Edward Shawcross, The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World (New York: Basic Books). Vii+324 pp., $30.00.

LATIN AMERICA has had two empires in its post-colonial history. One was the Brazilian Empire, which came into being in September 1822 as a representative parliamentary constitutional monarchy under Dom Pedro I. The empire continued under his son, Dom Pedro II, who ruled for fifty-eight years, but was overthrown by a military coup that led to the creation of a republic. During his reign, however, the country enjoyed political stability, economic growth, freedom of speech, and respect for the civil rights of its subjects, though it continued to maintain the institution of slavery.

The other Latin American empire initially lasted but two years and was reestablished three decades later, only to last just slightly longer. The Second Empire was sustained by foreign invaders two years prior to its establishment, and was marked by political instability, a ferociously brutal civil war, and economic hardship. The empire was Mexico, the foreign invaders were the French, and the emperor whom they installed was a Habsburg archduke named Maximilian. Long forgotten, especially in Mexico but also in the United States, the tale of Maximilian’s rise to the throne and sudden fall is not only fascinating but offers some worrisome lessons for contemporary American policymakers.

Edward Shawcross brings to life the tragicomic history of Maximilian’s short-lived reign in a fast-paced, highly readable volume entitled The Last Emperor of Mexico. The book draws heavily upon archival material in three languages—English, French, and German—as well as on personal memoirs in those languages and in Spanish. It is unlikely to be surpassed.

SHAWCROSS BEGINS his story fifteen years before the first European soldiers set foot on Mexican soil in 1862. Mexico had just emerged from the wreckage of its disastrous 1846–47 war with the United States, which saw American troops marching through its capital and had cost it territories that are now California, Nevada, and Utah; most of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado; along with parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. The war had been followed by a period of instability deriving from tensions between liberals, who sought to create an enlightened secular state, and conservatives, actually reactionaries, who not only wanted to maintain the absolute primacy of the Catholic Church but also something akin to the Spanish monarchy. Spain had been expelled in 1821 when a rebel leader named Agustín de Iturbide had set himself up as emperor. He only ruled for two years before ultimately being executed for treason.

In 1855, the liberals came to power and sought to disestablish the Catholic Church, seize its property, and enshrine those actions in a constitution that it promulgated two years later. The reactionaries responded by overthrowing the government. The result was a three-year civil war, which in some respects was a class conflict. Its opposing leaders were, on the one hand, Miguel Miramon, the conservative wealthy descendant of the colonizing Spanish, and on the other, Benito Juárez, the liberal head of the Mexican Supreme Court, an indigenous Zapotec who rose from poverty to become a lawyer before evolving into a politician. 

Though Juárez emerged as the winner and the country’s president, his government was saddled with a sizeable debt to both Britain and France. The British simply wanted their debts repaid, but the French emperor, Napoleon III, saw an opportunity to create a European counterweight—meaning, as it still does to many Frenchmen today, a French counterweight—to the increasingly powerful American republic. Moreover, Napoleon subscribed to what came to be called “pan-Latinism,” which tied Catholic Latin France to its American counterparts, and, indeed, was the ideology that prompted the designation of the lands to America’s south as “Latin America.”

Mexican conservatives, chafing under liberal rule, had even more reason to share Napoleon’s unease about American power. Far more explicitly than the French leader, who actually supported freedom of religion, speech, and the press, Mexican conservatives saw American Protestantism and liberal values as a fundamental threat to their nation’s security. The Mexican Catholic Church was even more reactionary than the politicians—it had the backing of the pope, Pius IX, who refused to accept the legitimacy of any religion other than Christianity nor any church other than Catholicism.

The challenge for the conservatives was to convince Napoleon to intervene in Mexican affairs and place a European royal on a re-established Mexican throne. Their lobbying foreshadowed the efforts of Ahmed Chalabi in the late 1990s and early 2000s, whose blandishments convinced neoconservatives to topple Saddam Hussein. And like the neocons, Napoleon did not need much convincing. Not only did he hope to bring about a check to American power, but like the British, he also wanted to have Mexico repay the funds it owed France. What he did need, however, was a suitable royal to install on the Mexican throne.

