"...that the Mexican Navy had not been there, too, but Maximilian cringed at the realization that two of the three dreadnoughts assigned to Mexico's east coast were exposed in squadrons at the Florida and Yucatan Straits to potential attack from the Atlantic or central Caribbean; just as Mexico had developed the fleet he and his adoptive son Prince Salvador de Iturbide had spent their whole lives trying to bring to fruition, it was at high risk of ending up at the bottom of the Gulf.
[1]
Maximilian's background a lifetime earlier in the Austrian Navy and the immediate exposure of his prized armada made Hilton Head hit much harder for home for him, but it was not the only bit of bad news that weighed on the Chapultepec over the course of May 1915. The Confederate position around the industrial city of Nashville had collapsed as well after a ten-month siege that had seen tens of thousands of men killed or wounded, badly kneecapping their army, and as Chile tottered on the edge of civil war they had struck an armistice, thus fully granting the United States supremacy over the Pacific at last and allowing them to concentrate their attention to a much closer neighbor - Mexico. With the peasant uprisings that were starting to reach the size of the Revolt of the Caudillos now burning in the North and South, in both directions threatening supply lines to Los Pasos or Ciudad Guatemala and potentially posing a major risk to the ability of Mexican forces in both theaters to sustain the campaigns.
This was the context of the
Mayo Negro, or "Black May," in which Mexican leadership were forced to contemplate difficult choices in the wake of the Red Battalions and then the massive strategic setbacks for the Bloc Sud. The immediate consequence was the effective and permanent isolation of the most aggressive hawks, who only had the fact that spies in Pancho Villa's camps suggested that the dogged American General Pershing had been recalled to the United States to point to as any kind of optimistic development. Admiral Prince Salvador remained at sea where he belonged but his half-brother Agustin was essentially sidelined from then on, disinvited from most of Maximilian's family councils at the Chapultepec. This was repeated within the civilian administration as well; Enrique Creel's influence within the Cabinet evaporated overnight, and his hatchet man Olegaria Molina was put out to pasture and asked to go resolve the growing insurgency in his home department of the Yucatan before it could link up with Zapata's rebellion.
Louis Maximilian, always the staunchest skeptic of the war within the royal family, wanted to go further than that. He urged his father to make an example of the "chickenhawks" in Cabinet by sacking the entire government and replacing it with a caretaker Cabinet to negotiate an immediate armistice and exit from the war. In front of his stunned teenage sons Carlos (the future Charles I) and Agustin, he dove into an angry, red-faced tirade, for the first time in Maximilian's presence losing his temper. His only surviving son and heir roared that his father's desire to appear apolitical at the hour "in which Mexico needed the stern hand of the
Padre de Patria rather than the empty lies of Creel and his charlatans" had given the Confederophile faction of the Cabinet enough strength to bully the moderates and soft-skeptics into going to war immediately after the Sack of Washington rather than waiting and assessing Mexico's best option, especially as war was declared a mere six months after the shocking collapse of Madero's government when the Empire's foundation had seemed unsteadier than it had in three decades. According to Louis Maximilian, the Zapatista and Villista rebellions and the Red Battalions were only the beginning, and if the Empire collapsed it would end with the whole family in exile or "shown the same grace as Louis XVI", and could be traced back to the Emperor's indecisiveness. Maximilian was taken aback; in forty-seven years of life, his son had
never dared speak to him that way. At first, he was unsure what even to say, completely at a loss for words, but Louis Maximilian gave him a straightforward opening. After venting his anger at his octogenarian father, the crown prince calmed down and continued by suggesting that one mistake did not need to beget another, and that there was still a difficult but feasible way out: sack the Cabinet, and do it soon, to make it absolutely abundantly clear that the Emperor was fulfilling his role as the guarantor of the Empire.
What Louis Maximilian was proposing was, on paper, entirely within the parameters of the Century Constitution. As discussed in Chapter 24, the organizing document of the Second Empire outlined clear powers for the sovereign, considerably more than in many European constitutional monarchies. On paper, the decision to appoint or dismiss a government was not just a formality reserved to the Emperor, but his (and it was indeed
his) prerogative entirely and exclusively.
