Introduction

Shawcross, Edward

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70464-7_1

Edward Shawcross⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

The introductory chapter reviews the historiography of the 1862–67 French intervention in Mexico. It identifies the need to both Mexicanise and imperialise the event in order to better understand the motivations of those in France who launched it and those in Mexico who called for and supported it. The chapter addresses the problematic portrayal of Mexican conservatism and monarchism. France’s position as an imperial power is detailed. Colonial conquest and colonisation in Algeria is identified as an exception in French imperialism for the period 1815–70, which saw France deploy non-colonial means to spread its influence and increase its commerce across the globe. The concept of informal empire, a theory which has never been applied to French imperialism in Latin America, is suggested as a useful analytical tool. The British model of informal empire is compared to that of the French, which relies more heavily on discourses, such as pan-Latinism, to demarcate French spheres of influence, than the British version of commercial and financial hegemony.

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Notes

1.
Dan Williams, ‘Mexico’s Obsession with “Foreign Intervention” Enshrined in Museum’, LA Times (Los Angeles), 5 June 1986, p. 21.
2.
The piastre was the Mexican currency, fixed and equivalent in value to the US dollar. One franc was worth roughly a fifth of one piastre or dollar and therefore the indemnity was equal to circa 3 million francs. $600,000 was 3.42% of the total tax revenue collected by the Mexican government in 1839. Tax figures taken from Barbara Tenenbaum, The Politics of Penury: Debts and Taxes in Mexico, 1821–1856 (New Mexico: University of New Mexico, 1986), ‘Appendix: Mexican Finances, 1821–56, Table C, Income vs Expenses, 1821–61’, 182.
3.
The convention is printed in ‘The Mexican Convention between England, France, and Spain ’, The Times (London), 18 November 1861, p. 7.
4.
For the diplomacy behind this see Carl Bock, Prelude to Tragedy: The Negotiation and Breakdown of the Tripartite Convention of London, October 31, 1861 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966).
5.
The choice of Maximilian was made for a variety of reasons, not least of which was his desire to take the throne. Other candidates had been suggested, but a Spanish Bourbon was considered impractical from a Mexican perspective because of antipathy towards Spain and from a French point of view because Spain as a maritime power would have significant influence over the new monarch. Louis-Napoléon considered a French candidate impolitic. Finally, he harboured vague hopes that supporting a Habsburg would facilitate a rapprochement with Austria after the 1859 Italian War. The most detailed analysis of the diplomacy behind Maximilian ’s acceptance of the crown remains Egon Caesar Corti, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico, 2 vols. trans. Catherine Alison (New York; London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). See also Mary Margaret McAllen, Maximilian and Carlota : Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014).
6.
Iturbide was elected emperor of the First Mexican Empire on 19 May 1822. He abdicated on 19 March 1823 and went into exile. He was executed a year later when he returned to Mexico without the authorisation of the republican government. See Timothy Anna, The Mexican Empire of Iturbide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
7.
Most notably by José María Vigil, La Reforma, vol. 5 of Vicente Riva Palacio (ed.), México a través de los siglos: Historia general y completa del desenvolvimiento social, político, religioso, militar, artístico, científico y literario de México desde la antigüedad más remota hasta la época actual, 5 vols. (Barcelona: Espasa y Compañía, 1884–89).
8.
See Charles Weeks, The Juárez Myth in Mexico (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1987) and his earlier article Charles Weeks, ‘Uses of a Juárez Myth in Mexican Politics’, Il Politico, 29 (1974), 210–33.
9.
Alan Knight, ‘The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America (1821–1992)’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1992), 139–40.
10.
See, for example, Jesús Reyes Heroles, El Liberalismo mexicano, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 1957–61).
11.
