Many writers on Maximilian and the French Intervention pass rapidly over the preliminary debt-collecting expedition which Britain, France, and Spain sent to Mexico in 1861. Not only does this early episode lack the romance and drama of the ill-fated archduke, but it involves tortuous diplomatic negotiations and misunderstandings, difficult to relate and tiresome to read about. Nevertheless, the ambiguous tripartite convention and the botched expedition which followed form a necessary background to the more stirring Intervention of 1862-1867.
Bock has set out to give an exhaustive diplomatic account of the convention and of the tripartite expedition, relying primarily on British and French archival sources, which have never before been so thoroughly researched or combined in one account. His labors in the Public Record Office and the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères must have been prodigious, and it is difficult to imagine any pertinent file in these repositories which he has overlooked. Also his well-annotated bibliography includes a considerable cross-section of nineteenth-and twentieth-century secondary sources, especially French.
Close inspection of his formidable documentation discloses a few gaps. He has failed to consult the Spanish archives, although these are open to researchers for the early 1860s. Instead, like all other writers on the subject, he has relied on published collections. These might have been adequate for his purposes, if he had used recent monographs on Spanish politics and biographies of Marshal Juan Prim, but such secondary works are absent from his bibliography. Even more surprising: except for the dispatches of Matías Romero, he has apparently ignored all Mexican sources, monographs, and articles dealing with the period.
Still, a historian cannot be expected to go everywhere and look at everything under the sun. Considering Bock’s impressive work in London and Paris, the critic might overlook a few omissions, if he had produced a clear guide to the tangle of motives and deceptions which led to the abortive expedition or a commanding new thesis to lighten the dark corners of the Intervention. Unfortunately he has done neither. This is a rigidly conventional diplomatic account in which the narrative creeps from one dispatch to another, tracing the intricate, formalized verbiage of the diplomats with a minimum of explanation or interpretation. Bock supplements his densely written text with no less than twenty-one appendices, and he has overloaded the book with footnotes—often two or three per sentence of text. Some of these amount to small, digressive essays. The publishers have added to the confusion by placing all notes at the end of the volume.
What the book needs primarily is less diplomatic detail and more background material: analyses of the political situation in Britain, France, Spain, and Mexico, sketches of the principal actors and their personalities, and a little leaven of press reactions. (Few newspapers are cited.) Reliance on non-Mexican sources produces some oddly spelled proper names (St. Jean d’Ulloa, Mathias Romero) and leads the reader to wonder whether the author has really gotten to the bottom of controversial topics which rest on a groundwork of Mexican polities, such as the negotiations with Manuel Doblado.
The concluding chapter presents little that is startlingly new but offers a succinct, clear summary of the negotiations and the expedition. It is a pity that the rest of the book is so hard to penetrate, for Boek’s painstaking research deserves more readers than he is likely to have, and no one may work through these materials again for a long time.
