Watercolor painting of guerrillas firing on a column of French troops during the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars
19 November 2020
In Spanish, guerilla literally means little war. Henry Neuman’s 1809 Spanish-English dictionary defined it so:
Guerrílla, s. f. 1. Skirmish, a slight engagement. 2. Game at cards between two persons, each with twenty cards.
The word also came to mean an irregular warrior who engages in a skirmish or raid, as opposed to a regular soldier who fights in pitched battles. It is this sense that English borrowed guerrilla, and it first appeared in English in the context of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign during the Napoleonic wars. Wellington wrote in a dispatch on 8 August 1809:
Beresford writes me on the 4th from Almeida, that 34,000 men had gone by Baños to Pasencia, and that none but sick remained in Castille. I have recommended to the Junta to set Romana, the Duque del Parque and the guerrillas to work towards Madrid.
And Walter Scott lionized the guerrillas of that war in his poem “The Vision of Don Roderick,” published in 1811 but likely also written in 1809:
Nor unatoned, where Freedom’s foes prevail,
Remained their savage waste. With blade and brand,
By day the Invaders ravaged hill and dale,
But, with the darkness, the Guerilla band
Came like night’s tempest, and avenged the land,
And claimed for blood the retribution due,
Probed the hard heart, and lopp’d the murderous hand;
And Dawn, when o’er the scene her beams she threw,
Midst ruins they had made the spoilers’ corpses knew.
This sense of an irregular soldier has been the primary sense in English ever since.
But like many words, it acquired a figurative sense over time, and it has been used attributively to refer anything that is non-standard or that seeks to accomplish its goals through irregular means.
Guerrilla advertising appeared as early as the late nineteenth century. From the medical journal Polyclinic of November 1888:
Do the committee intend to recognize the so-called pure pepsins, crystal pepsins, scale pepsins, etc., etc., which, by a system of “guerrilla” advertising known as the “pepsin war,” have been foisted upon the deceived medical profession?
But this instance was something of an outlier. This figurative sense of guerrilla didn’t really catch on until the second half of the twentieth century, a result of the various “wars of liberation” fought by irregular forces in that period.
The phrase guerrilla theater appeared in and as the title of an article in the Tulane Drama Review in the summer of 1966. The article’s author, R.G. Davis, credited Peter Berg of the San Francisco Mime Troup with the term’s coinage. Davis and Berg envisioned guerrilla theater as committed to radical social change. Davis wrote:
Social theatre is a risky business, both aesthetically and politically: assuming that the difficulties of style and content have been solved, the stage success can be closed because of "fire violations," obscenity, or even parking on the grass. What do you do then? You roll with the punches, play all fields, learn the law, join the ACLU, become equipped to pack up and move quickly when you're outnumbered. Never engage the enemy head on. Choose your fighting ground; don't be forced into battle over the wrong issues. Guerrilla theatre travels light and makes friends of the populace.
But it wouldn’t be long before corporate America appropriated the guerrilla label. An advertisement in the Minneapolis Tribune of 22 April 1979 touted a seminar in which, among other things, paying attendees could learn:
The principles of guerrilla marketing warfare.
Guerrilla marketing uses surprise and low-cost, unconventional tactics, like flash mobs, to generate publicity. It uses revolutionary tactics without revolutionary ideology, the tools of the communists to keep the capitalists in power.
Sources:
Advanced Management Research. “On Monday, June 11th War Comes to Minneapolis” (advertisement). Minneapolis Tribune, 22 April 1979, 7D. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Beringer, George M. “The National Formulary.” The Polyclinic, 6.5, November 1888, 134. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Davis, R. G., “Guerrilla Theatre.” The Tulane Drama Review, 10.4, Summer 1966, 131–132. JSTOR.
Neuman, Henry. A New Dictionary of the Spanish and English Languages, vol 1 of 2. London: J. Johnson, et al. 1809. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, draft editions, June 2015, s.v. guerrilla | guerilla, n.
Scott, Walter. “The Vision of Don Roderick.” The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1809, vol 2, part 2. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne for John Ballantyne, 1811, 622. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wellesley, Arthur. “Dispatch to Viscount Castlereagh, 8 August 1809.” The Dispatches of Field Marshall The Duke of Wellington, vol. 5 of 12. London: John Murray, 1838, 9. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: "As Guerrilhas na Guerra Peninsular" (Guerrilla Warfare During the Peninsular War), Roque Gameiro, 1907.