Although he was not an apologist for the French intervention or the Mexican Second Empire, the Porfiriato-era Mexican writer and politician Francisco Bulnes attempted to debunk the hero worship of Juárez in El verdadero Juárez y la verdad sobre la intervención y el imperio (Mexico City: Vda. de C. Bouret, 1904), and Juárez y la revoluciones de Ayutla y de Reforma (Mexico City: Tip. de la Compañia Editorial Católica, 1906). This resulted in numerous articles, pamphlets and books attacking Bulnes as well as public demonstrations denouncing him as a “traitor to the fatherland”. Weeks, ‘Uses of a Juarez Myth’, 220. On Bulnes see David Brading and Lucrecia Orensanz, ‘Francisco Bulnes y la verdad acerca de México en el siglo XIX’, Historia Mexicana, 45 (1996), 621–51.
12.
Leonardo Marqúez, Manifiestos: El imperio y los imperiales (Mexico: F. Vazquez, 1904), 23–29; Francisco de Paula Arrangoiz y Berzábal, Méjico desde 1808 hasta 1867. Relacion de los principales acontecimientos … desde la prison del Virey Iturrigaray hasta la caida del segundo imperio. Con una noticia preliminar del sistema general de gobierno que regia en 1808, etc., 4 vols. (Madrid: A. Pérez Dubrull) III, 219. For an overview of the historiography see Erika Pani, El Segundo Imperio: pasados de usos multiples (Mexico: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004) and ‘Republicans and Monarchists, 1848–1867’, in William Beezley (ed.), A Companion to Mexican History and Culture (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 273–87.
13.
French public opinion is explored in Lynn M. Case, French Opinion on the United States and Mexico, 1860–1867. Extracts from the Reports of the procureurs généraux (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936). See also Frank Lally, French Opposition to the Mexican Policy of the Second Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1931). The French historiography on the Mexican expedition is discussed in Guy Martinière, ‘L’expédition mexicaine de Napoléon III dans l’historiographie française’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 21 (1974), 142–73.
14.
Their speeches were reproduced the next day in the official government paper, Le Moniteur universel (Paris). The published speeches of Berryer , Favre and Thiers all contain their attacks on the government’s Mexican policy. Pierre Antoine Berryer , Oeuvres de Berryer : discours parlementaires, 8 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1872–78); Jules Favre , Discours parlementaires, publiés par Mme. Vve. J. Favre , 4 vols. (Paris: E. Plon, 1881); Adolphe Thiers , Discours parlementaires de M. Thiers , 16 vols. (Paris: M. Calmon, 1879–89).
15.
One of the earliest and most influential in this genre, with a preface by Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol, was Émile de Kératry ’s, L’élévation et la chute de l’empire Maximilien: intervention française au Mexique, 1861–1867 (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1867).
16.
Most famously Victor Hugo, Napoléon le Petit (London: Jeffs; Bruxelles: A. Mertens, 1852).
17.
On the black legend, see Maurice Agulhon (ed.), Pourquoi réhabiliter le Second Empire?: actes du colloque organisé par le Souvenir napoléonien (Paris: Souvenir Napoléonien, 1997); Pierre Guiral and Émile Témime, ‘L’Historiographie du Second Empire’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 21 (1974), 1–17. In English see Roger Price, The Second French Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stuart Campbell, The Second Empire Revisited: A Study in French Historiography (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978).
18.
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but Bazaine escaped to Spain , where he lived in obscurity and poverty until his death in 1888. In its obituary for Bazaine , La Presse cheerfully announced “[t]he traitor is dead!” ‘Bazaine —La mort d’un soldat traître à son pays’, La Presse (Paris), 26 September 1888, p. 2. As late as 1927 an article in La Revue de Paris argued that attempts to rehabilitate “the man of Metz” and his role in Mexico were undeserved: “[Bazaine ] was the principle architect of the catastrophe and history should consider him primarily responsible for the death of the unfortunate Maximilian ”. Louis Sonolet, ‘Agonie de l’Empire du Mexique—I’, Revue de Paris, 34 (1927), 590. All translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.
