The Second Empire, governed by Maximilian of Austria from 1864 to 1867, has long been the stepchild of Mexican political historiography. Liberal historians have vilified its adherents as traitors and ridiculed the trappings of monarchy as an exotic intrusion into a republican and progressively democratic world. Erika Pani, in this remarkably judicious, thoughtful, and thoroughgoing study, has successfully demonstrated that the Empire had a natural and legitimate place in Mexico’s nineteenth-century struggle to achieve peace, administrative order, legal codification, moderate liberal reform, and economic development. In a sense, she is responding to the challenge laid down in Edmundo O’Gorman’s irreverent essays of 1954 and 1967 (which she cites at critical places) that monarchy was a viable political option, for which there was considerable support.
Pani describes herself as a historian of ideas, attempting to identify the imaginario político, not only of the Mexican imperialists themselves but also of the...