Mexican Monarchists

The story matters for three reasons. It is the only case in the Americas of a monarchy created by a domestic political faction and installed behind foreign bayonets, and so it is the sharpest test the hemisphere offers of the conservative claim that order is prior to liberty. It produced the Second Mexican Empire, an experiment that lasted less than four years, cost tens of thousands of lives and left Mexico with a foreign debt large enough to help unseat the next two governments. And it destroyed the faction that made it. After 1867 there was no organised Mexican monarchism worth the name: the men who had signed the invitations were dead, exiled, dispossessed or quietly absorbed into the dictatorship that eventually solved the problem they had diagnosed.

The evidence is unusually good and unusually partisan. The Assembly of Notables published its own dictamen and decrees, the Miramar convention survives with its secret articles, and Juárez's government printed its decrees of proscription. What does not survive is any honest count of the faction's supporters: nobody took one, and the ratification vote of 1864 was conducted by an occupying army.

At a glance

What was the Conservative Party, and did it exist?

Mexican conservatism was not founded; it crystallised. Its core was the defence of two things that the liberal reform programme threatened at once: the legal personality of the Catholic Church, with its property, its courts and its monopoly on marriage, burial and schooling; and the corporate privileges of the army, which meant that officers answered to their own tribunals rather than to civilian courts. Around those two interests gathered everyone whose position depended on the colonial inheritance — cathedral chapters, convents, confraternities, great landowners, the merchant houses of Mexico City and Puebla, and the provincial notables who had run municipal life since the viceroyalty. The slogan that organised them, painted on banners in a dozen revolts, was "Religión y Fueros".

The intellectual centre of the group was Lucas Alamán: a Guanajuato miner's son, a minister under successive governments, a mineowner with a large stake in the silver economy and the author of a five-volume history of Mexico that is still worth reading. Alamán's conservatism was not nostalgic. He had seen the cotton mills of Puebla and wanted tariffs, banks and technical schools; he thought Mexico needed a strong central state able to tax, conscript and educate, and he thought a hereditary executive was the only mechanism that could supply one, because the country's propertied classes would never consent to be governed by their equals. He also thought the United States was the mortal danger, and that only a European guarantee could check it.

The organisational reality was thinner than the name suggests. There were no congresses, no membership, no branches and no election fund — only newspapers, clubs, family networks and the dioceses. Alamán's El Tiempo ran from January 1846 and closed within months; El Universal began in November 1848 with much the same contributors, and for the next decade those papers were the party's only continuous institution. The label "c. 1849" in this dataset is bookkeeping: nothing happened in 1849. The nearest thing to an event is the launch of El Universal a few months earlier.

That looseness matters for everything that follows. A party with no membership cannot be expelled, disciplined or dissolved, and a faction with no treasury cannot pay for a war. When the Conservative Party fell in 1867 there was nothing to wind up: the men simply stopped meeting. It also explains the recurring pattern in which small groups of conservatives spoke for the whole, negotiated in Europe on their own authority, and committed their friends to obligations nobody had authorised. The commissions that went to Madrid, Paris and Vienna in 1853, 1859 and 1863 were exactly that — self-appointed embassies with credentials of varying authenticity, in one case signed by a president who had already lost the civil war.

Why did a minority of conservatives want a European prince?

The argument was made first, and most consequentially, by José María Gutiérrez de Estrada. On 25 August 1840, after twelve days of street fighting in Mexico City had wrecked the National Palace, he published a letter to President Anastasio Bustamante arguing that the republic had failed and that the remedy lay in a constituent convention with power to change the form of government. He then said which form he preferred: a monarchy under a European prince. His reasoning was empirical. Every constitution Mexico had tried since 1824 had been copied from the United States, and the copy had not produced the American result, because that result depended on habits, commerce and a century of self-government Mexico did not have. A prince raised to rule would bring an interest in the country's success that a four-year president could not have, and would stand above the factions rather than inside one.

The reaction was ferocious. The government called the letter treason and an incitement to civil war; refutations appeared within weeks; the printer was jailed; Gutiérrez de Estrada left for Europe and did not return for twenty-three years. But the pamphlet predicted the American annexation of Texas and then of half the country, and the war of 1846–48 made its author look like a prophet to exactly the people who had been most alarmed by him. The defeat did what no argument had done: it convinced a section of the elite that the republic was not merely badly governed but structurally incapable of defending the nation.

