by
Winterhalter, 1864. This portrait hangs in
Chapultepec Castle. Post-independence Mexico was briefly a monarchy, lasting just over a year, when the emperor abdicated and went into exile, and a federated republic was established in 1824. The idea of monarchy persisted and in 1861, Mexican conservatives and emperor Napoleon III of France brokered a deal to create a new monarchy in Mexico, with Archduke Maximilian agreeing to become emperor, with the military and financial backing of France. The French army ousted Mexican President Benito Juárez from the capital and Maximilian and his wife Carlota arrived in Mexico in 1864. The regime lasted so long as French troops and money supported it but rapidly fell once Napoleon III withdrew that aid.
Mexican monarchism After a decade of
warfare (1810–21),
New Spain gained its independence as
Mexico under the leadership of the royalist military commander turned insurgent
Agustín de Iturbide, who united insurgents and Spaniards under the
Plan of Iguala. The Plan promised independence for Mexico as a monarchy (
First Mexican Empire), and also invited a member of Spanish royalty to assume the newly established Mexican throne. After the offer was refused by the Spanish royals, Congress searched for an emperor within the newly independent country. After an armed demonstration by Iturbide's regiment of the
Army of the Three Guarantees, the Mexican Congress elected the Mexican-born military officer and leader of independence as the first Mexican emperor. Although during the independence struggle, Mexicans considered the idea of republicanism, "monarchy was the default position." Iturbide's rule as emperor lasted less than two years, but the height of his power lasted only six months. in his attempts to govern, Iturbide struggled to find funds to pay the army and the rest of the government, and closed congress, accusing representatives of obstructionism and idleness, eventually leading to a military uprising against Iturbide and his subsequent abdication. The idea of a monarchy had been discredited for a time, but the idea did not disappear, as many of the disorders associated with the First Empire continued well into the Republican era. French observers began expressing interest in the idea of a Mexican monarchy as early as 1830.
Lorenzo de Zavala claimed that in that year, he was approached by a foreign agent hoping to recruit him in a plan to place an
Orléans monarch upon a Mexican throne. In 1840
José María Gutiérrez Estrada wrote a monarchist essay endorsing the idea of a legitimate European monarch being invited to govern Mexico. The pamphlet was addressed to the conservative president
Bustamante, who rejected the idea. French diplomats tended to sympathize with the Conservatives in Mexico,
Victor de Broglie opining that monarchy was a form of government more suited to Mexico at the time and
François Guizot giving a positive review of Estrada's pamphlet. A monarchist faction in 1846 promoted the idea of establishing a foreign prince at the head of the Mexican government, and president
Paredes was viewed as being sympathetic to monarchism, but the project was not pursued due to the more pressing matter of the
American invasion of Mexico. The candidate being proposed at the time was the Spanish prince,
Don Enrique. The last official Mexican effort to explore the possibility of establishing a monarchy occurred under the presidency of
Santa Anna in the early 1850s, when conservative minister
Lucas Alamán directed monarchist diplomats
José María Gutiérrez de Estrada and
Jose Manuel Hidalgo to seek a European candidate for the Mexican throne. With the overthrow of Santa Anna's government in 1855, these efforts lost their official support and yet Estrada and Hidalgo continued their efforts independently.
French invasion and establishment of monarchy The international situation shifted making a French invasion and establishment of a monarchy in Mexico a real possibility. Conservative Mexican politicians Estrada and Hidalgo managed to get the attention of
Emperor Napoleon III of the French, who came to support the idea of reviving the Mexican monarchy and re-establishing a French imperial presence in the Americas. During this time the
Second French Empire was establishing a going through a period of colonial expansion
Napoleon III's conquest of Algeria was unpopular and tied with the establishment of an Empire in Mexico. Prior to 1861 any interference in the affairs of Mexico by European powers would have been viewed in the U.S. as a challenge to the
Monroe Doctrine. In 1861 however, the U.S. was embroiled in its own conflict, the
American Civil War, which made the U.S. government powerless to intervene directly, but it never condoned the French invasion or the regime it established. In July, Mexican President
Benito Juárez declared a two-year moratorium on repayment of Mexican debt to France and other nations, much of it loans contracted by the defeated rival conservative government. Napoleon finally had a pretext for armed intervention. Encouraged by his Spanish-born wife, Empress Eugenie, who saw herself as the champion of the Catholic Church in Mexico, Napoleon III took advantage of the situation. Napoleon III saw the opportunity to make France the great modernizing influence in the Western Hemisphere, as well as enabling the country to capture the
South American markets. To give him further encouragement, his half-brother, the
duc de Morny, was the largest holder of Mexican bonds on which President Juárez had suspended payment. French troops landed in December 1861 and began military operations in April 1862. They were eventually joined by conservative Mexican generals who had never been entirely defeated in the
War of Reform.