19.
In a speech made in 1864 criticising the Mexican intervention, Thiers managed to fit the word “illusion” three times into one sentence which concluded with the adjective “chimerical” before pronouncing that he would henceforth refer to the intervention as an “adventure”. Thiers , Discours, XIX, 468–70. The criticisms of Thiers and Favre were followed by early historians of the French Second Empire. See, for example, Émile Ollivier L’Empire liberal, 18 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1895–1915), V and VI, and Taxile Delord, Histoire du Second Empire, 6 vols. (Paris: G. Baillière, 1869–75), III, 287–88; 289–90; 366.
20.
A view recently restated by Romain Delmon, ‘Les acteurs de la politique impériale lors de l’expédition au Mexique: L’ecart entre la vision de Napoléon III et la réalité Mexicaine’, in Gabriel Leanca (ed.), La politique extérieure de Napoléon III (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 75–99. See also (and note the titles), Guy-Alain Dugast, La tentation mexicaine en France au XIXe siècle: L’image du Mexique et l’Intervention française, 2 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); Alain Gouttman, La guerre du Mexique (1862–1867): Le mirage américain de Napoléon III (Paris: Perrin, 2008); Jean-François Lecaillon, Napoléon III et le Mexique: les illusions d’un grand dessein (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994); Jean-François Lecaillon, ‘Mythes et phantasmes au cœur de l’intervention française au Mexique, 1862–1867’, Cahiers des Amériques latines, 9 (1990), 69–79; Nancy Nichols Barker, The French Experience in Mexico 1821–1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Christian Schefer, La Grande Pensée de Napoléon III, Les origines de l’Expédition du Mexique (Paris: M. Riviére, 1939).
21.
Lecaillon, Napoléon III, 222.
22.
Michelle Cunningham explores the intervention through the prism of Louis-Napoléon ’s approach to nationalities and his European system of diplomacy, Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Nancy Nichols Barker addresses interventionist diplomats and the Jecker bonds in ‘The Duke of Morny and the Affair of the Jecker Bonds’, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970), 556–61; ‘The French Legation in Mexico: Nexus of Interventionists’, French Historical Studies, 8 (1974), 409–26. Shirley Black offers an alternative interpretation: the intervention was undertaken to guarantee France’s supply of precious metals in order to maintain its monetary system of bimetallism, Shirley Black, Napoleon III and Mexican Silver (Colorado: Ferrell, 2000). A conclusion that Marc Flandreau considers unlikely, The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism, and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, trans. Owen Leeming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 179, fn 9. See also Jack Autrey Dabbs, The French Army in Mexico 1861–1867: A Study in Military Government (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1963), for a good narrative account of the intervention following French sources, especially the archive of Marshall Bazaine . Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico. American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), is, as the title suggests, a partisan narrative, but remains a frequently cited work, as does Thomas David Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican- United States Relations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
23.
Modern analyses of the French Second Empire or Louis-Napoléon give the expedition little space. For example, Éric Anceau, Napoléon III: Un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 391–93 and 429–31; Jean-Claude Yon, Le Second Empire: politique, société, culture (Paris: A. Colin, 2004), 97–100; Price, Anatomy of Power, 57, 71, 305 and 401; Sylvie Aprile, La IIe République et le Second Empire, 1848–1870: du prince président à Napoléon III (Paris: Pygmalion, 2000), 321–25; James McMillan, Napoleon III (London: Longman, 1991), 149–52; Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 149–50; Louis Girard, Napoléon III (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 315–20.
24.
The word “adventure” is used seven times in the three-page preface to Lecaillon, Napoléon III, v–vii. The intervention is described as an “adventure” in the introduction of José Moya (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.
25.
