Second Mexican Empire

It matters for three reasons. It was the last serious attempt to plant a European monarchy in the Americas after independence, and it failed in a way that made the failure permanent: no European power tried again. It was also, Brazil apart, the only American state to be governed by a monarch who thought of himself as a liberal, which turned the empire into an argument about what Mexican liberalism was and who owned it. And it produced the founding myth of the modern Mexican state — the republic saved by Benito Juárez, the foreign prince shot at Querétaro — a story that is still taught in schools, printed on banknotes and celebrated every 5 May.

The empire is often described as a French puppet state, and that is half true and half misleading. The French army made it possible and French money kept it alive; French commanders retained military command in any garrison that was not exclusively Mexican, and French officials collected the customs revenue against the debt. But the monarchy was also the project of a Mexican party that had been arguing for a European prince since 1840, when José María Gutiérrez de Estrada published a pamphlet urging exactly this solution to the country's instability. What failed in 1867 was not only a French expedition. It was a Mexican political programme, and that is why the execution at Querétaro was aimed at a Mexican argument as much as at a Habsburg prince.

At a glance

How did a debt dispute become a foreign war?

The war began as a collection case. On 17 July 1861 the Mexican congress, at Juárez's request, suspended payment of the foreign debt for two years. Mexico owed money to British bondholders, Spanish creditors and French holders of the Jecker bonds, a Swiss banker's paper issued to fund the conservative government during the Reform War and repudiated by the liberals as fraudulent. Britain, France and Spain signed the Convention of London on 31 October 1861, agreeing to occupy the customs houses at Veracruz until they were paid. Spanish troops landed in December; British and French squadrons arrived in January 1862.

The coalition came apart within weeks, and the way it came apart is the first thing to understand about the empire. The Mexican foreign minister, Manuel Doblado, met the allied commanders at Soledad in February 1862 and persuaded the British and Spanish that the suspension was temporary and that Mexico would honour its debts. Both withdrew. The French did not, because the debt was never the whole of Napoleon III's interest. In Paris the Mexican adventure was being sold as something larger: a Latin and Catholic empire in America to balance the United States, a market for French manufactures, a source of silver and cotton, and a check on the Protestant republic that was then tearing itself apart in its own civil war. The Jecker claims gave the enterprise a legal instrument; the American Civil War gave it a window.

The military campaign then went wrong in a way that fixed French policy for five years. On 5 May 1862, at Puebla, a French force of about 6,500 under Charles de Lorencez attacked a fortified position held by roughly 4,500 Mexicans under Ignacio Zaragoza and was thrown back with heavy losses. The defeat was not decisive — the French retreated to Orizaba and waited — but it became the founding symbol of Mexican national identity, and it obliged Napoleon to send a much larger army. A reinforcement of some 26,000 men under Élie-Frédéric Forey landed in September 1862. Puebla was invested in March 1863 and capitulated on 17 May; Mexico City was occupied on 10 June, and Juárez's federal republic abandoned the capital and retreated north, eventually to Chihuahua and then to El Paso del Norte on the American border.

That retreat is the central fact of the war's next four years. The republic lost its capital but not its government, its treasury, its army or its claim to legitimacy. It kept a functioning administration in the north, kept the loyalty of most of the state governors, and kept the ability to raise taxes and troops. A monarchy that controlled the centre and the ports had to fight a government that controlled the periphery — and in a country of mountains and bad roads, that is the wrong way round.

Who invited a Habsburg, and how was the invitation made?

The monarchy had a Mexican precedent. The First Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide had been crowned in 1822 and shot in 1824, and for forty years afterwards the memory of that failure had been the strongest argument the republicans had. This time the monarch would be a European prince with a European army. Forey issued a decree on 16 June 1863 creating a Junta Superior de Gobierno and an Assembly of Notables, and the assembly was installed in Mexico City on 8 July with 215 members — clergy, landowners, merchants, lawyers, officers and officials, chosen by the French commander and the Mexican regency. Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, the regent, told them that the nation had gone from abyss to abyss under one constitution after another and that they had been called to decide its destiny for good; Teodosio Lares replied that Mexico had tried seven constitutions, organic bases and statutes, and had fallen into an eighth, that of 1857.

