The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2015 | Page 45

did try to arrange for additional Austrian troops to fill their void. America
immediately threatened Austria with war. Austria backed down. 24 Vienna had a
growing concern that Berlin would target them next, even though they had been
allied against Denmark not long before. Berlin’s aggression would soon yield
devastating results to Austria’s once-great continental power.
As expected, all the other troops, along with many colonists Maximilian
had invited, fled Mexico when the French regiments, there protecting them, started
to leave. 25 Mexicans sympathetic to Juárez, increasingly the majority of the
country, would make little distinctions in nationalities when carrying out reprisals
against those they saw in their country to aid a foreign power poised against them.
By the start of 1867, those who had come to Mexico to prop up or benefit
from the imperial throne began to desert that same throne— the emperor of the
French would be no exception. The nineteenth century English historian, W. H.
Adams, notes that the desertion of Maximilian by Louis Napoleon in the face of
American pressure “must ever remain a dark stain on the history of the second
French empire.” 26 Because of this, Maximilian would pay with his life, while
Napoleon would eventually pay with his throne. These events started when
America decided to get involved with the currents affairs of Mexico.
The French emperor’s desire to regain lost prestige would tempt him into
war with Prussia in hopes that his subjects would rally around him in the time of
war. The emperor was in need of a new, revamped image—what better way than to
lead his nation into action against upstart Prussia in order to gain the “revenge for
Sadowa” his subjects were clamoring for? Since “both the military and political
prestige of Napoleon III were dimmed by the melancholy issue of the Mexican
expedition” 27 there needed to be a war to return the glory to the throne that was
sliding into jeopardy. There must have been a question in the minds of his
subordinates: if Louis-Napoleon would leave a Hapsburg, the brother of the
Emperor of Austria, in the lurch, how faithful would he be to anyone else he had
need of that was perhaps less nobly born?
The enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine upon a global power, the Second
Empire of France, compromised the power and legacy of the first Napoleon’s
greatness to a point of inaugurating the decline of France’s domination of the
European continent in the face of Prussia. Prussia, the unifier of Germany, would,
in a few years, be celebrating the beginning of the Second German Reich in the
halls of Versailles itself. Napoleon III’s scheme at re-legitimization had backfired
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