Book Review: Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire
Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire. By Raymond Jonas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 369 pp. $35.00.
Reviewed by Max Longley
In 1864, the scheming emperor of France, Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon, nephew of the original Napoleon) installed Maximilian, brother of the Austrian emperor, as emperor of Mexico. French troops had been occupying Mexico (or parts of it) for several years, and Emperor Napoleon wanted the country to have an imperial government of its own. Within three years, the French had withdrawn, Mexicans had executed Maximilian, and his wife Charlotte had gone mad, even before her husband’s death.
To people in the United States, Mexico’s imperial interlude is viewed from the standpoint of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the U.S. government tried to keep European powers from meddling in Latin America. With resources diverted by the Civil War, the U.S. administration at first could only wag its finger at the French for intervening in Mexico. For his part, Napoleon sympathized with the Confederacy—whose existence could protect French troops in Mexico from Union troops to the North—and was influenced by French intellectuals who wanted a French-friendly Mexico to be a buffer of Latin civilization versus Anglo-Saxon (i.e., U.S.) encroachments. After the war, victorious Union generals strengthened the Mexican anti-imperialist forces with donations of arms. Former Confederates who tried to settle in Maximilian’s Mexico soon found that they had served two lost causes, as the American-armed anti-imperialist troops were victorious.
To many Mexicans, the empire was a phase of a war between Mexico and France, with the patriotic Republican forces led by President Benito Juarez against French troops and their puppet “rulers.” The morale-boosting May 5, 1862, Mexican victory of Puebla (Cinco de Mayo)—and Juaraz’s generals’ more durable victories some years later, ended with the defeat of the empire and the re-establishment of a republic.
In contrast, in his Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire, Raymond Jonas puts the foreign idealists and adventurers who came to Mexico only to see their beautiful visions of nation-building promptly destroyed and deformed into ugly reality at the center of his narrative. To be sure, Jonas points to the existence of Mexican imperialists, making the episode a Mexican civil war as well as a struggle with foreigners. Yet the misguided Europeans with their grandiose plans for Mexico get Jonas’s main attention. Thus, while Jonas’s account is Eurocentric, it is not pro-European.
Jonas contributes to the study of this episode thanks in part to his study of the European volunteers who came to Mexico to fight for Maximilian and Charlotte. The foreign volunteers—mainly from Maximillian’s native Austria and Charlotte’s native Belgium—left records in the European newspapers which covered their optimistic volunteering, and in the private letters and journals where they wrote about the bad conditions of their service and the deteriorating situation; in the end many of the surviving, unpaid volunteers came ingloriously home. Jonas also mines the French sources to see how realism dawned on the occupiers about the resistance they were facing.
The most deluded of the misguided foreign idealists was the emperor. From the time Maximilian contemplated his Mexican assignment in his Austrian palace, to the moment he stood in front of a Mexican firing squad shouting “Viva México,” he entertained romantic fantasies about his imperial mission. As a descendant of Charles V, the 16th-century emperor whose vast domains included Mexico, Maximilian saw himself as the benevolent ruler the Mexicans needed. He would protect Mexicans from foreign aggression—meaning aggression from the United States, not the French aggression which put Maximilian on the throne. He would protect the indigenous population of Mexico against the United States and against would-be oppressors among the non-indigenous (Juarez, Maximilian’s archenemy, was indigenous, which complicated Maximilian’s fantasy). Maximilian even rejoiced at the withdrawal of the French in 1866, thinking it gave him more room for independent action. He was defeated and shot soon afterwards. Idealistic to the end, Maximilian perished praying that his death could contribute to the healing of Mexico’s divisions.
The reality behind all these dreams was bitter warfare, with vicious guerilla attacks and reprisals against civilians. Indeed, Mexicans shot Maximilian after his conviction in a Republican military tribunal of offenses including what we would call war crimes. His prosecutor successfully argued that Maximilian should not get mercy as Jefferson Davis did after the recent civil war up north, but should be executed like Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville.
Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande is not strictly a full history of Mexico during the imperial era, but a history of the people who took part in the European intervention (with some slight attention given to the Mexican supporters of the intervention). The most eye-opening part of the book is the contrast between the Europeans’ grandiose delusions of a grateful, liberated Mexican public welcoming their deliverers’ plans for their well-being, and the bloodstained reality and the ignominious fates of the would-be deliverers.
