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Dreaming of a Mexican Empire: The Political Projects of the “Imperialistas”

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-1-1

1527-1900

Érika Pani,

Latin American and Latino Studies

In the narrative of Mexican national memory, the struggle against the French intervention and Maximilian’s empire seems to have retained, even in the face of increasing revisionism, all the qualities of a pristine patriotic myth: the color, excitement, and simplicity of a triumph of good over evil. If we are to believe the textbook version, between 1862 and 1867 the nation—except for a few traitorous Conservatives—led by Benito Juárez, rose heroically to vanquish French imperialism, sweeping away the ridiculous throne set up by the invader. For added drama—and poetic justice—the Hapsburg usurper was shot; his wife went crazy. Mexico’s victory in such an unequal struggle confirmed its commitment to democracy and freedom and its providential destiny as an independent liberal republic.As a building block for Historia patria, the imperial episode fades before this promethean “Second War of Independence.” Interestingly, the depiction of the Second Empire as an exogenous event, as the frivolous, misbegotten experiment of degenerate Europe, in which Mexicans played practically no role, has been pervasive in Mexican historiography. After Maximilian was defeated, those who had fought against him pen in hand—José María Iglesias, Vicente Riva Palacio, and José María Vigil—blissfully gave into deriding and ridiculing his regime and its supporters.1Conversely, historians who resisted the official version of the story and tried to defend the imperial project—self-proclaimed clerical monarchists such as Francisco de Paula Arrangoiz and, to a lesser degree, Spaniard Niceto de Zamacois—sought to wash their hands off its disastrous results: the regime ratified the Reforma laws that nationalized church wealth and legalized religious toleration, and culminated with the spilling of Hapsburg blood in Querétaro. In other words, they strove to minimize the role of the Conservatives in such an experiment.2 Subsequent works of diverse ideological orientation—from Sierra and Rivera Cambas to García Cantú3—have not only repeated the original arguments but also reiterated the strident images of traditional historiography: the static imperial government run by thieving central Europeans who did not even speak Spanish; the omnipresence and omnipotence of the French army in the affairs of the Mexican government. More recent work has focused on more specific aspects of the imperial experience such as its cultural, social and foreign policies, or the roles played by Napoleon’s soldiers. It has started to chip away at this monolithic Historia de bronce.4 Nevertheless, historians who have attempted to present an overall vision of the period—José C. Valadés, José Fuentes Mares, and Gastón García Cantú—do little to disturb the ways in which official national memory has chosen to remember the empire.5Thus this period has remained the picturesque, romantic, amusing realm of Austrian music, Zorrilla’s theater, and hollow court ceremonial; of a womanizing emperor and his bossy wife; of a perverted upper class who, too preoccupied with mimicking European aristocracy, abandoned the affairs of state to a group of swindling foreigners. The regime is painted as having been glaringly detached from Mexican social and political realities. As such, it has been considered totally alien to Mexico’s historical development. It would seem that the so-called empire—el llamado imperio—does not even deserve to be called a Mexican government; consequently, its laws do not appear in any of the legislative compilations that have since been edited.6The traditional version of the story tells us that the empire was the “feeble, puny, rickety” creature of the French monarch’s ambition; of Maximilian’s gullibility; and of the misguided dreams of monarchy of a minuscule, senile, and impotent Conservative party. Who then, manned the machinery of government between 1864 and 1867? Who took on the day-to-day task of governing? Only “traitors” and “imbeciles” could have collaborated with the imperial administration. So has historiography passed judgment on the men who answered Maximilian’s call.7 Nevertheless, a quick survey of the empire’s political personnel yields an impressive list of Mexicans of relatively diverse social and ideological or partisan backgrounds, distinguished in the fields of law and culture, with experience in high-level politics since the 1840s.8 With very few exceptions— the young and relatively unknown Francisco Artigas, minister of public instruction, for instance—these men were anything but political lightweights.Between 1864 and 1867, about 100 men acted as ministers, counselors of state, imperial visitors and commissaries, members of the Supreme Court of Justice, and of other important government agencies such as the Junta Protectora de Clases Menesterosas and the