Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio: El imaginario politico de los imperialistas (review)

The Second Empire, governed by Maximilian of Austria from 1864 to 1867, has long been the stepchild of Mexican political historiography. Liberal historians have vilified its adherents as traitors and ridiculed the trappings of monarchy as an exotic intrusion into a republican and progressively democratic world. Erika Pani, in this remarkably judicious, thoughtful, and thoroughgoing study, has successfully demonstrated that the Empire had a natural and legitimate place in Mexico's nineteenth-century struggle to achieve peace, administrative order, legal codification, moderate liberal reform, and economic development. In a sense, she is responding to the challenge laid down in Edmundo O'Gorman's irreverent essays of 1954 and 1967 (which she cites at critical places) that monarchy was a viable political option, for which there was considerable support.

Pani describes herself as a historian of ideas, attempting to identify the imaginariopolítico, not only of the Mexican imperialists themselves but also of the moderate liberal and conservative "political class" that preceded and followed the short imperial period itself. Her study is enhanced by a revealing tabulation in the appendix of 100 leading imperialists and their activities before, during, and after the Empire. In fact, her emphasis on the continuity of political ideas is one of the great strengths of the book. The Mexican imperialists, she argues, perpetuated ideas and programs developed in the period of soul-searching following defeat at the hands of the United States in 1847 and culminating in the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna (1853-55). Many of those who served the Empire had been officials in the Santa Anna regime or moderates from 1855 to 1857. Following 1867, she suggests persuasively that the imperial formulas for national reconstruction were implemented in the doctrine of "scientific politics" (or "conservative-liberalism") espoused in 1878 by Justo Sierra and his colleagues in support of the regime of Porfirio Díaz. Pani also identifies a current of French and Spanish political thought and experience from the 1830s to the 1850s, from which the future imperialists drew, in particular the emphasis on scientifically based administration and creative economic development in the regime of Napoleon III. Pani is also explicit about what she does not present: detailed political narrative, implementation of imperial legislation, military history, and the "exotic" French presence. The study is based on the wide-ranging Mexican press from 1848 to 1867, some official imperial sources, correspondence, and papers of several key figures, such as Teodosio Lares, José López Uraga, and José Fernando Ramírez, located at the Archivo General de la Nación, Condumex, and the University of Texas. Pani also makes particularly effective use of recent secondary literature, not only on Mexico but also on France and Spain.

Any ambitious interpretative project presents problems and opens questions for future research. One such problem for Pani is the place of European influences or models in the "political imaginary" of the Mexican adherents of the Empire. One the one hand, the title reveals her determination to avoid any implication that the Mexican imperialists were imitators. On the other hand, she recognizes, and indeed probes deeply, the Mexican use of French and Spanish ideas and political experience up to 1857, but not thereafter, except for an occasional passing reference by imperial officials and the press to Napoleon III. One wonders if she is governed too much by her determined purpose. After all, as she herself shows, European ideas could be and were "Mexicanized," a natural process different from mere imitation, which took place throughout the century.

Another problem Pani faces is the complexity of the era 1854-67, a problem exacerbated by her understandable decision to omit military history, the Three Years War (1858-61), and...