On 10 and 11 July 1863 the assembly resolved that the nation should adopt a moderate hereditary monarchy and named Maximilian of Austria as emperor. A deputation carried the offer to Miramar, his castle near Trieste, in October 1863, where Gutiérrez de Estrada addressed him as the answer to half a century of misery. Maximilian did not accept at once. He spent the winter asking questions — about the terms of French support, about the crown's finances, about whether the Mexican nation had really spoken — and sent agents to Mexico to test opinion. What they reported was mixed, and he knew it.

The ratification published in the official gazette on 10 April 1864 is the document that the empire's defenders and its critics have argued over ever since. It declares that the vote of the notables had been ratified by the enthusiastic adhesion of the immense majority of the country, of the municipal authorities and of the popular corporations, and that the decision was therefore a truly national vote, by its moral weight and by its numerical value. No universal male suffrage, no secret ballot and no neutral supervision stood behind that claim. Municipal councils under French guns produced addresses of adhesion; the liberal press was closed; the men who would have voted no were in the field with Juárez. The empire was not a plebiscitary dictatorship — it never held a plebiscite — but it was a regime whose founding mandate was manufactured in the prefectures.

The invitation did have real content. Mexican monarchists had been at this since the 1840s; the Church had lost its corporate property and its courts to the Reform laws and wanted them back; army officers wanted the privileges the Reform had abolished; and a substantial administrative class wanted order, foreign capital and railways. These people were not French. The tragedy of the empire is that the ally they chose could not deliver what they wanted, and the prince they chose did not believe what they believed.

What did Maximilian sign at Miramar?

On 9 April 1864 Maximilian signed a family pact with his brother renouncing his rights in the Austrian succession and his rank as an archduke. On 10 April he signed the Convention of Miramar with Napoleon's plenipotentiary, Charles Herbert, and his own minister, Joaquín Velázquez de León. Then he accepted the crown. The order matters: he gave up Austria before he had a Mexican army, and he accepted a throne whose military foundation was a foreign corps under foreign command.

The convention's terms were harsher than the version that circulates in popular accounts. The French troops in Mexico were to be reduced as quickly as possible to 25,000 men, including the Foreign Legion. They would evacuate as the emperor organised replacements. The Legion, 8,000 strong, would stay six years after the rest had gone — and would then pass into Mexican service and Mexican pay. Mexico would repay the costs of the expedition to 1 July 1864, fixed at 270 million francs, with interest at 3 per cent; would pay 1,000 francs a year for every French soldier remaining; would hand over 66 million francs in loan bonds immediately; and would pay 25 million francs a year in cash against the arrears. French commanders kept military command wherever the garrison was not exclusively Mexican, and French ships were to show the flag in Mexican ports.

The secret articles contained the schedule that everyone later forgot. The French force, then 38,000 effectives, would be reduced only gradually: to 28,000 in 1865, 25,000 in 1866 and 20,000 in 1867. The promise that "whatever events may occur in Europe, the new empire will never lack the help of France" was a formula, not a guarantee, and it was the formula Maximilian trusted. The claim that France promised 20,000 men for six years conflates the Legion's six-year term with the army's three-year drawdown. What France actually promised was a declining garrison and an open-ended obligation it had no intention of honouring.

Maximilian understood the risk and signed anyway. He had wanted a European guarantee, a loan and a Mexican army; he got a schedule, a debt and a French commander-in-chief. The empire's finances were compromised at birth: the customs houses were pledged against the indemnity, the new loans were raised in Paris at a discount, and the Mexican treasury was expected to pay a foreign army more than its own receipts could bear. Maximilian spent the next three years asking Napoleon for relief from terms he had accepted in writing.

What kind of state did the empire build?

The empire's constitution was the Estatuto Provisional del Imperio Mexicano, decreed at Chapultepec on 10 April 1865, a year to the day after Miramar. It was a monarchical administrative statute, not a constitution: it described how the emperor would govern, not what he could not do. Article 5 gave him nine ministries; Article 6 gave him a Council of State to consult on legislation; Article 52 divided the country into eight great military divisions, fifty departments, districts and municipalities. Prefects, appointed by the emperor, administered the departments with a departmental council composed of the senior judge, the tax administrator, a landowner, a merchant and a miner or manufacturer. Imperial commissioners and inspectors toured the divisions to hear complaints and correct abuses.

The machinery was serious, and much of it outlived the empire. The Estatuto created a tribunal of accounts with judicial authority, a hierarchy of prefects and sub-prefects, and a title of individual guarantees that listed the rights of inhabitants — with an article allowing them to be suspended where martial law was declared. It promised a definitive constitution and an elected congress. Neither came. The empire governed by decree for its whole life, and its one attempt to summon a national congress, in 1866, was a gesture of a government that had already lost the argument.

