204 CHAPTER 9 DECOLONIZATION AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIONAL IDENTITIES, 1821–1870
like Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Hapsburg,
brother of Austrian emperor Franz Josef.
To prepare the ground for the arrival of the new
ruler of Mexico, the French army advanced from
Veracruz into the interior toward Puebla, where,
instead of being received as liberators, the invad-
ers met determined resistance from a poorly armed
Mexican garrison and suffered heavy losses. The
date—Cinco de Mayo de 1862—is still celebrated
as a Mexican national holiday. Nonetheless, the
French soon secured control of some major cities,
but republican guerrilla detachments controlled
most of the national territory.
Meanwhile, a delegation of conservative ex-
iles called on Maximilian to offer him a Mexican
crown, which he and his wife Carlota gratefully ac-
cepted in 1864. The conservative conspirators had
counted on Maximilian to help them recover their
lost wealth and privileges, but the emperor, mind-
ful of realities, would not consent to their demands;
the purchase of church lands by native and foreign
landlords and capitalists had created new interests
that Maximilian refused to antagonize. Confi dent
of conservative support, Maximilian even wooed
moderate liberals.
But the hopes of both conservatives and mis-
guided liberals were built on quicksand. The victo-
ries of Maximilian’s generals could not destroy the
fl uid and elusive liberal resistance, fi rmly grounded
in popular hatred for the invaders and aided by
Mexico’s rugged terrain. In 1865, with its triumph
over the Confederacy, the Union government de-
manded that the French evacuate Mexico, a region
regarded by Secretary of State William Seward as
a U.S. zone of economic and political infl uence.
Facing serious domestic and diplomatic problems
at home, Napoleon decided to cut his losses and
liquidate the Mexican adventure. Abandoned by
his Mexican and French allies, Maximilian and
his leading generals, Miguel Miramón and Tomás
Mejía, were captured, found guilty of treason, and
executed by a Juarista fi ring squad.
POSTWAR TRANSFORMATION OFLA REFORMA
Juárez, symbol of Mexican resistance to a foreign
usurper, assumed the presidency in August 1867.
His government inherited a devastated country.
Agriculture and industry were in ruins; as late as
1873, the value of Mexican exports was below the
level of 1810. To reduce the state’s fi nancial bur-
dens and end the danger of military control, Juárez
dismissed two-thirds of the army, an act that pro-
duced discontent and uprisings that his generals
managed to suppress. He also devoted the state’s
limited resources to the development of a public
school system, especially on the elementary level;
by 1874 eight thousand schools with some three
hundred fi fty thousand pupils were in operation.
However, his agrarian policy continued the
liberal program that aimed to implant capitalism in
the countryside, at the expense not of the haciendas
but of indigenous communities. Indeed, the period
of the “Restored Republic” (1868–1876) saw an in-
tensifi ed effort by the federal government to imple-
ment the Lerdo Law by compelling dissolution and
partition of indigenous communal lands, opening
the way for a new wave of fraud and seizures by
neighboring hacendados and other land-grabbers.
The result was a series of nationwide peasant re-
volts, the most serious occurring in the state of
Hidalgo (1869–1870). Proclaiming the rebels to be
“communists,” the hacendados, aided by state and
federal authorities, restored order by the traditional
violent methods. A few liberals raised their voices
in protest, but they were ignored. One of them was
Ignacio Ramírez, who condemned the usurpations
and fraud practiced by the hacendados with the
complicity of corrupt judges and offi cials and called
for suspension of the law.
Reelected president in 1871, Juárez put down
a revolt by a hero of the wars of the Reforma,
General Porfi rio Díaz, who charged Juárez with at-
tempting to become a dictator. But Juárez died the
next year of a heart attack and was succeeded as
acting president by the chief justice of the Supreme
Court, Sebastían Lerdo de Tejada, who governed
until 1876 when Díaz, aided by a group of Texas
capitalists with strong links to New York banks,
successfully overthrew him.
Díaz seized power in the name of the ideals of
the Reforma, but thereafter, he embraced a new,
profoundly antirevolutionary ideology of positiv-
ism, which ranked order and progress above free-