The monarchists' case rested on a second pillar, which was fear. Their private correspondence and their newspapers return again and again to the same proposition: that Mexico would be absorbed by the United States unless a European power took an interest in its survival. A monarchy installed by France or Britain would bring a guarantee; a republic brought nothing but the Monroe Doctrine, which was a warning to Europe and no protection at all to Mexico. In this they were not wrong about the danger. They were wrong about the remedy's price, and the price was set in Paris.

It is worth being clear about how small the monarchist current was inside conservatism. Most conservatives wanted a centralised republic with a strong presidency, restricted suffrage and the church's privileges intact, and had spent the 1830s and 1840s building exactly that under the Siete Leyes and the centralist constitution. Monarchism was a minority position within that camp, and it became attractive chiefly in moments of collapse — after 1847, after 1857, and after 1861. Some historians treat the agitation of 1840 to 1857 as a series of private intrigues without elite backing. That is too harsh: the pamphlets were read and serious men committed money to them. But no monarchist ever won an election, and the project only became practical when a foreign army made elections unnecessary.

Who was supposed to supply the prince?

The first search, in 1846, was for a Spaniard. President Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, who had taken power in December 1845 and was widely believed to favour a restoration, allowed the monarchists to sound out the courts of Europe, and the candidate discussed was the Infante Don Enrique, a Bourbon prince with liberal sympathies. The Mexican minister in Madrid was instructed to probe the idea. It went nowhere: the American war broke out in April, Paredes told the congress elected in June that Mexico was and would remain a republic, El Tiempo closed, and the project died of the invasion.

The second search, in 1853, was official. Alamán, back in the foreign ministry under Santa Anna's last dictatorship, told the French minister André Levasseur plainly what he wanted, and the government issued credentials to Gutiérrez de Estrada to look for a candidate at the courts of Britain, France, Austria and Spain, while José Manuel Hidalgo y Esnaurrízar was posted to Madrid to work the Spanish option. Alamán died on 2 June 1853, six weeks into the effort. The revolution of Ayutla ended it in 1855: the new liberal government withdrew the credentials, and the two diplomats carried on as private citizens with no authority whatsoever.

There followed the strangest phase of the campaign, conducted almost entirely by two men and a press campaign. Hidalgo, who had fought at Churubusco and been wounded at Contreras, was handsome, articulate, wrote novels, and had a talent for drawing rooms. Through his friendship with Eugénie de Montijo he got access to the Empress of the French, and at Biarritz in August 1857 he put the Mexican monarchy to her as a project whose time had come. Eugénie, Spanish-born and devout, took it up with enthusiasm and lobbied her husband. Gutiérrez de Estrada, meanwhile, had seen Napoleon III himself in June 1857 and been politely refused: the Emperor said he had no pretext for intervening and no wish to quarrel with the United States.

Two documents from this period explain why the project survived the refusals. One is a memorandum by the Marquis de Radepont, a Frenchman who had managed estates in Mexico, arguing that a Mexican empire would be to the Americas what the Ottoman Empire was to Europe — a barrier state that checked an expanding power without requiring Europe to conquer anything. The other is the Treaty of McLane-Ocampo, signed on 14 December 1859, in which Juárez's government, desperate for money and recognition, granted the United States perpetual transit rights across three routes with the right to police them by force. The Senate rejected it on 30 May 1860, but the damage was done: European newspapers read it as proof that Mexico was becoming an American protectorate, and the monarchists distributed it as proof that only a European guarantee could save the country.

The same year produced the other precedent, and it is the one usually misdated. On 26 September 1859 the conservative government in Mexico City, then fighting for its life, signed a treaty with Spain — the Mon-Almonte treaty, negotiated by Juan Nepomuceno Almonte and Alejandro Mon — which recognised Spanish claims and mortgaged Mexican revenues to pay them. A Mexican faction was now mortgaging the country's revenue to a European power in exchange for political support, and the republic never recognised it. It lapsed, but it set the template that Miramar would follow five years later, with larger numbers.

How did the Reform War turn pamphlets into foreign policy?