The court was the visible face of the regime, and it was expensive. Chapultepec was rebuilt and furnished as an imperial residence, with a household, a guard, a theatre, balls and a ceremonial calendar copied from Vienna and Brussels. Maximilian revived the Order of Guadalupe, created a Mexican nobility of sorts, and spent money on the ceremonial that a monarchy needs and a bankrupt state cannot afford. His own tastes ran to natural history, botany and the drawings he made of Mexican plants and birds; he was, by temperament, a curator rather than a conqueror. Contemporaries noticed. The court was gracious, cultivated, and irrelevant to the war.

The economic programme was the most consequential part of the imperial state. A decree of 2 January 1864 granted a privilege for a Bank of Mexico to Michel Heine and a group of French financiers, with note issue and a monopoly of government banking. The colonisation law of 5 and 6 September 1865 opened Mexico to emigration from all nations, with land, security of property and exemptions for settlers — a measure aimed at Europeans and, as the American war ended, at ex-Confederate soldiers who were known to be looking for somewhere to go. Railway concessions, telegraph lines, a public instruction law and a programme of road building followed. Almost none of it was built, but the programme is the bridge between the empire and the Porfiriato: the same vision of foreign capital, immigration, railways and export agriculture that Porfirio Díaz would carry out thirty years later.

Why did the emperor quarrel with the Church that had invited him?

Because he was a liberal, and because he meant it. The Mexican Church had been the empire's most committed sponsor: bishops had preached the monarchy, the clergy had financed regiments, and the papacy had blessed the venture. What the Church expected in return was the restoration of the corporate property, the tithe and the ecclesiastical courts abolished by the Reform laws of 1859–61. What it got, within a year, was an emperor who proposed to keep the property sales and compensate the Church for them.

The letter Maximilian wrote to his minister Pedro Escudero y Echánove on 27 December 1864 is the clearest statement of his position. He had been negotiating with the Holy See, he wrote, but the papal nuncio had arrived in Mexico without instructions to negotiate. The situation could not wait. He therefore asked for a plan that would guarantee the legitimate interests created by the so-called Reform laws, ratify the sales of church property made without fraud, provide for the maintenance of worship, and ensure that the sacraments were administered free of charge throughout the empire — while never losing sight of the fact that the religion of the State was the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion. In other words: the confiscations would stand, the Church would be compensated, and the state would keep control of the settlement.

The nuncio, Francesco Meglia, had been instructed to demand the restoration of church property and the repeal of the Reform, and he refused to negotiate on any other basis. A concordat was drafted and abandoned. In 1865 the empire decreed religious toleration, which the curia regarded as an affront, and the clergy began to withdraw the support it had given so lavishly in 1863. Parishes that had preached for Maximilian now preached against a government that protected Protestant worship and upheld the sale of convent lands.

The quarrel cost the empire more than any battle. The Church was the only institution in Mexico with a nationwide organisation, its own revenue, and moral authority in every village. Having mobilised it for the monarchy, Maximilian alienated it within eighteen months, and he did so for a policy that never won him a single liberal convert — the liberals regarded him as a usurper whatever he decreed, and the conservatives began to regard him as a traitor. The best recent work on the empire has made this its central argument: the imperial project failed not because it was foreign but because it tried to be liberal in a country where liberalism already had an owner.

What did the empire do for labourers, peasants and Indians?

More than is usually allowed, and less than its decrees promised. On 10 April 1865, the day of the Estatuto, Maximilian created a Junta Protectora de las Clases Menesterosas under the interior ministry, with five members empowered to receive complaints from the poor and propose remedies, and to demand reports directly from the prefects. It was a paternalist institution with no enforcement power, but it was also an open channel that had not existed before.

The labour decree of 1 November 1865 went further than any Mexican statute had gone. Farm workers were declared free to leave an estate at any time if they owed nothing, or on paying what they owed in cash. The working day ran from sunrise to sunset with two hours off for meals. Work on Sundays and public holidays was forbidden. Children under twelve could be employed only half a day, and only at light tasks. Wages had to be paid in coin, not in goods, and the estate shop could not be made compulsory. Debts contracted to the estate or its shop could not be recovered in court, and debts above ten pesos contracted in the shop were void. The cepo, the stocks, the tlapixquera and flogging were abolished, along with corporal punishment in general. Every estate had to supply water and housing and keep a stamped wage book for each worker. Any estate with more than twenty resident families had to maintain a free school.

