| Date | 25 July – 2 August 1813 |
| Location | Western Pyrenees, Spanish-French frontier |
| Caused by | French counter-offensive ordered by Napoleon Bonaparte to relieve Pamplona and San Sebastián |
| Resulted in | Allied victory; French withdrawal into France; Wellington's subsequent crossing of the Bidasoa |
| Parties | Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish Allied Army · French Army of the Pyrenees |
| Lead figures | Duke of Wellington, Marshal Nicolas Soult, General Sir Rowland Hill, General Sir Lowry Cole, General Bertrand Clausel, General Honoré Reille, General Jean-Baptiste d'Erlon |
The Campaigns of the Pyrenees were a series of military engagements fought between 25 July and 2 August 1813, along the mountain passes and river valleys forming the natural frontier between France and Spain. The campaigns marked the final phase of the [Peninsular War](/wiki/peninsular-war), in which a combined Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish force under Field Marshal the [Duke of Wellington](/wiki/duke-of-wellington) repelled a sustained French counter-offensive ordered personally by Napoleon Bonaparte and thereby secured the allied crossing into metropolitan France.
By the summer of 1813, French military authority in Spain had effectively collapsed. Wellington's decisive victory at the [Battle of Vitoria](/wiki/battle-of-vitoria) on 21 June 1813 had shattered the Army of Spain and forced King Joseph Bonaparte to flee with the remnants of his court across the French border. Napoleon, alarmed by the strategic implications of an allied advance into French territory, replaced the discredited Joseph with Marshal Nicolas Soult, appointing him on 1 July 1813 as commander of the newly reconstituted Army of the Pyrenees with orders to retake Pamplona and San Sebastián, both then under allied siege.
Soult reorganised his forces with considerable speed. Drawing on depots at Bayonne, Pau, and Tarbes, he assembled a force of approximately 83,000 men divided into three corps under Generals Clausel, Reille, and d'Erlon. His plan called for a two-pronged offensive: Clausel's and d'Erlon's corps would advance through the passes of Maya and Roncesvalles respectively, converge on Pamplona, relieve its garrison, and compel Wellington to abandon the siege of San Sebastián. The operational concept was bold, but it depended on a speed of execution that the terrain of the western Pyrenees would not easily permit.
Wellington's dispositions at the time were extended across a front of some sixty miles. The allied forces guarding the passes — principally General Sir Rowland Hill's corps at Maya and General Sir Lowry Cole's division at Roncesvalles — were outnumbered at their respective positions but held the defensive advantage of high ground and prepared positions. Intelligence of Soult's movements, relayed via signals officers attached to Wellington's headquarters, reached Wellington on the evening of 24 July. He issued redistributive orders the same night.
### Monday, 25 July
Soult opened the offensive at dawn on 25 July with simultaneous assaults on the passes of Maya and Roncesvalles. At Maya, General d'Erlon's corps attacked the two British divisions holding the pass with approximately 20,000 men against a defending force of fewer than 6,000. Despite suffering severe casualties, the British rearguard under Major-General William Pringle conducted a fighting withdrawal in good order, ceding the pass by midday but preserving the integrity of the division. At Roncesvalles, Clausel's corps engaged Cole's division on a narrow front obscured by low cloud and persistent fog, conditions that prevented Clausel from deploying his numerical advantage effectively. Cole withdrew southward toward Pamplona after nightfall, having inflicted disproportionate casualties on the French columns.
### Tuesday, 26 July
Wellington, having received confirmation of both withdrawals, rode through the night from his headquarters at Lesaca to assume personal command at Sorauren, a village on the River Ulzama approximately eight miles north of Pamplona. His arrival on the morning of the 26th was observed by allied troops already engaged with French forward elements, and contemporary accounts in the *Recollections of Rifleman Harris* and related regimental diaries record that his presence materially steadied formations that had begun to waver. Wellington selected the ridge of Oricain as his defensive line, concentrating approximately 18,000 men against Soult's converging force of nearly 30,000.
