The young emperor had faced defeat at Solferino and lost Italy, but he had survived it all. Until recently Archduke Maximilian had been his heir, but their mother Sophia had arranged Franz Josef’s marriage to her Bavarian niece, the twenty-three-year-old Princess Sisi. The dour kaiser fell madly in love with her. ‘Dear Angel’, he always called her, ‘My sweet dearest soul, my heart’s love’, signing himself ‘your little man’. As he recovered from the loss of Italy, Sisi gave birth to two daughters. But she was unmoved by the stolid emperor, stifled by the pompous court and harassed by her strident mother-in-law, who commandeered the babies and mocked Sisi as a ‘silly young mother’. When a daughter died of typhus aged two, Sisi sank into depression, refusing to eat. Setting up gyms in her palaces, she exercised, dieted and binged obsessionally.
Tall, slim, beautiful, she prided herself on her waist (16½ inches), strapping herself into tightly laced corsets. She craved freedom, fame and love like a modern woman, riding and hunting manically, making herself Europe’s fastest equestrienne. Growing ever more self-absorbed and self-indulgent, she had little time for Franz Josef and not much for her children: ‘Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty.’ She adored Heinrich Heine’s verses and wrote poems herself, often mocking her enemies; she hated royal life – ‘this drudgery, this torture’, she called it. ‘She espoused the view that freedom was everyone’s right,’ wrote her future daughter-in-law Stephanie. ‘Her picture of life resembled a beautiful fairy-tale drama of a world without sorrow or constraint.’ In 1858, she gave birth to a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, fulfilling her chief duty, after which she travelled the world, pursued pleasure and avoided court, husband and children.
Maximilian was a problem. Recently married to Leopold of Belgium’s daughter Charlotte, another Saxe-Coburg splicing, he craved a crown. The emperor appointed him naval commander but sacked him for liberalism. Now, in the summer of 1863, as the American civil war raged, he was offered the throne of Mexico. Charlotte pushed him to accept. It was not quite as absurd as it seems today: there was already a successful Brazilian monarchy, ruled by his cousins, and the Habsburgs had ruled Mexico for centuries. Napoleon turned his charm on to Maximilian, who disdained him as a ‘circus ringmaster … with bow legs, a sidling walk and a furtive look out of half-closed eyes, running after every pretty woman’. But Napoleon played on Maximilian’s sense of liberal mission. ‘It is a question of rescuing a whole continent from anarchy,’ he said, ‘of setting an example to the whole of America.’ He promised, ‘France will never fail the Mexican Empire.’
Embroiled in civil war, Lincoln warned against a plan that contravened American paramountcy in south America, expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, but he was in no position to stop it. Franz Josef encouraged it but insisted that Maximilian renounce his rights to Austria. A furious Maximilian had second thoughts, but Charlotte insisted, and Napoleon wrote, ‘It’s impossible you should give up going to Mexico. The honour of the House of Habsburg is at stake.’
Maximilian and Charlotte sailed for Mexico.
AMERICAN WARS: PEDRO AND LóPEZ; CHARLOTTE AND ELIZA
In May 1864, the couple arrived in Mexico,* setting up their court at the vast but ruined Chapultepec Castle, once a shrine for the Mexica
Maximilian could look southwards to his first cousin, Pedro II, in Brazil with some envy: there the young emperor was beloved. Aged fourteen, the grandson of Franz of Austria, nephew of Napoleon I – very Habsburgian, blond, big-chinned – had been crowned as constitutional emperor with sceptre, toucan cloak and epaulettes of galo-da-serra feathers, attended by black and mixed-race courtiers. ‘The monarchy,’ writes Lilia Schwarcz, ‘was tropicalizing itself.’
