Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As the era of the French Revolution
melted into the Napoleonic era (1789-
1815), Spain's weak leaders shifted back
and forth between support of the changing
regimes in France and affiliation with Brit-
ain's crusade against the successive versions
of the new European order promulgated
from Paris. Napoléon proved the most for-
midable enemy that Spain had ever yet
encountered. His contempt for its ruling
dynasty was, perhaps, justified, but his
appointment of his brother Joseph
Bonaparte as J
OSEPH
I combined with the
ravishing of Spain's resources and the
slaughter of its people provoked a national
resistance (P
ENINSULAR
W
AR
). England's
intervention, in which the duke of Welling-
ton's liberation of Portugal from French
control was followed by the expulsion of
the Bonaparte regime from Spain in 1814,
permitted the return of the banished F
ERDI
-
NAND
VII. The hope of a modern, progres-
sive, and self-respecting Spain that emerged
at the beginning of the 19th century proved
a delusion, however. By the 1830s the sup-
porters of rival claimants to Ferdinand's
throne were slaughtering each other, and
the Liberal governments of London and
Paris were using Spain as a ploy in their
confrontation with the Conservatives who
ruled in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin.
In the configuration that emerged from the
Congress of Vienna (1814-15), Britain,
France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia were
recognized as the “Great Powers,” and
Spain was merely regarded as part of the
European miscellany.
By the end of the 19th century Spain's
colonial empire had shrunk to a bare rem-
nant. Its politicians and generals had turned
the political system into a game of rotation
in which monarchy possessed neither
authority nor even the prospect of perma-
nency. Its economy was enfeebled, and its
society, bitterly divided. Little wonder that
the rulers of Europe, whether the old dynas-
ties or the new capitalists, did not take Spain
seriously. The ultimate humiliation seemed
to come in 1898, when the United States
despoiled Spain of all that remained of its
empire (S
PANISH
-A
MERICAN
W
AR
).
Spain's neutrality in World War I (1914-
18) was less the result of its leaders' pru-
dence than of the Great Powers' indifference
to its absence from the battlefield or the
conference table. Limping from military
disaster in M
OROCCO
to military dictator-
ship in the 1920s to an unpopular republic
in the early 1930s, Spain plunged into the
S
PANISH
CIVIL
WAR
in 1936-39. Once again
it became the plaything of the great powers
although their identities had shifted. Brit-
ain and France stood aside while the fascist
regimes in Germany and Italy and the Com-
munist regime in Russia intervened sup-
porting one side or the other in Spain while
testing weapons and tactics for the Euro-
pean war that would break out in 1939.
The United States, which had been indiffer-
ent to the European crisis, did not become
involved in World War II until 1941.
Adolf Hitler was interested enough in find-
ing a role for Spain in this war to meet with
the victorious general F
RANCISCO
F
RANCO
.
Although the latter would not facilitate a
German attack on G
IBRALTAR
, he did offer
Spanish troops and fliers to aid in Hitler's
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The German dictator was disgusted by the
duplicity of his Spanish counterpart, who
withdrew his troops as soon as difficulties
arose in the Russian campaign. Moreover
Hitler and Benito Mussolini of Italy, who
had both supported Franco's seizure of
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