Hats remained upon heads. On the 6th of January 1809, when Napoleon entered Valladolid by the bridge, the city offered him none of the enthusiasm that imperial processions were accustomed to finding in their path. There were French cheers, those of the partisans of the new regime; for the rest, the chronicler Hilarión Sancho remembered above all this withheld courtesy. In the evening, the palace was illuminated. One could command lights far more easily than bows.
Six days later, the Emperor announced to his brother that he would have seven men hanged on the morrow.
Between these two moments, it was not merely a matter of a conqueror wounded in his vanity. Valladolid had endured months of violence, shifting authorities, and reprisals. Inhabitants had denounced their neighbours; others had died under the accusation of treason. The presence of an army did not suspend local grudges. It merely offered those who now held its ear the means to present them as affairs of state.
During the preceding month of June, the artillery commander Miguel de Ceballos had been brought in as a prisoner from Carboneros. He was accused of having surrendered Segovia to the French. According to Sancho, the mob of Valladolid fell upon him and slew him in the Campo Grande. His wife and children were at his side. The chronicler, hostile though he was to the occupier, preserved this death in his journal; the accusation of treason stood distinct therein from the murder it had incited. To have been designated a traitor had sufficed to deliver a man over to the blows of the crowd.
A few days later, while the defeat at Cabezón threw the Spanish forces back toward the city, another prisoner was slain. Juan Ignacio González Prada, an officer of the law, was detained in the quarter of San Ignacio. His guards feared, recounts the same witness, that he might denounce them to the French once they entered. They eliminated the informer they dreaded before he had the chance to speak. In this logic of terror, death became a precaution.
Then the French troops occupied the city, departed, and returned once more. The inhabitants endured requisitions, pillaging, and levies. In November, at the announcement of a fresh advance, a great part of the populace fled beneath the rain with their children and whatever they could carry away. Representatives who remained behind went out to meet the soldiers bearing a white cloth upon the end of a staff. Gregorio Chamochín took part in the reconstituted municipal authority. His name was to reappear when Napoleon demanded arrests.
By January, the French sovereign had won his battles; it remained for him to bestow a kingdom upon Joseph. The latter was waiting to return to Madrid. Oaths of allegiance, deputations, and appointments were meant to transform a military occupation into an accepted government. But Napoleon was not content with signed registers. He wished to divide the population between those who were to be reassured and those who were to be made an example of.
In Valladolid, Sancho attributes to Chamochín the commission to proceed with the arrests. Eighteen or twenty persons were reportedly taken. The journal employs the phrasing of intelligence received, not the tone of a clerk verifying a register; yet it reveals the descent of imperial order into the streets. The soldiers could not know every face by themselves. Men of the locality were required to point out the doors.
On the 12th of January, at noon, Napoleon wrote to Joseph. He approved the arrests carried out in Madrid by General Belliard, recommended executions, and then cited Valladolid as an example. Seven men were to be hanged there on the following day. He described them as notoriously responsible for outrages; honest inhabitants had allegedly denounced them in secret, and would take heart upon seeing them disappear.
In this letter, the informers possessed moral stature; the denounced were merely a number. Names, particular facts, and individual defences did not accompany the order transmitted to the King. The purpose was to impart a method of governance: to purge the capital of a hundred men deemed dangerous, put some to death, and dispatch the rest to France. The punishment no longer merely answered a crime; it was intended to act upon those who would witness it.
Yet certain inhabitants petitioned for the pardon of the condemned of Valladolid. Their intercession disturbed the picture of a city unanimously relieved. Napoleon brushed it aside, and offered, several days later, his own interpretation of this refusal: the petitioners, he maintained, were at heart pleased not to have obtained what they asked for. The explanation was convenient. It permitted one to discern approval even within supplication, and to transform objections into favourable testimony.
The executions took place. Yet the tally announced in the letter is not to be found as such in the local journal: Sancho speaks of five men hanged and another pardoned just as he was about to mount the scaffold. He mentions as well banishments to France. Seven condemned men announced by the sovereign, five dead recorded by an inhabitant: the discrepancy remains. Above all, it affords a glimpse of what imperial figures crush—that fleeting instant when a sentence may yet be arrested for one man, while it is stayed no longer for his companions.
On the 16th of January, Napoleon returned to the matter in another letter to Joseph. In Madrid, the magistrates had acquitted some of the arrested men or condemned them merely to imprisonment. The Emperor ordered a retrial before a military commission and demanded that the guilty be shot. Valladolid served once more as his argument. There, he had refused pardons, ordered hangings, and accounted this severity a political success.
This comparison lays bare the true stake of the affair. The repression of actual crimes, of which the murder of Ceballos offered a terrible example, became entangled with the desire to subjugate a people. A judicial decision marked by excessive leniency became an obstacle that another jurisdiction was required to redress. The Emperor professed to restore order; the inhabitants saw the establishment of a power capable of choosing its tribunal according to the sentence it desired.
Napoleon quitted Valladolid on the 17th of January. The illuminations had vanished, the authorities remained, yet the prisons were by no means emptied. Sancho continued his journal, chronicling the exactions, the arrests, and the guerillas who harassed the French on the outskirts of the city, driving the soldiers back to their very gates. The proclaimed tranquility had brought no end to the war.
In the correspondence of the victor, Valladolid could henceforth be reduced to a lesson addressed to a brother. In the streets, life had to go on among those who had informed, those who had begged for mercy, and the families to whom nothing had been restored. The hats, at last, had returned indoors upon their owners' heads; but of the men led away, not all returned.