French troops occupied Mexico City in June 1863, setting up a puppet government that proclaimed Mexico an empire and called for Maximilian to rule.Īll this was a tremendous challenge to the United States and its Monroe Doctrine, which aimed to prevent European interference in Latin America. Instead of deterring Napoleon III, the defeat convinced him to send reinforcements. But much of Mexico rallied around Juárez and on May 5, 1862, the French army was defeated outside the walls of Puebla-a day that went down in history as Cinco de Mayo. Mexican political exiles in Paris portrayed the Mexican president, Benito Juárez, as a despot and claimed that Maximilian would be welcomed as a liberator. What was easy to plan in Europe proved harder to execute in the New World. Spurred on by his equally ambitious wife, Carlota, he had the additional motivation of trying to restore his family’s glory in the Americas: In 1519, Mexico was conquered for the Spanish Empire in the name of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V. But Maximilian had few prospects of power in Europe. He was the ambitious younger brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, from the illustrious Habsburg royal family. Napoleon III found an ideal candidate to occupy the throne: Ferdinand Maximilian. On April 19, some 30,000 French troops invaded Mexico to overthrow the republic and its president. Many French thinkers believed the region was naturally suited to monarchy, like the southern European Catholic nations.Ī later French president, Adolphe Thiers, called the scheme “madness without parallel since Don Quixote.” In 1862, the French fleet arrived in Mexico, under the pretense of collecting debts-but it soon became clear they had other motives. In fact, the term “Latin America” was first coined in Paris in the 1850s, and for some it was an intellectual justification for these imperialist designs. There, the emperor Napoleon III dreamed of a “Latin” sphere of influence in the New World, with France as the leading voice. The improbable story of how an Austrian archduke and a Belgian princess ended up on the throne of Mexico in the 1860s begins in France. Their hope: Lincoln’s demise would mark an end of U.S. “Here, the mood is excellent,” she wrote from Mexico City to her husband, Maximilian I, the emperor of Mexico. When Princess Carlota heard that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, she was delighted. This article is adapted from AQ ’s special report on the education crisis
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