Vanity and nervousness of the Empress Charlotte—Evil omens which
frightened—Her journey to Europe to seek help for Maximilian—Her
cold reception by Napoleon III.—Symptoms of approaching insanity—Her
madness—Maximilian abandoned by the French—Attacked by the
Republicans—Captured at Queretaro—Francis Joseph’s vain attempt to
save him—His trial and execution.
It must be repeated that the common view of the Empress Charlotte as
a valiant woman who took matters into her own hands when the Emperor
Maximilian was timorous and hesitating cannot stand. She was, in the
first place, a vain woman who took purely frivolous views of Imperial
responsibilities; in the second place, a woman who lost her mental
balance when she discovered that the position for which she had longed
had its duties as well as its pleasures, and its perils as well as its
privileges.
The legend has grown up that she came to Europe to plead for the life
of a husband who was in the hands of his enemies, and lost her reason
in despair at Napoleon’s decision to leave him to his fate; but that
is not the case. At the time when she started for Europe, Maximilian
was still free to walk out of Mexico at any moment; and her purpose
in coming to Europe was to ask Napoleon for more soldiers to keep him
there against the will of the majority of the Mexican people. Moreover,
the first signs of insanity had already shown themselves before her
embarkation at Puebla, where, no one could imagine why, she woke up the
whole of her escort in the middle of the night and insisted upon their
all going with her to call upon the Prefect. That assuredly was the
action of a woman whose wits were already taking flight through terror!
It used to be whispered that her Mexican enemies tried to poison her,
and that the drug, though it failed to kill, drove her mad; but that
is another story unsupported by any shred of evidence. Charlotte was
simply scared; one needs—and one can find—no other explanation.
Warnings to which she attached no importance at the time now rang like
alarm-bells in her ear. There was the warning of Louis-Philippe’s
consort, Queen Marie-Amélie, who was Charlotte’s grandmother. “They
will be assassinated,” Marie-Amélie had said, and repeated daily to her
little Court, when she heard of her granddaughter’s adventure. There
was the warning of the Archduchess Sophia. “Remember, my son,” she had
said to Maximilian—forgetting what she had previously said to the
Emperor Ferdinand—when bidding him farewell, “one does not descend
from a throne except to mount a scaffold.”
Charlotte remembered these things, and remembered also the stories
she had heard of the savage temper of the Mexicans: Indians and
half-breeds who had no bowels of compassion, but were capable of
torture as well as murder. Those memories, and the apprehensions
roused by them, were so many haunting phantoms; and the news which
Charlotte heard when she landed at St. Nazaire, and the circumstances
of her reception at Paris, were like a further series of evil omens.
At Saint-Nazaire she was told of the catastrophe of Sadowa; and at
Saint-Lazare she found no representative of the French Court awaiting
her on the platform—an omission not the less painful because
it was due to a misunderstanding. There would have been no such
misunderstanding if Napoleon had not been indifferent. An Empress whose
regard Napoleon valued would not have been left to drive to the Grand
Hotel and ask for a bed in that great caravanserai.
The Empress Eugénie, hearing of her arrival, hurried to see her at
the Grand Hotel, and the two women cried together. General Castelnau,
who was in attendance on the Empress, tells us that when she left
Charlotte’s apartment her eyes were red. The interview with Napoleon
himself followed; but, though he kissed Charlotte’s hand with proper
gallantry, he would do nothing for her. He was “gentle but obstinate,”
as his mother, Queen Hortense, had always declared him to be. When
Charlotte knelt at his feet, sobbing and supplicating, he was moved
to kind words, but he would make no promises. The Mexican expedition,
he pointed out, had become unpopular in France. It had already cost
him too much money and too many men. He must get out of it—as he
probably had always meant to do from the hour at which he had inveigled
Maximilian and Charlotte into their false position:—
“Then we shall abdicate,” said Charlotte, believing that this menace
would intimidate the Emperor.
“Yes, I suppose you had better abdicate,” was Napoleon’s polite reply.
That was all she could get out of him; and she got still less out of
his Ministers. One of these, indeed, begged her to grant him permission
to retire, “lest your Majesty’s eloquence should induce me to make
promises incompatible with my position as a Cabinet Minister.” It
was Maximilian’s sentence of death if he still insisted upon obeying
his mother’s injunction: never to descend from his throne unless
pulled off it to mount a scaffold. Charlotte, in full flight from her
terror, hurried to her old home at Miramar; and Miramar was only a
halting-place on the road to Rome.