The war of the Reform was fought over the laws, and the laws were the most radical thing Mexican liberalism ever did. The Ley Juárez of 22 December 1855 abolished the special tribunals that sheltered soldiers and priests. The Ley Lerdo of 25 June 1856 forced corporations — above all the Church, but also Indian communities holding land in common — to sell their properties, on the theory that this would create a class of small proprietors and taxable wealth. The Ley Iglesias of 11 April 1857 capped parish fees. Then, from Veracruz, where Juárez's government had installed itself in May 1858, came the decrees that turned a quarrel into a revolution: the nationalisation of ecclesiastical property on 12 July 1859, with its twenty-five articles and its abolition of the legal personality of the religious orders; civil marriage and civil registration later that month; and, in December 1860, freedom of worship.

Conservative Mexico understood exactly what had been done. The Lerdo law did not merely tax the Church; it transferred, on the most careful estimate, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the country's real estate into the hands of purchasers who would henceforth have a material interest in the liberal state's survival. The nationalisation decreed at Veracruz went further and took the buildings themselves. For the hierarchy this was spoliation; for the parish clergy it was the loss of the fees and rents that had fed them; for the Indian communities it was the loss of communal land that the law treated as church property because the title deeds had been kept in the parish chest.

The war itself went badly for the liberals at first. The Plan de Tacubaya of 17 December 1857 set up a rival conservative government in Mexico City under Félix Zuloaga, and for three years two administrations governed, taxed, conscripted and borrowed. Juárez was driven from Guanajuato to Guadalajara to Colima and finally to Veracruz, which he held with the customs revenue and a United States naval presence offshore. The conservatives, with Miguel Miramón as their best general, came within a battle of winning. They lost at Calpulalpan on 22 December 1860, and Juárez re-entered the capital in January 1861 with an elected congress and a country that was, in fiscal terms, destroyed.

Both sides had borrowed, confiscated and printed. The foreign debt on the eve of the suspension was of the order of 80 million pesos, of which the London bonds were the largest block, and much of the rest was owed to Spanish and French claimants. The defeated conservatives had borrowed in Paris and Madrid in 1859 and 1860 against future customs revenue. When the republic defaulted, it defaulted in part on debts contracted by its enemies — a point the French press made relentlessly, and not without justice.

What did the suspension of payments actually do?

On 17 July 1861 Juárez's congress passed a law whose first article is worth quoting, because it is usually summarised as a repudiation of the debt and it was not. "From the date of this law," it reads, "the government of the Union shall receive the whole net product of the federal revenues, deducting only the costs of collection, all payments being suspended for the term of two years, including the payment of the assignments destined for the debt contracted in London and for foreign conventions." That is a two-year moratorium, not a cancellation, and it applied to domestic obligations too. It was the act of a government that had no money: the customs houses were its only reliable revenue, the army ate most of that, and the treasury could not pay the interest without ceasing to function.

The European response was not immediate, and the delay is instructive. Britain, whose bondholders were the largest creditors, wanted payment and access; Spain wanted satisfaction for the murder of Spaniards and the expulsion of its minister, and the restoration of a standing that had never recovered from the loss of the colony; France wanted a pretext. Napoleon III had been looking for one since 1857. What he got in the autumn of 1861 was a tripartite convention that gave him cover.

The Convention of London, signed on 31 October 1861 by John Russell for Britain, Francisco Javier de Istúriz for Spain and the Comte de Flahault for France, and ratified on 15 November, provided for the dispatch of combined naval and land forces to the Mexican coast to seize the forts and positions necessary to obtain satisfaction. Its second article is the one that matters:

The High Contracting Parties engage not to seek for themselves, in employing the coercive measures contemplated by the present Convention, any acquisition of territory nor any advantage of a particular nature, and not to exercise in the internal affairs of Mexico any influence of a nature to affect the right of the Mexican nation to choose and constitute freely the form of its government.

That clause was drafted by Russell, who had no interest in a Habsburg Mexico and knew what his ally was contemplating. The fourth article invited the United States to adhere while providing that operations would not wait on an answer — a measure of how carefully the powers had weighed the American Civil War. Within six months France had broken article two in substance, and the British and Spanish commissioners had left rather than be party to it. The monarchists' later claim that the nation had freely chosen its government has to be read against a treaty its own protector signed and discarded.

How did a debt collection become a monarchy?

The landings were Spanish first. On 14 December 1861 General Juan Prim occupied Veracruz with 6,200 troops from Cuba; 2,000 French and 700 British joined him on 7 January 1862. Prim was an odd choice to lead a coercive expedition — a liberal, married to a Mexican, and temperamentally hostile to the clerical party — and he negotiated. The preliminaries of La Soledad, signed with Manuel Doblado on 19 February 1862, recognised the republic, agreed that the allies would occupy Orizaba, Córdoba and Tehuacán while claims were discussed, and promised that if the talks failed the allied forces would withdraw to the coast rather than advance.

