How Did Napoleon Iii End Up In Mexico?

The history of Mexico is marked with a truly impressive amount of disputes

, revolutions, republics, and reversions. Prior to the 16th century, the land was ruled by the indigenous populations, including the Maya and Aztec empires. With the arrival of Hernan Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors in 1519, everything changed; the conquest of the Yucatan peninsula and the rest of the country was the start of several hundred years of colonial rule.

But the story was far from over. An interesting time in Mexico occurred, when a monarchy that was established by Napoleon III, (nephew of Bonaparte) collapsed within the space of only three years, after his troops invaded in the 19th century and installed his friends to the throne. In order to understand why these events took place, it's important to establish a rough sense of what had occurred in New Spain over the previous three centuries.

The conquest of the Aztec empire by Cortes in 1521 was only the beginning; taking over the rest of the country took another century to complete. Friars began converting the indigenous populations and helped to establish a feudal system that best benefited Spain, in which the locals were seen as nothing but a labor force. Mexicans suffered harsh treatment under Spanish colonial rule, and were barred from education, government, and even had dictated to them the farming of crops that only benefited Spain..

In 1810, the locals had had enough. A peasant uprising escalated into a full-blown War of Independence, lasting eleven years, which resulted in Spain surrendering their colonial claims to the land. Augustine de Iturbide was the ruler of the First Mexican Empire, and he had helped in stopping the conflict.. However, the regime collapsed after only eight months due to infighting between two major factions: the liberals, who favored democracy, and the conservatives, who wanted a monarch to rule.

This struggle would be a major aspect in Mexico's politics over the next several decades. Texas and California were lost to the United States after war started between Mexico and the USA, once Mexico declared the land to be a Republic.. A second federalist government, established in 1846, was marred by the Reform Wars of the 1850s: an attempt, by the liberals, to to strip the Catholic Church of a lot of its power, and to remove centralist authority, resulted in a brutal civil war.

Over the seventeen years of the Second Republic's reign, there were fourteen separate heads of state. The war between the liberals and conservatives ended with the election of Benito Juarez as president in 1861, but the infrastructure and economy of Mexico were utterly crippled. It was around this time that Spain, Great Britain, and France began to pressure the government over the immense amount of debt that they were owed. Sadly, some treacherous locals were waiting to help the conservadores implement their monarchy, and when ships bound from Europe arrived in the region in 1862, they helped them take over..

by: Robert Nickel

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