### Wednesday, 27 July — First Battle of Sorauren
Soult attacked the Oricain ridge on 27 July in what became known as the First Battle of Sorauren. Three French columns advanced across the valley floor and up the southern face of the ridge under sustained musketry fire. The attack was repulsed at all points by early afternoon. French casualties for the day were estimated at 4,000 killed and wounded; allied losses stood at approximately 2,600. Soult, his primary axis of advance stalled, suspended operations and awaited the arrival of Reille's corps, which had been delayed on the road from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.
### Saturday, 30 July — Second Battle of Sorauren
Reinforced by Reille, Soult resumed the offensive on 30 July, now directing the weight of his attack westward toward the village of Huarte in an attempt to turn Wellington's left flank and reach Pamplona by an indirect route. Wellington had anticipated the manoeuvre and shifted reserves accordingly. The ensuing engagement, the Second Battle of Sorauren, lasted the better part of the day. A counter-attack by the 3rd Division under General Thomas Picton broke the cohesion of Reille's leading brigades and initiated a general French withdrawal that continued without significant pause for the following two days.
### 31 July – 2 August
Between 31 July and 2 August, allied columns pursued the retreating French army through the passes of Yanzi and Echalar, engaging French rearguards in a succession of sharp actions that inflicted further losses and prevented Soult from consolidating a defensible position on Spanish soil. By 2 August, the last French formations had recrossed the frontier. Soult's offensive had failed entirely, at a total cost to the Army of the Pyrenees of approximately 13,000 casualties against allied losses of roughly 7,000.
News of the repulse reached London on 6 August 1813 and was reported in the *London Gazette Extraordinary* of that date. The government of Lord Liverpool received the dispatches with considerable relief; there had been concern in Whitehall that a successful French counter-offensive might have strengthened Austrian diplomatic pressure for a negotiated settlement. Wellington was granted a formal vote of thanks by both Houses of Parliament on 19 August, the fourth such resolution in his name since the commencement of the Peninsular campaign.
Soult's failure was noted sharply in Paris. Napoleon, then engaged in the armistice negotiations that would briefly suspend operations in Germany, directed a series of critical memoranda to the Army of the Pyrenees headquarters in Bayonne. In these, he attributed the collapse of the offensive principally to a failure of coordination between the three corps commanders — a characterisation that Soult disputed in his own after-action report, copies of which are held at the Service Historique de la Défense at Vincennes.
The Campaigns of the Pyrenees are generally regarded by military historians as the definitive conclusion of offensive French capability on the Iberian peninsula. Following the failure of Soult's counter-offensive, Wellington was able to resume and complete the sieges of both Pamplona and San Sebastián, crossed the Bidasoa River on 7 October 1813, and carried the war into southern France. The operational methods demonstrated during the Pyrenees campaign — in particular, Wellington's rapid personal redeployment to a threatened point and his use of ridge-line terrain to neutralise French numerical superiority — were subsequently documented in the [Infantry Field Manual](/wiki/infantry-field-manual) of 1814 and contributed to the codification of [British Army Doctrine](/wiki/british-army-doctrine) during the post-war reform period.
The campaign is the subject of the seventh volume of Sir William Napier's *History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France* (1840), which remains the foundational primary analytical work on the subject. Subsequent reassessment by Jac Weller in *Wellington in the Peninsula* (1962) revised Napier's casualty figures for the First Battle of Sorauren upward by approximately 400 on the French side, based on regimental muster rolls held at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives).
The Campaigns of the Pyrenees feature in several of Bernard Cornwell's *Sharpe* series of novels, most directly in *Sharpe's Honour* (1985), in which the fictional Rifleman Richard Sharpe participates in the actions around the Maya pass. Cornwell's depiction of the terrain and tactical conditions around Roncesvalles has been cited by reviewers in the *Journal of Army Historical Research* as among the more accurate fictional treatments of Peninsular War mountain operations.
A commemorative plaque marking the site of Wellington's arrival at Sorauren on the morning of 26 July 1813 was installed by the Asociación Cultural Navarra in 1988 and is maintained by the municipal authority of the Ayuntamiento de Sorauren. The plaque inscription reproduces, in Spanish and English, a sentence from Wellington's dispatch of 28 July 1813 in which he described the ridge of Oricain as "the ground on which the fate of this army was settled."