The Resistance of Agustina de Aragón and the Birth of Spanish Nationalism
An essay on artistic depiction of sieges

I am a huge fan of siege art, and all my favorite painters know how to use fire. This exquisite scene has sparks in the background, a slow-burning matchcord on the linstock, and a flame in the belly of Agustina Raimunda María Saragossa Domènech, known as Agustina de Aragón. Spanish artist Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau Nieto portrays la artillera (the artillery woman) as a “handsome” young woman “of the lower class, about twenty-two years of age,” the description of historian Robert Southey in 1823.1
When Napoleon deposed Ferdinand VII and the Bourbon dynasty in 1808, Agustina de Aragón had been married to Juan Roca, a lieutenant in the First Artillery Regiment, for five years. Roca was one of many officers who refused to follow the orders of superiors collaborating with Napoleon, joining the nascent rebellion in the Spanish countryside instead. “He fought with the insurgents in western Catalonia, participating in key battles at El Bruch, María, and Belchite in June and July,” writes John Lawrence Tone.2
“Agustina, not content to remain in French-occupied Barcelona with their four-year-old son, also headed west, into guerrilla country.”
She did not stay long in the field: with a child in tow she could hardly campaign. But word had reached her ears about an uprising in Zaragoza, and so she headed for the Aragonese capital, never realizing that she was heading into one of the bloodiest sieges in history.
During a French assault on the Portillo gate, where a heavy cannon was positioned to fire grapeshot, Agustina “arrived at this battery with refreshments, at the time when not a man who defended it was left alive, so tremendous was the fire which the French kept up against it,” in Southey’s telling. French troops were advancing on the loaded, but unmanned, cannon. “For a moment the citizens hesitated to re-man the guns; Agustina sprung forward over the dead and dying, snatched a match from the hand of a dead artilleryman, and fired off a six-and-twenty pounder; then, jumping upon the gun, made a solemn vow never to quit it alive during the siege” (emphasis added). As a result of her inspiring example, “the French were repulsed here, and at all other points, with great slaughter.”
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It is a great story, too good to be entirely true. Agustina de Aragón became a legend in her own time because her story was sensationalized immediately and promoted as wartime propaganda. Napoleon’s war in Spain was seen as the fractious birth of Spanish nationalism, much as the exportation of French revolutionary fervor did the same for Italy and Germany, though in different ways. Agustina was courageous, to be sure, yet she was not unique in European warfare. On the contrary, Agustina became an instant hit because she fit an already-existing archetype of civic resistance by women that had developed across Atlantic Europe, the most siege-dense region of the world, since the Middle Ages.
To date, my study of siege art has not located a standalone volume on this topic in military history. Agustina lived at the precipice of 19th century feminism, but she was not resisting men. She was resisting Frenchmen. The women of Spain followed her example, but then English and Spanish men inflated her legend in pursuit of their own ends. Known for hyper-realism, Ferrer-Dalmau has hit the mark, in my estimation: his subject has just done her brave deed. The lies have not begun to accrete onto her legend yet. His heroine is the real heroine, not the legend of the heroine.
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