The victory over the conservatives allowed Mexico to hold elections. Three candidates presented themselves—Acting President Juarez, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, author of the Lerdo Law, and General Jesus Gonzalez Ortega, a war hero. Due to his reputation achieved during the War of Reform, as well as rising anti-military sentiment, Juarez defeated Gonzalez Ortega. Lerdo de Tejada died of natural causes just before the election.50
Even after the defeat of the conservative army, turmoil continued. There were several peasant uprisings in central Mexico. In June 1861, U. S. Ambassador Thomas Corwin sent a dispatch from Mexico City describing the conservative irregulars who continued to attack Juarez’s forces:
Since my last dispatches the country has been in a state of great disorder. Bands of armed men,
In numbers varying from fifty to four thousand, have been ravaging the country in this and two
Or three adjoining States, pushing their operations to the very suburbs of this city.51
Given the unrest and destruction, Mexico could not make payments on its public debt. In July 1861, the Mexican Congress recognized this and, as an emergency measure to permit internal reconstruction, it unilaterally suspended payments on its foreign and domestic debts for two years, but it did not repudiate the debts. This act, coming as it did during the U. S. Civil War (which prevented the United States from enforcing its Monroe Doctrine and keeping Europeans out of Latin America), gave Europe the pretext for massive intervention in Mexico.52
Spain, England, and France formed an alliance to collect the debt, including the amount due on the Jecker bonds approved by conservatives battling Juarez’s forces in the War of Reform. Representatives of the three creditor nations met in England and signed the Tripartite Convention of London. Its signatories declared that they would occupy Mexico’s customs houses so they could collect funds to retire the debt owed them. However, they pledged not to “interfere in Mexico’s internal affairs in such a manner as would impair that nation’s right to freely elect and constitute its own government.”53
The French, who were already expanding their empire into Algeria and Indo-China, had the most far-reaching plans. French Emperor Napoleon III planned to impose a monarchy that would provide France with markets and raw materials and prevent the spread of U. S. influence into Latin America.54
Mexican conservatives welcomed France’s monarchical pretensions. Having lost in the War of Reform, they were more than willing to allow foreigners to restore them to power. They felt the early 1860s were an ideal time to install a monarchy since the United States, preoccupied with its own civil war, could not oppose an empire to its south. Also, as long as the United States remained at war, it would not compete with Mexico for European investment capital. Conservatives felt the circumstances were finally at hand to fulfill Lucas Alaman’s dream of a monarchy that would produce stability—the key to attracting foreign capital for development.55
In December 1861 and January 1862, Spain landed 6,000 troops and Britain sent 800 marines. As occurred with the U. S. invasion fifteen years earlier, Mexicans failed to oppose the landing. Unlike their American predecessors, though, the European invaders remained on the coast too long and fell victim to yellow fever.56
The British and Spanish soon realized that the French, the Tripartite Convention of London notwithstanding, were planning a much greater undertaking than debt collection. After the Mexican government pledged to resume debt payments as soon as possible, the British and Spanish departed.57
The French commander, General Charles Latrille, Count of Lorencez, began an advance on Mexico City. On April 25, 1862, he wrote his minister of war, “We are so superior to the Mexicans in race, organization, morality, and devoted sentiments that I beg your excellency to inform the Emperor that as head of 6,000 soldiers I am already master of Mexico.”58
Ten days after this was written, the French force fought its first major battle at Puebla, where its advance was blocked by two forts, Loreto and Guadalupe, perched on hilltops connected by a 3,500 foot-long ridge. The 4,500-man French force had to traverse a two-mile wide plain. Then they faced withering Mexican cannon fire as they scrambled up the hills. Eventually combat extended along the ridge connecting the two forts. The French approaching the ridge were exposed to crossfire from both forts. After 475 of the attackers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, the French force withdrew. Mexican casualties totaled 227.59
