The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The accidental emperor
How an absurd Austrian archduke sent by Napoleon III ended up (briefly) ruling Mexico
336pp, Faber, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £12.49 ÌÌÌÌÌ
The life and death of Maximilian, archduke of the house of HabsburgLorraine 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-byblow 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 19thcentury 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.
Living with his wife, Carlota, at Miramare Castle outside Trieste –
amid its stiff, Schönbrunn-lookalike gardens and pointless grandeur – Maximilian was no klutz. He was a charming, laudably liberal man whose heart was in the Enlightenment, and he was doing an excellent job of reforming the Austrian Navy. But Shawcross makes his fatal flaw clear: his envy of his older brother’s empire and its accompanying tra-la-la made him breathtakingly suggestible.
He rapidly accepted Napoleon III’s brazen lies about many aspects of the enterprise, such as that he would have British support. A striking parallel with today is that the leader of a civilised nation was prepared to make promises that were simply lies that hadn’t happened yet, and that diplomats and army officers in Mexico had carte blanche to say soothing things – fake news – to Maximilian, in the knowledge that any bad news from Paris would take six weeks to arrive.
Was there ever a chance of things turning out differently? Not really. Maximilian wrongly believed himself to be widely welcomed by a people who had just fought a civil war to be not only independent, but free of the conservative power of nobility and Church. He compounded his error by issuing reformist decrees without paying attention to how they were carried out, and spending his time on stagemanaged royal tours, and on building palaces like his winter residence at Cuernavaca, where “vines and orchids were arranged on the walls, and fish swam in crystal globes, while exotic birds in cages were hung from the ceiling”.
Ultimately deserted not only by Napoleon – who lost faith in the occupation as president Juárez’s liberals continued to oppose it – but also by his own brother in Vienna, Maximilian made an honourable death at Querétaro, captured at the head of his dwindling rag-tag army. Carlota, in Europe pleading his cause, lost her mind when she heard.
In retrospect, Maximilian’s Mexican saga, along with the rest of the 1860s, looks a lot like an amateur-dramatic rehearsal for the 20th century’s blockbuster conflagrations. Shawcross’s entertaining, just occasionally over-detailed account, leaves the emperor with some dignity, weaving the warp of his ridiculousness with the darker threads of his betrayal by his imperial allies in Europe. But as for empires, by 1871 Napoleon III was in exile in Chislehurst, Kent, and when Maximilian’s widow Carlota finally died in 1927, Franz Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian empire too was a memory, its realm shrivelled to the size of the Kaisergruft imperial crypt in central Vienna, containing the gothic tombs of 12 emperors and 18 empresses, including Maximilian’s. Hitler should have taken note. Sic transeunt imperia mundi. That’s the way the empire crumbles.
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