The same day produced a second decree on land and water, which is less often noticed. Disputes between villages and private landowners over land or water were to go first to the political prefecture, then to a departmental council chaired by the prefect, which would decide whether a village had enough of a case to be allowed to litigate at all; appeals went to the interior ministry, and the ministry's decision was final. Villages could sue landowners only with a licence from the council, and were given a state-appointed lawyer when they did. The intention was to protect communities from ruinous litigation and from the collusion of local courts. The effect was to move the decision from judges to prefects — better for a village with a friend in the prefecture, worse for one without.

None of this transformed rural Mexico, and the reasons are worth stating plainly. The war made enforcement impossible in most of the country; the imperial treasury could not pay the inspectors the decrees required; and the government simultaneously upheld the disentailment of corporate property, which was dissolving the very communal landholdings the land decree was meant to protect. Maximilian's Indian policy, which his proclamations described in the romantic language of the noble savage, produced commissions, prizes and decrees rather than secure tenure. The measures matter as evidence of intent, and as precedent: the labour code of 1865 anticipated provisions that Mexican legislators would enact decades later.

How was the war actually fought?

As a French war of positions against a Mexican war of movement. French troops held the cities, the ports, the fortified lines of communication and the custom houses, and could march almost anywhere in a column; they could not be everywhere at once, and every column that left a district left it to the republicans. The imperial Mexican army garrisoned what the French did not, and its quality varied from disciplined battalions to armed levies. Juárez's forces held the north, the sierras and much of the south, taxed what they held, and avoided the set-piece battle the French wanted.

The foreign contingents are part of the story and are often left out of it. Alongside the French army — 38,493 men sent over the whole expedition and, by one tabulation of the returns, 6,654 dead of wounds or disease — served the Foreign Legion, a Belgian legion raised with King Leopold's encouragement, several thousand Austrian and Hungarian volunteers, and a battalion of some 450 Egyptian troops sent by the Khedive in 1863. These units fought well and suffered disproportionately, and their presence made the empire look, to Mexican eyes, exactly like what its enemies said it was: a foreign occupation with a Mexican façade. When a Belgian detachment was destroyed at Tacámbaro in April 1865, the news in Europe did the empire more harm than a lost battle at home.

Against the guerrillas the French developed the contraguerrilla: small mounted columns of French soldiers and local guides operating without baggage, hunting bands, and answering terror with terror. The imperial government added its own response on 2 and 3 October 1865, in the decree that Mexico remembers as the Ley Negra, the Black Decree. Its manifesto announced that the struggle was now only between the honourable men of the nation and the gangs of criminals and bandits, and that the government's indulgence was at an end. The decree itself was more sweeping than the rhetoric.

Article 1 provided that anyone belonging to an armed band not legally authorised, whatever political pretext it claimed, whatever its size or organisation, would be tried by court martial, and if convicted — even of nothing more than belonging to the band — would suffer death, to be carried out within twenty-four hours of sentence. Article 2 allowed the commander who made the arrest to hold a verbal inquiry, hear the accused, and have him shot within twenty-four hours. Article 5 extended capital punishment to those who gave the guerrillas money, information, arms, horses or food. Article 13 forbade any petition for pardon. Article 14 offered an amnesty to anyone who presented himself before 15 November 1865. The decree made membership a capital crime and removed the two things that had previously restrained military justice: a real trial and the possibility of mercy.

The Black Decree is defended by the empire's apologists as a response to a war in which both sides shot prisoners, and there is something in that. Juárez's government had issued its own decree in January 1862 threatening death for those who aided the intervention, and a further decree in 1863 declaring traitors of those who served it. But there is a difference between a law against treason and a law that makes belonging to an armed group a capital offence to be established by a verbal inquiry on the spot, and contemporaries saw it. The decree was denounced in the Mexican and foreign press, cited by Maximilian's enemies in Europe for decades, and used against him at his trial.

Why did Washington's opinion decide the outcome?

Because the United States never recognised the empire and never had to fire a shot to say so. Washington treated Juárez's government as the only lawful authority in Mexico throughout the empire's existence, received its envoys, allowed it to buy arms and munitions, and refused the empire even de facto recognition. The Monroe Doctrine was not a treaty and had no army behind it while the Civil War lasted; once the war ended in April 1865, both became available.

