The life and death of Maximilian, archduke of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine and emperor of the second Mexican empire, are a cautionary tale about not wanting something just because your sibling’s got one. Maximilian was 34 when a Mexican firing squad executed him at Querétaro on a cloudless June morning in 1867. He had only spent three years on his imperial throne, having finally equalled the status of his brother Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria since 1848. As Edward Shawcross’s level-headed, and at times comically absurd, blow-by-blow history shows, his fate wasn’t fair, but it was inevitable.
One virtue of Shawcross’s book is his uncovering of the non-comic aspects of Maximilian’s story, almost all involving the true villain, Napoleon III of France. Napoleon was another self-fabricated emperor (empires being the 19th-century über-brand, and being an emperor the sort of status you feel our current Prime Minister would snap up, if he could see a way to make it stick), and after Napoleon had seized power in 1851 and called himself Emperor of the French, he identified Maximilian as the perfect stooge for a Mexican adventure, a military operation ostensibly to recover unpaid debts, but in fact to invade the country and create a client state.
Serious, if swashbuckling, geopolitics were at stake: French intervention in Mexico would create a Catholic empire in Latin America that would be a bulwark against the new American republicanism (itself a kind of imperialism). On the other hand, it is hard to deny that from the late 1850s until the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, a good deal of what passed for international relations in Europe was beyond satire.
Indeed, had it turned out less bloodily, the whole saga could well be called “Carry on Max”. It begins in 1858, when, after a civil war that has left the liberals in power in Mexico, José Manuel Hidalgo y Esnaurrízar, envoy of the Mexican conservatives, bumps into Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie, in Biarritz and tells her the only way to save Mexico is to found a monarchy. Napoleon sees a chance not only to recover his debts, but control a nation fabulously rich in raw materials. Why not call it an empire and offer it to an archduke? Hidalgo suggests.