ENTER MAXIMILIAN. The young archduke was not Napoleon’s first choice, but his influential wife, the Empress Eugenie, favored him, as did key Mexican émigrés—the most notable among them being José Manuel Hidalgo, the Chalabi of his day. Maximilian was far more popular than his older brother, the emperor Franz-Joseph, who after some hesitation decided that it was best to have him as far away from Austria as was reasonably possible. Maximilian himself hesitated before agreeing to take on the throne of a land he had never visited and knew little about. It would not be the last time he would be plagued by indecision. Indeed, he lived in something of a dreamworld, building a palace in Italy he named Miramar to escape the stifling atmosphere of Vienna and favoring gardening over politics.

For his part, Napoleon concluded that the time to intervene in Mexico was especially propitious, as the United States was enmeshed in a civil war and would therefore be unlikely to intervene. Moreover, having strong sympathies for a Confederacy that in the war’s early days had achieved a number of battlefield victories, he correctly intuited that the war would last several years. Napoleon recognized, however, that he needed to pave the way for Maximilian’s entry into the country. To that end, in November 1861 he dispatched an initial force of 3,000 soldiers, accompanied by 6,000 Spanish and 800 British troops. The Spaniards supported the Habsburg royal, while Britain merely sought to have its debts repaid. That was not enough for Maximilian though, who insisted that any intervention that set him on the throne should benefit from active British support, not merely debt collection.

The dispatch of a multinational force notwithstanding, Maximilian hesitated to commit himself to travel to Mexico. He resisted both the blandishments of the Mexican émigrés who offered him the crown and the insistence of his young wife Carlota, daughter of Belgium’s King Leopold I and a cousin of Queen Victoria, that he accede to the émigrés’ wishes. He feared that without British support the United States would eventually intervene to dethrone him. He also wanted to be sure that the Mexican people, about whom he knew virtually nothing, and who knew even less about him, seriously wanted him to rule over them.

In the meantime, while trying to convince Maximilian to commit, Napoleon concluded that his initial expeditionary force was too small. Accordingly, in January 1862, he dispatched an additional 4,500 troops to Mexico. Even this larger force was insufficient to dominate the Juarista fighters, however; the French forces suffered a defeat at the hands of the liberals at Puebla, leading Napoleon to throw up his hands and commit 25,000 more troops to the conflict. By June 1863, the French, in league with the Mexican conservatives, created a thirty-five-man governing body called the Junta Superior del Gobierno (loosely translated as the “Superior Council of the Government”). This body, in turn, named two arch-conservatives, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte and a senior priest named Pelagio Antonio Labastida, as well as an ancient general, to act as a Regency Council until the new emperor arrived. The junta also elected a 215-man (they were all men, of course) assembly that voted to invite Maximilian to lead the new empire. The entire exercise was stage-managed by the French representative in Mexico—an obnoxious, formerly obscure French diplomat named Dubois de Saligny.

In creating institutions that nominally reflected “the will of the people,” Napoleon’s government not only foreshadowed similar undertakings by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II, but America’s creation of the so-called Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) which nominally governed the country from July 2003 after the American invasion. Like the junta, the IGC was subordinate to the occupiers, in this case, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Washington organized, controlled, and led. And, as the Americans soon discovered in Iraq, huzzahs in the capital meant little outside it. As François Claude du Barail—whom Shawcross merely describes as an officer but who at the time commanded two cavalry squadrons and later not only rose to the rank of brigadier general but subsequently served as minister of war—tartly recalled in his memoirs, “while we danced and flirted in Mexico City, in the rest of the country we had a little less fun.” And with good reason, for, as Shawcross observes, “Juárez had retreated, not surrendered.”

