The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2015 | Page 42

few years following the French pullout from Mexico and America had a hand in
that result. The honneur of the French Army had suffered; a flagging morale would
follow. Hazen comments on the Mexican Affair that: “It had damaged him [Louis
Napoleon] morally before Europe [and elsewhere] by the desertion of his protégés
to an appalling fate before the threats of the United States.” 15 The damage to
Napoleon III’s prestige revealed cracks in the armor of the French behemoth that
the likes of Bismarck would exploit. The world had seen how the threats from the
United States had forced the mighty Second French Empire to back down.
Napoleon III thought he could rectify his sagging fortunes by saber-
rattling against the Prussians, but Bismarck was ready for any and all of his actions.
The Prussian chancellor engineered events that would culminate in the Franco-
Prussian War. 16 That would be the last war that Napoleon III would fight, and its
result would not be the same as his namesake had achieved at Jena decades before.
Prussia defeated France, and Napoleon became a prisoner who would then die in
exile a few years later. The Second French Empire simply would not survive. 17
France was not excluded from further global power however, for it reinvented its
imperial vision under its new government, the Third Republic. From that time
forward there would be no French monarch, Bonaparte or otherwise, to command
the homeland or its far-flung colonies. In place of royalist adventurers, there came
efficient republican bureaucrats who had more success than that experienced by
any of Louis-Napoleon’s administrators. How did events in Mexico become so
important for the United States, France, and the world at large? During the early
years of the American Civil War, the great European powers, France, Great Britain,
and Spain, landed troops in Mexico, as had happened before, thanks to the anarchy
that had gripped this unhappy nation for the previous forty years. 18 Although they
claimed to have taken this action of forcing Mexico to resume the debt payments to
the European nations it had defaulted on, it in fact turned out to be a scheme of the
French emperor to establish a new monarchy in Mexico. This was to be a power
base that would expand European influence in the Americas in direct opposition to
the Monroe Doctrine. Kératry sums up well what was in Napoleon III’s mind at the
beginning of the Mexican adventure:
Since the United States already appeared non-existent, since the coast was
clear in the New World, why not attempt something big, which although
not useless to the French interest, would certainly enhance the prestige so
needed by its government [emphasis added]. They had, against Mexico;
endless grievances…why not go with weapons in hand to demand
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