HABSBURGS ON THE RIO GRANDE: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire, by Raymond Jonas
In October 1863, a Mexican delegation arrived in Trieste, a polyglot city in southern Europe on the borderlands of the Hapsburg Empire. In a turreted castle on the Adriatic coast, the delegates — many of them Europhile bankers and industrialists — offered the crown of Mexico to Maximilian, a Hapsburg prince, and his wife, Charlotte, daughter of the king of Belgium.
Since gaining independence in 1821, Mexico had squandered the “splendid legacy” of European rule, the delegates explained, and the country now led a “sad existence” as a shaky, vulnerable republic. Only the resurrection of monarchy could guarantee stability and prosperity. The timing was crucial. Mexico’s republican neighbor, the United States, was too preoccupied by a civil war to block European intervention.
Maximilian thought of himself as a progressive monarch; he would accept the invitation only if it represented the true will of the Mexican people. When the delegates returned the following April, they brought enthusiastic testimonials from towns and villages across Mexico. Satisfied, flattered and ambitious, Maximilian and Charlotte set sail for North America as the emperor and empress of Mexico.
Two years later, a shattered Charlotte was back in Europe, eating nothing but fruit she peeled and nuts she shelled herself for fear of poisoning. Maximilian would soon be dead, executed by Mexico’s republican forces on a rocky hillside outside Querétaro.
The rise and fall of the Second Mexican Empire is the subject of “Habsburgs on the Rio Grande,” by the historian Raymond Jonas. Seen from the American perspective, Maximilian’s fleeting rule is all too easily understood as a European fantasy that failed to grasp history’s ineluctable path from monarchy to democracy. Jonas instead argues for its global significance, placing it at the center of a transcontinental power struggle between an expansionist United States and faltering European supremacy.
When Mexico first cast off Spanish rule, the country established its own independent monarchy — the First Mexican Empire — and then, in 1824, a republic. Two decades of turbulent constitutional change and civil strife followed. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas from Mexico. It then launched a war of aggression that would strip Mexico of half of its territory. U.S. ambitions appeared unlimited, its appetite for territory insatiable, and many Mexicans feared their young republic would succumb entirely.
They were not alone in their alarm. Across the Atlantic, as Mexico ceded California to end its war with the United States, European autocrats were busy stamping out liberal revolutions, many of which had drawn up constitutions inspired by the American one.
But it wasn’t just the existence of a stubbornly persistent democracy that made the United States a threat: European rulers watched aghast as the former English colony assumed colossal new proportions, stretching from coast to coast and dwarfing their own states in size. “In the space of two generations,” Jonas writes, “the American republic had transformed itself from a postcolonial backwater — distant and easily ignored — into an insolent continental powerhouse and an existential threat to Europe and European hegemony.”
They needed a strategy of containment. When the Civil War erupted, absorbing American energy and attention, European rulers, led by the French autocrat Napoleon III, seized the opportunity to check the rising hegemon. They joined forces with conservatives and traditionalists chafing at republican rule in Mexico to launch a wildly ambitious plan to restore monarchy and defend Mexico against the “Yankee imperialism” of the “Robber Republic” to the north.
On the pretext of collecting debt and protecting “persons and property,” British, Spanish and French forces formed a coalition of the willing and invaded Mexico in 1861. Cracks emerged quickly in this motley alliance. Facing military defeats, yellow fever and skeptical opinion at home, Britain and Spain soon fell away, leaving Napoleon III to wage his increasingly bloody “war of liberation” alone.
Napoleon claimed that he was not seeking a new French colony. He even paid lip service to the idea that the Mexican people should determine the type of regime to come — the main thing was that it be friendly to France and strong enough to resist U.S. power.
Yet he also conveniently subscribed to the unsupported view that Mexicans craved a monarch, and was all too happy when Mexican conservatives selected a Hapsburg prince to rule the new government his war had made possible. With Maximilian’s arrival, Napoleon’s project of regime change appeared complete.
Jonas vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet. It took the “largest transoceanic deployment of its time” — more than 30,000 soldiers were shipped from Europe and North Africa in the space of nine months — and even then the bitter fighting progressed street by street, house by house. Republican guerrilla resistance forces never surrendered.
The irony of an imperial intervention to defend against empire is not lost on Jonas, but, with a historian’s open-ended curiosity, he also wants to understand how the ideology of “liberatory” empire worked. If many invoked it opportunistically, others clearly did so with complete sincerity — including Maximilian, who saw his monarchy as a bulwark of Mexican independence against U.S. encroachment.
Maximilian learned Spanish before departing Europe and took his role seriously, becoming a champion of the majority Indigenous population and refusing to undo the popular nationalization of church property enacted by his republican predecessors, to the fateful dismay of the conservatives who propped up his rule.
He also saw American slavery as “hideous,” but, desperate for allies, he courted Confederate settlers, presenting Mexico as a refuge following their defeat in the American Civil War and drafting a peonage law that allowed them to bring their enslaved laborers to Mexico even though slavery had been abolished there following independence.
Jonas is astute and judicious in navigating the kaleidoscope of contradictory political ideologies that came together in the Second Mexican Empire, before all too quickly coming apart again. Captured by the republican forces of Benito Juárez as French troops withdrew, 34-year-old Maximilian was marched before a firing squad in June 1867. “I am going to die for a just cause, the independence and liberty of Mexico. May my blood end the misfortunes of my new country! Viva Mexico!” he declared, before parting his long blond beard over his shoulders to give the executioners a straight shot at his chest.
Maximilian was far from the last imperial leader to call himself a liberator. The 20th century belonged to two great anti-imperial empires — the United States and the Soviet Union — both of whom espoused self-determination even as they intervened far beyond their borders. The war on terror, with its naked pursuit of regime change abroad, also casts a long shadow over Jonas’s narration. Anti-imperialism, moreover, has remained a popular catch cry, and not just on the left, as Viktor Orban, in Hungary, and Narendra Modi, in India, remind us today.
In the end, Maximilian’s story captures a political world in dramatic transition, as traditional institutions — monarchy chief among them — reckoned with doctrines of popular sovereignty. For all his enlightened modernity, Maximilian still believed in the magical shield of his blue blood, a magic that was fitfully losing its force. Imprisoned and awaiting trial in Querétaro, he reportedly remarked to his general, “Don’t think that an Austrian archduke can be shot so easily.”
HABSBURGS ON THE RIO GRANDE: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire | By Raymond Jonas | Harvard University Press | 369 pp. | $35