The diplomatic record is precise about what the United States wanted and what it did. On 6 December 1865 William Seward replied to the French minister in Washington, the Marquis de Montholon, who had asked whether France could withdraw without fear of American action. Seward refused the assurance and explained the objection: it was not the presence of a foreign army as such, but that the French army had invaded Mexico to overthrow a republican government that the United States regarded as sympathetic, and to replace it with a monarchy which, for as long as it existed, would be taken as a threat to the American republic itself. He invited France to withdraw its troops within a reasonable term and to let Mexicans enjoy the government they had chosen.

At the same time the United States made its weight felt on the ground. Some fifty thousand troops under Philip Sheridan were concentrated on the Rio Grande, ostensibly to police the border and to disband Confederate forces; arms, ammunition and surplus war material crossed the river to the republicans; and veteran volunteers from the Union army enlisted on the Mexican side. Washington also pressed Vienna to stop the flow of Austrian volunteers, and pressed Paris for a date. The result was the arrangement of April 1866 which President Andrew Johnson described to Congress in December: a phased French withdrawal in three stages, with the last troops out by November 1867, after which France would adopt the same policy of non-intervention towards Mexico as the United States.

That arrangement, not a threat of war, is what ended the French presence. The United States did not invade, did not blockade and did not break relations; it made the French position untenable by refusing to guarantee it, and it made the republican cause viable by letting it buy rifles. When the end came, Washington asked for mercy rather than victory: on 6 April 1867 Seward instructed the new American minister, Lewis Campbell, to tell Juárez that the United States hoped the prince and his followers would receive the treatment that civilised nations concede to prisoners of war.

Why did Napoleon III abandon his own empire?

Money, first. The Mexican expedition had been sold to the French public as a cheap and profitable affair, and it had become neither. The Miramar convention loaded the Mexican treasury with an indemnity it could not pay, which meant that French troops were financing themselves from customs houses that produced less every year the war went on. By 1866 the emperor was being told by his own finance ministry that the expedition could not be sustained, and the Mexican bondholders in Paris were discovering that their paper was worth what a Mexican treasury in the middle of a civil war could pay.

Europe, second. Napoleon's Mexican adventure depended on a quiet continent, and by 1866 the continent was not quiet. The Prussian challenge to Austria was moving towards the war that would end with the dual monarchy of 1867, the French army was needed at home, and the emperor's domestic opposition — republicans, Catholics scandalised by the treatment of the Mexican Church, liberals hostile to an adventure run for the Church's benefit — had found a common language of criticism. The decision to withdraw was taken in January 1866, months before the Prussian victory at Königgrätz in July made the need for troops in Europe obvious. The German crisis confirmed a decision that had already been made, and the myth that Prussia saved the Mexican republic gives Berlin too much credit.

The correspondence between the two emperors in August 1866 is the empire's death warrant, and it is worth reading as a lesson in how a great power ends a client relationship. Napoleon wrote to Maximilian on 29 August that he had received the empress with pleasure but could not grant what she asked: from that point on, he said, it would be impossible for him to give Mexico a single piastre or a single man more. He then asked the question that decided the empire — could Maximilian hold on by himself, or would he be forced to abdicate? If the first, French troops would stay as agreed until 1867; if the second, Maximilian should publish a manifesto explaining the insuperable obstacles and use the presence of the French army to summon a national representation and choose a stable government. Maximilian replied that Napoleon was breaking treaties signed two years before, that he would not make himself the cause of danger to the emperor or his dynasty, and that he asked France to withdraw its forces from the American continent at once; for his own part, guided by honour, he would deal with his compatriots in a manner worthy of a Habsburg.

Carlota had gone to Europe to prevent exactly this. She left Mexico in July 1866 with a memorandum she had drafted for Napoleon, arguing that the empire was a French interest, a Catholic cause and a Mexican necessity; she saw the emperor at Saint-Cloud on 11 August and got nothing. From Paris she went to Rome, where the pope received her but would not grant what she asked, and in the autumn of 1866 she collapsed. She never recovered. She lived, in seclusion in Belgium, until January 1927, long enough to see the Mexican revolution, the Second World War and the empire she had ruled for three years become a subject for historians.