Patricia Galeana (ed.), El Imperio napoleónico y la monarquía en México (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2012); Patricia Galeana (ed.), Impacto de la intervención francesa en México (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2011); Kristine Ibsen, Maximilian , Mexico and the Invention of Empire (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010); Claudia Ceja Andrade, Al amparo del imperio: ideas y creencias sobre la justicia y el buen gobierno durante el Segundo Imperio mexicano (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez , 2007); Erika Pani, ‘Dreaming of a Mexican Empire: The Political Projects of the “Imperialistas”’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 82 (2002), 1–31; Brian Hamnett, ‘Mexican Conservatives, Clericals, and Soldiers: The ‘Traitor’ Tomás Mejía through Reform and Empire, 1855–1867’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20 (2001), 187–201; Erika Pani, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio: el imaginario político de los imperialistas (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2001); Berta Flores Salinas, Segundo Imperio mexicano (Mexico City: Editorial Praxis, 1998); Robert Duncan, ‘Political Legitimation and Maximilian ’s Second Empire in Mexico, 1864–1867’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 12 (1996), 27–66. Recent work has focussed on the Second Empire’s impact on a regional level. See Douglas Richmond, Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán: Liberals, the Second Empire, and Maya Revolutionaries, 1855–1876 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2015); Angela Moyano Pahissa, Veinte años de la historia de Querétaro (1853–1873): Reforma, Intervención francesa, Segundo Imperio y Restauración de la República (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro; Editorial Universitaria, 2013); Roberto Lara, La intervención francesa en Nuevo León (1864–1866): estudio de la resistencia a las autoridades y fuerzas armadas del Segundo Imperio Mexicano (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011); Carlos Armando Preciado de Alba, Guanajuato en tiempos de la intervención francesa y el Segundo Imperio (Mexico: Universidad de Guanajuato, Centro de Investigaciones Humanísticas, 2007).
26.
Pani, Para mexicanizar, 20.
27.
An argument made for South America by Jeremy Adelman, ‘Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the South Atlantic’, in David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context c.1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 82.
28.
Timothy Anna, ‘Demystifying Early Nineteenth-Century Mexico’, Mexican Studies, 9 (1993), 120.
29.
For an overview of the period, see William Fowler, Independent Mexico: The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna , 1821–1858 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). For the Federal Republic, see Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico: 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). The Central Republic is covered in depth by Michael Costeloe, The Central Republic, 1835–1846: Hombres de Bien in the Age of Santa Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On Santa Anna ’s last dictatorship, see Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, Santa Anna y la encrucijada del estado: La Dictadura, 1853–55 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986). Works on Juárez and the Reforma era are numerous; Brian Hamnett provides an introduction in Juárez (London: Longman, 1993).
30.
On the causes of Mexico’s instability, see Donald Stevens, The Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico (London: Duke University Press, 1991).
31.
Charles Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.
32.
Eric Van Young, Writing Mexican History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 160–61.
33.
Edmundo O’Gorman, La supervivencia política novo-hispana: Reflexiones sobre el monarquismo mexicano (Mexico City: Fundación cultural de Condumex, S.A., Centro de estudios de historia de México, 1969), 5.
34.
Marco Antonio Landavazo, ‘Orígenes políticos y culturales del monarquismo mexicano’, Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de filosofía, política y humanidades, 25 (2011), 62–85; Erika Pani, ‘La innombrable: monarquismo y cultura política en el México decimonónico’, in Brian Connaughton (ed.), Prácticas populares, cultura política y poder en México (Mexico: Casa Juan Pablos, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa, 2008), 369–94; Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, ‘Centralistas, conservadores y monarquistas, 1830–1853’, in William Fowler and Humberto Morales, El conservadurismo mexicano en el siglo XIX, 1810–1910 (Puebla: Benemerita Universidad Autónoma, 1999); Luis Medina Peña, Invención del sistema político mexicano: Forma de gobierno y gobernabilidad en México en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo Cultura Económica, 2005); Elias José Palti (ed.), La política del disenso: la “polémica en torno al monarquismo” (México, 1848–1850) … y las aporías del liberalismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998); Jaime Delgado, La monarquía en México: 1845–1847 (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1990); Miguel Soto, La conspiración monárquica en México, 1845–1846 (Tepepan: EOSA, 1988). See also Pani, ‘Republicans and Monarchists’; Frank Joseph Sanders, ‘Proposals for monarchy in Mexico: 1823–1860’ (University of Arizona, D.Phil thesis, 1967), and Carlos Villanueva, La Monarquía en América, 4 vols. (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1911–13).
