This is a little blog for things about the man with the single more alliterative reginal name: Maximilian von Mexiko. Though earlier he's Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian.
You may know him as Emperor of Mexico. But he was also: Contra-Admiral and Oberkommandant of the Imperial Navy (1854-1864) and Governor-General of Lombardy-Venetia (1857-1859).
Brother to an Emperor, beloved son of an Archduchess, husband to a rather famous princess, and much loved Son-in-law to the King of the Belgians.
The cover photo is Chapultepec castle. The icon is his admiralty portrait from 1857 by Franz Xavier Winterhalter, which is currently at The Museum of Military History in Vienna (it's my favorite one)
It took me longer than it should have to figure out your guy because I assumed he was so high profile that major research had already been done on his story and you must be working on someone else in his circle. Since it turns out it hasn't really been done, why do you think that is? I understand the European disdain toward Mexico, but surely a Mexican or at least New World in general scholar should have been interested before now. On the scale of history, this was relatively recent and well-documented at the time, did people just assume the newspaper stories had covered everything and there was nothing else to learn or what?
So, this is a complicated question, and I hope you do not mind a complicated (and long-winded) answer.
I think there are quite a few factors that influence why this is the case in Mexican historiography, and I'll try my best to explain them.
However, I do first want to say that there is good literature on The Second Empire coming out of Mexican history. When people ask me for a good book on this, I often recommend Erika Pani's Para mexicanizar el segundo imperio. El imaginario político de los imperialistas (2001) if they can read Spanish, because it's a really valuable book for understanding what happened. She makes the argument that the creation of the empire was driven by Mexican initiative based on sincere fears in the wake of the Mexican-American war that the republic was too unstable to resist their expansionist Northern neighbor, and that historiography has mostly ignored Mexican agency in that process.
I have not yet read her very new book Torn Asunder but I know it does also make the argument that we need to approach this period as a Civil War with Mexican actors who were contesting the ideal form of the state on both sides. In short, her work is really important for taking back the narrative of the empire's construction from a French-centered view.
There is also pretty good literature on the policies of the Reforma and the policies of the Empire, like books on education or economics. Or books on the ways policy impacts particular groups or states across this period. For example, I think Florencia Mallon's Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru/Campesino y nación: la construcción de México y Perú poscoloniales (2003) actually does a compelling job showing Maximilian's liberalism because she's working from the bottom up and shows the impact of his policies on upholding the autonomy of indigenous communities. Ironically, she didn't really set out to say anything particularly about him, it just comes through when you approach the period from the position of policy.
But....that's is where the problem comes in. There are several good books on the Second Empire as in its policies, its impacts, its construction, even its legacies if you read between the lines a bit where Juarez maintains a lot of what Maximilian establishes. You can see Max very obliquely through the body of literature if you look closely and ask yourself what kind of man leads a government like that.
But, they aren't books about Maximilian.
In fact, Pani explains in her introduction that she is intentionally setting him to the side. I don't think that's a bad decision on her part, to be clear, because her entire point is to emphasize the Mexican monarchists as actors.
Why is that? Well, here's where it all gets very complicated and structural.
For one, there is the national canon. In one of my very first meetings with the Mexican historian on my committee (way back when I was drafting my prospectus), he explained it as "well Maximilian isn't really a Mexican figure" and while I think that's a bit harsh, I know what he means. The defining political figure for this era in the pantheon of national figures is Benito Juarez. He's on money, he has a statue, and the airport in Mexico City is named after him. He's become much bigger in national memory as someone who defended the nation against "foreigners" than he was in the period, and nationalism has subsumed much of the complexity....or Juarez's own compromises with the US. Much of this, by the way, is a product of Porfirio's nationbuilding project. Just because you tried to overthrow the guy in a coup doesn't mean you can't make his birthday a national holiday.
Mallon's chapter "Whose Bones Are They, Anyway, and Who Gets to Decide?" in the aforementioned book talks about this posthoc creation of an Us vs Them narrative out of a messy civil war, and it's worth a read if you're ever interested.
I think Maximilian escapes being just labeled as a foreign invader by virtue of being simply too undeniably devoted to Mexico. But he isn't really the first choice of who to focus on if you're interested in the Reforma. Since he isn't a "national" figure in Mexico or Austria, he has fallen into a kind of historiographical rift between geographies.
