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

Then the archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, born at the Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn, offered his sword to Escobedo, a former farm labourer from the harsh sierras of Nuevo León. If blood must be spilt, Maximilian said, then let it be only his, before pleading for his closest officers and friends to be spared.

“Thus, the majority of Maximilian’s own ministers and advisers had voted for the end of the empire. Read another way, however, twenty-one out of twenty-three had voted for Maximilian to remain as emperor for the time being. The latter was Maximilian’s interpretation.”

“Carlota loathed the United States… she saw Mexico’s neighbour as a nation bereft of religion, principles, and liberty. The civil war was a consequence of this degradation, she argued.”

“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.