Habsburgs on the Rio Grande joins a long tradition of works about the tragic political experiment Archduke Maximilian of Austria embarked upon in Mexico between 1864 and 1867. The story is well known. After three years of civil war, liberal President Benito Juárez declared a moratorium on foreign payments, leading to a military intervention by England, Spain, and France under the pretext of collecting debts by seizing customs duties. Showing that he had a much larger project in mind, French Emperor Napoleon III ignored the agreements that his two allies made with President Juárez and instead ordered his army to march into the country’s interior, being stopped by Mexican forces outside the city of Puebla on May 5, 1862. A year later, and with a much greater force, French troops managed to occupy the capital and install a provisional government backed by Mexican conservatives, after which an “Assembly of Notables” offered the Mexican crown to the Habsburg prince, who gladly accepted the invitation in April 1864. Heading a government crippled by debt, drowning in courtly expenses, and mainly sustained by French bayonets, Emperor Maximilian stayed in power less than three years, ending up abandoned by the French army and facing a firing squad in the Hill of Bells on June 19, 1867. As Raymond Jonas claims, the Second Empire had been an “ill-conceived farce” that only “prolonged Mexico’s agony for five years” (270).

What is noteworthy in this new account of Mexico’s favorite nineteenth-century tragedy? Like a growing number of historians (many of them specialists in the US Civil War), Jonas aims to reinterpret this episode of Mexican history in light of global trends and transnational interactions. He rightly points out, however, that presenting the Mexican Empire as part of “an epic struggle between democracy and autocracy” distracts from the actual elephant in the room. The best way to understand France’s costly intervention, the enthusiasm of thousands of Europeans with this enterprise (including Maximilian), and the reckless political gamble of Mexican conservatives is to take into account the “globally destabilizing effect of US encroachment under the guise of Manifest Destiny.” Indeed, if there was something that all these actors shared in common, it was an “astonishment at unrelenting US expansion,” especially after the annexation of almost half of Mexico in 1848 (5). Thus, for Jonas, the central irony of Napoleon III and Maximilian’s enterprise lies in its anti-imperial character. Misled by Mexican conservatives who grossly overestimated the level of popular support for a European intervention, the promoters of this strange empire cast themselves as nothing less than the liberators of a Catholic and Latin nation besieged by an arrogant “Robber Republic,” which by happy coincidence was consumed by turmoil due to the secession of slave states after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 (the author should have explained why France opted for enabling such a tortuous project south of the Rio Grande instead of openly supporting the Confederacy during the US Civil War, but the general argument holds water).

Clearly, this is a book that accentuates the European context and the international actors that took part in the farcical Mexican Empire. Some of its best chapters deal with the intricate diplomatic negotiations that led to Maximilian’s adventure, or the European justification of a foreign-supported monarchy in an era of liberal nationalism. Jonas notes, for instance, that many volunteers who joined the French expedition thought of themselves not as colonial conquerors, but as heirs of the French revolutionary tradition of exporting freedom—by force if necessary—to reluctant countries oppressed by tyrannical rulers. Following the steps of Jean Meyer’s Yo, el francés (2002), Jonas offers a compelling analysis of the motives (and false illusions) of the thousands of European recruits who cast their lot with Maximilian, showing that they not only came from France but from Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Bavaria, Denmark, Switzerland, and Great Britain. He adds to this list the Confederate refugees (mostly from Texas, Missouri, and Mississippi) who saw in the Empire an opportunity to recreate the Southern plantation economy, in this case through a colonization law that authorized exploitative bondage labor to repay a debt or obligation.

If the international dimensions of the Mexican Empire are well-covered in the book, the same cannot be said about the domestic side of this story. Jonas seems to agree with Spanish general Juan Prim’s assessment of Mexico in 1862: the country lacked a hereditary nobility, “monarchist sentiments were rare in Mexico,” and republicanism remained strong (34). This is correct, but it overlooks the fact that the country had been engulfed in civil war over a broad range of issues on which there was no consensus, and that no one was certain about the very survival of the triumphant liberal government in 1861. As Jonas realizes, neither Maximilian nor President Juárez—who had to establish his residence in a dusty town along the US-Mexico border—was able to fully control the national territory, which attests to the profound weakness of any political party at the time. The author could have benefited from a deeper engagement with the abundant Spanish-language historiography on the Reforma and the Second Empire, particularly from the works of Erika Pani, who has shown that Mexican imperialistas were a heterogeneous cadre integrated not only by reactionaries but mainly by moderate liberals who believed that an enlightened constitutional monarchy could serve as a more solid foundation for the country’s economic development. Likewise, the author’s reading of the church-state conflict (and of the failure of Maximilian in negotiating a concordat) does not properly convey the magnitude and complexity of the issues at stake, which had been fought over in Mexico since the 1820s. Jonas is right in criticizing Maximilian for ignoring Mexican reality and letting himself be carried away by monarchist fantasies, but this book will not explain to the reader how complex Mexico really was.