35.
His ideas were most famously articulated through his history of Mexico, Lucas Alamán , Historia de Méjico, 5 vols. (Mexico: Impr. de J. M. Lara, 1849–53). The edition consulted throughout this work is Historia de México, 5 vols. (Mexico: Impr. de V.Agüeros y Cía, 1883–85).
36.
Enrique Krauze, Siglo de caudillos: Biografía de política de México, 1810–1910 (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1994), 20–21.
37.
For example, Karen Caplan, Indigenous Citizens Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Patrick McNamara, Sons of the Sierra: Juárez , Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics and the Formation of the Mexico’s Nation State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (California: University of California Press, 1995); Alan Knight, ‘Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 10 (1994), 135–61. Brian Hamnett argues that anglophone historians have shown a preference for progressive liberal republicans rather than authoritarian or clerical Catholics in ‘El Partido Conservador en México, 1858–1867: La lucha por el poder’, in Fowler and Humberto Morales, El conservadurismo, 213–14.
38.
James Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Carlos Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900. Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Pubic Life in Mexico and Peru, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
39.
Zachary Brittsan, Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico Manuel Lozada and La Reforma, 1855–1876 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015); Keith Aaron Van Oosterhout, ‘Confraternities and Popular Conservatism on the Frontier: Mexico’s Sierra del Nayarit in the Nineteenth Century’, The Americas, 71 (2014), 101–30; Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, ‘Liberales y conservadores en México: diferencias y similitudes’. Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 8 (2014); Benjamin Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962 (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2012); Erika Pani (ed.), Conservadurismo y derechas en la historia de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica; Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2009); Renée de la Torre, Marta Eugenia García Ugarte and Juan Manuel Ramírez Sáiz (eds.), Los Rostros del conservadurismo Mexicano (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2005); Hamnett, ‘Mexican Conservatives’; Javier Rodriguez Piña, ‘Conservatives Debate the Meaning of Independence’, in William Beezley and David Lorey (eds.), Viva Mexico! Viva Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 (Delaware: SR Books, 2001); Fowler and Morales (eds.), El conservadurismo mexicano; Alfonso Noriega, El pensamiento conservador y el conservadurismo mexicano, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 1972); François Chevalier, ‘Conservateurs et libéraux au Mexique: Essai de sociologie et géographie politiques de l’indépendance à l’intervention française’, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, 8 (1964), 457–74.
40.
William Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821–1853 (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 42. The Conservative Party was a loose affiliation of like-minded politicians rather than a clearly defined organisation. Vicente Fuentes Díaz, Los partidos políticos en México, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Altiplano, 1969), 57.
41.
Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 46; Stevens, Origins of Instability, 28–36.
42.
Smith, Roots of Conservatism, 80.
43.
Fowler argues that “there was no conservative political project until the 1840s. To claim that there was one before then is not only an anachronism; it simply cannot be sustained with the available historical data”. Fowler, Age of Proposals, 44. Fowler prefers the term “traditionalist”. However, the currents of thought influencing the politicians who expressed what Fowler terms “traditionalist” ideas from the 1820s to 1840s were eclectic, ranging—to name but a few—from Burke to Constant and Chateaubriand to Guizot . Given this intellectual genealogy, and the fact that they wished to reform Mexican political institutions along French or British parliamentary lines (see Chap. 3), the term “traditionalist” can obscure because it is not clear in what sense these factors were “traditional” to Mexican or even Spanish political culture. Catherine Andrews engages in this debate in ‘Sobre conservadurismo e ideas conservadores en la primera república federal (1824–1835)’, in Pani (ed.), Conservadurismo y derechas, 88–92.