Maximilian's own last chance to leave came in the autumn. He moved his government to Orizaba in October, spoke of abdication, and on 25 November 1866 put the question to a council of his ministers, who voted narrowly to continue the war. He returned to the capital, summoned a congress that never met, and prepared to fight with the army the empire had managed to raise — some 9,000 men at Querétaro, with 39 guns, a few hundred French soldiers who had stayed, and generals who had been fighting since 1862.

How did the empire end in 1867?

The end was quick once the French left. The last French troops embarked at Veracruz in February 1867, Bazaine among them, and the imperial army's line of communication to the coast went with them. Maximilian left Mexico City on 13 February with 1,600 men, twelve guns and 50,000 pesos, and entered Querétaro on 19 February, where he was received with enthusiasm by Miramón and the other generals. The republicans under Mariano Escobedo came into view on 5 March, and the siege began on 6 March.

The defence was gallant and badly managed. Miramón, the best soldier the empire had, led sorties and counter-attacks that cost the besiegers dearly — 2,000 dead in one assault, according to the accounts — but the imperial command wasted its chances in councils of war, and Leonardo Márquez, sent out on 22 March with 1,200 horsemen to bring reinforcements from Mexico City, never came back. By May the garrison was eating its horses. On the night of 14 May, Colonel Miguel López opened the gates of the city to Escobedo's troops. By the morning of 15 May it was over, and Maximilian, Miramón and Tomás Mejía were prisoners.

The trial was short and, in form, legal. A court martial under Colonel Rafael Platón Sánchez opened at the Teatro Iturbide in Querétaro on 13 June. The charges were conspiracy against the government, treason and usurpation, together with the Black Decree, which the prosecution treated as evidence that the accused had made war on the Mexican people rather than governing them. Maximilian's counsel, Mariano Riva Palacio and Rafael Martínez de la Torre, argued that the empire had been a legitimate government recognised by foreign powers, that their client had been invited by a Mexican assembly, and that a head of state could not be tried by a military court for acts of government. The court convicted him, according to the accounts that survive, within a day.

Then came the appeals, which are the part of the story that Mexican memory has found hardest to accommodate. Riva Palacio wrote to Juárez on 16 June acknowledging that the sentence had been confirmed and asking only for the pardon. The death of Maximilian, he argued, would never cause a domestic upheaval, but it would isolate Mexico in Europe and give the neighbouring nation a grievance. Seward asked for humane treatment; the Austrian, British and Belgian governments asked for clemency; the princesses of Europe wrote; the American press debated it. Juárez refused. His public argument was that the law of 25 January 1862 and the decree of 1863 applied to everyone, that the empire had been an armed invasion and not a government, and that a pardon would tell Europe that intervention could be redeemed by a change of heart. The refusal was deliberate enough to be defended in print. The Manifiesto justificativo de los castigos nacionales en Querétaro, published in 1867 and reprinted in Guadalajara in 1879, argued that the case had been heard by a lawful military tribunal, that the law of treason did not distinguish the principal from his accomplices, and that Europe and the United States had done the same with rebels and usurpers — Murat, Iturbide, López, Walker and the men hanged with Booth's conspirators.

At 6.40 on the morning of 19 June 1867, on the Cerro de las Campanas outside Querétaro, Maximilian was shot with Miramón and Mejía. He spoke in Spanish, gave a gold coin to each man in the firing squad, and asked that his blood end the bloodshed. The body was embalmed and displayed, photographed, and eventually carried to Austria aboard the frigate Novara; it was placed in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna on 18 January 1868. Mexico City fell to Porfirio Díaz two days after the execution, on 21 June. Juárez entered the capital on 15 July, and the Restored Republic began.

What did the execution settle?

It settled that Mexico would be a republic, and it settled it in the hardest available way. The monarchy had been the programme of a real party, with a real social base, for thirty years; after 19 June 1867 no Mexican politician of any consequence proposed a European prince again, and the conservative party never recovered its old confidence. Mexican monarchism, as a political force rather than a nostalgia, died at Querétaro.