MAXIMILIAN, TRUE to his nature, continued to dither. He desperately continued to seek British support in addition to that of Napoleon, who flattered him by treating him as an equal. He also wanted an invitation from the Mexican people. When a delegation of Mexican émigré conservatives traveled to Miramar in October 1863 to formally  offer him the crown, Maximilian “reiterated the conditions stated nearly two years earlier: the empire must be guaranteed by France and Britain, and a popular vote must proclaim him sovereign.” These conditions were impossible to fulfill; French troops occupied less than half of the country and not all of those who did live under French occupation supported the notion of a foreign prince ruling over them. As for that portion of the populace not yet under French control, their loyalties were even more problematic.

Nor had there been any change in Britain’s reluctance to participate in the adventure. When Napoleon and Carlotta, who after all was Queen Victoria’s niece, persuaded Prime Minister Lord Palmerston to meet with one of the Mexican conservatives who would put the case for British support for Maximilian, the meeting went badly. Palmerston “merely mentioned to his foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, that a Mexican with an unpronounceable name had come to speak with him.”

Nevertheless, the Whig government hid its reluctance to support Maximilian. The government was no lover of the United States, and for that reason, although slavery was repugnant to them, Palmerston and Russell sympathized with the Confederacy. While not formally recognizing the South, Britain did declare it a belligerent. A strong Mexico under a European ruler with European support represented a further check on its neighbor to the north.

Britain’s ambiguity led the gullible Maximilian to believe that London would ultimately come ‘round and support him. At the same time, he began to conclude that British support was becoming less important because the American Civil War was dragging on, meaning that the United States would be preoccupied with its internal crisis for some time. Moreover, his Confederate contacts assured him that the Confederacy could win the war. Palmerston and Russell secretly shared the same belief.

Maximilian also sought his brother’s support. Much as he may have wanted his brother as far away from Vienna as possible, however, Franz-Joseph had no interest in enmeshing his country into the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Carlota, who was far more eager to become an empress than Maximilian was to be emperor, tried to convince Franz Joseph’s mother, Sophie of Bavaria, to get her oldest son to reverse his position. But the dowager empress was equally adamant: “Maximilian no doubt ... would be seen as a foreign ruler imposed by French bayonets.” The Taliban said the same about Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, who had lived many years in the United States and was supported by the modern-day equivalent of American bayonets.

Carlota did win the support of her father, King Leopold of Belgium. But his tiny country was in no position to play a major role in support of her husband. Meanwhile, Maximilian felt that he had yet to be sure the Mexicans wanted him. In the end, it was Napoleon who misled him into believing that not only would he ultimately win full-throated British support, but that an assembly ratifying his rule would be called as soon as the country was fully stabilized. Under pressure from his wife, with the support of his father-in-law, the entreaties of the Mexican conservatives, and Napoleon’s blandishments, Maximilian finally gave in and agreed to accept the crown.

In the meantime, the French forces, led by General Élie Frédéric Forey made little progress on the ground in Mexico. A frustrated Napoleon kicked Forey upstairs by making him marshal of France and ordered his return to Paris. He also sacked Saligny, who, despite orders from the Foreign Ministry, remained in Mexico for six months both to enrich himself and to marry a Mexican woman. Forey’s replacement was Achille Bazaine, a lifelong soldier who had risen from the ranks to become a general officer. He had seen action in Algeria, Spain, and the Crimean War and spoke Spanish. Whereas Forey, like his contemporary counterpart George McLellan, commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac, was slow to capitalize on whatever military advantages he might have had, Bazaine actively engaged the Juarista forces once his predecessor had left the scene.

WHEN MAXIMILIAN finally arrived in Mexico, to what he thought was the welcome of adoring crowds, he hoped to act as a constitutional monarch, governing more in consonance with the views of the liberals. As Shawcross puts it, “Maximilian set out to establish a modern, popular monarchy that married tradition with ideas of democracy closer to those of Juárez than to the caricature of aristocratic European courts”—this included, it might be added, the constricting atmosphere of his brother’s court in Vienna. At the same time, however, he also thought he might be able to retain the support of conservative monarchists, which he still needed, although both he and his empress ridiculed them in private.

