Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico

On the 150th anniversary of the installation of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian von Habsburg as emperor of Mexico , McAllen (I Would Rather Sleep in Texas) offers an authoritative, detailed, and engrossing account of the rise and fall of Mexico’s Second Empire. New republican president Benito Juárez had defeated conservative factions in Mexico’s bloody War of Reform. However, French Emperor Napoleon III, seeking to enrich his country while curtailing the regional influence of a U.S. distracted by Civil War, invaded Mexico in 1861 under “the pretext of claiming unpaid bond debt.” In the wake of a decisive French victory at the Second Battle of Puebla in 1863, Juárez abandoned Mexico City for the northern desert. Mexico’s Assembly of Notables voted to reconstruct the Mexican government as an empire, and the crown was offered to Maximilian. Despite their charm and education, the new emperor and his wife Carlota became “victims of Napoleonic greed, their own desires, and Mexican pride,” alienating their base by upholding Juárez’s nationalization reforms. By early1866, after the U.S. threatened to enact trade sanctions against its neighbor to the south and also hinted at a possible alliance with Prussia, a country at odds with French regime, Napoleon withdrew his troops and funding; after the republicans vanquished the imperialists in battle, Maximilian was executed, while Carlota had already returned to Europe. McAllen ably demonstrates how the Second Empire’s collapse was one of the most spectacular personal tragedies and political failures of the 19th century. Illus. (Feb.)