Eduardo González
On May 2, 1808, the rumour that the royal family intended to leave Madrid to meet Carlos IV in Bayonne caused a popular uproar. The disproportionate response of Napoleon’s troops sparked off the War of Independence. Witness to those events was the ambassador of France, whose optimism bordered on absolute naivety.
“The events of the day before yesterday (May 2) has until now all the consequences that could be expected of a victory of great size”, wrote Antoine René Mathurin, Count of La Forest, in a letter addressed to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and collected by the French historian and hispanist Jean-René Aymes.
“The party of Fernando has been completely defeated by the scoundrel who had put in the front rows”, the ambassador, posted that same year to Madrid, goes on. “The tranquility of the Spanish troops and that was not populace in the capital has to prove to that Prince (Fernando VII) that all the schemes of his supporters did not manage to give him what constitutes the strength of the sovereigns”, he continued.
According to the ambassador, “the hatred that inspired the Prince of Peace (the prime minister of Carlos IV, Manuel Godoy) was the almost only power of the one that knocked him down”, but “that power has vanished in the thinking heads”.
For this reason, the ambassador assured Napoleon, “in general terms the change of dynasty is foreseen”, from the Bourbon to the Bonapartist. “The hope of advantages for the nation means that the majority of the Enlightened Board renounce the family that reigned, with the exceptions linked to passions, interests or fidelity to loaned oaths”. “Everything will be submitted to the force of the circumstances, when not by conviction”, he concluded.
A week later, La Forest was bent on confusing desires with realities in another letter, in this case the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “Day 2 has irreversibly destroyed the power of Fernando’s party. Thanks to the accurate mixture of energy and caution, demonstrated by His Imperial Highness, the leadership of the Spanish government has already passed into his hands”.
La Forest was ambassador in Madrid until 1812, and at the end of the following year Napoleon entrusted him with the mission of negotiating with Ferdinand VII the Treaty of Valençay by which the throne of Spain was returned to the Bourbons. Once back in his country, in April 1814 he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the provisional government of the newly enthroned Louis XVIII. Suddenly, and because of these paradoxes of history, the champion of the Bonapartist “new dynasty” in Spain had reached the zenith of his political career with the restoration of the old Bourbon dynasty in France.
