The Second Mexican Empire (1863–7), which saw the idealistic Austrian Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg accept the Mexican Crown at the request of a Mexican conservative faction, has not received much attention from historians. It is mostly known, notes Jonas in this engagingly written study, as “the French Intervention” (an allusion to the almost 40,000 French troops who installed and propped up Maximilian’s reign)—“a parenthesis in the history of Mexico but otherwise alien to it” (5). And while the Mexican historian Erika Pani has long challenged such a dismissal in a series of influential publications, it is true that in Anglophone scholarship, the Second Mexican Empire remains somewhat of a blank.

In addressing this scholarly neglect, Jonas looks at the empire largely from the perspective of its European makers. The book’s focus is squarely on Maximilian, his wife (the Empress Charlotte), and those who accompanied or followed them from Europe. In that regard, it shares much with Edward Shawcross’s 2021 biography of Maximilian. Similar to Shawcross, Jonas presents Maximilian’s reign as an example of well-meaning but misguided and ultimately catastrophic imperial hubris. He regards traditional portraits of Maximilian “as an airhead, the inept puppet of Napoléon III” (5), to be caricatures. But file down the edge of caricature ever so slightly, and Jonas’s own Maximilian—vain, clueless, and willfully naïve—does not fit the description badly.

This book is not a biography, however, and while Maximilian is at the center of his historical narrative, Jonas’s account of the rise and fall of the second empire is more detailed and expansive—if also less nimble and coherent—than Shawcross’s elegant character study. Jonas is interested in Maximilian’s empire not merely as a personal project but also as a political and military machine. He uses army correspondence to reconstruct the major armed encounters that bookended the empire: two battles of Puebla (the first, in 1862, famously a route of the French and the second, in 1863, less famously a hard-won French success) and the siege of Querétaro that culminated in the capture—and soon the execution—of Maximilian. The author also gives us lively portraits of some of the young Europeans who enlisted in Maximilian’s Mexican enterprise as volunteer soldiers, some of them driven by “the allure of empire” (148), others economic hardship and the promise of a final reward of land.

Above all, Jonas is interested in the empire’s diplomatic relations. He argues that, for Maximilian, diplomacy was an arena not merely for pragmatic politics but also for the pursuit of a global ideological project. An heir to the Habsburg dynasty, Maximilian wished to “reconnect with the weighty legacy of Ferdinand and Isabella” (81), who, more than three and a half centuries ago, had founded the Habsburg’s global empire—an empire of which Mexico had for a while been the wealthiest, most prized overseas dominion. Maximilian thus had personal reasons to want to be Emperor of Mexico. Indeed, from a dynastic point of view, he was not the stranger to the Mexican nation that his enemies painted him to be. Reconnecting with his family’s legacy was for him a way of challenging the republicanism that, in the Americas, had emerged as an alternative to “Old-World” monarchical rule and that in Mexico, according to Maximilian’s local conservative backers, had been responsible for the disastrous loss of half the national territory in the Mexican–American War (1846-1848).

If Maximilian believed his conservative allies that republicanism was alien to Mexican culture or, indeed, Mexican popular desires, events soon proved him wrong. “The Mexican Empire,” writes Jonas, “was founded on a lie” (38)—and once the French withdrew their military support, the empire’s days were numbered. This assertion sits awkwardly with Jonas’s insistence elsewhere that we should understand the empire as a Mexican affair rather than only a foreign-imposed parenthesis in Mexican history (5, 213–4). Jonas’s ambivalence about the crucial question of what type and level of support the empire enjoyed in Mexico is, it seems to me, a symptom of his largely European source base, which allows him to provide a rich portrait of Maximilian’s reign as an imperial project but not to analyze its on-the-ground operation with any depth or consistency.