Description
During the 1860s, Mexico, under the republican government of President Benito Juarez, was invaded by the French Empire, who set up a new regime led by Prince Maximilian of Austria, who became Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico with the support of the local Mexican conservatives. The Republicans kept fighting the French and the Empire until the French were forced to withdraw from Mexico, and Maximilian was captured and executed by Republican forces. This thesis focuses on the international reaction of this event based on what the newspapers reported because newspapers reveal the general mindset and opinions of the people, or even influences them. Each chapter of this thesis will focus on a different event of the war with the first one being the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla, the second one of the arrival and reign of Maximilian, and the last one of his eventual captured and execution. I will divide each chapter on subsections based on the country the newspapers belong to, and there I will compare and contrast these newspapers to analyze their ideas and positions regarding the French occupation of Mexico. I will also provide a historiographical recount of the Second French Intervention in Mexico to compare my own argument with the argument taken by other historians who have researched this topic. Some of these historians include Mexican historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II who wrote the trilogy titled Patria (2017), Florencia Mallon who wrote Peasant and Nation (1995), and Walter Scholes with Mexican Politics During the Juarez Regime, 1855-1872 (1956), just to name a few. The purpose of this is to show the differences within the historiography of this topic and how my thesis would add to it.
