The Age of Regeneration: Capitalism and the French Intervention in Mexico (1861-1867)

This dissertation places the French Intervention in Mexico (1861-1867) within the broader history of transatlantic capitalism and nineteenth-century European imperialism. By the 1860s, France’s political leadership had largely adopted the belief that the population’s having a financial stake in industry, infrastructure, and even war could transcend social conflict. Such a technocratic, utopian vision of capitalist growth infused Napoleon III’s Second Empire, whose Saint-Simonian officials sought to export it to Mexico. Examining Mexico’s political economy in the era of the Reform Wars, this dissertation argues that the country was already the scene of repeated, destabilizing economic interventions from abroad. By using official and private correspondence, as well as mass media from France and Mexico, the author shows the effect when this ideology of capitalist “regeneration” was imposed across the Atlantic. For French officials, the Intervention quickly became a series of costly crises, in which the imperatives of free trade, debt repayment, and military domination of the countryside each came into conflict. Rather than focus on the personalities of the Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Charlotte, this dissertation examines the structural contradictions that arose in each year of the Intervention. The author shows how the France’s rulers, military officers, and bureaucrats sought to discharge responsibility through the Second Empire’s financial and administrative apparatus, particularly by means of two large loans raised to fund the Mexican Empire in 1864 and 1865. Resembling a pyramid scheme, these loans bound private investors, joint-stock banks, and limited-liability corporations into an unsustainable speculative bubble, ultimately prolonging the French army’s violent counterinsurgency campaign in Mexico. French ideas about Mexico and “Latin America” evolved to explain these tensions of empire, changes which this dissertation traces in the public and private discourse of the Interventionists and their rivals. By dissecting the politics of the collapse of the grand scheme for regeneration, the author positions the Intervention as a failure that informed France’s “New Imperialism” in the decades that followed.