Pope Pius IX, the Faulty

To the LOCKDOWN List add one more: Bertita Harding, Phantom Crown. I should have started this on Cinco de Mayo but hey.

This wasn't just "the French invasion". Almost all the Continent had their fingers in this one. The initial move was a filibustering attempt - seize the Gulf Coast until the Mexican government paid up what it owed. The problem was that the government owed... pretty much everything, to several parties. The party I'd discuss here is the Church.

Over the centuries the Church had acquired a full third of all the lands claimed by the State. Benito Juarez had recently expropriated the bulk of that. Most of the Europeans were Catholic and, in exchange for Papal blessing on their adventure, promised to restore the holdings. One large problem with that was the Protestant parties to said adventure. And indeed the English bugged out soon they could.

So, then: how to enforce a re-appropriation of property. Install a Most Catholic Monarch, was the European consensus. They found a spare Habsburg, Ferdinand Maximilian, and his wife Carlotta daughter of Leopold (sister of future tyrant Leopold II), and offered them Mexico's crown.

This adventure was not necessarily Doomed From The Start. Mexico had been a Habsburg possession once before. A royalist party did remain there; and the local indios had not yet learnt to prefer one form of government over another. To Mexicans, Juarez was just another caudillo, like that contemptible Santa Anna; and if Habsburgs and French were foreign, so too - to many - were Spaniards. Juarez would later prove himself exactly that caudillo after his term in office ran out and he failed to yield his forces to the Constitutionally-assigned interim, the Supreme Court.

The European powers, there to take rather than to give, starved their Habsburg of funds and - in France's case - even moved funds out of the country. But this much, I don't think mattered as much. Britain and even Spain had already abandoned their claims. When "Maxl" and Carlotta found out what the French were doing, they put a stop to it. If belated, I do not think the Crown was too late.

As I see it, the Papacy's stubborn insistence on retrieving their lost assets was the turning point. Some flexibility or even a delay on their part, followed by full support for the Habsburg regime, would have been, if I may, a godsend to them. The Papacy also should not have countermanded the Habsburg suggestion of religious tolerance.

Harding finds an irony in that the Pope, Pius IX, is most famous in Church history for enacting the dogma of the Chair's Infallibility. If you'll pardon me a Lutheranism, this man was speaking from the seat of his pants.

Empress Carlotta, poor woman, went mad trying to get the Europeans and finally this Pope to fix the mess they'd brought to the New World - and the disgrace to the Old. Pray mercy on her soul, and justice on Pius'.

SLAVERY 4/1/23: This bishop was a Confederate too. I'm not even calling him a "Pope" anymore.