This chapter examines siege surrender rituals and the obstinate defence of practicable breaches during the Napoleonic Wars, with a particular focus on French obstinacy in the Peninsular War, which triggered the British general storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian. Whereas a century earlier Louis XIV’s fortress governors had surrendered at the point of a practicable breach or beforehand, Napoleon’s now fought on. This chapter explores how this had come to pass, the extent to which eighteenth-century siege surrender conventions were disrupted during the Peninsular War and Napoleonic Wars more generally, and British attitudes and practices towards siege defences taken to the last extremity. On the one hand, French garrison commanders were adhering to Napoleon’s orders to defend practicable breaches, which became the subject of an instructional treatise by Lazare Carnot. On the other hand, this was the culmination of a much broader and long-term evolution in cultures of war and honour codes – that encouraged a cult of obstinacy. The chapter concludes by comparing siege surrender in Spain with siege defences and capitulation throughout other regional theatres of war and campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

Storming the breaches of a fortress was the most perilous of military undertakings. After setting out the operational nature and challenges of British sieges in the Peninsular War, this chapter explores the cultural and emotional history of the British storming of besieged fortress-towns in the Napoleonic era, especially in Spain, revealing a cult and spectacle of storm that took hold in this epoch, borne of a reinvigoration of martial honour codes, ideals of heroic and patriotic self-sacrifice, and romantic and sublime sensibilities. British soldiers’ writings on their motivation for storming reveal a complex and interactive mix of remunerative incentives of promotion and plunder on the one hand, and bravery, esteem, honour and patriotism, on the other, with soldiers driven by both individual and collective values and loyalties. Further, this chapter analyses how soldiers managed fear and emotion in the impending eye of the storm, and the importance of sentimental culture in how they responded to the trauma and devastating loss of comrades in the aftermath.