[2] In practice, Maximilian had intentionally created the precedent that the Prime Minister should at least in some capacity rely upon the confidence of the Assembly to sustain its ability to promulgate laws, or at the very minimum not waste all its time fighting with an oppositional and intransigent parliament. So while the proposal was legally and constitutionally airtight, politically it went against the spirit of what Maximilian had hoped to achieve with his granting of a more liberal and democratic constitution at the turn of the century, and his dithering started up again. It was not only the act itself that was dangerous but
who it was directed against. The government of Leon de la Barra, while not as aggressively reactionary as Creel's, was nonetheless one of the traditional, agrarian, Catholic conservative strain of Mexican political life that was responsible for the existence of the Empire in the first place. Maximilian had stuck to his principles in anointing Madero as the Assembly's choice, angering the Right, and upon the self-immolation of
Maderismo had threatened to radicalize the Left further by appointing the caretaker cabinet of Leon de la Barra that was now dominated by its conservatives and had led the country into war. What would throwing out
El Puro's government do to Mexican politics? Could the Empire survive it?
At the same time, upon careful consideration, Maximilian had to acknowledge that much as his son had offended him, he had a point, it was just a question of how to thread an exquisitely difficult and dangerous needle. Madero had left into a self-imposed exile out of the country and, at any rate, had shown in even less difficult circumstances he had little credibility with the public or with parliamentarians. That was essentially the only statesman available on the Left, for after the Red Battalions the
Bloc Democratico had eaten itself alive, its hardliners dead or in exile and its moderates dissipated into various new factions. The movement that had once seen likely to supplant the Mexican establishment and usher in a revolutionary new era - perhaps even a republican one! - had gambled entirely wrong. But the Right behind Creel had been the most aggressive advocates of the war and it was plain their credibility was gone as well, and Leon de la Barra's with it.
Who then was left? To Louis Maximilian, the answer seemed obvious - Bernardo Reyes, long a close personal friend and confidant who had very carefully built up a considerable amount of influence behind the scenes with the heir and his wife politically and socially. The choice was not entirely unconventional, either. Politically-minded generals loyal to the Emperor had made able Prime Ministers in the past, as Maximilian's long friendship and partnership with Miguel Miramon attested to. Above and beyond that, unlike Miramon who had been a creature of the pre-Imperial conservatism largely kept afloat in politics by his own infamy, longevity and the Emperor's patronage
[3], Reyes had found an important niche for himself as a muscular representative of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes his main base rather than the landed aristocracy, but still had populist credibility with laborers in farms and factories, though the violent response to the Red Battalions had damaged that a bit.
Maximilian was less sure. Reyes brought with him his own political bloc that was represented in Cabinet and had never been a stranger to ambition, and having him dominating both the military and the civilian sides of government worried Maximilian about what Reyes would ponder doing once he had passed on, which at his age could happen at any time. That being said, Reyes
did represent the only bloc of Mexican politics with any remaining popular legitimacy, the quieter and more brittle but broad center that was starting to turn on the war but had been militantly opposed to the Red Battalions and their abortive national strike. From the
Bloc Independiente could come somebody else to lead the charge moving forward, and one man from the
Bloc Independiente sat in Leon de la Barra's Cabinet already and could be easily asked to slide over into the biggest seat: the competent and capable Industry Minister Francisco Carbajal.
The choice was not without some controversy, not least in how it was handled. Carbajal was an otherwise non-entity politically chosen almost entirely because he got on well with Reyes and had not angered any major faction, but until May 21, 1915, when he was called to the Chapultepec he had been nobody's idea of a Prime Minister, not even to himself. Leon de la Barra had not been surprised that he was given the sack after two years in charge with the way the war was going but he was genuinely shocked that Carbajal of all people was his choice, and the Mexican public largely shared the reaction of "Who?" upon the choice. But the choice was made, and Carbajal did not significantly reshuffle the Cabinet, keeping both Reyes and Lascurain in their current positions. Mexico had at least some new leadership at the helm; the question was now simply what direction the obscure new Prime Minister would sail the ship of state..."
-
Maximilian of Mexico
[1] Seeing as the Battle of Puebla in 1862 was just another victory in Lorencez's ongoing march to Mexico City and it occurred before the crown was even offered to him, Max is not pondering, as we all here on Earth-1 are, the irony of all this happening on the same day that secured him his Empire on Earth-5 (Earth-Cinco?
)
[2] Obviously this is in theory how every constitutional monarchy back then worked.
[3] And weird maybe-cuckolding love triangle with Carlota - throwback to early in the last thread!