It settled less than it seemed to about Juárez. His constitutional position had been dubious since 1865, when his term expired and he continued to govern under emergency powers granted by congress before it dispersed; his rival Jesús González Ortega claimed the presidency, and the dispute was still alive in 1867. The execution gave Juárez the moral authority to close that argument, and the Restored Republic elected him again in 1867. But it also made him a figure of European execration: the French and Austrian press called him a murderer, and conservative circles in Mexico and abroad kept the accusation alive for decades. Not everyone in Europe agreed — Victor Hugo wrote to Juárez from Hauteville House on 20 June 1867 to tell him that he had equalled John Brown, that Mexico had been saved by a principle and a man, and that every monarchical attempt ended as this one had, beginning at Puebla and finishing at Querétaro. Mexican liberals answered with a press campaign that made the execution the founding act of the Restored Republic, and with the argument that a government which pardoned an invading prince would be inviting the next one.

It settled nothing about the programme. Railways, foreign capital, immigration, export agriculture, a professional army, a secular state that kept the Church out of politics: every item on the imperial agenda reappeared under Porfirio Díaz after 1876, and several of the empire's administrative instruments — the departmental structure, the prefectural system, the statistical office — survived into the republic. The men who had served Maximilian were not purged en masse; they became governors, engineers, deputies and, in some cases, Porfirian ministers. The empire was defeated, but the state it had tried to build was not.

The human costs were not settled either. The war had killed, by one tabulation of the French returns, some 6,650 French soldiers, and the Mexican dead — soldiers on both sides, guerrillas, civilians caught in the counter-insurgency, and the men shot under the Black Decree — were never counted. The foreign volunteers who had come to fight for the empire were stranded, some of them settling in Mexico, others repatriated by a French government anxious to be rid of them. The Egyptian battalion went home. The Legion went back to France, its Mexican service remembered as the expedition's most bitter chapter.

How is the empire remembered in Mexico?

As the great national crime and the great national deliverance, which are the same event seen from two sides. The official memory is the one built into the calendar and the schoolbooks: 5 May, the day of Puebla, is a national commemoration; Juárez is Benemérito de las Américas; the Niños Héroes, the cadets who died at Chapultepec in 1847, share the pantheon with Zaragoza and Escobedo. In that story the empire is an interruption, a foreign episode with a Mexican cast of collaborators, and Maximilian is a well-meaning foreigner manipulated by a reactionary party — an object of pity at best, never of sympathy.

The physical memory is everywhere. Chapultepec Castle, which Maximilian rebuilt as an imperial residence, is now the Museo Nacional de Historia, and visitors walk through his rooms to reach the rooms of the revolution. The Teatro Iturbide in Querétaro, where the court martial sat, is the Teatro de la República, where the constitution of 1917 was drafted. The Cerro de las Campanas is a park with a chapel and a monument, and the spot where the emperor fell is marked. In Vienna, the Habsburgs buried their Mexican emperor in the Kapuzinergruft with the rest of the dynasty, which is either a family's loyalty or a state's embarrassment depending on who is telling it.

The historiography has moved, and this is the most interesting part of the legacy. Mexican liberal history wrote the empire as treason, and the account was moral before it was analytical. From the 1970s, and much more intensively since the 1990s, Mexican and foreign historians have begun to study the empire as a state: its finances, its legal culture, the petitions it received, its police, its treatment of indigenous communities, its ceremonial. What emerged is a regime that was neither a puppet nor a national government, but a coalition project with a genuine administrative programme, destroyed by a war it could not win and by an emperor who would not be the conservative the coalition had paid for.

The popular memory has moved less. Maximilian remains a figure of romance in Europe — the tragic archduke, the beautiful empress who went mad, the castle at Miramar — and a figure of derision in Mexico, where "Maximiliano" is still a byword for a foreign imposition and where the Black Decree is remembered as the regime's true signature. Neither image is quite right. The emperor was a competent administrator and a poor politician who signed a bad contract and then honoured it; the empire was a Mexican party's last chance, and its failure closed a question that had been open since the Spanish Empire fell in 1821.

Common myths about the Second Mexican Empire

Timeline of the Second Mexican Empire

What the map shows next

At 1865 on the map the empire is at its widest on this map, and the map flatters it: the departments of the Estatuto are drawn as a single territory, while the war is being fought in Oaxaca, in the sierras and along the northern frontier, and Juárez's government is still collecting taxes in Chihuahua. The Black Decree and the labour code belong to this year, and so does the last serious imperial offensive.

At 1866 on the map the French line from Veracruz to the capital is still open, but the withdrawal has been agreed and the imperial army is being asked to hold alone. At 1867 on the map the territory is drawn for the last time: the empire is reduced to Querétaro and a few garrisons, and the republic that follows it — the restored federal state of 1867 — takes its place on the map and keeps it.