In his account of the international intervention that led to the creation of the short-lived Second Mexican Empire of the 1860s, Raymond Jonas paints a vivid new rendition of imperial overreach from many different perspectives. The misfortune of the “Mexican adventure” for Franz Joseph’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (thereafter styled as Maximilian I, emperor of Mexico), and his consort Charlotte of Belgium is often portrayed as a tragicomical farce of stupendous geopolitical miscalculation then and now—Karl Marx irreverently referred to the scheme to establish a European figurehead in Mexico as “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.” Likewise, Franz Werfel famously made good use of Maximilian’s rise and fall in a play later dramatized for American and Mexican cinema audiences. His defeat in January 1867, mere years after the initially successful French-led invasion of Republican Mexico in 1861, cemented the fateful tragedy among international onlookers. Maximilian’s ignominious end following a performative court-martial (which he did not attend) and then via summary execution by firing squad (which he did attend) alongside his defeated generals, Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía, at the Hill of the Bells (Cerro de las Campanas) near Querétaro, captured the essence of the ill-fated enterprise. Édouard Manet’s well-known depiction of the three men at the moment of expiration further resounded Maximilian’s downfall as a republican repudiation of monarchy in the Americas. For the US government, it supposedly solidified their hegemony on the continent that had temporarily lapsed due to the vicissitudes of civil war; for European onlookers, such as the Italian unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi and French novelist Victor Hugo (who both called on the victorious Mexican President Benito Juárez to show Maximilian clemency), such events inspired dejection, even anger. The Austrian government broke off relations with the Mexican regime over Maximilian’s capital punishment as an insurrectionist and staged a public funeral procession for his poorly preserved corpse to the traditional Capuchin crypt in Vienna.

The storied account of Maximilian’s Mexico is so rich that its various complexities and components defy easy categorization or unbiased explanation. Indeed, the first pro-imperialist histories of the Second Empire appeared almost immediately after its demise, before Maximilian’s body had even been interred in the family vault (Juan Antonio Mateos, El cerro de las campanas: memorias de un guerrillero, novela histórica [Mexico City, 1868]). There is the French ambition (largely of Emperor Napoleon III) to reassert European imperialism in the Americas; the dream of Mexican conservatives to finally rid themselves of republicanism; Confederate Americans finding an alternative to the Union; British investors seeking a return; thrill-seeking youth on a military escapade; and, at its heart, a Habsburg princeling who yearned for greatness as the wholehearted but naive leader of his Mexican people. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande, Jonas presents all of these qualities with striking ease and comprehensiveness. For each aspect, there are several illustrative characters in this book: an English parish priest as the unassuming investor whose finances are snared in a moment of political upheaval (26–27); a talented officer and oceanographer who sought to transform Maximilian’s Mexico into a new home for his fellow American Confederates (1–2); a lovesick Hungarian volunteer who barely survives the cause he enlisted for (153); and naturally Archduke Maximilian, a nobleman always “capable of magical thinking” (234) up until the very end. It is this variety and interwoven nature of this monograph that speaks to the essence of the subject, and here Jonas performs a particular feat in his deft storytelling. His treatment of Maximilian, though occasionally acknowledging the archduke’s own pretentious and lofty personality (81–84), is rather more grounded than previous scholarly accounts, particularly Maximilian’s first scholarly biographer Egon Caesar Corti who portrayed him as a person of extremes, at all times gullible and overbearing (Egon Caesar Corti [Conte alle Catene], Maximilian und Charlotte von Mexiko, 2 vols. [Vienna, 1924]). Instead, Jonas gives us a more mature image of the archduke-cum-emperor, taken on the sovereign’s own terms, as a man of conviction who truly believed in the scheme with which he had been entrusted, demonstrated through his actions to build internal coalitions and defy the French puppet strings slung over him (132–34). Jonas reminds that it was Maximilian’s belief that he had become a true Mexican that ultimately led to his untimely demise when he could have escaped but preferred to remain, thinking that he could not be tried like a foreign usurper (230–31). He also liked to catch butterflies (201).

Although Maximilian and the cast of characters that filled his new court are at the center, Jonas sees the analytical meaning of the Second Mexican Empire elsewhere. For him, the Mexican intervention is not necessarily the familiar story of a duped monarch and a failed exercise in state building. The significance of this episode of Mexican history lies, according to Jonas, rather more in its global context as a bump on the road toward the US hegemony of the twentieth century. “The story of the Mexican Empire,” he argues, “is rooted in Mexican dismay and European astonishment at unrelenting US expansion” (5). It is the US perspective that should reorientate us; hence the ominous title Habsburgs [are] on the Rio Grande [border!] from the perspective of the Americans to the north. And so, unraveling this episode as a moment of reaction against the previous series of US enlargements following Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from France, mostly at the expense of Spanish America and then independent Mexico in the early 1800s, leads us to view how the United States—despite being racked by internal conflict—exerted a growing influence on world affairs, at least in the western hemisphere as a “continental powerhouse” (6). Here Jonas’s arguments fit into the earlier calls of early Americanists to see the rise of US nationalism and imperialism on a continental scale.Footnote ¹ The embrace of this continental perspective generated a much-needed counterweight to the more overtly narrow perspectives offered by decades of transatlantic studies.

Seen in this light, Jonas’s history of the Second Mexican Empire holds much promise. Yet it is unfortunate that this framing and its promised analytical function is undermined in the course of the book’s narrative of fifteen chapters, which arguably becomes seduced by the various intriguing and richly researched vignettes. Instead of making good on the claim that “the Second Mexican Empire offers a unique position from which to understand the globally destabilizing effect of US encroachment under the guide of Manifest Destiny” (10), the story ends with an epilogue describing the tortuous relationship between Mexico and Austria-Hungary following the execution and the eventual erection of a memorial on the Hill of the Bells (257–70). The specter of US encroachment, its global effects, and hemispheric or continental entanglement with the Americas is missing through most of the acts in between; much like Werfel’s depiction of Juárez, it remains offstage. Sustained argument is gradually replaced by an ensemble—who, though engaging as historical figures, cannot substitute the bigger issues at stake in the empire’s example. Habsburgs on the Rio Grande is therefore an enjoyable read, written as it is in a crisp, humorous, and sensitive manner, but one that is less informative as a result.