Habsburgs on the Rio Grande

“Vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet.” —New York Times Book Review

The story of how nineteenth-century European rulers conspired with Mexican conservatives in an outlandish plan to contain the rising US colossus by establishing Old World empire on its doorstep.

The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected opportunity for political conservatives across continents. On one side were European monarchs eager to counter growing US power, which threatened their hegemony. On the other, Mexican antidemocrats needed backers to fend off the republicanism of Benito Juárez. When these two groups found each other, the Second Mexican Empire was born.

Raymond Jonas argues that the empire, often dismissed as a historical sideshow, is critical to appreciating the global effects of US power in the nineteenth century. In 1862, at the behest of Mexican reactionaries and with the initial support of Spain and Britain, Napoleon III sent French troops to Mexico. There, he installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as a ruler who could resist democracy in North America. But the French were routed at the Battle of Puebla, and republican guerrillas spent the next four years bleeding the would-be empire. After the Civil War, African American troops were dispatched to Mexico to hasten the French withdrawal.

Habsburgs on the Rio Grande fundamentally rewrites narratives of global history. Far from a footnote, the Second Mexican Empire was central to great-power struggles that set the terms of twentieth-century rivalry.