Maximilian failed to satisfy either constituency. Though some liberals supported him, in part because, like the French, he had no desire to return anything that had been seized from the Catholic Church, many still backed Juárez, whose forces conducted a guerilla campaign to drive him out of the country. Indeed, Maximilian’s writ extended only to Mexico’s central states; elsewhere in the country Juárez still ruled. Although Juárez commanded an army of just 15,000, half the size of the French forces and even smaller than the Mexican fighters that supported Maximilian, the emperor’s troops “would need to end Juárez’ regular and guerilla resistance in a country of nearly 760,000 square miles.” If that alone were not a virtually impossible task, the French forces, like Maximilian himself, were unfamiliar with the local culture or terrain, further complicating their military prospects.

The situation was similar to that which the United States would encounter in Afghanistan 150 years later. Most of America’s troops, and those of its allies, and especially the thousands of American contractors supporting those troops, had little if any understanding of Afghanistan’s culture, which had hardly changed over the centuries, especially in its rural areas. The Washington-backed government controlled only the major urban centers, and not even all of those. It was the Taliban that controlled the countryside. So did the Juaristas.

Maximilian’s lack of familiarity with local conditions and values undermined his ability to draw away the majority of Juárez supporters. Ironically, the very same progressive instincts that won Maximilian at least some degree of liberal backing alienated the hardline reactionaries. They had expected him to restore both church lands and Catholicism as the country’s only licit faith. True to his liberal instincts, he did nothing of the sort.

It did not help that Maximilian was a terrible administrator. He was much more interested in designing residences and gardens than he was in governing. He was exceedingly dilatory when it came to making any decisions, much to the frustration not only of his Mexican advisors, but, of far greater consequence, Napoleon III.

The French emperor had viewed Mexico not only as a potential political counterweight to the powerful United States but also as an economic milk cow. He anticipated that France would reap the benefits of a neo-mercantile relationship with the country, importing its wealth of raw materials for French manufacture. In addition, he not only expected Mexico to repay its prior debts, a concern that he shared with the British, but also to finance the operations of his forces, including interest on the cost of those operations, in accordance with the terms to which Maximilian foolishly agreed in the Treaty of Miramar, signed at and named for his Italian palace.

Maximilian, on the other hand, displayed little interest and even less ability to deal with the country’s deepening financial hole. He preferred to go on royal tours and give what he thought were rousing speeches, but which actually tended to fall flat on his audiences. He also spent his time and extravagant sums that his treasury did not have redesigning his royal residences, including handpicking the china, crystal, and furniture. He detested formal balls, but his wife loved them and held them at great expense; she also accumulated a large staff of her own that accompanied her everywhere. This too added to the treasury’s woes. 

Maximilian did have regular meetings with his ministers, but his most immediate staff advisors were Europeans like himself. This did not endear him to the Mexicans, whether liberal or conservative. Indeed, his chef de cabinet, a Belgian named Felix Eloin, spoke no Spanish, was a Protestant, knew nothing about Mexico, and had never previously held a government position. Yet he insisted, like many far more capable chiefs of staff before and since, that all government documents pass through him before reaching the emperor. In the words of Francisco de Paula de Arrangoiz, the man with the unpronounceable name who had met with Palmerston but also had previously served as Mexico’s finance minister, Maximilian’s advisors were “a polyglot, a sort of Tower of Babel, composed of French, Belgians, Hungarians and I do not know what other nationalities.” His description would equally well apply many years later to Paul Bremer’s Congressional Provincial Authority team that sought to govern Iraq after the American invasion.

Nevertheless, despite all his shortcomings, Maximilian’s personal charm enabled him initially to win over some liberals, including some key generals, and he did appoint liberals to his council of ministers. The short-term result was that the French and Mexican imperial forces were able to chalk up several victories during the course of 1864, the first year of his reign. In contrast, with his resources dwindling, his forces on the run, and an unfriendly Confederate Army still on the other side of the Rio Grande, it appeared that Juárez was finished.