The battle fought on May 5, 1862, brought together diverse elements of Mexico’s population. Not only did units come from numerous states but indigenous units from north Puebla towns fought alongside mestizos, distinguishing themselves in bitter hand-to-hand combat. The victory at Puebla remains the outstanding military victory in Mexican history. Each year Mexicans, and many Americans, celebrate the Cinco de Mayo (Fifth of May), and Ignacio Zaragoza, who commanded the defending forces, is widely honored.60
This defeat affected the outcome of the intervention since the French had to await reinforcements before they could advance. This delayed the establishment of a puppet government by a year, which left relatively little time for that government to consolidate itself before the end of the U. S. Civil War. After its own civil war ended, the United States could credibly threaten France for violating the Monroe Doctrine.61
After their defeat at Puebla, the French retreated and awaited the arrival of additional troops. By January 1863, the interventionist force totaled 30,976. Then the French advanced and besieged Puebla for seventy-four days. Its residents were reduced to eating house pets and small animals that they trapped. After a lack of food and ammunition forced Puebla to surrender to the French, starving children stole corn from the fodder bags of French cavalry mounts.62
As the French approached Mexico City, Juarez abandoned the practically defenseless capital and moved his government north to San Luis Potosi. For the next three years, he would govern by decree, using the extraordinary powers Congress had granted him to prosecute the war.63
After arriving in Mexico City, the French created an interim government. Its officials invited all Mexicans to unite around it and urged them to cease considering themselves liberals or conservatives. Conservatives forming the interim government felt a foreign Catholic monarch would bring Mexico’s polarized society together. As a result, they invited the Austrian archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian, to become emperor of Mexico.64
The person invited to assume the throne was the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and the son-in-law of King Leopold of Belgium. His invitation resulted from pressure exerted on Napoleon’s wife Eugenie by conservative Mexican exiles in Europe who had engaged in a prolonged lobbying effort to have a European power install a monarchy in Mexico. Eugenie influenced her husband, who insured that Maximilian received the invitation.65
Maximilian did insist that a plebiscite be held in Mexico to determine whether he should assume the throne. The French obliged, allowing individuals favoring the monarchy to act as local representatives who could “vote” for the rest of the population. Sometimes the French claimed that voting, which only occurred in a state capital, represented the entire state’s population. Ultimately the French claimed that all important Mexican cities and towns had accepted the empire, even though the French had yet to extend its control to many areas.66
The future emperor of Mexico accepted the plebiscite at face value. However, a somewhat more skeptical Sir Charles Wyke, the former British charge d’affaires in Mexico City, remarked that Maximilian had been “elected” to the throne by a “majority vote from places inhabited by two Indians and a monkey.”67
In April 1864, Maximilian signed a secret treaty with the French, making Mexico a virtual French colony. He agreed to pay not only the inflated debt claims of the French but also the cost of French troops occupying Mexico. Napoleon agreed to keep French troops in Mexico until 1870.68
Before leaving Europe, Maximilian received the personal blessings of Pope Pius IX. The pope felt Maximilian would restore the Church to its former position in Mexico. Pius commented, “Although the rights of nations are great and must be respected, those of religion are much greater and holier.”69
Even before arriving in Mexico, Maximilian began courting liberals by granting pardons to republican prisoners and reducing their prison sentences. To broaden his support, he shifted tax burdens to the rich and ended debt servitude. He also showed his moderate European liberalism by refusing to return to the Church the property it had formerly owned and by allowing freedom of worship. He abolished corporal punishment, limited hours of work, and guaranteed a minimum wage to agricultural workers. He mandated that those employing more than twenty families should provide free primary education and that Indian schools should be bilingual. He anticipated twentieth-century land reform efforts by ordering that unused government land should be provided to the landless. Maximilian’s failure to embrace the conservative agenda reduced his conservative backing and won him few liberal supporters. His enactments might have been sound policy. However, quite often imperial hegemony did not extend beyond the edge of Mexico City, leaving his decrees
