Carolina Diaz’s Reviews > The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World > Status Update

“He passed some of the most progressive laws anywhere in the world. In addition to outlawing corporal punishment and regulating child labour, decrees provided for such unheard-of things as lunch breaks, limits to working hours, and days off.”

“He agreed to pay the entire cost of the intervention from January 1862 to July 1, 1864, which the French calculated that 270 million francs, plus 3 percent interest. After this, Mexico would have to pay for the privilege of its occupation at 1000 francs per man per year to keep the French army across the Atlantic.”

As the French general wrote to the minister of war, “we have over the Mexicans such a superiority of race, of organization, of discipline, of morality… that I beg Your Excellency to be good enough to inform the emperor that now at the head of 6000 soldiers I am the master of Mexico.”
The French were defeated on 5th of May 1862.

“Undeterred, six years later, while the prison was undergoing construction, Louis-Napoleon dressed in the clothes of a workman, picked up a wooden plank, put it over his shoulder, and walked out the front gate before fleeing to London.”
The recent Louvre heist may have had historical inspiration after all!