As it happens, I am just now reading Georges Blond's La Grande Armee, and I am quite surprised by the descriptions of events in Spain. Until now I have had the impression that the bulk of the Spanish people were generally passively going about the peasant's round of trying to wrest a living from rudimentary agriculture. It was only a relatively small number of fanatics who were the dreaded guerrillas. That's not Blond's picture.

From an Amazon review:

'La Grande Armee"'s greatest strength are the details it presents: from the tactic of Russian playing dead on the battlefield and then getting up to shoot the advancing French in the backs is hard to ignore. To American readers, the chapters on the Spanish insurgency will be particular interest. Many other books of the era gloss over the Iberian campaign, especially after Napoleon himself later refused to enter Spain in an attempt to rescue the situation. That slow, tortorous defeat experienced by the Grand Army will make any reader wonder ...

The picture Blond gives is of a population hard to sort between those participating and those not participating in the war or insurgency -- whichever it might be.

I have no idea of Blond's reputation or the level of acceptance of the accuracy of this book, which does seem to have a connection with the trend of threads about so-called war crimes of the Napoleonic era. I would appreciate comments about how to regard its descriptions of Spain.

Best regards, BaldJim