What comfort she expected to find at Rome it might be difficult
to say. The Pope, so far as his temporal power went, was the mere
creature of Napoleon; even more dependent on the support of Napoleon’s
bayonets than Maximilian himself. Perhaps Charlotte expected him
to intercede with Napoleon; perhaps she expected him to work a
miracle—she was quite mad enough by this time to take the pastoral
staff for a magician’s wand. At Miramar, as at Puebla, her proceedings
betokened irresponsible frivolity. She paused there to give a _fête_
in celebration of the anniversary of Mexican independence: that
independence for which the Mexicans were, at that very hour, fighting
against her husband. She told the President of the Trieste Chamber of
Commerce that Maximilian might, in the course of the next year, “take a
little trip to Europe,” in which case he would not fail to pay a visit
to Trieste. Francis Joseph sent his brother, the Archduke Louis Victor,
to see her there; but sympathy was all that he could offer. He lay at
the proud foot of the Prussian conqueror, and was helpless.
So Charlotte at last went on to Rome, and there the crisis came. There
was no lack of ceremony, no lack of consideration. The Pope received
her in a manner befitting her rank, and went to her hotel to return her
visit. She went to see him again, and then, in a Vatican ante-chamber,
broke out into a violence of word and action which permitted of no
doubt as to her mental state, though the attempt was made to mask the
truth:—
“The words ‘mental alienation,’” wrote an official, “have been
pronounced. The truth is that the Empress is in a state of excitement
which indicates serious nervous agitation, but does not preclude the
exercise of her reasoning faculties. This excitement is specially
remarked whenever Mexico and the Mexicans are mentioned in her
presence.”
[Illustration: CHARLOTTE, WIFE OF MAXIMILIAN, EMPEROR OF MEXICO.]
“The crisis demands rest—mental as well as bodily; and the Pope
has, for that reason, assigned the Empress an apartment in the
Vatican, close to his own, while awaiting the arrival of the Comte de
Flandre, who will conduct his august sister to Miramar.”
But rest was of no avail. Charlotte was not only mad, but a monomaniac.
She had the delusion that there was a conspiracy to poison her; she was
insisting upon trying all her food on the cat before she would touch
it. A telegram had to be sent to Maximilian:—
“Her Majesty the Empress Charlotte was seized, on October 4th, at
Rome, by a cerebral congestion of the gravest character. The august
Princess has been taken back to Miramar.”
That was the end of Charlotte’s tragical odyssey; and Maximilian’s
struggle was also nearing its close. No one wanted to prevent him from
abdicating, and one may fairly say that nothing but Habsburg pride
stood in the way of his abdication. He had all that pride without any
of the strength of character which ought to go with it. It was the
creed of the family—the creed, in particular, as we have seen, of
the Archduchess Sophia—that a Habsburg might yield his throne of his
own free will to another Habsburg, but must on no account resign it
for the paltry reason that his people did not want him to rule over
them. Maximilian decided to be true to the tradition—to throw himself
into the arms of the Clericals, and with their help, and in conformity
with the simple Papal doctrine that the rights of the Church were more
sacred than the rights of peoples, make a fight for it.
So long as the French were with him, he could not do everything that
the Clericals would have liked him to do; for France, while remaining
Catholic, had ceased to be ultramontane and obscurantist. Now he could
embrace them, and even restore the Inquisition if he chose—on the one
condition that he defeated the Republicans. On the day of the departure
of the French from the city of Mexico he shut himself up in his Palace,
with all the blinds drawn, peeping out from behind the blinds to
watch them march away, while remaining himself unseen. When the last
of them had gone, he reopened the blinds and the windows, exclaiming
dramatically:
“Now at last I am free!”
Free to do what?
Free to give orders that if Benito Juarez and certain other Republican
leaders were caught in arms against him, a court-martial should
sentence them to be shot; but not free to carry out his threat, for the
order never reached General Miramon, to whom it was addressed, but fell
into the hands of Juarez himself, to be produced against Maximilian at
his own trial by court-martial. Free to march, with his Clerical host,
into Queretaro, but not free to get out again; for it was on Queretaro
that Juarez, and Diaz, and Escobedo, and Corona, and Regules, and Riva
Palacio converged to take him prisoner, and bring him to judgment in
the Theatre of Iturbide—that name of evil omen—on the charge of
pretending to be an Emperor.
