When Princess Carlota heard that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, she was delighted. “Here, the mood is excellent,” she wrote from Mexico City to her husband, Maximilian I, the emperor of Mexico. Their hope: Lincoln’s demise would mark an end of U.S. resistance to their monarchy. But it was not to be.
The improbable story of how an Austrian archduke and a Belgian princess ended up on the throne of Mexico in the 1860s begins in France. There, the emperor Napoleon III dreamed of a “Latin” sphere of influence in the New World, with France as the leading voice. In fact, the term “Latin America” was first coined in Paris in the 1850s, and for some it was an intellectual justification for these imperialist designs. Many French thinkers believed the region was naturally suited to monarchy, like the southern European Catholic nations.
A later French president, Adolphe Thiers, called the scheme “madness without parallel since Don Quixote.” In 1862, the French fleet arrived in Mexico, under the pretense of collecting debts—but it soon became clear they had other motives. On April 19, some 30,000 French troops invaded Mexico to overthrow the republic and its president. Napoleon III found an ideal candidate to occupy the throne: Ferdinand Maximilian. He was the ambitious younger brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, from the illustrious Habsburg royal family. But Maximilian had few prospects of power in Europe. Spurred on by his equally ambitious wife, Carlota, he had the additional motivation of trying to restore his family’s glory in the Americas: In 1519, Mexico was conquered for the Spanish Empire in the name of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V.
