The mills of the gods grind slow, for it has taken the Colegio de México nearly twenty years to publish the first four volumes of this series, containing general dispatches of the Spanish legation in Mexico City from 1839 to 1848. Fortunately the other half of the slogan applies also, and the work has been well done, so that these volumes constitute an indispensable source of information on an apocalyptic decade in Mexican history.
The dispatches in Volume IV were all written by Salvador Bermúdez de Castro, an impulsive but able young Spanish intellectual who came to Mexico in 1845 full of determination to help Conservatives regenerate that unhappy country. By the summer of 1846, when this volume begins, his efforts to encourage monarchism had collapsed, and Mexico was enmeshed in a hopeless war with the United States. Bermúdez de Castro did not have much to do with that war or with the peace negotiations, but his reports give occasionally revealing insights into these and other problems of Mexican public affairs.
Nearly a hundred pages of the text are devoted to the Spanish minister’s correspondence with the French government from 1845 to 1848. In the former year France broke relations with Mexico over the comic-opera incident of the Baño de las Delicias. For over two years Bermúdez de Castro handled French diplomatic business in Mexico and did what he could to repair the breach.