It all happened quickly—almost in the twinkling of an eye. The date
of the departure of the last French detachment was February 5th, 1867;
and it was on the following day that Maximilian dispatched his letter
instructing Miramon to condemn Juarez to death. On February 13th,
he left the city of Mexico, and on February 17 he entered Queretaro
amid the acclamations of the Clerical inhabitants. On February 26th
he decreed a forced loan, and actually got the money; but on March
2nd his enemies began to arrive. Roughly speaking, there were 40,000
Republicans against 7,000 Imperialists; and, after sustaining a siege
of rather more than two months’ duration, Maximilian had to surrender
in the early morning of May 15th.
The news came to Europe. A Habsburg—the brother of the head of the
House of Habsburg—was in the hands of Indians and half-breeds, who
threatened to treat him as he himself had threatened to treat their
leaders, under that notorious Black Decree which his own hand had
signed. It was an urgent question for Francis Joseph what steps, if
any, he should take in order to try to save his brother’s life.
He could have made excuses to himself if he had decided to take no
steps at all; for he, no less than the Mexicans, had his grievances
against Maximilian. At a time when Francis Joseph seemed to have been
compromised by disaster, Maximilian had been cheered in the streets
of Vienna. There had been a party in Vienna which had entertained the
idea of putting Maximilian on Francis Joseph’s throne. Maximilian
had himself spoken imprudent words on that occasion; and the
imprudent words had been reported. Moreover, even after Maximilian’s
elevation to the throne of Mexico there had been stormy diplomatic
passages-at-arms between the brothers.
Maximilian had resented Francis Joseph’s allusion, in his speech at
the opening of the Reichsrath, to his resignation of his Austrian
privileges, and had addressed an indignant protest to his diplomatic
representative at Vienna: a protest in which he set forth that
he had consulted the most eminent jurists of the day about the
Family Compact which he had been induced to sign, and that they had
unanimously advised him to treat it as null and void. The protest
had been published in the Viennese newspapers, but had not been
formally presented at the Austrian Foreign Office. The Austrian
Foreign Minister, taking unofficial cognisance of it, had unofficially
intimated that if it were so presented, the Mexican Minister would
be conducted to the frontier. It would have been easy, therefore,
for Francis Joseph to excuse himself for bearing malice and leaving
Maximilian to his fate.
He bore no malice, and he did what he could. The Austrian Minister at
Washington was instantly instructed to solicit the intercession of the
Government of the United States. As a guarantee that, if Maximilian
were spared, he would definitely abandon his ambitions, it was proposed
to offer formally to restore him to his old status as a Habsburg, and
a family council was convoked for that purpose. One of the Archdukes
present raised objections, recalling Maximilian’s ambitions as an
Austrian Pretender, and predicting trouble; but Francis Joseph would
not listen. “That question,” he said, “is not before us. Our only
question is: how to save human life.”
But Maximilian’s life was not to be saved. The man who had him in his
power was a man whose life he had threatened. Juarez might play with
Maximilian as a cat with a mouse, but he would not let go. He used fine
phrases about it—“high considerations of justice,” and the like; he
most punctiliously accorded Maximilian the benefit of all the forms
of law. But the law was against Maximilian; there was no way through
that Black Decree which he himself had promulgated. Legally and morally
alike, Juarez had as good a title to execute him as he had ever had
to execute Juarez; and Juarez stood upon his rights. He laughed—or
rather the President of the court-martial laughed on his behalf—at
Maximilian’s naïve invocation of “the immunities and privileges which
appertain in all circumstances to an Austrian Archduke.” The Indians
and half-breeds knew nothing and cared nothing for those privileges and
immunities. The Austrian Archduke had pretended to be their Emperor,
and had killed some of them and threatened to kill others, and for
those offences he should be shot. They shot him in the early morning of
June 19th, 1867. For Charlotte, who still had occasional glimmerings of
sanity, he was “the good Shepherd who gave his life for the sheep”; but
for his Mexican subjects he was merely the foreigner who had presumed
to come among them and pretend to be an Emperor.
Such was the first of the long series of tragedies which were to
punctuate Francis Joseph’s personal life; and there is a moving irony
in the fact of its occurrence in the very year of his first great
political triumph. One can imagine that the shame of it was an even
heavier blow to him than the sorrow. A Habsburg, close to the Habsburg
throne, tried like a criminal and shot like a dog by Indians and
half-breeds; the head of the House of Habsburg unable to help him, and
curtly told, almost without the formula of politeness, that his attempt
to interfere was an outrage on “high considerations of justice”! Truly
Francis Joseph must have felt in that hour that the curse of Countess
Karolyi, called forth because he too had tried his enemies like
criminals and shot them like dogs, had not been unavailing.