Dos de Mayo Uprising
1808 rebellion during the Peninsular War
The Dos de Mayo or Second of May Uprising took place in Madrid, Spain, on 2–3 May 1808. The rebellion, mainly by civilians, with some isolated military action by junior officers, was against the occupation of the city by French troops, and was violently repressed by the French Imperial forces, with hundreds of public executions. These actions led to the Spanish people revolting against French occupation and outbreak of the Peninsular War, and ended the Franco-Spanish alliance in the Napoleonic Wars.
Background
The city had been under the occupation of Napoleon's army since 23 March of the same year. King Charles IV had been forced by the Spanish people during the Tumult of Aranjuez to abdicate in favor of his son Ferdinand VII, and at the time of the uprising both were in the French city of Bayonne at the insistence of Napoleon. An attempt by the French general Joachim Murat to move Charles IV's daughter and her children along with his youngest son to Bayonne sparked a rebellion.
Social aspects
The Dos de Mayo was among the few spontaneous popular uprisings of the war, launched without significant fore-planning, funding, or leadership by government elites. While elements within the Spanish military and state bureaucracy did envision military action to expel the French from the country, Murat's hold on Madrid was held to be unassailable in the short term. The two most senior uniformed leaders involved in the Dos de Mayo, Daoíz and Velarde y Santillán, were caught unprepared by the actions of the laboring poor: Velarde, a 28-year-old artillery captain, was secretly plotting a campaign elsewhere in the country, but considered a direct attack on the Spanish capital impractical – drawn to the sound of gunfire, he joined the fighting contrary to his own military instinct, and would perish leading the defense of the Monteleón artillery barracks.
Beginning of the uprising
On 2 May a crowd began to gather in front of the Royal Palace in Madrid.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Dos de Mayo Uprising” as 1808 rebellion during the Peninsular War. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q181146. Authority coordinates are 40.433, -3.683. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1808.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dos de Mayo Uprising” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.