Napoleon was forced

Napoleon was forced to intervene personally, defeating several Spanish armies and forcing a British army to retreat. However, further military act

ion by Spanish armies, guerrillas and Wellington’s British-Portuguese forces, combined with Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia, led to the ousting of the French imperial armies from Spain in 1814, and the return of King Ferdinand VII.[85]

During the war, in 1810, a revolutionary body, the Cortes of Cádiz, was assembled to co-ordinate the effort against the Bonapartist regime and to prepare a constitution.[86] It met as one body, and its members represented the entire Spanish empire.[87] In 1812,

a constitution for universal representation under a constitutional monarchy was declared, but after the fall of the Bonapartist regime, Ferdinand VII dismissed the Cortes Generales and was determined to rule as an absolute monarch. These events foreshadowed the conflict between conservatives and liberals in the 19th and early 20th centuries.