Agustina de Aragón
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Agustina Raimunda Maria Saragossa Doménech, aka Agustina de Aragón (1786-1857) was a Spanish heroine who defended Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. She is known as "the Spanish Joan of Arc".[1]
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[edit] Heroic acts
By the Summer of 1808, Zaragoza was one of the last cities in Spain not to have yet fallen to the forces of Napoleon and was therefore, by the time of the siege, choked with vast numbers of refugees, fleeing the advancing French. In early June, the French began to advance on Zaragosa, which had not seen war for about 450 years, and had a tiny provincial and significantly outnumbered force. On June 15, 1808, the French army arrived at the Portillo, one of the ancient gateways into the city, defended primarily by a battery of assorted ragtag cannons and the 2nd Aragon Volunteers under local commander Palafox. As Agustina arrived with a basket of apples to supply to the troops, so the Spanish troops broke ranks, having suffered heavy casualties, and abandoned their cannon posts. With the French troops a few yards away, Agustina ran forward and lit the fuse on one of the cannons. At point blank range the effect was devastating upon the first of the French, buying a few seconds. Seeing a woman bravely manning the cannons inspired the fleeing Spanish troops and other volunteers to return and assist her. After a bloody struggle, the French gave up the assault on Zaragosa, and abandoned their siege for a few short weeks before returning to fight their way into the city, house-by-house. With the human cost proving truly terrible on both sides and the city's defences hopelessly compromised, Palafox finally accepted the inevitable and was forced to surrender the city to the French. Despite the eventual defeat, Agustina's action became an inspiration to those opposing the French and, in latterday, to many feminists.
[edit] General Background
Original records on Agustina suggest that she was not fervently patriotic or pious, but an ordinary girl motivated by war. In the mores of the time, her actions would have posed a problem for the Spanish Catholic Church, which maintained women who take on "manly" duties must be witches. However, as the French-imprisoned King of Spain was ordained by God, the Church considered it the duty of every Spaniard to take up arms against his captors.
[edit] Early life
Various places claim to be Agustina's birthplace. Most biographies suggest that she was born in Reus, in Tarragona, in 1786. At an early age, her family moved to Madrid. To the annoyance of the Spanish, she showed an independence of mind from an early age and records indicate that she was a persistent nuisance, hanging around the Army barracks there at the age of 13 year old. Although popular history records that she married for love at the age of 16, the age of her son at his death is disputed, suggesting that she might already have been pregnant at the time of her marriage to an artillery gunner by the name of Joan Roca Vila-Seca. The name of her first born child, does not appear in the popular record, though a gravestone indicates his name was Eugenio.[original research?] Although her husband was in the army as the Peninsular War was breaking out, she suddenly left him to return to the home of her sister in Zaragoza.
[edit] Goya and Lord Byron
Agustina is the only clearly recognisable figure in The Disasters Of War by Goya who was himself from the same city, the Spanish seem happy to ignore the fact that Lord Byron wrote several highly detailed verses in Childe Harold about Agustina. Despite having supposedly never met Agustina before writing Childe Harold, records show that the two of them did indeed meet afterwards, yet did so as if friends who had met and known each other for some time. Lord Byron is known to have traveled throughout Europe, often turning up in places shortly before the arrival of British troops. Despite by most as wrong on the grounds that she was already married, "Childe Harold" clearly states that a key reason for running to defend the city by manning the cannons was that Agustina had an illicit lover in the city by the name of Raul and that it was seeing closehand his mortal wounding in the front line that drove her actions.
[edit] A Leader In The Resistance
The image of Agustina as the savior of Zaragoza has, however, also overshadowed her later actions. After being captured, she was imprisoned during which she was to see Eugenio die in the hands of her French guards. She subsequently mounted a daring escape and became a low level rebel leader for the Guerillas or "Little Warriors" helping to organise raids and attacks that harassed the French. As the strateic situation deteriorated for the French military, her role became increasingly orthodox as supplies and training was covertly supplied by Wellington, the British General, whose puny force of 20,000 British soldiers had been sent on must have seemed at the outset to be a suicide mission to take on a French Army occupying Spain with over a quarter of a million men.
[edit] Battle of Vitoria
Agustina began to fight for the allied forces as Wellington's only woman officer and ultimately rose to the rank of Captain. On June 21, 1813, she acted as a front line battery commander at the Battle of Vitoria under the command of Major Cairncross who reported directly to Wellington himself. This battle was to see the French Army that had occupied Spain, effectively smashed beyond repair and driving them out of Spain.
[edit] Later Life And Death
After the war, she married a doctor and, late in life, she became a familiar sight in Zarragoza as a respectable old lady, wearing medals, who used to go for walks around the Portillo. Agustina de Aragón died at the age of 71 in Ceuta. Until 1870 her remains lay in the Pillar until 14th June 1908 when she was moved to the Chapel of the Announcement of the Church of Our Lady.
[edit] References
- ^ Marvin D'Lugo, Guide to the cinema of Spain, Greenwood Press, ISBN 0313294747