Charles de Lorencez's small expeditionary force was repulsed at the
Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862, delaying the French push to capture the capital. Reinforcements were sent and placed under the command of
Élie Forey. The capital was not taken until a year later in June 1863 and the French now sought to establish a Mexican regime under its influence. Forey appointed a committee of thirty-five Mexicans, the
Junta Superior, who then elected three Mexican citizens to serve as the government's executive:
Juan Nepomuceno Almonte (the natural son of independence leader
José María Morelos),
José Mariano Salas, and
Pelagio Antonio de Labastida. In turn this triumvirate then selected 215 Mexican citizens to form together with the
Junta Superior, an
Assembly of Notables. The Assembly met in July 1863 and resolved to invite Archduke Maximilian to be Emperor of Mexico. The title of the executive triumvirate was formally changed to the Regency of the Mexican Empire. An official delegation left Mexico and arrived in Europe in October. In Europe, Maximilian was continuing negotiations with Napoleon III. He requested a plebiscite to ratify the establishment of the Empire by the Assembly of Notables. The
referendum was granted, and the result was affirmative; critics viewed it as illegitimate and suspect due to being conducted by the occupying French authorities. Maximilian also rebuffed French efforts to outright annex the state of
Sonora, an act which would later be used in his trial to defend against the Republican government's accusation that Maximilian had been a French puppet. Maximilian formally accepted the crown on 10 April 1864 and set sail for Mexico. He arrived in
Veracruz on 28 May and reached the capital on 12 June. Although French troops controlled the center of the country, the port of Veracruz, the capital Mexico City, and other major cities as north as Monterrey and as south as Oaxaca, President Juárez remained in the national territory, moving north toward the border. In the countryside, republican guerrillas waged warfare against the French troops and their Mexican army allies.
Maximilian's reign According to
Edward Shawcross, The Mexican Expedition faced backlash from the French government due to its costs, so they decided to lower expenses by installing a man named
Archduke Maximilian, the brother of the Austrian
Emperor Franz Josef, as Emperor of Mexico. When he took the throne, he agreed to a treaty known as the Miramar Convention with France, which stated that Mexico's government would pay for the costs of the expedition and support the presence of French troops. Maximilian and Carlota were crowned at the
Cathedral of Mexico City. On his arrival in the summer of 1864 Maximilian declared a political amnesty for all liberals who wished to join the Empire, and his conciliation efforts eventually won over some moderate liberals such as
José Fernando Ramírez,
José María Lacunza,
Manuel Orozco y Berra, and
Santiago Vidaurri. His first priorities included reforming his ministries and reforming the Imperial Mexican Army, the latter of which was impeded upon by
Bazaine in an effort to consolidate French control of the nation. Maximilian alienated conservative supporters who had brought him to the throne. In December the pope's representative,
Papal Nuncio Francesco Meglia, arrived in order to arrange a concordat with the Empire to revise the
Reform laws previously passed by the liberal Mexican government. Liberal laws and the
Constitution of 1857 nationalized Catholic Church property. Although a Catholic, politically Maximilian was a liberal. The Papal Nuncio's demands that the emperor restore the power and privileges of the Catholic Church resulted in Maximilian confirming the liberal reform laws regarding freedom of religion and the nationalization of Church property. In taking this action, the emperor alienated the Catholic hierarchy and many Mexican conservatives, who had backed Maximilian becoming emperor. The confrontation over the role of the Church produced an atmosphere of crisis. In Mexico City, the disorder was considerable, and Maximilian feared a revolt by Mexican army generals on whom he had relied. He sent Generals
Miguel Miramón and
Leonardo Márquez out of the country and disbanded the small Mexican army that had supported the empire. That was because those disagreements with the Catholic Church caused conservatives like
Remigio Tovar to conspire against the empire, or that Archbishop
Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos said these judges on Maximilian's supporters: Maximilian took a number of solo state trips through the nation while Empress
Carlota reigned as regent. He went to
Querétaro,
Guanajuato, and
Michoacán, giving public audiences and visiting officials, even celebrating Mexican independence by commemorating the
Cry of Dolores in the actual town where it took place.