44.
On Mexican liberalism see Charles Hale, Liberalism in the Age of Mora , 1821–53 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). See also Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism and Heroles, El Liberalismo mexicano. The ideas of liberals are outlined in Stevens, Origins of Instability, 29–31, and Fowler, Age of Proposals, chs. 4 and 5.
45.
María del Carmen Borrego Plá, ‘La influencia de la francia revolucionaria en México: el texto constitucional de Apatzingán’, in Borrego Plá and Leopoldo Zea (eds.), América Latina ante la Revolución Francesa (Mexico City: UNAM, 1993), 9–30. See also Solange Alberro, Alicia Hernández Chávez, and Elías Trabulse (eds.), La Revolución francesa en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1992) and Oscar Marti, ‘Le Mexique et la Révolution française: Antécédents et conséquences (1746–1838)’, in Christian Hermann (ed.), Les Révolutions dans le monde Ibérique, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1991).
46.
Hale, Liberalism, 61.
47.
See Vázquez, ‘Liberales y conservadores’.
48.
Fowler, Age of Proposals, 43; Hale, Liberalism, 124.
49.
Hale, Liberalism, 95–98.
50.
Ibid., 164–65; Fowler, Age of Proposals, 43–44.
51.
‘Acta Constitutiva de la Féderación Mexicana’, 31 January 1824 printed in Miguel Ángel Porrúa (ed.), Documentos para la historia del México independiente, 1808–1938 (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa; H. Cámara de Diputados, LXI Legislatura, 2010), 246–55.
52.
Hale, Liberalism, 248–89.
53.
Ibid., 296–97.
54.
The evolution of santanista ideas is charted in William Fowler, Tornel and Santa Anna : The Writer and the Caudillo, 1795–1853 (London: Greenwood Press, 2000). See also Fowler, Age of Proposals, ch. 6.
55.
Fowler gives a good summary of the groups in this varied alliance, Independent Mexico, 234.
56.
Hale, Liberalism, 202–09; 214.
57.
On the impact of 1848 in Latin America, see Guy Thomson (ed.), The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (London: University of London; Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002).
58.
Vigil, México a través, 281; 367.
59.
Roberto Gargarella, The Legal Foundations of Inequality: Constitutionalism in the Americas, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98.
60.
Burke ’s Reflections on the Revolution in France had been translated into Spanish and published in Mexico City in 1826. On the importance of Burke and other British political thinkers to early Mexican conservative thought, see Catherine Andrews, ‘In the Pursuit of Balance. Lucas Alamán ’s Proposals for Constitutional Reform (1830–1835)’, Historia constitucional, 8 (2007), 13–37.
61.
Christopher Clark, ‘After 1848: The European Revolution in Government’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 22 (2012), 171–97.
62.
A point made in Brian Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24.
63.
John Lynch, Bourbon Spain , 1700–1808 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 58–59.
64.
‘L’héritage colonial, un trou de mémoire’, Hommes et Migrations, 1228 (2000).
65.
Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, ‘Penser le passé colonial français, entre perspectives historiographiques et résurgence des mémoires’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 86 (2005), 60. See also Alice Bennington, ‘Writing Empire? The Reception of Post-Colonial Studies in France’, The Historical Journal, 59 (2016), 1157–86.
66.
Cécile Vidal, ‘The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History’, Southern Quarterly, 43 (2006), 59.
67.
