Conquest of Trocadero

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The location of Trocadero in the Bay of Cadiz (1888)

During the conquest of Trocadero , the French army under the Duke of Angoulême took the fortress on the island of Trocadero in front of the Spanish city of Cádiz on August 31, 1823 and ended the Spanish Revolution .

Prehistory and course

After the capture of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII , the European powers of the Holy Alliance commissioned France to suppress the bourgeois revolution in Spain during the Verona Congress at the end of 1822.

The revolutionary militias under the command of Rafael del Riego y Núñez (1785-1823) were defeated during the French invasion of Spain in San Sebastian and Madrid and were pushed back as far as Cádiz.

The militias had gathered in the Trocadero fortress in front of Cádiz, which controlled access to the city. On August 31, the French were able to take the fortress in a surprise bayonet attack. The attack was carried out from the sea side, taking advantage of low water. After conquering the fortress, the village of Trocadero was also taken by French infantry in a flank attack. A total of 1,700 Spanish militiamen were captured in the course of the battle.

consequences

The city of Cadiz could only hold out until September 23, 1823. Ferdinand VII was released and reinstated immediately. The victory was overshadowed by his ruthless retaliation, which French troops did not prevent. Thousands of people suspected of sympathy with the republic fell victim to torture and massacres.

The victory at the siege of Trocadero, however, had great symbolic power for the monarchy and was honored in 1826 by Charles X with a military parade at the Hauteurs de Chaillot (German: heights of Chaillot) in Paris . Since then, much in the area has been named in memory of this victory. He gave his name to the Palais du Trocadéro , a building that was erected on the Hauteurs de Chaillot for the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878 and demolished again in 1937 to build the Palais de Chaillot on its foundations . The name lives on to this day in the Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre with its Métro station Trocadéro and the Jardins du Trocadéro .

With Cádiz as the setting for the drama The State of Siege , Albert Camus probably wanted - among other events - to allude to the revolution of 1823 as a paradigm , especially since the drama in general addresses the resistance to any form of inhumanity in the world, both political and existential.

literature

  • Hermann Baumgarten: History of Spain from the outbreak of the French Revolution , 3 volumes; Leipzig 1865–71. Volume 2, p. 581 ( digitized version in the Google book search).

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