In 1795, José de Urrutia, the captain general of Catalonia gave him the command of 20,000 migueletes which, together with volunteers raised in Valencia by the Marquis of La Romana, expulsed the French forces from Cerdanya, in the Catalan Pyrenees.

[1] On 30 June 1808, soon after the outbreak of the war, his second-in-command, the Marquis del Palacio, who had taken up the post of governor of Minorca earlier that month,[2] joined the open mutiny of the Aragonese and Catalan battalions of the corps of 10,000 men stationed in the Balearic Islands, garrisoned at Majorca and Minorca, demanding to be transferred to Barcelona to take up arms against the French, finally set sail from Port Mahon to mainland Spain.

[3] Vives had been reluctant to leave Port Mahon without troops due to his "deeply rooted idea"[3] that the English would once again take over Minorca, as they had done for the greater part of the 18th century.

While the Aragonese regiment landed near Tortosa and marched for Saragossa, the bulk of the expeditionary force, nearly 5,000 strong, was put ashore in Catalonia between 19 and 23 July.

He failed to take vigorous action at Barcelona and was defeated by a second column of French troops under Laurent Gouvion Saint-Cyr at the battles of Cardadeu and Molins de Rey in December.