I think it helps to keep in mind that actively running counter to nationalist canon in historiography is relatively new on the grand scale of things; not just for Mexico but generally.
In Mexico, and from what I know in Latin American history more broadly, this shift has also led to a more social approach to history, much more ground up. So, there's just generally less work being done on the men at the top of government.
For two, there's the archival situation. As I've discussed already, to work on Maximilian you really do have to be in Vienna. This is where his personal papers are, including the ones about Mexico. It creates a situation where you need a lot of funding for: 1. The travel itself (don't ask me my aggregate flight costs over the last four years) 2. The cost of living if you're spending significant amounts of time in Vienna (it's one of the most expensive European cities outside of Switzerland and the Nordics).
And here's where I have to be blunt about some of the structural realities: I am better funded because I am at a wealthy university in the Global North. I have also received significant important funding mostly through luck, because I'm hitting right at the moment where Austrian history has decided they want to ask global questions. Access to funding is not distributed equally, and this is a persistent problem.
If we are honest about it, Austria had the archival power to make these documents much less accessible if you're traveling from Mexico. Can I say definitively that's the primary reason the Habsburg Empire centralized his documents so much? No, but it certainly has been a part of the issue. And if it makes research complicated in the age of commercial air travel, imagine before that.
There's a reason the classic books about him still being published in Mexico came from Austrians with access to the archive (Egon Corti and Konrad Ratz), because while I'm sure there is interest, there are problems of time, money and consequently access.
For three, the problem of specialization and training. The linguistic bar for this work is high, and I often feel strange saying that I've even come close to clearing it. I regularly read German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish in a day. German is especially tricky because in this period it is written in an antiquated cursive that you ideally need specialized training to read, so just being able to understand modern German is not enough. I think I've also posted enough pictures of his handwriting to show that his is....let's say not standard. Even outside of the Mexican vs. Austrian dichotomy, this is where most historians of the United States fall flat on their faces on the topic, because they can only read a limited number of letters and get a skewed picture.
It also has not been standard in most historical fields for a long time to be trained in multiple geographies. In Maximilian's case, this is compounded by the fact that the Habsburg Empire is not something people outside of the field know very much about at all. Again, not a criticism directed at Mexican historians specifically, I've seen very shallow understanding from historians of the US, Great Britain, France, Italy, etc. So, where Maximilian does show up in Mexican history, it is often with little to no background or ideological history. He becomes this kind of unmoored figure who enters the scene without a history, does his best, and exits stage left suddenly.
The period I'm working on (1854-1864) is exceptionally disorienting if you don't also have a firm grasp on Habsburg history basically going back to Joseph II. The way history has been structured for a long time really doesn't allow you to specialize in that and also be well-versed on Mexican history. This is one of my wider critiques about how the academic system still doesn't set people up well to do global history, by the way.
Even with all of that said, I would absolutely be lying to you if I said I'm confident. I still lay awake sometimes thinking that I MUST be wrong, that someone else MUST have already told this story. Everyone in my life is tired of hearing it. But historians I've talked to about it have said pretty much the same thing: they want to read this book when it's done, because there hasn't been something that tackles the subject. All I can do is believe them.
How did you first discover him? And what made you wanna study him?
Oh good, I think I've told this story before but now I can tell it with names and places!
So I took this picture in 2018 at Chapultepec. To me it feels like one of those moments that are very significant in hindsight. ^ that portrait and everything around it is my origin story.
I had been interested in Mexican history before, though most of what I knew skewed a bit earlier. I'd mostly taken classes on the colonial period, and had a very broad understanding of the rest: Santa Anna, Battle of Puebla, Porfirio, Revolution. Though funnily enough, I recently found a capstone paper I wrote as an undergrad on the influence of liberalism on the different factions in the War of Independence. So, I guess the hints were always there.
Since I was interested in Mexican national history generally, a very good friend suggested I should spend a day at Chapultepec while I was in Mexico City.
And Chapultepec stuck with me, because (if you haven't been) they still have that portrait up and several rooms reconstructed exactly as he had them. The way that museum discusses him is...I wouldn't say fully positive...but definitely gives him credit for meaning well and wanting to truly do good things for Mexico. How much he cared about Mexico comes through the way the story is told in Mexico.