The Juaristas continued to fight on, however, launching guerilla operations that frustrated the French-led forces. Even when the French were able to seize towns or villages, they had insufficient troops to garrison them. Much as the American-led coalition experienced in Afghanistan when fighting the Taliban, the guerillas “moved in once the French army had left.” In addition, the war became increasingly brutal, with both sides committing atrocities against both men and women.

MAXIMILIAN SEEMED oblivious to developments throughout the country, or, for that matter, to the demands of governance. He embarked on a three-month tour during the summer and early autumn of 1864, throughout which he neglected the management of his country’s affairs. Not surprisingly, Napoleon was increasingly frustrated by Maximilian’s incompetence, especially as he had to raise a second loan to finance his forces’ operations while Maximilian did nothing to reform the treasury in order to pay off the initial borrowing. Maximilian’s response was to blame the French commanders, whom he said should have organized the country in preparation for his arrival. Nevertheless, Maximilian added, he would now resolve all the regime’s outstanding issues. He did nothing of the kind.

In the meantime, Maximilian found himself under increased pressure from the Catholic Church. A new papal nuncio arrived in Mexico City in December, demanding that Catholicism be once again the state religion to the exclusion of all others, and that Maximilian restore church properties that the previous government had seized and sold. Indeed, the very day after the nuncio’s arrival, Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical that denounced “progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” and branded freedom of worship as “a pestilence more deadly than any other.”

Incompetent he may have been, but Maximilian was not easily cowed. After having failed to reach a compromise with the nuncio, on December 27, 1864, he officially accepted most of Juárez’s earlier reforms, including freedom of worship. Moreover, he upheld the government’s appropriation and sale of church property. Anticipating a violent conservative backlash, and worried that the conservatives commanded the loyalty of many of his own troops, he disbanded much of the Mexican army. He then proceeded to pass a series of liberal-inspired laws that outlawed capital punishment, regulated child labor, limited working hours, required large land and factory owners to provide free schooling for workers’ children, and abolished indentured servitude called debt peonage.

Maximilian also reached out to Mexico’s many and varied indigenous peoples, including returning communal lands that the previous liberal government had divided for private sale. Doing so not only further alienated the conservatives, who had little regard for people they still considered to be savages, but also the liberals, whose law he had abrogated, and whose elites shared conservative views of the native Mexicans. Moreover, despite passing all those liberal laws, Maximilian’s inability to govern resulted in few of them ever being implemented. As Shawcross notes, “the emperor was at his happiest when overseeing a paper empire, but his state was much greater in his imagination than in reality.”

Maximilian’s government was riddled with corruption, a sure sign of trouble in a country in the throes of a civil war. The government had no real structure. French troops received orders directly from Paris while Maximilian’s ministers and his cabinet would issue competing instructions that were worth no more than the paper they were written on. When Maximilian actually chaired a ministerial meeting, he rarely decided on anything; it was the young and inexperienced Carlotta who was the only real policymaker. Tragically, the emperor was living in a dream world, as was his empress. They simply did not see that the prospects for the empire’s survival were increasingly dim.

BY THE end of 1865, Napoleon was beginning to write Maximilian off. The Mexican emperor persisted with his grand tours, extravagant meals, and elegant balls. He was more interested in chasing butterflies with one of his advisors than managing the country’s budget or implementing his liberal laws. He clashed with the French military leadership, and increasingly relied on Austrian volunteers and his father-in-law’s Belgian troops. As Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, who was serving as Napoleon’s foreign minister for a second time put it:

The lustre of a court … and the spread of compulsory education are the lights of the most advanced civilisation … we would applaud these intentions and acts more willingly if we were able to observe at the same time the effects of [the] government on the social, political, administrative, financial and military reorganisation of a country, where, despite our efforts and our sacrifices, everything remains in crisis.

