Robert Tombs is a fellow St John’s College, Cambridge and the author of Paris Commune, 1871.
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Vol. 15 No. 19 · 7 October 1993
pages 10-11 | 3362 words
Exporting the Royals
Robert Tombs
- Maximilian and Juárez by Jasper Ridley
Constable, 353 pp, £16.95, March 1993, ISBN 0 09 472070 3
- Maximilian’s Lieutenant: A Personal History of the Mexican Campaign, 1864-7 by Ernst Pitner, translated and edited by Gordon Etherington-Smith
Tauris, 256 pp, £35.00, October 1993, ISBN 1 85043 560 X
Europeans coming to Veracruz during the 19th century were invariably impressed by its large population of vultures and sharks. Those who arrived in the 1860s in pursuit of Napoleon III’s Mexican dream, or who followed in the train of Maximilian von Habsburg in the hope of sharing in the glory and profit of his new empire, found what one French officer called ‘these disgusting animals’ which ‘stalk you like a prey’ a sobering sight. Things were to turn out worse than their worst forebodings.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993
From Ian Jacobs
Robert Tombs’s review of Jasper Ridley’s Maximilian and Juarez (LRB, 7 October) may well be sound in its account of France’s role, but shows a thorough lack of knowledge of Mexican history. He is simply wrong to state that ‘small property-owners did not exist in Mexico,’ as numerous studies over the last two decades have shown. Similarly, for a good twenty years no serious scholar of rural Mexico has accepted that ‘an estate-owning aristocracy, the hacendados … ruled over an indebted peasantry that were little more than slaves.’ The Liberal Government, we are told, was supported by ‘disaffected warlords’. To quote just one example, Juan Alvarez, one of the great Liberal caudillos, was a Liberal from the start: when did he become disaffected, and from whom or what? The Conservatives were apparently supported by the hacendados, but then how do we explain that the majority of prominent Liberals were ‘estate-owning aristocracy’?
Ian Jacobs
London WC2
