19 July 1808, 10 am to noon
Dupont surrounded
Fresh troops come up at 10 am and Dupont attacks a third time, with General Pannetier’s brigade in front and the 300 Sailors of the Imperial Guard under Captain Daugier, the only Guard troops in his corps. Dupont, wounded in the hip, gathers his exhausted regiments around them. The attack breaks through the first Spanish line, but with no reserve behind it the columns are driven back down the slope by the Spanish guns.
French officers at the capitulation of Bailén, painting by Maurice Orange, 1906Wikimedia Commons, Maurice Orange, Public domain (Capitulation at Bailen.jpg)
The Swiss regiments of Dupont’s corps, raised in Spanish service, go over to the Spaniards with their arms and baggage. Lapeña’s division of Castaños’s army reaches the Rumblar behind Barbou, and Colonel Juan de la Cruz Mourgeón comes down from the hills with 2,000 sharpshooters onto the French left. Surrounded on three sides, Dupont asks for a truce.
Sources
- Maximilien Sébastien Foy, History of the War in the Peninsula under Napoleon, vol. II (1827).
- Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, vol. I (1902).
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