Tribunal de Cuentas. I refer to them as “imperialistas” because it was their allegiance to Maximilian’s regime that constituted them temporarily into a group within the political elite. It was a name that—along with the more pompous imperiales—was used during these years by both friends and foes to describe them. The purpose of this article is to analyze why these men accepted collaboration with the imperial regime. It is true that some of these men joined the ranks of the empire almost automatically: Conservative military leaders, who had kept up the fight after the end of the Reforma War (1858–60), later argued that the republican government’s hostility had left them with no other choice but to support the French army and the imperial regime.9 On the other hand, exiled monarchists such as José María Gutiérrez Estrada and José Hidalgo, who had been pleading for a European prince since the 1840s, felt that their dream was finally coming true.Nonetheless, for most imperialistas, active cooperation with a monarchical regime supported by French bayonets was a conscious, painful decision. José Fernando Ramírez, who later became minister of state and foreign relations, painted his house in black, as a signal of mourning, when the imperial couple entered Mexico City in June 1864. Minister of Justice Pedro Escudero y Echanove described his acceptance of a Cabinet position as “the greatest sacrifice I have made in my life, and the costliest service I have rendered unto my country.”10 How can this be explained? Could these men of political experience and respectable positions have all—simultaneously—lost their minds and fallen prey to the folly of the monarchical pipe dream? Could they not bear the idea of giving up the spoils of public office?On the contrary, in 1864, in the context of a successful foreign invasion that overlapped an ongoing divisive civil war, the empire did not appear to be a foolish political project. What would later be deemed treason was then perceived to be patriotic sacrifice. This article explores why part of the Mexican political class believed the imperial regime offered solutions to the problems that had kept the Mexican state dangerously weak and powerless: Why did this eclectic group of politicians support Maximilian’s regime? Why did they believe that a monarchy was not only the most viable but also the most desirable alternative? What sort of state did they envision, once the young prince was in power?Who were these men, with “the hearts of canary birds and the temperament of butterflies,” who joined the empire?11 Did they share any life experiences that could explain the positions they embraced between 1864 and 1867? At least 60 of them had been born before independence, of which 36 had been born before 1810. Only 5 were 30 years old or younger at the time of Maximilian’s arrival. In the words of their younger counterparts, the dashing generation that had manned the Reforma movement of the 1850s, they belonged to a “worried generation,”12 allegedly timorous and slow moving. Few could remember the viceregal period, and while some of these men spoke of it fondly as a “pleasant memory, like that of the pleasures of childhood,”13 none considered the corporatist, Catholic Spanish monarchy of yore to be an operative model.If the colonial period had become little more than a rhetorical device for this group of elder statesmen, the years of the war with the United States were remembered vividly, with dismay. We know that at least 19 of these men were involved with the war, either as defeated combatants, or as members of the maligned government that signed the humiliating Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. This experience partly explains their pathological fear of their neighbor to the north. José Fernando Ramírez argued that nothing could be worse than living in a city occupied by North Americans. This included, one would assume, residing in a city that had been taken by the French. The relationship between the members of the imperial government and the expeditionary army was fraught with tensions, struggles for power, and disagreements. Nevertheless, for many of the former, the presence of French soldiers, although burdensome and even tragic, represented the only “dike” that could hold back the ferocious expansionism of the neighboring Protestant republic.14Most of the imperialistas had some sort of professional training that marked them off as members of the intellectual and economic elite, for only the latter could afford investing in higher education. But with a few exceptions (Carlos Sánchez Navarro, whose family owned half of Coahuila; and Francisco Pimentel, heir to the Spanish title of Conde de Heras y Soto), Maximilian’s collaborators did not come from families of exceptional social or economic background; education provided access to politics, but their social insertion depended on their performance, not family connections. Perhaps this explains why Ignacio Aguilar y Marocho, who had attended the Morelia seminary on a