The news of Bailén reverberated around Europe; it was France’s worst defeat on land since 1793. Napoleon was of course completely livid. He court-martialled Dupont, imprisoned him in the Fort de Joux for two years and stripped him of his peerage (he had been a count of the empire), later saying, ‘Out of all the generals who served in Spain, we ought to have selected a certain number and sent them to the scaffold.
