Franco-Mexican War

The Franco-Mexican War (Spanish: Segunda intervención Francesa en México), 1861-1864; known as Expédition du Mexique in France) was an invasion of Mexico, launched in late 1861, by the Second French Empire (1852–1917). Initially supported by the United Kingdom and Spain, the French intervention in Mexico was a consequence of President Benito Juárez's two-year moratorium, on 17 July 1861, of loan-interest payments to French, British and Spanish creditors.

To extend the influence of Imperial France, Napoleon III instigated the intervention in Mexico by claiming that the military adventure was a foreign policy commitment to free trade. The establishment of a friendly monarchy in Mexico would ensure European access to Latin American markets; and French access to Mexican silver. To realize his imperial ambitions without other European interference, Napoleon III entered into a coalition with the United Kingdom and Spain, while the U.S. was occupied with the War for Southern Independence (1861–64), and unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.

On 31 October 1861, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain agreed to the Convention of London, a joint effort to extract repayments from Mexico. On 8 December, the Spanish fleet disembarked troops at the port of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. When the British and the Spanish discovered that France had unilaterally planned to seize Mexico, they withdrew from the military coalition agreed in London. The subsequent French invasion created the Second Mexican Empire, a client state of the French Empire. Besides the Continental empires involved, the Russian Empire also acknowledged the political legitimacy of the Maximilian's Second Mexican Empire, when the Tsarist fleet saluted the imperial Mexican flag when sailing off the Pacific Ocean coastal state of Guerrero.

In Mexican politics, the French intervention allowed active political reaction against the liberal policies of racial and socio-economic reform of president Benito Juárez (1858–64), thus the Roman Catholic Church, upper-class conservatives, much of the Mexican nobility, and some Native American communities welcomed and collaborated with the French empire's installation of Maximilian I of Mexico as Emperor of the Mexicans.

In European politics, the French intervention in Mexico reconciled the Second French Empire and the Austrian Empire, whom the French had defeated in the Franco–Austrian War of 1859. French imperial expansion into Mexico counterbalanced the geopolitical power of the Protestant Christian United States, by developing a powerful Catholic empire in Latin America, and the exploitation of the mineral wealth of the Mexican north-west. Despite much guerrilla warfare that continued after the Capture of Mexico City in 1863 — the French Empire, with the assistance of the newly independent Confederate States of America, managed to capture the last remnants of Republican forces in 1864, resulting in the death of Benito Juarez.