Of course you are right, but, we can see on dispatches, memoirs and other documents of that time, that some behaviour were considered crimes, were not accepted commonly, so, even then what happen in the Peninsula was not acceptable.

The proof: how often the French general make excuses so justify what can´t be justify.

I think that the French Army , after Loison, choose a war of terror and intimidation as a military action.

When General Kellerman make a public declaration on paper stating " Citizens of Alentejo. Beja rebel against the Frech. Beja doesn’t exist any more, and the all people of Beja was put on the sword". This is a public statement of pure terror.

A few days after as the time of Evora, etc. This is a Politic and Military decision.
When we see the repulse of people on those behaviours we can conclude that, even by 1800 standards , this was not accepted.

Here I put some of them, as my point of view . ( If a foreign person satets that, imagine a Portuguese point of view)

Leavesfrom the diary of an officer ofthe Guards, pp. 53 "If the result of the advance of the French into Portugal was calamitous, the scenes witnessed on their retreat were deplorable. Destruction, incendiarism, violation, and murder, - in short, desolation, marked their course. Their steps were traced by the conflagration of towns, villages and quintas. [...] If the enemy could not exist in the country, they had determined that nothing should be left for others."

Jonathan Leach "The French set fire to Pombal in the most wanton and barbarous manner, before they retreated from it. It [Condeixa] had been plundered and set on fIre, and such enorrnities committed, as would have disgraced a band of Hottentots or North American Indians."

William Tornkinson "The convent of Alcabaça [sic] exceeded anything 1 ever saw as a work of destruction. They had bumt what they could and destroyed the remainder with an immense deal of trouble. The embalmed kings and queens were taken out of their tombs, and 1 saw them lying in as great preservation as the day they were interred. (Pedra 1 el Cruel [sic] and lnnes de Castra [sic] were, 1 believe, the two 1 saw). The fine fesselated pavement, fram the entrance to the altar, was picked up, the facings to the I stone pillars were destroyed nearly to the top, scaffolding having been erected for that purpose. ln short, regular working parties must have been constantly employed in a work of so much time and labour. No man, for mischief, would bestow so much time.
An orderly book found near the place showed that regular parties had been ordered for the purpose”

George Simmons "It is beyond everything horrid the way these European savages have treated the unfortunate Portuguese. Almost every man they get hold of they murder. The women they use too brutally for me to describe. They even cut the throats of infants. The towns are mostly on fIre - in short, they are guilty of every species of cruelty. 1 have seen such sights as have made me shudder with horror, and which 1 really could not have believed unless an eye-witness of them."

"How different this town [Santarém] now appeared. When 1 last was on it all was gaiety and happiness, and the shops abounding with every luxury, and a smile upon every one' s face; but now the houses are tom and dilapidated, and the few miserable inhabitants, moving skeletons; the streets strewn with every description of house-hold fumiture, halfbumt and destroyed, and many streets quite impassable with filth and rubbish, with an occasional man, mule or donkey rotting and corrupting and filling the air with pestilential vapours."

Jonathan Leach “"The French set fIre to Pombal in the most wanton and barbarous manner, before they retreated from it. It [Condeixa] had been plundered and set on fIre, and such enormities committed, as would have disgraced a band of Hottentots or North American Indians."

Andrew Leith Hay "The condition in which we found the town [Alenquer] left not a doubt that the enemy had completed its demolition out of pure wantonness. [...] Azambuja, left in a state of ruin not inferior to other unfortunate towns on the route. The houses in many instances were unroofed, doors and windows bumt, the interiors as uninhabitable as malignity or ingenuity could make them."

Walter Henry "We witnessed much misery and distress among the poor inhabitants of
this devastated tract of country on the march [from Lisbon to Alhandra] who were slowly retuming to their bumt and dilapidated homes, with exhausted means and emaciated frames, every one having his peculiar tale of sorrow to tell, but ali unanimous in bitter hatred of the cause of ali their sufferings, the 'malditos Franceses'

João Centeno