Maximilian was feeling the pressure from another source as well. The American Civil War had ended in the Union’s victory, and several of its most senior generals, led by Ulysses S. Grant, pressed for American support of Juárez’s forces. Shawcross erroneously portrays Grant as seeking to depose Maximilian by all means, including war. It is true that Grant sympathized with Juárez. Indeed, at one point toward the end of the Civil War, Grant appears to have mused about a united Union and Confederate Army entering Mexico to unseat Maximilian (and incidentally bring the Civil War to a peaceful conclusion). Once the war ended, however, Grant no longer advocated a full-blown American invasion to support Juárez. As recounted in Ronald C. White’s American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, a letter that he sent to President Andrew Johnson urging support for Juárez demonstrates that there were limits to Grant’s support for the ousted Mexican president: “I would openly sell, on credit,” he wrote, “to the Government of Mexico all the arms, Munitions, and clothing they want, and aid them with officers to command troops.” Grant also authorized one of his top generals, Philip Sheridan, to command a force of 50,000 troops on the Mexican border, as an “Army of Observation” as much to pressure Maximilian as to obstruct the efforts of General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the last remaining Confederate forces, to support the Mexican emperor.

It was Andrew Johnson, however, and not Grant, as Shawcross asserts, who authorized covert American support to Juárez. With the president’s approval, America became a safe haven for Juárez’s units and a supplier of men, money, and equipment for his forces. It was an approach that later American presidents would take in supporting friendly forces in numerous conflicts and civil wars.

Napoleon anticipated an American invasion. He ordered his commander-in-chief, General Achille Bazaine, to withdraw his troops southward. Bazaine did so, but in a brutal scorched earth operation. In October 1865, Bazaine prevailed upon Maximilian to issue what came to be called “the Black Decree,” in which French forces were ordered to take no prisoners but instead kill-or-be-killed in what he termed a “death struggle.” As a result, Maximilian lost the support of all but a tiny minority of the liberals who had previously backed him, while Juárez, bolstered by American support, grew increasingly stronger.

Meanwhile, it was not only Napoleon who was tiring of the Mexican adventure. Opposition in the French National Assembly continued to grow as the emperor sought additional funds to finance Maximilian. Although Napoleon had repeatedly assured the legislators that the intervention was going well and would soon come to end, bad news kept arriving from Mexico that undermined his assertions. Without conceding that his previous optimistic reports were a sham, Napoleon announced to the Assembly in January 1866 that French troops would be coming home.

WHEN MAXIMILIAN failed to convince Napoleon to reverse his decision, he finally began to take the country’s financial troubles seriously. But he was too late. “The disjuncture between what was on paper and reality was astronomical,” writes Shawcross. “The imperial troops remained unpaid and without provisions. The Austrian and Belgian volunteers were owed $1.5 million in back pay. The salaries of government officials had been in arrears for months.”

Maximilian found himself increasingly abandoned on all sides. In addition to Napoleon’s withdrawal order, Leopold II, Maximilian’s brother-in-law who had succeeded his father, responded to American pressure and refused to allow any additional Belgian volunteers to serve in Mexico. Maximilian’s brother likewise bowed to American demands and forced several thousand Austrian volunteers to disband. Maximilian began to talk of abdication, but his wife, as delusional as he was, talked him out of it.

Yet matters continued to worsen for the Mexican emperor. Carlota traveled to Paris to confront Napoleon, but failed to move him. She became paranoid, thinking that the “evil” Napoleon was seeking to kill her. She left France for Rome to plead Maximilian’s case with the pope, but not only failed to win his support, but broke down in public. She was brought to Miramar Palace to convalesce, but never really recovered. Transferred to Belgium, she never saw her husband again. Then two of his leading generals betrayed him, while one of his closest advisors returned to Europe after failing to convince him to abdicate.

All the while the republican Juaristas, operating in Brownsville, Texas, were continuing to recruit volunteers for the insurgent forces and planning Juárez’s return to the presidency. As the war continued to go badly for Maximilian’s forces, those Mexicans still fighting under his flag, “many of whom had not been paid for months, took the view that Maximilian’s empire was not a cause worth dying for and surrendered before fighting.” Years later, many of the Afghan National Security Forces who had been fighting alongside the units of the American-led coalition would do exactly the same thing, and for precisely the same reasons.

