Now, one might be wondering what business a high Tory might have in celebrating a holiday which is most closely associated with a string of historical events in Mexico which led to the disruption of the Catholic Church in that country and the violent dismantling of the monarchy under the liberal, republican regime which followed the death of Maximilian I. And that regime was absolutely not blameless, expropriating the property of the Church in a particularly brutal manner reminiscent of Henry VIII. So I very much realise that I leave myself open to the charge of hypocrisy, given my stance on the War of American Independence, but one must keep in mind that the context and the consequences - despite a few surface similarities - were vastly different.
For one thing, the Fifth of May, in spite of the popular mythology in El Norte, is in fact not a national holiday in Mexico. It is a local holiday in the state of Puebla; and given that the Battle of Puebla did occur in their own backyard, memorialising the event is a form of local and community spirit that I absolutely endorse. In fact, the Fifth of May is much more widely celebrated amongst the Mexican-American community here in the United States, for several historical reasons.
Secondly, the distinction between monarchy and empire should be upheld. Though American popular mythology likes to cast the British regime against which it fought as an empire, there was in fact (in the Proclamation of 1763) a deliberate attempt to rein in the forces of empire by a British government which had grown weary of protecting an expanding border. The American colonists were British subjects, and therefore obliged to pay in taxation for the privileges they enjoyed as such - including the protection which they asked for in the Seven Years’ War. Mexico, indeed, also had a number of war debts outstanding to France, Britain and Spain at the time of the French invasion; however, the British and Spanish governments agreed to a reasonable settlement whereas Napoléon III was bent on conquest and the expansion of his empire. The monarchy he sought to impose on Mexico, unlike the British monarchy in North America (sustained after the WAI and vindicated in the nation of Canada) was not one recognised by the inhabitants or demanded by tradition. Nor was it particularly friendly to either: the monarch himself had uprooted himself from his Old World family and seemed hell-bent on continuing Benito Juárez’s policy of curtailing the rights of the Catholic Church in Mexico, ballooning Mexico’s debts to France and opening Mexican resources to French exploitation under Napoleon III’s aggressive ‘free’ trade agreements. It was clear that Maximilian had every intent of ruling as the Napoleon of the New World rather than as the bastion of Catholicism and the common good which his conservative supporters had hoped he would be, or as the Mexican version of the Meiji Emperor he might have been. As such, it should come as very little surprise that Maximilian I was rejected even by such conservative Catholics as Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos once he came to power; by 1865 and 1866 most former conservative generals were backing their former archrival Juárez against the detested Maximilian, with only a few entrenched holdouts continuing to back the French puppet monarchy.
Thirdly, there is the intertwined impact of French policy on Mexico and the United States to consider. The history of the United States might have looked very different had the French intervention succeeded; in spite of - nay, because of - Napoleon III’s economic liberal political bent, he had a very favourable attitude toward the illegal Confederacy, and moved his country toward a recognition of that polity which required one of two things. The first would be the recognition of the CSA by another European power, preferably Britain. Failing that, however, the second would be a firm foothold in the Americas, a position which the insurrection of Juárez supporters rather thwarted. Juárez supporters in El Norte and elsewhere in the United States saw the Union cause and the Mexican Republican cause as being inherently linked, each a front in a struggle against a long legacy of imperialism and colonial rapine.
It is a very interesting bit of history, though certainly tragic for the Catholic Church, which found very few friends either amongst the openly-hostile Republicans or amongst the hypocritical French. At the end of the day, however, what right there was in this fight was probably ultimately to be found on the side of Juárez and Zaragoza.
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