Raymond Rudorff

The first chapter is worth reading all on its own - reminded me of Dumas' The Black Tulip! The Spanish royal trio of King Charles IV, Queen Maria Luisa and heir to the throne Prince Ferdinand are all moral weaklings and parochial fools devoid of culture and intellect. Their individual beliefs that they are the favoured one by Napoleon - and the "sausage-maker" Manuel Godoy, Maria Luisa's lover and soon prime minister is just as awful - are hilariously told.

The rest of the book tells, in superb and horrific detail, the two sieges of Saragossa in 1808 and 1809. The French are regeimented and brave and the Spaniards are crazily brave in return. There are feisty women in here, including Augustina who grabbed the match from her dying lover and, surrounded by her dead neighbours, fired the cannon into the French troops. Palafox is drawn as well as he can be it seems, and at the end, when Rudorff relates how disappointed he was to find that today the city has almost no notable records of the sieges, you understand why Palafox never quite makes it to be a three-dimensional character.

Saragossa ultimately was taken, at a cost of 54,000 lives and a city in ruins, but Rudorff demonstrates brilliantly how the Aragonese resistance sickened the French commanders and soldiers and inspired the rest of Spain to the point that Napoleon was ultimately weakened. It's starkly clear why this episode, compounded by the destruction of the Grand Army in the 1812 French invasion of Russia, was a key factor in the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.… (meer)