Deteriorating imperial military situation French troops had been able to take considerable Mexican territory from republican forces while the U.S. was embroiled in its
civil war, but in April 1865, Union forces defeated the secessionist
Confederate States of America after four years of bloody combat. The U.S. government was reluctant to enter a direct conflict with France to enforce the Monroe Doctrine prohibiting European powers in the Americas, but official U.S. government sympathy remained with Mexican president
Benito Juárez. The U.S. government had refused to recognize the Empire and also ignored Maximilian's correspondence. In December 1865, a $30 million private American loan was approved for Juárez, indicating a confidence that he would return to power, and American volunteers joined the Mexican republican troops. An unofficial American raid occurred near Brownsville, and Juárez's minister to the United States,
Matías Romero, proposed that
General Grant or
General Sherman intervene in Mexico to help the republican cause. The United States refrained from direct military intervention, but it put diplomatic pressure on France to leave Mexico. A concentration of French troops in the northern republican strongholds of Mexico led to a surge of republican guerrilla activity in the south. While French troops controlled major cities, guerrillas continued to be a major military threat in the countryside, which affected Imperial military planning. Troops had to be concentrated and operate in areas where guerrillas could not easily cut them off and eliminate them. In an effort to combat the increasing violence and in a belief that Juárez was outside of the national territory, Maximilian in October signed an order at the urging of the French military commander Bazaine, the so-called "Black Decree". It mandated the court martial and execution of anyone found either aiding or participating with the guerrillas against the Imperial government. Although the harsh measure was not unprecedented in Mexican history, resembling an 1862 measure by Juárez, it proved to be widely reviled, and contributed to the growing unpopularity of the Empire. In January 1866, seeing the war as unwinnable, Napoleon III declared to the French Chambers that he intended to withdraw the French military from Mexico. At this point, the U.S. government was no longer preoccupied militarily with winning the Civil War and could enforce the Monroe Doctrine against foreign intervention in the hemisphere. Maximilian's request to France for more aid or at least a delay in troop withdrawals was defused nominally because a
possible war against Prussia was coming, so despite the
sunk costs of the French occupation, abandoning the enterprise was France's strategic decision. Empress Carlota arrived in Europe in an attempt to plead for the Empire's cause, but she was unable to gain France's support.
Conservative and traditionalist turn in the government However, by July 1866, there was an increasingly
conservative and
reactionary turn in the government to avoid the military crisis, influenced by
Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos and
Clemente de Jesús Munguía letters to Maximilian with harsh criticism to his policy influenced by
Bonapartism, declaring that the establishment of the empire had been due more to the desire of the population to see the liberal laws repealed than to the existence of a true monarchical tradition in the country. This was due to the measures suggested and taken by the political advisors that Emperor Maximilian had, while they noted that the indigenous, and in general the common Mexican, clung to
traditionalist New Spanish ways of life, being stubborn in their customs as a
traditional society and communitarians form of life that were alien to the
Modernization project of the liberal and
Individualist-
egalitarian model, coming mostly from the
Europeanizing Criollo elites, which the indigenous people did not seem willing to follow and showing indifferent or even opposed attitudes to the notions of
Equality before the law, while they wanted their inherited differences restored, that was, to have again the legal recognition of their distinction as "Indian" in the
fueros of the
Indian political society during the
Spanish imperial era (in fact, quite a few appeals were made in the government according to the
Siete Partidas of
Alfonso X of Castile until the
Novísima Recopilación), especially in terms of communal property and its legal existence as an indigenous community, to subsist and exist as such in contrast to the criollo or the mestizos, and not just a generic recognition as a Mexican/citizen-owner (so in the complaints from several indigenous peoples were referred to
Reales Cedulas). and in turn finally returning the church properties. However, it was very late to regain the support from the conservative and traditionalist Mexicans. Thus, according to
Jean Meyer, Maximilian acted, more than as a liberal, as an
enlightened Despot (closer to
Bourbon Reformism), who would try to take advantage of the elements of
Tradition and
Modernity, taking extreme measures that contradicted
classical and
economic Liberalism, drawing on the "old" Indian legislation, or the "modern" proposal of
socialism, in addition to the ideas of
Cameralism (very popular in the Germanic states) that gave importance to small peasant property compared to the lordly
latifundia, expressed in the
Urbarium Code of 1767 (which established the plots of the Hungarian peasants and prohibited their lord from seizing them). (which granted them a protective board on 10 April 1865, to favor the dispossessed classes of the empire) in said social transition. He intended to appeal to the nation in order to hold a national assembly which would then decide what form of government the Mexican nation was to take. Such a measure however would require a ceasefire from Juárez. The president of the republic would never consider an offer from the foreigner placed on the throne by Juárez's Mexican political enemies with the aid of a foreign power. Republican army troops on the ground were fighting to defeat those supporting the emperor. After the hopeless national assembly project fell through, Maximilian focused on military operations. In February 1867, the last of the occupying French troops departed for France. Maximilian headed for the city of
Querétaro, north of the capital, to join the bulk of his Mexican troops, numbering about 10,000 men. Republican generals
Escobedo and
Corona converged on Querétaro with 40,000 men. The city held out until being betrayed by an imperial officer who opened the gates to the liberals on 15 May 1867. Maximilian was captured and placed on trial with his leading generals
Mejía and
Miramón. All three were tried, sentenced to death and executed on 19 June 1867 by the republican army. ==Government==