And then I went to Vienna again and actually looked for him....
If you've never been to Austria, and especially to somewhere like the Welt Museum or the Hofburg, you've probably never experienced how incredibly dismissive it is towards everything about him. You can look up what the Hofburg says on their website on the description of the "memorial" room. But here's my less serious summary: "he was an idiot who was tricked and convinced by his bitch ambitious wife to leave Austria (and who would willingly do that?) for some stupid unstable country as a colonial adventure."
But here's the real trick: if you go to the Imperial Crypt, his is the coffin with the most flowers and flags and gifts by a wide margin. Mexican flags, dahlias, medallions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, there were sugar skulls for a while in November. There are notes too, if you take time to read them, that say where they are from in Mexico.
So here's the puzzle I started with: why does the country he was born in, where he was a prince, talk about his decisions in this way? Why is it the country that executed him that gives him grace and brings him gifts? It's backwards, it seems backwards.
It's one of those questions that just does not leave you alone if your brain works like mine. I thought my research would be mostly about public perception, because, well, the story everyone usually tells means there isn't that much backstory to cover. But, oh boy, was I wrong about that, but I probably can't delve too much into that without revealing some key parts of my research. Just trust me that when I started digging, I realized the historiography was WAY worse than I thought.
I suppose I should level with you that I don't really know where to start with posting about him, but I want to give everyone the chance to ask what they want to know.
I suppose I should level with you that I don't really know where to start with posting about him, but I want to give everyone the chance to ask what they want to know.
I recall you were keeping track of where everyone was& what their experiences were during 1848. Maximilian would have been what, 16? Anything you're willing to share on how that influenced his subsequent politics?
Yes, he was 16 in 1848. And I know that he was at Schönbrunn with his family during the revolutions in Vienna. If you want to know how 1848 looked through the eyes of a teenage archduke, here are some drawings.
Unfortunately his diary from that year is fragmentary either because pieces were lost or because he stopped writing it once things got really stressful. So, it's not as clear as other periods of his life.
However, he does reflect on the revolutions a great deal in his later writings. What seems to have happened is that in his years in the navy, he met a lot of sailors or former sailors who were involved with the naval mutiny in 1848, and he writes about them very sympathetically and transfers that feeling to his general argument that the Italian provinces are being unfairly punished. Which is pretty consistent over time for him. He meets an 1848 French exile in Brazil ("a true barricade man") and talks about it like he thinks that defending the republic was an admirable thing to do.
For him, it seems like whatever personal discomfort he felt during the revolutions (he doesn't really tell us, but one can imagine it was a stressful time) really is outweighed by his profound sympathy for the goals of the revolutions and a severe distaste for the post-revolution crackdown.
If I had to simplify my theory on this, it's that he had the same "that can't happen again" reaction that Franz Joseph did, but took it much more in the direction of wanting to reform so the conditions that created the Revolutions don't exist again.
Do you ever find yourself making jokes about Tetgetthoff's name including "get off"? Because that's all I can think of when I see it.
I've been trying to come up with an answer to this that isn't as dreadfully serious as "no, because when you read it in German the h is pretty important, so it doesn't sound like that" but I have also failed to come up with one.
You've mentioned archive trips to Europe but not Mexico. Have you traveled there for research? Or are so high a percentage of Maximilian's papers archived in Austria that travel to Mexico wasn't necessary?
This is actually one of the reoccurring questions I have about my research, because there's a number of things going on:
1. The research for the dissertation covers from 1854-64, so up to the point of departure to Mexico. The reason is that I think that is where we are missing most of the story; most authors just blow right past it. That then took on quite the massive spatial dimensions. So, currently my plan is to go to Mexico this coming academic year and then to go back for more intensive work in Mexico during a postdoc. Then I can properly build out 64-67. I just couldn't feasibly build Mexico into a timeline that would align with my department's expectations.
2. You'd be surprised how much from Mexico is in Vienna. I haven't figured out all of the mechanisms that led to that centralization (I know Baron von Kaska got a noble title from Franz Joseph for bringing back part of his archive, Tegetthoff also mentions bringing back some, etc.) but one way or another, it is.
For example:
Some day I'll figure out how exactly the dynastic archive in Austria came to possess such a pile of Mexican government documents, but I've only partially gotten there.