Unenforced.70
Maximilian attempted to hold himself above the liberal-conservative Iray and invited all Mexicans to join his government. Moderate liberals did accept appointments to serve as ministers of foreign relations, interior, and justice. Again, this cost him conservative support and did little to attract other liberals.71
In 1863, French General Francois Bazaine, who had learned counter-guerrilla tactics while imposing French colonial rule in Algeria, assumed command of imperial forces in Mexico. The next year, he wrote Napoleon to say that Maximilian was “putting on airs; that he fails to remember that he is still dependent—dependent on France, dependent on General Bazaine, and dependent on General Bazaine’s army.”72
After occupying Mexico City, the French moved north, taking Saltillo and Matamoros. Juarez retreated, eventually taking refuge in Paso del Norte (today, in his honor, Ciudad Juarez). By mid-
1864, French-installed governments controlled eighteen of the twenty-four Mexican states. By the following year, all state capitals flew the imperial flag. Imperial forces totaled 60,000 troops, of whom 30,000 were French, 24,000 Mexican, and the rest Austrian and Belgian. These forces confined Juarez’s regular forces to a small area bordering on west Texas and New Mexico. In December
1865, the U. S. consul in Paso del Norte reported that Juarez’s forces numbered only 300. In addition, 200 to 300 men in Guerrero and Oaxaca, led by the wily guerrilla fighter Porfirio Diaz, supported Juarez. Unlike Santa Anna in the Mexican—American War, Juarez realized that guerrilla warfare was the only way to confront a powerful foreign army.73
The French occupation made elections impossible when Juarez’s presidential term expired in 1865. Juarez used the extraordinary powers granted him by Congress in 1861 to simply extend his term. Some liberals, especially those seeking power themselves, criticized this as a violation of liberal principles. Undaunted, Juarez continued to rule by decree.74
Even though Juarez’s regular forces verged on annihilation, the French could not extend their control into the countryside. As soon as their troops withdrew, popular uprisings occurred. The French-organized counter-guerrilla forces were effective, but lacked sufficient numbers to dominate an area as large as Mexico.75
The imperial government’s fragmentation prevented it from implementing policies that might have won it adherents. The French dominated the military and occupied the customs houses. Maximilian’s cabinet contained both conservatives and liberals and had to share power not only with Maximilian’s European-dominated private cabinet but with the French ambassador and the head of the French financial mission.76
Maximilian established a royal court complete with what he considered fitting pomp and ceremony. The manual describing court etiquette, the Relgamento para el servicioy ceremonial de la corte (Regulationsfor Court Service and Ceremony), filled almost four hundred pages. His elaborate lifestyle made previous Mexican presidents seem positively frugal. Guadalupe Victoria had a pair of carriages, while Maximilian had thirty-three. During his last presidency, Mexicans had widely criticized Santa Anna for his spending some 8,000 to 10,000 pesos a month to maintain himself in regal style. Maximilian and his wife Carlota received an annual allowance of 1.7 million pesos for living expenses and maintaining the court, palace, and grounds.77
Feeling the republican forces were almost defeated, on October 3, 1865, Maximilian signed the infamous black flag decree, published in Spanish and Nahuatl and posted throughout the empire. It decreed that any person apprehended bearing arms against the empire would be executed within twenty-four hours. Despite its widespread application to prisoners of war, this measure drove more Mexicans into the arms of the republic.78
In 1866, Napoleon decided to withdraw French troops from Mexico. His decision resulted from: 1) the high cost of the war in Mexico; 2) its unpopularity in France; 3) Maximilian’s failure to develop an independent base; 4) the fear that the United States would support Juarez after its own civil war ended; and 5) Napoleon’s need for troops in Europe to respond to the threat posed by an increasingly militarized Prussia.79
Upon learning that the French had decided to withdraw their troops, Carlota returned to Europe to persuade Napoleon and the pope to continue supporting her husband’s empire. Before leaving, she appealed to Maximilian to stay in Mexico and uphold Habsburg honor. The empress not only failed to rally support in Europe but suffered a mental breakdown there from which she never recovered.
