This book is aimed at readers of popular history. It is written by an English author whose previous works include biographies of Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, and Napoleon III. Though based on a wide survey of published sources, many of them from the nineteenth century, it provides no new data or interpretation.
Jasper Ridley approaches the story of Maximilian and Mexico’s failed Second Empire as a tragicomedy that presumably contains some kind of universal lessons for mankind. Precisely what those lessons are is not spelled out beyond implied messages not to meddle in other people’s affairs and to look before you leap. There is nothing very Mexican about the book; that is to say, it does not seem to convey any feel for the country or its history, strongly suggesting, along with inaccurate background (chapter 2), that the author knows little about Mexican history. The book discusses thinking in Miramar, in the Tuileries, in Whitehall, in the Hofburg, at Laeken, and in the White House, but Mexicans are not so much actors as the objects of the action. Ridley is also on thin ice when it comes to the implication (again, never spelled out) that U.S. resistance to the French intervention played a role in making the United States a major power; little evidence of this is apparent.
It is a clear-eyed treatment, free of the sort of romantic nostalgia this topic often generates. Ridley does not want the reader to like Maximilian, and although a glimmer of warmth is mustered for Carlotta, it is rapidly dissipated. Despite the title, Benito Juárez plays very much a bit part, never allowed to develop beyond a cardboard character. Little discrimination is apparent among facts—all are recounted in a relentless narrative that provides no weighting and only glimpses of analysis—but the use of sources is equitable, and notes are included. In his focus on personalities, however, Ridley does not give the reader enough sense of what was really at stake in the liberal-conservative struggle. Both sides remain one-dimensional (liberals are good, though often incompetent; conservatives are bad, and snobs to boot). The assessments do not go much beyond arguing that Maximilian was lackluster, spoiled, and a Hapsburg while Juárez was self-made, stalwart, and an Indian; apparently we will all know what that means. Aristocrat-non-aristocrat, U-non-U, Old World-New World, refined and nasty versus rough and genuine; Ridley imposes a dichotomy that is not so much wrong as tepid—not Mexican but perhaps very British. Besides, it does not fit well over what was one of the great defining events in the formulation of Mexican national identity. Although the issues Mexicans were fighting over were of vast significance, in this book they come out sounding so flat, and so European, they do not seem worth such bloodshed.
