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The eighty prints of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War present a panorama of virtually unrelieved horror and barbarism. French and Spaniards, men and women, soldiers and civilians: all are perpetrators and victims of savage violence. There is very little that is redeeming here. One exception is print 7 (Fig. 1). A single woman in a white dress, bodies at her feet, stands beside a cannon, which she is about to fire. Goya's lapidary caption, "Qué valor!" (What bravery!), provides a very rare positive comment.
The woman in the print has her back to us, but she is far from anonymous. Unlike the other scenes Goya portrays, either of generic violence or actual events involving nameless-and faceless-people, the protagonist of print 7 has a name, and one that has a distinguished place among Spain's pantheon of national heroes. She is Agustina de Aragón.
The topic of hero cults in modern Europe has attracted considerable attention lately: special issues of European History Quarterly in October 2007 and July 2009 are but two indications.1 Within this literature, the role of gender has been repeatedly highlighted. Historians have shown that, in the European context, heroes have been "overwhelmingly male" and that "most national hero cults in modern Europe emphasized male virility and strength while the unheroic 'other' against whom the narrative was principally directed was often feminized."2 They have also pointed out that "war, along with revolution[,] unsettled gender norms in ways that could not be undone" and produced the apparently paradoxical trends of the establishment of complementary and separate spheres of male and female activity, alongside the presence of women engaged in a range of public activities during the war."3
The literature on heroes is now going beyond studies of individual nations to look at the broader European context. As Robert Gerwarth puts it in his introduction to the recent special issue of European Historical Quarterly devoted to hero cults and the nation, one of the editors' objectives was to begin to develop "a more integrated, Europeanized perspective on the politics of the past."4 This article proposes to carry this project one step further by considering one European woman warrior and national hero, Agustina de Aragón, in a comparative frame that extends beyond Europe. The article consists of...