“Vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet.” —New York Times Book Review

The story of how nineteenth-century European rulers conspired with Mexican conservatives in an outlandish plan to contain the rising US colossus by establishing Old World empire on its doorstep.

The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected opportunity for political conservatives across continents. On one side were European monarchs eager to counter growing US power, which threatened their hegemony. On the other, Mexican antidemocrats needed backers to fend off the republicanism of Benito Juárez. When these two groups found each other, the Second Mexican Empire was born.

Raymond Jonas argues that the empire, often dismissed as a historical sideshow, is critical to appreciating the global effects of US power in the nineteenth century. In 1862, at the behest of Mexican reactionaries and with the initial support of Spain and Britain, Napoleon III sent French troops to Mexico. There, he installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as a ruler who could resist democracy in North America. But the French were routed at the Battle of Puebla, and republican guerrillas spent the next four years bleeding the would-be empire. After the Civil War, African American troops were dispatched to Mexico to hasten the French withdrawal.

Habsburgs on the Rio Grande fundamentally rewrites narratives of global history. Far from a footnote, the Second Mexican Empire was central to great-power struggles that set the terms of twentieth-century rivalry.

"Vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet…Jonas is astute and judicious in navigating the kaleidoscope of contradictory political ideologies that came together in the Second Mexican Empire, before all too quickly coming apart again." - New York Times Book Review

"Adds to our understanding of the Second Mexican Empire by giving us a fuller account of both its rise and dissolution, and…helps us to see anew the importance of an episode, so near the U.S., that is routinely overshadowed by the drama of the Civil War." - Wall Street Journal

"Jonas has made a grand entrance into the study of Mexican history with his new book…This work, which is not only scholarly, very well-written, and engaging, is intelligent, thought-provoking, and presented in an original manner." - Journal of the Civil War Era

"Jonas has produced perhaps the first comprehensive history of the Second Mexican Empire published in English …[and] has supplied a definitive text on an important if transitory stage of North American history and one that will be cited extensively." - Pacific Historical Review

"One of the few detailed studies of a subject little known to most readers in North America or Europe: the short-lived Mexican Empire of 1863/67." - German Politics and Society

"Engaging…the book could hardly be timelier." - CEU Review of Books