It's not the only archive where this is the case either. I had a whole conversation with the head archivist in Brussels about the seeming lack of letters in their archive between Leopold I and Maximilian....only to find both sides of the correspondence in Vienna.
Somehow, at some point, the imperial government made a point of bringing as much about him as possible to Austria, and I'm this close to going on a full blown side quest about it.
3. I thought about going to CDMX this summer, but there is a rather large sporting event going on that skyrocketed prices. So....that delayed the planning a bit.
Basically, the book will be bigger than the dissertation, and I'm gathering what I can in Europe right now so I can finish within the expected timeline. But once I'm free of that, going back to Mexico is the first priority.
"Your Imperial Highness has most graciously deigned to remember the oldest of all travelers and to invite me to draft instructions—modeled on those I prepared for French and English expeditions—for the magnificent scientific undertaking of the circumnavigation by the Imperial frigate Novara….In the name of the sciences to which my life is dedicated—and which elevate and ennoble the intellectual life of humanity—I offer Your Imperial Highness my thanks for an undertaking that will so brilliantly contribute to the renown of the Sovereign and the Monarchy."
Alexander von Humboldt to Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, 11th of April 1857
"No more qualified or reliable guide could have shown our scholars the goals of their endeavors and pointed out the means to achieve them than the grand master of natural science; and if—as I suspect—the expedition contributes to enlightening and perfecting our knowledge of the world in many respects, a large part of the credit for this will be due to the author of those instructions. As for the Novara—if it is destined to live on in the memory of the educated world—it will be a source of honor for her in times to come that her name is linked with that of Humboldt, who for three generations has shone as a guiding light at the forefront of every conquest on the realms of natural science.”
Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian to Alexander von Humboldt, 2nd of May 1857
From unpublished letters in the Austrian State Archives
oh gosh thank you for this I've been wanting to ask this question for ages but I couldn't find a way to do it without doxxing ur man. have you read noticias del imperio? if so, did you like it? I think (?) it's more of a charlotte book but I wanted to ask anyway bc I haven't read it but I've been curious
That's why I made this one, since I assume you aren't the only one who might want to ask things.
I know of it, and yes it is from Charlotte's perspective. There's a reason she's on the cover and not him. I believe the author has said he doesn't consider Maximilian a particularly important character in driving the narrative.
I'm going to level with you, and hopefully this will clear up future questions of this kind too. I don't read historical fiction about this at all. I've also learned that it is best for me not to watch fictionalizations, because to be quite blunt: I don't have a tolerance for things being wrong. The more I know about the source material, the less grace I have for fiction. So, the Second Mexican Empire is the worst possible thing for me in that respect. I just have to know this about myself.
Personally, I also do not want to review things just to get mad at them, because at a certain point it isn't charitable to the author. I know that even if someone did a remarkable amount of reading of the existing secondary literature as it currently stands, they'd miss quite a bit and fall into common misconceptions that aren't supported by the primary sources. I know this, but other people do not, because they haven't read what I've read.
At a certain point I feel like I'd just be yelling at writers and screenwriters for not knowing things they can't possibly know.
"Your Imperial Highness has most graciously deigned to remember the oldest of all travelers and to invite me to draft instructions—modeled on those I prepared for French and English expeditions—for the magnificent scientific undertaking of the circumnavigation by the Imperial frigate Novara….In the name of the sciences to which my life is dedicated—and which elevate and ennoble the intellectual life of humanity—I offer Your Imperial Highness my thanks for an undertaking that will so brilliantly contribute to the renown of the Sovereign and the Monarchy."
Alexander von Humboldt to Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, 11th of April 1857
"No more qualified or reliable guide could have shown our scholars the goals of their endeavors and pointed out the means to achieve them than the grand master of natural science; and if—as I suspect—the expedition contributes to enlightening and perfecting our knowledge of the world in many respects, a large part of the credit for this will be due to the author of those instructions. As for the Novara—if it is destined to live on in the memory of the educated world—it will be a source of honor for her in times to come that her name is linked with that of Humboldt, who for three generations has shone as a guiding light at the forefront of every conquest on the realms of natural science.”
Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian to Alexander von Humboldt, 2nd of May 1857
From unpublished letters in the Austrian State Archives