scholarship, after slowly and laboriously climbing the social, professional, and political ladder—he taught at the seminar, sat on the Commercial Tribunal in San Luis Potosí, worked for the state government, set up private practice as a lawyer in Mexico City, wrote for El Universal, managed to establish compadrazgo relationships with Archbishop Pelagio Antonio Labastida and wealthy entrepreneur Antonio Escandón, was a congressman in 1846 and finally a secretary of state in 1853—wistfully hoped for a regime that would secure the government of “an aristocracy of merit, which is democratic when compared to that of blood, and aristocratic in relation to the populace.”15Forty-one of the members of this less-than-solid middle class were lawyers, whose numbers had “multiplied far beyond” society’s need for them16; this was typical of Mexico’s nineteenth-century political class, while the nine engineers, including one member of the Smithsonian, were less so. Among the 15 military men who held civilian office, all except Indian leader Tomás Mejía and Ramón Méndez—a candlemaker who had been forcefully drafted, and then risen in the professional armed forces—had formally embraced a military career, having graduated from the Colegio Militar in Mexico City. Some, like Bruno Aguilar and José López Uraga, had even studied abroad. In other words, these men were qualified military engineers and mathematicians, not fierce caudillos who had cut their teeth on the battlefield. In its dealings with the church, the other corporation that many found antiliberal and antimodern, the empire still managed to find a space, within its institutions, for three priests.As befitted the century’s politicians, except for the 19 men who had been born in the capital, most imperialistas had been born in the provinces; conversely, 49 of them died in Mexico City or its nearby suburbs, bearing witness to the country’s growing centralization. It is interesting to note that of these “traitors,” only 13 died in exile. This speaks not only to the magnanimity of the triumphant republican government but also to the fact that collaboration with the empire must have been less exceptional and less aberrant than subsequent historiography has led us to believe. Not only were these men persecuted and ostracized only exceptionally; some were even recycled by the ensuing regimes. The case of imperial prosecutor Manuel Dublán, Juárez’s brother-in-law, who in 1869 was already a congressman, and would become secretary of the treasury in 1884, is certainly unique. Nevertheless, imperialistas sat in legislative drafting committees without scandal: even Aguilar y Marocho, who had rabidly opposed the 1857 constitution, was a member of the commission that drafted the navy’s code. Many were also respected academicians, and belonged to and sometimes presided over professional and cultural associations throughout the Porfiriato—the Academia Mexicana de Jurisprudencia y Legislación, the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, the Sociedad Agrícola Mexicana, and the Asociación de Ingenieros Civiles y Arquitectos.Prior to the arrival on the archduke, these men served as provincial governors, former congressmen, and cabinet members in the Arista, Herrera, Santa Anna, and Comonfort administrations. Of these 100 high-ranking officials who flocked to Maximilian’s side, at least 15 had launched their political careers as members of city councils; twenty-nine had been members of legislatures, and, of these, 15 had represented the sovereign people more than once; twenty-six had been either secretaries or members of Councils of State; seventeen had been members of the judiciary; ten had been entrusted with diplomatic missions; eleven had held executive power in a state or department; and one had been Mexico’s youngest president. As draftsmen of a brand new state, they were immersed in the problems and challenges of an endeavor that too often seemed impossible. Because of this, they could not but try to create the national culture and sentiment that would bolster their political creation.Thus the imperialistas tried to construct, at least on paper, a nation whose profile, they feared, was still too sketchy: its borders threatened, its national culture undefined; its past contested, its future uncertain. Because of this, most of them were educators and cultural entrepreneurs. They were active members of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, the Ateneo, and the Academia de San Carlos: Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia taught Nahuatl; Joaquín Mier y Terán mathematics; Joaquín Velázquez de León presided over the Colegio de Minería; Manuel Orozco y Berra and José Salazar Ilarregui tried to fix Mexico’s borders and physical characteristics on maps17; Manuel Larrainzar drew the first outline for a general history of his country; and José María Lacunza held the first History chair at the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, whose Academy he founded with Guillermo Prieto in 1843.At the