See Robert Tombs and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), L’histoire coloniale en débat en France et en Grande-Bretagne (Brussels: A. Versaille, 2010); Catherine Coquio (ed.), Retours du colonial?: disculpation et réhabilitation de l’histoire coloniale française (Nantes: Atlante, 2008); Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire and Nicolas Bancel (eds.), Culture coloniale en France: de la Révolution française à nos jours (Paris: CNRS éditions, Autrement, 2008); Hubert Bonin, Catherine Hodeir and Jean-François Klein (eds.), L’esprit économique impérial (1830–1970): groupes de pression et réseaux du patronat colonial en France et dans l’empire (Paris: SFHOM, 2008). In English see Alice Conklin, ‘Histories of Colonialism: Recent Studies of the Modern French Empire’, French Historical Studies, 30 (2007), 305–32; Martin Evans (ed.), Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Robert Aldrich, ‘Imperial mise en valeur and mise en scène: Recent Works on French Colonialism’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 917–36; Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
68.
The special issue, ‘The Politics of Empire in Post-Revolutionary France’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 33 (2015) addresses French colonialism in the period 1815–70 and its impact on the metropole.
69.
David Todd, ‘A French Imperial Meridian’, Past and Present, 210 (2011), 158–59.
70.
A point made by James Daughton, who does explore French informal French influence in ‘When Argentina Was “French”: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Epoque Buenos Aires’, The Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), 831–64. See also Edward Shawcross, ‘“When Montevideo Was French”: European Civilization and French Imperial Ambitions in the River Plate , 1838–52’, European History Quarterly, 45:4 (2015), 638–61.
71.
Michael Powelson gives a brief account of British, French, Spanish and US imperialism in ‘19th Century Latin America Imperialism from a Global Perspective’, History Compass 9 (2011), 827–43.
72.
Cayenne was first settled by the French in 1604; Guadalupe and Martinique were first settled in 1635. Philippe Haudrère, L’Empire des rois, 1500–1789 (Paris: Denoël, 1997), ‘Tableau synoptique’, 387–96.
73.
Todd, ‘A French Imperial Meridian’, 155; 173.
74.
On the conquest of Algeria see La conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827–1871), vol. 1 of Charles-Robert Ageron and Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979–86).
75.
David Todd, ‘Transnational Projects of Empire in France, c. 1815–70’, Modern Intellectual History, 12 (2015), 293.
76.
See Charles Iain Hamilton, Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Ernest Harold Jenkins, A History of the French Navy, from its Beginnings to the Present Day (London: Macdonald and Jane’s (1979), chs. 13 and 14.
77.
Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina : An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, trans. Ly Lan Dill-Klein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), ch. 1; John Frank Cady, The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954), chs. 12 and 16.
78.
French troop numbers in Cochinchina taken from Cady, Roots of French Imperialism, 269.
79.
‘Ouverture de la session législative. Discours de l’Empereur’, Journal des débats (Paris), 6 November 1863, front page.
80.
In the “Sous-direction de l’Amérique et de Indo-Chine”, Yves Bruley, Le Quai d’Orsay Impérial (Paris: Editions A. Pedone, 2012), 64.
81.
See, for example, Henri Galos , ‘L’Expédition de Cochinchine et la politique française dans l’extrême Orient’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 May 1864, 173–207.
82.
Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 2002), 54.
83.
Knight, ‘The Peculiarities of Mexican History’, 125. Knight also refers to it as colonialism in Alan Knight, ‘Rethinking British Informal Empire in Latin America (Especially Argentina)’, in Matthew Brown, Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 38. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas (eds.), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), cite Mexico as an example of colonialism, which marks “the end of setback-free colonial expansion for France”, 76–78.
84.
Lecaillon, Napoléon III, 69.
85.
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6 (1953), 1–15.
86.
For example, Gregory Barton, Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Ricardo Salvatore, ‘The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire’, in Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand and Ricardo Salvatore (eds.), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1998). John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997) 614–42.
87.
A thesis outlined in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (with Alice Denny), Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1961).
88.
Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of Imperialism: A Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–42.
89.
Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 119.
90.
Todd, ‘Imperial Meridian’, 155–56.
91.
