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THE MEXICAN EXPEDITION OF 1862–1867 AND THE END OF THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2020

JEROME GREENFIELD*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
Department of History, King's College London, Londonwc2r 2ls[email protected]

Abstract

The French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

I wish to thank David Todd for his very helpful comments on a draft of this article and Robert Tombs for his advice on aspects of my argument, in addition to the journal editor and the two anonymous referees for their suggestions. I am also very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that allowed me to research and write this article.

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