Academy, future republicans (Prieto, Ignacio Ramírez) and imperialists (Aguilar y Marocho, Clemente de Jesús Munguía) discussed the character of national literature and published El Museo Mexicano, so that through its engaging “curiosities,” the general public would become aware of their country’s natural wealth and impressive historical legacy. Francisco Pimentel’s Memoria sobre las causas que han originado la situación actual de la raza indígena en México, y medios para remediarla (1864) was the first indigenista tract that addressed the problems of the Indians of the present, not the glories of their past. Seven imperialistas were also among the contributors to the Diccionario universal de historia y geografía (1853–55), which was meant to “erect a glorious monument to the country in which we live, to lay down the foundations of an exclusively Mexican historical dictionary” by cataloging, defining, and describing “Mexican things.”18The men who joined hands to support the Second Empire had thus traveled different, but parallel, paths to end up in the same place. In the years that followed the war with the United States, they had embraced distinct partisan positions and belonged to different political groups. Some had even stared at each other from opposite sides of the political trenches; three of them (Aguilar y Marocho, Lares, Velázquez de León) belonged to the cabinet of Antonio López de Santa Anna’s dictatorship between 1853 and 1855, while five (Dublán, López Portillo, Payno, Ramírez, Siliceo) were exiled by order of His Most Serene Highness. This has made it hard for historians to catalog them: José Fernando Ramírez has been described as both “the reddest republican” and a “fluctuating moderate”;19 Teodosio Lares as a “sober liberal” and as “the blind instrument of reaction.”20Nevertheless, the sinuous and difficult roads they traveled were not atypical for the century’s politicians. This was a time of difficult transitions, of conflictive constructions, of bewildering searches that did not lend itself to rigid ideological positions, for all historiography has insisted on depicting it as a simple struggle between liberals and conservatives, progress and reaction. Thus such men have often been dismissed as chaqueteros (turncoats) and oportunistas (opportunists). What kind of a state did they envision, as they shifted political alliances? Was there a common project that eventually bound them together? What led them to believe that their dreams could be realized under the imperial regime?Charles A. Hale has shown how the disgraceful defeat and territorial losses of 1846– 48 unleashed a “crisis of conscience” among Mexican politicians.21 After 1848 the consolidation of a national government that could withstand threats both internal and external came to be seen as an imminent, pressing need. For some, especially the more extreme members of the 1856 Constituent Congress—Puros Ponciano Arriaga, José María del Castillo Velasco, José María Mata, Isidoro Olvera, Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Ramírez, and Francisco Zarco —this meant doing away, mercilessly, with the “vices” inherited from colonial days; the creation of a modern democratic, dynamic republic required undermining the church, army, and other corporate entities, as well as the recovery of a crippled economy.22 Consequently, for all the concessions made to the moderate wing of the constituent congress, the 1857 Constitution was framed as a radical document that would “directly attack and harm interests and abuses which had grown old, and had become consecrated by the passage of time.”23Others—the future imperialistas among them—were less idealistic and less self-assured. Drawing on what they considered to be the sad experiences of the first 40 years of independent life, they believed the destruction of the remnants of an obsolete system hardly ensured that the new one would work. In order to function, postrevolutionary governments needed to rise to the epoch’s main challenge: ensuring “progress within order and freedom within the law.”24 The governments of independent Mexico had so far failed. In these men’s minds, the rapid succession, since the triumph of Iguala, of the most diverse political systems, in turn “democratic, oligarchic, military, demagogic, and anarchic,”25 seriously brought into question Mexico’s capabilities for building a stable government according to rigidly prescribed principles and theories. As we have mentioned, throughout their careers, these men had often been willing to abandon dogmatic positions, and look for answers beyond what Lucas Alamán described as “the beaten path of federalism and centralism.”26 They tended to be less concerned with postulates and forms, as indicated in José Fernando Ramírez’s defense of centralist principles within a federal system in 184027 and Teodosio Lares’s proposal for an independent Council of State within a republican framework in 1852.28 As General José López Uraga wrote in his diary, quoting French journalist Émile de Girardin, “We