Long View: When An Austrian Archduke Became Emperor of Mexico
By
Edward Shawcross
The little-known story of the 19th-century French invasion that gave rise to Cinco de Mayo.
This article is adapted from AQ’s special report on the education crisis 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”...
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