One of the most iconic paintings to depict the horrors of war is Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, which depicts an incident during the Peninsular War against Napoleon in Spain. The nighttime scene of a group of Spanish civilians facing execution by a French firing squad was remarkable for its time, being utterly devoid of the patriotic glorification of war that characterized most contemporary war art. Goya based the painting on reprisals the French army carried out against citizens of Madrid in the wake of the Dos de Mayo Uprising against Napoleon’s occupation forces. When French troops were attacked by supporters of the deposed Spanish royal family, the French commander Marshal Joachim Murat posted broadsides around the city proclaiming: “The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot.” Because “arms in hand” was interpreted to mean any person found with scissors, pocketknives, or shears, numerous innocent civilians were summarily shot without trial in the roundups that the French carried out in reprisal after the uprising. As many as 700 Spanish citizens were killed in the revolt and its aftermath.
Military reprisals against civilian populations have occurred throughout thousands of years of recorded history. Genghis Khan’s Mongols are said to have massacred the entire population of the Persian city of Nishapur in 1221 in reprisal for the killing of the Khan’s son-in-law during the siege. The death toll, according to contemporary chroniclers,down the uprising. When imperial Qing forces recaptured Guangdong province during the Taiping Rebellion in 1853, they massacred nearly 30,000 civilians a day. According to some histories, the total death toll from unrestrained reprisals in that province alone amounted to approximately a million people.
