Iberia, but 200,000 of them were guarding supply lines rather than fighting, resources Napoleon badly needed elsewhere as he prepared to invade Russia.
How we know
World History Encyclopedia's Peninsular War article documents the Dos de Mayo Uprising, the Battle of Bailen, and the French troop deployment figures for 1812, and the Frist Art Museum's exhibition notes on Goya's Disasters of War describe the series as a direct response to the war's violence and the Madrid famine of 1811-12.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Peninsular War · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Frist Art Museum. Goya: The Disasters of War · Unclassified sourcefristartmuseum.org · Cited as a "website" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineThe Napoleonic Wars23 events · How one artillery officer from Corsica remade Europe's map, then lost it all twiceView all →