Sound and fury, signifying nothing

In exile on St Helena, Napoleon brooded on the cause of the failure of his bid for the mastery of Europe. He confessed that ‘accursed Spain was the primary cause of my misfortunes’. Ronald Fraser’s book of over 500 pages may be seen as a commentary on this confession. Fraser made his name as the oral historian of Francoism and its opponents. Without the voices of the living, for his description of Spain from 1808 to 1814 Fraser has ransacked the archival sources and contemporary accounts. It is a fine example of what he calls history as seen from below. Whereas after Austerlitz the Austrian state survived defeat, and resistance in the Tyrol and in Naples were ‘minor surmountable regional affairs’, Spain was an exception. The state of the ancien régime collapsed and the popular resistance to Napoleon, the subject of Fraser’s book, was a formidable force. He rejects the notion of a universal national rising as a liberal myth.