The talks failed, and the French advanced. The Spanish and British contingents re-embarked in the last days of April and the first days of May 1862, once the instructions of the French commissioner Dubois de Saligny and the size of the reinforcements arriving from France made the design unmistakable. On 5 May 1862 the French under Charles de Lorencez attacked Puebla and were thrown back with heavy loss — the victory that Mexicans still celebrate, and the reason the French waited a full year before trying again.

They came back in force. Napoleon III sent some 30,000 men and a new commander, Élie Frédéric Forey, and the second attack on Puebla began on 16 March 1863. The siege lasted two months; the garrison under Jesús González Ortega surrendered on 17 May after its ammunition ran out, and Forey entered Mexico City on 10 June. Juárez's government had already left for San Luis Potosí, and would keep moving north for the rest of the war — to Monterrey, to Chihuahua, and eventually to the Paso del Norte on the American border. It never left Mexican soil, which was the single most important political fact of the next four years.

What followed in June 1863 was a constitutional coup carried out in three steps, all of them French. Forey issued a proclamation on 11 June announcing that the nation would be consulted and that the church property sales would stand — the second half of that sentence was the one the clergy would spend three years failing to reverse. On 16 June a decree created a Junta Superior de Gobierno of thirty-five Mexicans chosen by the French commander; the junta nominated three men to hold the executive, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, José Mariano Salas and Archbishop Pelagio Antonio de Labastida, and these in turn selected 215 more citizens to form an Assembly of Notables. The names on the executive's first published decree in July were Almonte, Salas and Juan B. Ormaechea, because Labastida was still in Europe being consecrated.

The mechanism deserves attention. The French general chose thirty-five men; those thirty-five chose three; those three chose 215. Nobody voted. The assembly's defenders called its members "the notables" without asking notables of what, or chosen by whom. Yet the body was not a puppet show: it contained moderate liberals as well as conservatives — Luis G. Cuevas, Pedro Escudero y Echánove, who had sat in the constituent congress of 1856–57 — and it contained men who refused to serve at all, among them José Fernando Ramírez and Manuel Orozco y Berra. That refusal is the telling detail: the assembly's legitimacy was contested from inside Mexican politics, not only from outside.

What did the Assembly of Notables decide?

The Assembly met on 8 July 1863 in the building of the former Chamber of Deputies and appointed a commission to report on the form of government. The commission — Aguilar, Velázquez de León, Orozco, Marín and Blanco — reported on 10 July. Its dictamen is a remarkable document: half sermon, half constitutional argument, and entirely clear about what it wanted.

Its historical case was that the republic had failed in both of its forms. "The republican system, whether under the federal form or under the one that most centralises power, has been, in the many years it has been tried, the fertile source of all the evils that afflict our fatherland." Its constitutional case was that monarchy combined order with liberty and force with right, and was "the only form adaptable to Mexico, especially in present circumstances". The third proposition reveals the logic: a sovereign could not be chosen from among Mexicans, "because the principal qualities that constitute a king are of a kind that cannot be improvised". A king is a manufactured object, and Mexico could not manufacture one.

The commission's four propositions were adopted in the same session, and the record says unanimously: the nation adopts a moderate hereditary monarchy with a Catholic prince; the sovereign takes the title of Emperor of Mexico; the crown is offered to Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria, for himself and his descendants; and, should he not take possession, "the Mexican nation refers itself to the benevolence of His Majesty Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, that he may indicate another Catholic prince". The decree was published on 11 July over the signatures of Teodosio Lares as president of the assembly and Alejandro Arango y Escandón and José María Andrade as secretaries.

That fourth clause is the tell. The assembly had begun by claiming to act "in use of the full right the nation has to constitute itself, and as its organ and interpreter", with "absolute independence and freedom". It ended by delegating the choice of its sovereign to the emperor of the French. No document produced in Mexico during those years states more exactly what the monarchy was: a national decision about the form of government, and a foreign decision about the person who would occupy it.