have not taken party against any form of government . . . but neither do we adore any. In our eyes, a government is worth something not because of its form but because of its actions; its origin matters less than its objective. All incapable governments are guilty. The good intentions of a bad government do not entail extenuating circumstances.”29How could one guarantee a government’s efficiency? How could one build a strong state whose authority could simultaneously ensure both order and liberty throughout the national territory? The would-be imperialistas, like the rest of the Mexican political class, believed that they were not alone in this search for a government that worked. Instead, they saw themselves participating in a—albeit asymmetrical—transatlantic dialogue on the nature and possibilities of the “modern” state, on how a government should be constructed, once the old assumptions of divine right sovereignty and the corporate organization of society had been rendered ineffectual by the Age of Revolution. They viewed the political theorists and practitioners of Western Europe—and specially the Catholic and Latin Spain and France—as their colleagues, for they shared with them a similar task, a common language and set of references, and often the same fears.Thus if they avidly read and enthusiastically quoted French writers and politicians, it was not only because such allusions lent a tone of distinction to their assertions30 but also because they were convinced that “civilization . . . makes one great family out of all men; the unity that Christianity has established on the social movements of all cultivated nations makes the knowledge of what is going on in other countries necessary, for these events hold the advance of humanity for all.”31 The Mexican political class did not look to the “Old Continent” in order to blindly ape “foreign” ideas and create unavoidably inferior—and probably doomed—versions of European institutions,32 but did so because they believed their European associates were involved in a similar process: the construction of a modern nation-state that would “monopolize” all useable political resources33 and guarantee order and liberty, peace and development, as well as individual rights and social harmony in postrevolutionary times.It is within this environment of cosmopolitan debate and local exigencies around what the national state should look and act like that the imperialistas operated. Most believed that a government was legitimate only insofar as it was effective. Consequently, they tacitly rejected the idea that the state should be an arena into which society channeled its conflicts, where its contending claims were reflected, confronted, and resolved. This clash of discordant interests would not engender, as some of the puros claimed, the much exalted “common good,” but only further instability. Nonetheless, even as they rejected the ideal of the state as the incarnation of society’s common hopes and dreams, which emerged purified from the contest between its various impulses, the future imperialistas did not think that government could remain the staid “night watchman” of classic liberalism. In a society riddled with disorder, such as postindependent Mexico, the state needed to be strong and active enough to be able to satisfy “the needs” of the governed.34 To Thomas Paine’s vision of government as a “necessary evil,” these men preferred that of Napoleon III, the man who sponsored Maximilian’s Mexican adventure, and saw in the state not a “necessary ulcer” but the “beneficial power in all social organizations.”35How then, to govern? In the words of engineer and imperial councilor Vicente Ortigosa, government should not be “an art . . . but a science.”36 The form of government itself was unimportant, since it was “good administration” that furnished the “instrument necessary to fulfill any idea”: a government without administration was “like an astronomer with no telescope.”37 Arguing along the same lines, Teodosio Lares, author of what is perhaps the most vigorous project of administrative law in nineteenth-century Mexico,38 insisted on providing the state with a structure organized along “the fixed principles of science,” in which efficiency, rationality, and uniformity would be ensured by the nonintervention of the different powers on each other, for it only “unnerved” the action of government when the different branches “invaded” each other’s spheres, and by the strict “hierarchic and gradual dependency which the agents of administration must have on the respective superior authority.”39It was thus a “scientific,” hierarchic, well-structured system of administration that would provide the state with the effective tools it needed to carry out its actions. The argument echoes those that French saintsimonians and positivists had been making since the 1820s, and announces the Porfiriato’s unofficial slogan “Menos política, más administración.”40 Nevertheless, by promoting a powerful state, these men did not advocate the erection