Antoine de Roten

Antoine de Roten (1780 – 1845) was a Swiss military man who entered the service of Spain at the age of seventeen during the French Revolutionary Wars, as an officer of the Valais Courten Regiment. Of progressive ideology, he served as interim captain general of Catalonia in the last months of the Liberal Triennium and faced the invasion of the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis, assuming the defense of Barcelona until he was forced to surrender the city to the Duke of Conegliano in October 1823.

Biography

Antoine de Roten was born at Raron in the canton of Valais. Member of a noble family of the Upper Valais, his father, Nicolas de Roten, was governor of Monthey and his younger brother, Maurice-Fabien, Bishop of Sion. In April 1797 he joined as a lieutenant in a regiment of Valaisians in the service of Spain during the French Revolutionary Wars. At the outbreak of the Spanish War of Independence — already as an officer in the Spanish army — in September 1808 he was captain of hunters of the Almeria regiment and in 1810 he was decorated for his participation in the defense of Tarragona. In 1811, he successively passed from the rank of lieutenant colonel of Almansa, in March, to that of colonel in May and commander of the third battalion of the second Savoy regiment in August. His military career was not interrupted with the reintegration of Ferdinand VII to the throne, but in 1819 he was imprisoned in the castle of San Sebastián in Cádiz for his participation in the conspiracy of Palmar, under the orders of General Antonio Quiroga, and in September 1820, after the triumph of Riego's Pronunciamiento, he already held the rank of brigadier of infantry and commander of the second battalion of the regiment of Aragón.

As a division general under the orders of Francisco Espoz y Mina, he marched to Catalonia in the middle of 1822 to fight the absolutist parties that rose up in the name of the Regency of Urgel. He became famous for the cruelty with which he behaved in some of his military actions, as in the organized sacking of the town of Sant Llorenç de Morunys, at the end of 1822, in which he assigned to each battalion the neighborhood to be sacked and then prevented the reconstruction of the destroyed houses, condemning his neighbors to wander through the mountains with the penalty of death if they dared to settle in Berga or Solsona. As military governor of Barcelona, according to Vicente de la Fuente's description of his methods, he implemented the repressive model that would later be known as the law of fugitives:

Rotten organized in Barcelona against the good men, the system that today [1870] is followed against the bandits and kidnappers of Andalusia. He sent the prisoners to Tarragona or any other town, and in the middle of the road, the escort that was chosen for the purpose, killed them with bayonets, alleging that they had tried to escape. The prisoners left in a tartan that came to have a disastrous celebrity, being called Rotten's tartan, although it was not his but that of the fiercest communards of Barcelona. It was known that whoever entered it traveled for eternity. Thus the old Bishop of Vic was assassinated on April 16, 1823.

Estanislao de Kostka Vayo adds that the same trickery was used to murder twenty-four Manresans, among them fifteen clergymen, during their transfer to Barcelona by order of Roten. In July 1823, when he took charge of the military and political government of Barcelona because Espoz y Mina was wounded, he created a Vigilance Commission, a recreation of an earlier Vigilance Board constituted by Mina, formed by him and ten exalted liberals representing the secret societies, which became the revolutionary organ that governed the city. In the three months that the commission was in operation was when the greatest number of executions took place, twenty-two, and also the greatest number of courts martial, eighty-eight, of which the sentence is mostly unknown. In addition, ten prisoners were killed on the way from Barcelona to another locality.

After signing the capitulation of Barcelona before Marshal Moncey, on November 6, 1823, he embarked for Genoa to return to his homeland. In Geneva he was received on December 9 as a "hero of democracy and victim of despotism". Strutting in full military uniform, his chest covered with decorations and the republican cockade on his hat, he was honored in other Swiss towns, while in his family circle and in Sion he was received with a certain distrust and suspicion because he was considered a heretic, for the atrocities he had committed in Spain against the clergy, because of the lightness with which he expressed his opinions contrary to all the ancient privileges, being married to an aristocrat named Francisca de Guzman, and because it was said that in a bank in Genoa he had deposited sixty thousand louis (more than a million francs), from the immense treasures of the convents of which he had taken possession.

In Sion he made some attempt to devote himself to commerce and cantonal politics, but to historian Heinrich Zschokke, who paid him a visit, he confessed that the pen was too heavy for the hand accustomed to wielding the sword, and the vigilance of the Holy Alliance over him frustrated all his political expectations. The revolution of 1830 in France brought him back into action when the Federal Diet decided on December 27 to proclaim neutrality in the face of the events and its intention to defend territorial integrity, for which it appointed eight federal colonels, Roten being the one chosen to represent the canton of Valais. On the death of Ferdinand VII, in 1833, he availed himself of the amnesty decreed by the regent and returned to Spain in 1835, called by Espoz y Mina. In February of the following year he received the office of field marshal from the new liberal government and in October the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Hermenegild. He did not reappear in Valais until October of 1840.

He died in 1845 leaving two sons, Nicolás, who became burgomaster of Sion, and Adolfo, who settled in Mallorca and became Marquis of Campo Franco by marriage.

References

• Courthion, Louis; Bioley, Pierre (1924). "Le Général Roten," Annales Valaisannes, Vol. V, No. 3/4, pp. 49–65.
• Roca Vernet, Jordi (2011). La Barcelona Revolucionària i Liberal: Exaltats, Milicians i Conspiradors. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera.
• Vayo, Estanislao de Kostka (1842). Historia de la Vida y Reinado de Fernando VII de España, Vol. 3. Madrid: Imprenta de Repullés.