Maximilian then asked for a ratification vote, and got one. The referendum of 1864 was held in the towns under French control, its actas de adhesión signed by officials, clergy and notables in garrisoned cities, and the result announced as overwhelmingly affirmative. No figure from it can bear weight: the registers were kept by the occupation authorities, the Republican zones did not vote, and the published totals vary. The delegation that carried the offer to Miramar in the autumn of 1863 — Gutiérrez de Estrada, Hidalgo y Esnaurrízar and the priest Francisco Javier Miranda — had more freedom of action than the electorate supposed to have sent them.

What did the crown cost?

Maximilian accepted on 10 April 1864, having signed the previous day a family pact renouncing for himself and his descendants any claim to the Austrian succession, and the same day he signed the Convention of Miramar with Napoleon III. Its eighteen public articles and three secret articles are the most concrete surviving statement of what the Mexican monarchy was: a state paying for its own conquest.

The public terms required the French corps to be cut as soon as possible to 25,000 men including the Foreign Legion; the Legion, 8,000 strong, to stay six years after the rest had gone and then pass into Mexican service and pay; 400,000 francs for every round trip of the transport service, every two months; 270 million francs for the expenses of the expedition to 1 July 1864, bearing interest at 3 per cent; 1,000 francs a year for every soldier from 19 July 1864; 66 million francs in bonds immediately, 54 million against the debt and 12 million against French claims; and 25 million francs a year in cash thereafter. The secret articles gave the real schedule: 38,000 men then, falling to 28,000 in 1865, 25,000 in 1866 and 20,000 in 1867. The first of them also recorded that the Emperor approved Forey's proclamation of 11 June 1863 and the measures taken under it — that is, he had bound himself in advance to accept the sale of church property.

The politics of that clause were poisonous. The Mexican commission knew what it had agreed to; the clergy either did not know or chose not to believe it. When the details became public, the imperial government found itself defending a financial settlement that no Mexican government could have survived and a religious settlement that its own supporters regarded as sacrilege. For a programme whose central promise had been fiscal honesty and the restoration of the Church, the empire began by contracting the largest foreign debt in Mexican history and confirming the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth.

The money had to come from somewhere. Customs duties were the only elastic revenue, and the two great customs houses, Veracruz and Mazatlán, were either in Republican hands or under French military control for much of the period. The regime borrowed in Paris on ruinous terms, pledged revenues it did not collect, and taxed a country whose economy was contracting under blockade and guerrilla war. By 1866 the Mexican treasury was months behind on the subsidy it owed the French army, which gave Napoleon III the most respectable of his reasons for leaving.

Who actually supported the empire?

The empire's constituency was broader than the Assembly and narrower than the nation, and it varied enormously by region. In the towns of the central plateau — Mexico City, Puebla, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Guadalajara — much of the propertied class supported it, not always enthusiastically, because the alternative was a government that had confiscated its property, closed its churches and taxed its trade. In Puebla and Tlaxcala the cotton industry had boomed during the American Civil War, and the mill owners wanted order and markets. In the Sierra Gorda the Otomí communities around Tomás Mejía fought for the empire as they had fought for the conservatives since the 1840s, out of loyalty to Mejía and to a remembered paternalism rather than to any theory of monarchy. In the north-east Santiago Vidaurri, caudillo of Nuevo León and Coahuila, went over in 1864 with his state administration intact.

A second category, recovered by recent work, is the imperialists proper, as distinct from the old Conservative Party. The best study of the empire's political imagination describes men who were not reactionaries waiting for the ancien régime. They wanted a centralised state, a professional administration, a national army, schools, railways and a legal order that would make Mexico governable; they believed a monarchy could do what a republic had failed to do, and they were nationalists who resented the French as much as they depended on them. Their weakness was that their state required a legitimacy they could not supply.

The numbers are thin. The imperial army in 1867 was about 29,000 men with 2,000 cavalry and ten guns, some 9,000 of them shut up in Querétaro — large by the standards of Mexican civil wars, small for holding a country of nearly two million square kilometres. Every estimate of supporters beyond the armies is guesswork. The empire could raise soldiers in the centre and the south-east, could not hold the countryside anywhere, and never controlled the north.

That pattern — cities held, roads contested, villages hostile or indifferent — explains both the empire's early confidence and its rapid collapse. A monarchy that governs through garrisons has no way to grow support. Its taxes fall on the towns that support it, its conscription takes the sons of its friends, and its reprisals create enemies in exactly the places where it needed neutrality.

