Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire

Abstract

Most Americans’ knowledge of the French Intervention in Mexico (1861–67) begins and ends with the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the date of the epic Battle of Puebla in 1862. But Kristine Ibsen believes Napoleon III’s mad “Mexican Adventure” and the installation of Austrian archduke Maximilian as Mexico’s puppet emperor still resounds in Mexican national identity today, and that it has been appropriated by American and European artists, filmmakers, and writers over the past 150 years to focus public attention on the dangers of dictatorship and imperialism. Ibsen employs a cross-disciplinary approach to demonstrate how Mexico’s struggle against autocratic rule shaped the country’s political and cultural identity and, at the same time, served activists beyond Mexico who sought symbols of successful resistance movements and popular sovereignty. Inspired by the work of Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Mexican Imbroglio), Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project and Illuminations), and Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism), she first examines visual culture in Maximilian’s occupied Mexico, 1864–67.Maximilian and his child-bride Charlotte became Mexico’s Maximiliano I and Empress Carlota, affecting indigenous dress and customs while playing the roles of European royals, to the delight of their conservative Mexican allies and the disgust of Benito Juárez’s Republicans. Ibsen sketches Maximilian’s enthronement and brief reign, and then follows with a chapter that views the spectacle of empire gone wrong from the vantage point of Edouard Manet’s Paris and his publicly banned masterwork, Execution of Maximilian. Next she leaps to 1930s Hollywood to dissect and explore the use of Warner Brothers’ Juárez (1939) as a deliberate attempt by the producers and the director to alert Americans and the world to the threat of Axis totalitarianism. Finally she examines Fernando del Paso’s 1987 Noticias del Imperio (News from the Empire), a historical novel that treats the tragedy of Maximilian’s imperial delusion and Carlota’s descent into madness as a metaphor for the madness inherent in all imperialism.The Manet chapter consists of dense art historical interpretation examining, it seems, every nuanced brushstroke and every symbol that generations of curators and scholars have read into the work. The Execution of Maximilian is considered by many to be the artist’s greatest achievement, but more important to Ibsen is the fact that the painting was banned in Paris during the reign of Louis Napoleon, reinforcing her contention that the politically active artist appropriated the imagery of the Mexican Adventure to undermine the credibility of the empire-mad regime of Napoleon “le petit.” Ibsen’s chapter on the making of Juárez on the eve of American involvement in WWII is engagingly written and largely devoid of the jargon that creeps into the other chapters. The author does a masterful job of demonstrating Warner Brothers’ deliberate propaganda effort, which dodged the Production Code Administration’s censorial minefield and pressure from a then isolationist United States government.Ibsen concludes with del Paso’s Noticias, a monumental (668 pages) theatricalized microhistory presenting discrete moments that explain great events, an homage to Benjamin’s work. She detects in del Paso’s pages “a symphony of voices in which historical representation and meaning itself are exposed as unstable constructs, imaginatively distorted and sometimes even reinvented by the ever-changing perspectives of time and space from which they are read” (p. 126).The author employs a rich array of primary sources, from Mexican newspapers to Warner Brothers’ film and interoffice correspondence archives, as well as a thorough survey of art and film studies and literary criticism in Spanish, French, and English. While images are essential to Ibsen’s thesis, the reader is at a disadvantage when critical illustrations do not accompany the text. A single signature of only 11 plates helps us visualize the self-centered Carlota and foppish Maximilian, but the illustrations are too few to allow the reader to fully appreciate the visual imagery and cinematic impact of Juárez, which the author attempts to describe frame by frame to convey the symbolism and subliminal meaning intended by the director. The text in each chapter is broken by ornaments that seem to indicate new ideas or themes. These stops sometimes relate to an illustration found among the plates but, frustratingly, just as often do not.This is a very creative literary approach to history, not a book intended for the general public. Familiarity with the works of art, film, and literature examined are a prerequisite, as is grounding in the works of Marx, Benjamin, and White. In sum, Ibsen has presented academic historians with a new look at the Second Empire of Napoleon III and the doomed empire of Maximilian as depicted in visual art, film, and literature. She reveals that the varied interpretations of history — though appropriated, invented, and contested — have all played a role in shaping Mexican national identity and public opinion about the dangers of autocratic empire.