At the time, Maximilian felt he could end the raging civil war by convening a national Congress that would invite both liberals and conservatives to sit down and amicably resolve their disputes. However, any chance of Juarez’s compromising with his foe had vanished, since the French departure opened the way for a liberal victory without compromise.80
Bazaine sailed from Veracruz with the last French forces in March 1867—three years earlier than the departure date agreed to by Napoleon. After the French departure, Maximilian’s empire began to disintegrate with increasing rapidity. Juarez’s forces, taking heart at the French withdrawal, moved south, aided by U. S. arms and veterans who appeared in Mexico after the end of the U. S. Civil War. In January 1867, liberal forces took Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, and Guanajuato. They occupied Cuernavaca, Morelia, and Zacatecas the following month.81
The imperial forces made their final stand at Queretaro. In February, General Mariano Escobedo besieged the city with 30,000 liberal troops. Maximilian had already come north from Mexico City to personally lead his 9,000-man force. The siege lasted until May, when liberals captured the city and took Maximilian prisoner. Shortly afterward, Porfirio Diaz came from the east and captured Mexico City for the liberals.
Juarez ordered that Maximilian be tried by court martial. The former emperor faced the same criminal charges of rebellion that he had decreed Juarez’s supporters captured in battle should face. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to be executed by firing squad, along with two of his generals, Tomas Mejia and Miguel Miramon. Juarez resisted intense pressure from around the world to issue a pardon, feeling that a live Maximilian would only serve to promote further uprisings and prolong internal strife. Juarez knew that conservatives pardoned after the War of Reform had supported the empire. Liberal journalist Juan Jose Baz wrote, “This example will ensure in Europe we are respected and will remove any desire on the part of any other adventurer to come here.”82
In July 1867, after an absence of four years, Juarez returned to Mexico City. His wife Margarita Maza de Juarez, who had spent the war years in the United States, soon rejoined him. During these years she had not only rallied support for the liberal cause in Washington but had done her best to keep her family together. Despite her efforts, two of her children died while in exile, one of dysentery and one of cholera.83
Compared to Mexican resistance in the Mexican—American War, resistance to the empire was, as historian Alan Knight noted, “more prolonged, dogged, and above all, successful.” Liberal strongmen provided Juarez with crucial support at the regional level, just as they had in defeating the conservatives during the War of the Reform. Rural people generally supported the liberal cause, feeling liberalism offered greater local autonomy. Much of Juarez’s appeal was based not on his program but on his once having been a poor Indian who rose thorough the ranks to govern the country.84
Another reason for the fall of the empire was the less than total support from France. In 1808, Napoleon I had sent more than 200,000 French troops to support his brother Joseph in Spain. Since these troops failed to keep Joseph on the throne, it is not surprising that 27,000 French troops failed to keep Maximilian on the throne in Mexico—a nation twice as large as Spain. The effectiveness of these troops was greatly reduced because guerrilla forces opposing them refused to fight the set-piece battles the European-trained military expected. Rather, they simply outlasted the French in a prolonged war of attrition.85
The forging of a Mexican national identity, a spirit sorely lacking in 1847, forms a lasting legacy of the struggle against the French. After the collapse of the empire, Creoles no longer defined Mexican nationality. This role shifted to Juarez’s generation of mestizo politicians, journalists, writers, poets, legislators, and historians. They created republican institutions and a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and scientific and literary academies. They felt that history and education should form national character and wrote novels with mestizo characters and scenes.86
The enhanced national identity resulting from the war came at a high cost. Approximately
300,000 died as a result of the French intervention. In addition, Mexico’s already abused and neglected infrastructure suffered extensive damage, and marketing arrangements were once again disrupted.87
World History