of a superior, arbitrary power. Lares explained that, on the contrary, since these solid administrative institutions were but the “realization and consequence” of “the principles of a rational order, built upon the nature of man,”41 they would prove to be a more solid bulwark to citizen rights and society’s welfare than the glossier declarations of congresses, which had historically been little more than fancy words on paper, a mean trick played on the people.Hence, a solid administrative structure would, finally, enable the national government to secure the rule of law, the strict enforcement of, as Juan Nepomuceno Rodríguez de San Miguel would say, those “very exact and very constant rules, which give order to the use of freedom and other human faculties, and prevent their abuse.”42 Only when a clear and reliable set of rules was in effect could order be assured, and only then would the stage be set for “material progress,” which would bring about “goods that can be felt, and which make the happiness of the people.”43 Nevertheless, the stress on fixed precepts, and on a need for their unfailing, mechanical, mathematical execution, goes beyond the perceived need to foster an auspicious climate for economic growth. It is symptomatic of the bafflement some felt, living in an uncertain world, where the old rules of morality and sociability had worn out, but which had so far failed to produce others. These men considered the state should step in and fill the void. It is probably José Fernando Ramírez who best expresses this sentiment, as he spoke of the need for clear-cut legal sanctions: “In effect, it is sanction that gives life to the law, and without it its text will never go beyond a philosophic apothegm, a piece of advice, or, if one wants, a threat which all will ignore if the only thing holding them back is a personal danger, which they do not fear, the judgment of public opinion, which they scorn, or the curb of religion, which they are not acquainted with.”44As we have seen, the would-be imperialistas hoped to construct government as a well-oiled machine that would go by itself, producing constant, uniform, never-failing action.45 Their obsession with unity and reliability made them frown upon two of the basic premises of political thought and practice in nineteenth-century Mexico: “modern” politics; and federalism. The latter was mostly a technical problem: sovereignty divided was no sovereignty at all. Order and harmony could not be preserved by the national government if it had to forfeit its authority to a state’s “so-called sovereignty.” According to Aguilar y Marocho, the federated states “were not, in fact, as the visionaries had proclaimed, brilliant satellites gyrating in harmonious concert around a vigorous, unifying center; instead, they were wandering bodies, with no rule to their direction, or stability in their course, between which all sensible men could foresee constant and ominous collisions, like the atoms in the chaos of the philosophers of antiquity.”46The wish to harness the centripetal forces that drove regional autonomy during most of the century may have been unrealistic, but it was consistent with the imperialistas’ centralizing, homogenizing project. It was their aversion to politics—their modus vivendi—that sank these politicians into a conundrum. Most of these men saw the advent of modern politics, competitive and popular, as one of the “evils of the century.” The game of politics was no longer, as the Escriche dictionary defined it, “the art of governing, of giving laws and statutes to keep the peace, public security . . . order and buenas costumbres.”47 As Francois-Xavier Guerra has shown, the crisis of the Spanish Crown and the independence revolutions made the sovereignty of the nation the ideological bedrock on which all the new states of Spanish America would have to be built, even as many of the political actors found the concept unintelligible, repulsive or absurd.48Consequently, those who governed independent Mexico did so in the nation’s name: they had to entice, harness, manipulate, or invent the nation’s “sovereign will” with enough plausibility to legitimize their position. Politics became the shameless, unrelenting, uncompromising struggle for power, and one for which many of these men felt particularly ill-equipped. The inevitable appeals to an unreliable, shortsighted populace and the struggle between political factions made for thoroughly unscientific government. According to José Fernando Ramírez, in such a context, successful politicians were not “men of capacity,” but “proven men,” who had demonstrated their loyalty to the party, their abilities to stir up a crowd or to deliver an election. They could be “good at everything, except at organizing a country in dissolution.”49Notwithstanding these nagging doubts, by the late 1850s, the political class, almost in its entirety, had accepted the principle of popular sovereignty, which was the logical corollary of that of the nation, even if some thought that, in the last