At last, seemingly coming to terms with reality, Maximilian became serious about abdication. He prepared letters to that effect and packed his belongings for shipment to Europe. Even so, he wavered, and he allowed a conniving ultra-conservative priest named Augustin Fischer to convince him to stay on. Maximilian had another reason for hesitating. He wanted to gain back his right to succeed to the Austrian throne, which Franz Joseph had insisted he relinquish as a condition for initially supporting his brother’s Mexican adventure, and to which Maximilian had consented. Franz Joseph would not relent.

Fischer also convinced the emperor to throw his lot with the conservatives, as the liberals had abandoned him. Though he found the idea repugnant, Maximilian had little choice but to do so, despite being urged to the contrary by Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, Général François Castelnau, whom Napoleon had dispatched from Paris to urge abdication. Maximilian’s volte-face accomplished virtually nothing. The Juarista forces continued their inexorable march to the capital.

Maximilian now decided that it was up to him to lead his forces into battle against Juárez’s troops. He headquartered in the conservative, pro-imperial town of Queretaro, but soon found himself under assault from three separate republican armies. When it became clear that he had no hope of prevailing, Maximilian finally agreed to an escape plan. Even then he delayed his escape by a day; it proved critical because he was then captured by the Juarista forces.

It was not obvious that Maximilian would be executed; regicide had become something of a rarity since the French Revolution. Juárez granted him a trial, and Maximilian received support for clemency from world leaders, including Ulysses S. Grant. It made no difference; the trial was a sham. Juárez sealed Maximilian’s fate by insisting that treason was punishable by death. He died alongside two of his generals at the hands of a firing squad; Eduard Manet immortalized the scene in his painting “The Execution of Maximilian.” Maximilian thus met the same fate as Mexico’s previous emperor, Agustín de Iturbide. As for Carlota, she never fully recovered from her paranoia and delusions, living in seclusion in a Belgian palace.

SHAWCROSS’ ACCOUNT of Maximilian’s rule is not without some flaws. Despite his heavily researched effort, Shawcross has a tendency, Bob Woodward-like, to delve into the minds of his protagonists. Like Woodward, he does so without citations or sources of any kind. He also can be annoyingly repetitious, most notably when focusing on Maximilian’s rather extensive love life. And at times he simply gets his facts wrong. For example, when he asserts that Napoleon III’s “unique insight, and it was unique at the time, was that conservatism could be popular,” he overlooks Benjamin Disraeli’s Tory democracy, which the future British prime minister was articulating at the very same time. In adding, however, that “carefully managed, the people could legitimize an authoritarian regime through the ballot box,” Shawcross appears to have several European governments in mind, or, perhaps, Donald Trump.

Indeed, Shawcross sees with some justification the entire Maximilian episode as an antecedent for America’s failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He nevertheless overstates his case when he asserts that “as the American imperial project proceeded into the twentieth century … it would frequently employ the strategy that failed in Mexico—regime change.” While one might criticize American interventions in Latin America, Iran, and Iraq in those terms, surely there was good cause for regime change in Afghanistan in 2001—NATO invoked Article V, and even Russia was supportive—and even more so in Nazi Germany, and for that matter when the Reagan administration forced the resignation of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Many Americans nowadays tend to associate Mexico almost exclusively with immigration issues. They tend to forget that the United States invaded Mexico on several occasions, notably the 1846–47 Mexican War and General “Black Jack” Pershing’s pursuit of the bandit Pancho Villa in 1916–17. For their part, on the other hand, many Mexicans do recall that history and still resent their powerful neighbor to the north. But neither Americans nor Mexicans know much about Maximilian or his short-lived empire. With the publication of Shawcross’ book, that no longer need be the case.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief Financial Officer for the U.S. Department of Defense (dod) from 2001–2004 and as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Planning and Resources) from 1985-1987. He also served as the dod’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Wikipedia.