Why did the Church break with its own candidate?

The clergy were the empire's most organised supporters and its most disappointed ones, and the break came within a year. Maximilian's audience with Pius IX on 18 April 1864, days after he had accepted the crown, settled nothing: the Pope wanted the church property restored and Catholicism reinstated as the sole religion; the Emperor wanted a concordat, imperial control of appointments, and the sales confirmed. He got neither and conceded neither.

In December 1864 the papal nuncio Pier Francesco Meglia arrived in Mexico with a list of demands: the liberal laws reversed, the property returned, toleration rescinded, Catholic exclusivity restored. Maximilian refused, decreed freedom of worship, and confirmed the purchasers in their titles. The nuncio's reply was that the Church had supported the establishment of the empire and would withdraw that support from a regime that governed as "ungodly". In Rome the emperor was being described as a dangerous liberal, which was, in the circumstances, accurate.

The quarrel was structural rather than personal. The Church wanted a corporate restoration: its property, its courts, its schools, its monopoly, and a concordat that would make those permanent. Maximilian wanted a modern Catholic state in which the Church was a department — useful, protected, and under imperial patronage. These were incompatible claims to the same sovereignty, and neither side could afford to lose. His Statutory Law of the Empire, promulgated on 10 April 1865, wrote freedom of worship and equality before the law into the imperial constitution, and with them the reform legislation that the conservatives had gone to war to overturn.

The hierarchy's own record was not monolithic. Labastida, archbishop of Mexico from 1863, had been a regent until his dismissal on 17 November 1863 over the church property question, and spent the rest of the empire in a cold war with the French commander Bazaine and with the emperor. Some northern bishops had accommodated the republic; many parish priests were poor men whose fees the Ley Iglesias had abolished, with no reason to love either side. What the empire lost in 1864–65 was not every priest's loyalty but the political weight of the only hierarchy capable of delivering rural Mexico — at the moment when rural Mexico was deciding the war.

How did the monarchy lose?

The military history of the empire is the history of a shrinking perimeter. The French held the capital, the great cities of the plateau, the ports, and the line between them; the Republicans held the roads between those places, and after 1864 they held them more effectively every year. Juárez's government, moving between Chihuahua, Monterrey and the border, kept the formal attributes of sovereignty and the recognition of Washington. The imperial government could not extinguish it, and each failure taught the Republican generals — Escobedo, Díaz, Corona, Riva Palacio — that the French could not be everywhere.

On 3 October 1865 Maximilian signed the decree that his opponents called the Black Decree, ordering the court martial and execution of anyone taken with arms against the empire, and the death penalty for those who aided the guerrillas. It was justified as a response to a war conducted by irregulars and to a Republican decree of 1862 that had threatened the same; it was a catastrophe. The executions it authorised, and the reprisals it provoked, turned a war about taxes and constitutions into a war about survival, and gave the republic a martyrology in every district. No reliable total of its victims exists; the figure of 11,000 that circulates in the literature is unsourced.

The diplomatic end came faster than the military one. Washington never recognised the empire, refused Maximilian's letters, and after the Confederate surrender in April 1865 had both the means and the motive to press. Seward demanded an unconditional withdrawal; a $30 million private loan was raised for Juárez in New York in the autumn of 1865; surplus American arms and volunteer officers crossed the border; and a Union force was concentrated on the Rio Grande in a demonstration that required no declaration. Austria and Belgium stopped recruiting. In January 1866 Napoleon III told the legislature that he intended to withdraw, and the schedule he announced was accelerated under American pressure until, by March 1867, the last French troops had gone.

Maximilian might have left with them. He went to Orizaba in the autumn of 1866 intending to abdicate, and was persuaded to stay by a deputation of notables, clergy and generals who offered him money and an army. It was the last act of the Mexican Monarchists as a political force, and it was entirely in character: a group with no popular base asking a foreign prince to save them with 30 million pesos and the remnants of a defeated army. He returned to the capital in January and on 13 February 1867 marched for Querétaro with some 9,000 men, where Miramón and Mejía were waiting.

