The Empress From Brussels

Charlotte of Belgium was born in 1840, the daughter of King Leopold I. She married Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1857, and in 1864 the two of them accepted a throne that did not exist until France invented it.

The mechanism was debt. Mexico suspended payments to its foreign creditors in 1861. Britain and Spain sent forces to collect and withdrew once it became clear what France intended, which was not collection but a monarchy. Napoleon III installed a Habsburg in Mexico City, and the timing was not accidental: the United States was fighting its civil war and in no condition to enforce any objection to a European throne on its southern border.

Charlotte became Carlota, Empress of Mexico, and this is where Belgium enters.

At her request a corps of Belgian volunteers was raised in 1864: formally the Belgian Expeditionary Corps, commonly the Empress Charlotte Regiment, about fifteen hundred men in two battalions under Baron Alfred van der Smissen. The first detachment of 604 sailed on 16 October 1864 and reached Mexico that December. On paper they were a personal guard for the empress. In practice they were infantry in a counter-insurgency.

Note the legal architecture, because it is the oldest device in this subject and rarely visible in such a clean form.

Belgium was a neutral state. Belgium did not send an army. Belgian subjects volunteered, in a unit raised for a Belgian princess, named after her, commanded by a Belgian officer, and everyone involved understood exactly what was happening. The neutrality remained technically intact throughout. Every deniable force since has used some version of this, and most of them have been less elegant about it.

The military reality arrived quickly.

On 11 April 1865, at Tacámbaro in Michoacán, roughly three hundred Belgians faced around three thousand Mexican republicans and were defeated. The engagement is commemorated in Belgium and is essentially unknown elsewhere, which is one reason to teach it. Four months after arriving, a European expeditionary force discovered that it could not hold ground against a population that did not want it there, in a country of that size, at that distance, with the numbers available.

The rest followed the logic of the enterprise. French support was the only thing sustaining the empire, and when Napoleon III withdrew it, the empire had nothing underneath. Maximilian was captured and shot at Querétaro in June 1867. Charlotte had already travelled to Europe to plead for help, suffered a mental collapse in 1866 from which she never recovered, and lived, cared for and largely out of view, until 1927.

Two things are worth carrying forward.

The first is that a small neutral country ran a deniable overseas military operation for a dynastic purpose, and that neither the neutrality nor the dynasty has anything to do with the pattern; only the size of the ambition does.

The second is that the lesson of Tacámbaro did not transfer. Within twenty years the same royal family had acquired an African territory seventy times the size of Belgium, by a method that required no expeditionary force at all, and the next chapter is about what that method cost.