A fierce, visionary account of Portugal under Napoleon's shadow, now available in English.
In King Junot, Portuguese modernist writer Raul Brandão turns the French invasion of Portugal into something far greater than a military episode. This is not a conventional history of generals, treaties, and campaigns; it is a dramatic meditation on fear, decadence, revolt, faith, empire, and the suffering of ordinary people caught in the machinery of power.
At the center of the book stands Jean-Andoche Junot, Napoleon's general, who entered Lisbon in 1807 and briefly ruled Portugal in the name of imperial France. Around him Brandão gathers a vast and unforgettable cast: Napoleon, the Portuguese royal court fleeing to Brazil, frightened ministers, compromised nobles, friars, soldiers, peasants, satirists, conspirators, and the restless crowds of Lisbon and the provinces.
Written in Brandão's intense, poetic, and often prophetic prose, King Junot blends historical documentation with literary force. It evokes the collapse of an old world and the birth of a new one through invasion, humiliation, popular resistance, and political awakening. The result is a powerful work of historical literature: part chronicle, part essay, part national tragedy.
This complete English translation brings to modern readers one of Raul Brandão's most striking works - a book essential for anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular War, Portuguese history, literary history, and the drama of Europe in revolution.