The siege of Querétaro ran from 6 March to 15 May 1867. Miramón wanted to break out and fight; Leonardo Márquez, the emperor's lieutenant, overruled him, and Escobedo's armies closed the ring. Márquez was sent to Mexico City for relief forces and never returned. On 15 May the Cerro de las Campanas was betrayed and the emperor taken. A court martial convicted him on 13–14 June of usurpation and of ordering executions under the Black Decree; Juárez refused every appeal for clemency, from Belgium, Britain, the Pope and the United States, on the ground that the law must apply to a prince as to a corporal. At 6.40 on the morning of 19 June 1867 Maximilian, Miramón and Mejía were shot on the hill outside the city. Juárez entered Mexico City on 15 July.

What became of the monarchists?

The republic did not merely win; it legislated its enemies out of existence. The decree of 16 August 1863, issued while the government was still in flight, declared traitors, and liable to confiscation of their property, all officials of the intervention, all civil, municipal and military employees of it, all constitutional officers who had stayed in occupied territory without permission, anyone who accepted subsidies, titles or decorations from the French or from "the so-called government of the intervention", anyone who defended it in print, and "in general, all those who serve or aid, directly or indirectly, the cause of the intervention". Its fourth article ordered confiscated estates sold, a third to the treasury, a third to pensions for the wounded and the families of the dead, a third to indemnify those who had suffered confiscation; rural properties were halved, one half sold and the other distributed among the inhabitants of the district who had taken up arms for the republic. In 1867 the government announced that the decree would stand.

The effect was a purge of the exact class that had made the monarchy possible. Thousands of families lost property or went into exile; army officers were shot or imprisoned; the cathedral chapters were decimated; the diplomatic corps of the empire dispersed to Paris, Rome and Havana. Leonardo Márquez, the most feared of the conservative generals, escaped to Cuba and later to Rome, where he died in 1913, an exile of forty-six years. The Conservative Party did not dissolve, because it had never been constituted; it simply ceased to be a factor in national elections, and Mexican public life was organised for a generation around the exclusion of Catholics who would not swear the constitution of 1857.

The Church's defeat was completed by others. The Reform Laws were written into the constitution in 1873–74 under Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, which removed any prospect of a concordat or a corporate restoration and made the liberal settlement the permanent law of the land. Catholic conservatives remained outside the political nation until the 1890s, when Porfirio Díaz's regime quietly readmitted them as a counterweight to the liberals he had himself displaced. Many of the families and administrative careers that had served the empire reappeared in the Porfirian state; the men who had wanted a monarchy settled for a dictatorship that gave them order, railways, foreign investment and peace, which was most of what they had actually wanted.

The memory was managed as carefully as the property. For the victorious republic, 1867 was the founding act of a nation that had beaten an empire, and the Cerro de las Campanas became a shrine to the sovereignty of law over the pretensions of princes. For the conservatives, the empire became an embarrassment to be explained away — a mistake about means, not ends. Only at the end of the twentieth century did historians begin to treat the imperialists as political thinkers rather than traitors or fools, and to describe the empire as state-building that failed for want of legitimacy rather than of ideas. A small fringe, the Frente Nacionalista de México, founded in 2006, still meets in Querétaro each June; it has no political weight.

What survives of the monarchist diagnosis is its accuracy about the disease and its failure about the cure. Mexico in 1867 did need a state that could tax, conscript, educate and hold a frontier; the Porfiriato built one, and it took thirty-five years of dictatorship to do it. The monarchists' contribution was to have understood the problem early, and to have proposed a solution so expensive, so foreign and so humiliating that the country chose a generation of civil conflict and a later dictatorship rather than accept it.

Common myths about the Mexican Monarchists

Timeline of the Mexican Monarchists

What the map shows next

The map holds this faction for a single year. At 1864 on the map the border data gives the Mexican Monarchists 234,098 square kilometres — a coarse band from Guadalajara and the Bajío through Mexico City and Puebla to Veracruz, plus a detached fragment around Campeche — in the same year in which the same data still draws a federal republic covering 1.8 million. The overlap is not an error so much as a snapshot of a civil war: a government in the capital and an army in the field, each claiming the same country. The shape also shows where the empire's support lay, in the towns of the plateau and the Gulf coast, and where it did not, in Oaxaca, Michoacán and the north.

There is no later year to step to, because the dataset does not draw the faction again: at 1864 on the map you can see the two Mexicos side by side, and the entry's account of 1865 to 1867 has to be followed in the text. The same year shows the French army's lines of communication and the republic's surviving core, which is the geography of the whole war. For the empire as a state rather than a faction, the map draws its own entry from 1866, and the contrast between that polygon and this one is the difference between a claim and a country.