See Sophus Reinert ‘The Empire of Emulation: A Quantitative Analysis of Economic Translations in the European World, 1500–1849’, in Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge (eds), The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 105–28.
92.
Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 2.
93.
Robinson and Gallagher discuss Latin America in ‘Imperialism of Free Trade’, 6, 8–10, 13 and 15. Robinson cites the River Plate as an area where British influence initially failed, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 125–26. See also Peter Winn, ‘British Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century’, Past and Present, 73 (1976), 100–26, and David McLean, War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire: Britain and the Republics of La Plata, 1836–1853 (London: British Academic Press, 1995). DCM Platt argued against the concept of informal empire in ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’, Economic History Review, 21 (1968), 296–306 and ‘Further Objections to an “Imperialism of Free Trade”’, Economic History Review, 26 (1973), 77–91. See also DCM Platt, Latin America and British Trade 1806–1914 (London: Black, 1972). The debate was revived by Andrew Thompson in ‘Informal Empire? An Exploration in the History of Anglo-Argentine Relations, 1895–1914’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1992), 147–77, and the response from Anthony Hopkins, ‘Informal Empire in Argentina: An Alternative View’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994), 469–84. See also Rory Miller, ‘Informal Empire in Latin America’, in Robin Winks and Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume V: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Rory Miller, Britain and Latin American in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Longman, 1993). Barton gives a review of debates over informal empire and Latin America, Barton, Informal Empire, 95–104.
94.
Andrew Thompson, ‘Afterward: Informal Empire: Past, Present and Future’, in Brown, Informal Empire, 233.
95.
Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45.
96.
Thompson, ‘Afterward’, 231–32.
97.
Alan Knight, ‘Rethinking British Informal Empire’, in Brown, Informal Empire, 28–31.
98.
Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians’, 617–18.
99.
Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 122.
100.
Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849–1999 (London: Penguin, 2000), 118–19.
101.
For a discussion of pan-Latinism in relation to Algeria, see Patricia Lorcin, ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past’, French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 295–329.
102.
‘Lettre de l’Empereur à General Forey ’, 8 July 1862, [A]rchives des [A]ffaires [E]trangères, [M]émoires et [D]ocuments 31/10; Michel Chevalier, Le Mexique ancien et moderne (Paris: L. Hachette et Cie, 1863), 478–79.
103.
The most influential work both in the English and French historiography is Schefer, La Grande pensée de Napoléon III, which downplays the importance of pan-Latinist ideas. They have been variously revived, for example, in Hanna and Hanna, American Triumph. The three most recent works mention them only in passing. Gouttman, La Guerre du Mexique; Cunningham, Mexico; Lecaillon, Napoléon III.
104.
For Chevalier’s career and his economic theory, see Michael Drolet, ‘Nature, Science and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Political Economy: The Case of Michel Chevalier (1805–1879)’, Modern Intellectual History (2017), 1–35, and ‘Industry, Class and Society: A Historiographic Reinterpretation of Michel Chevalier’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), 1229–71, and Jean Walch, Michel Chevalier, économiste saint-simonien (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1975). For his views on America, see Jeremy Jennings, ‘Democracy before Tocqueville: Michel Chevalier’s America’, The Review of Politics, 68 (2006), 398–427.
105.
Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord, 2 vols. (Paris: Ch. Gosselin, 1836), I, x.
106.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 88.
107.
Michael Gobat, ‘The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race’, American Historical Review, 118 (2013), 1361.
108.
Rafe Blaufarb, ‘The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 742–63; Piero Gleijeses, ‘The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and the Independence of Spanish America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1992), 481–505.
109.
The diplomatic relationship between Washington and reformist liberals is explored in Donathon Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States : A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–61 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1981).
110.
Todd, ‘Transnational Projects’, 284.

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Shawcross, E. (2018). Introduction. In: France, Mexico and Informal Empire in Latin America, 1820-1867. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70464-7_1

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