‘Perfidies, Robberies and Cruelties’: Latin America and Napoleon in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

In 1809, a pamphlet circulated in the viceroyalty of Peru, a major center of the old, tired Spanish empire in America. As its title promised, it described in detail the ‘perfidies, robberies and cruelties’ that the French Emperor Napoleon had committed since becoming a general of the French Revolution in the 1790s. In the final paragraph of his text the anonymous author prayed that the knowledge of these misdeeds would incense his readers and instil them with the patriotic fervor necessary to take revenge on the infamous Frenchman.¹ Reading this example of the many anti-Napoleonic diatribes produced at this time in Latin America, one gets the impression that there had never been a more mortal enemy for the people of Spain and Portugal than the great Corsican, and that the antagonism had been deeply ingrained in the colonial elite from the very beginning of Napoleon’s rise to power.