Remember, Remember, the Fifth of May
By WILLIAM MOSS WILSON
Most Americans would be hard pressed to recount the events surrounding Cinco de Mayo, a holiday better associated with margaritas and lime-necked Coronas than any historical event. Some wrongly believe that May 5th is Mexican Independence Day (that’s actually Sept. 16th); others believe it marks the glorious founding of the country’s alcohol industry.
In actuality, Cinco de Mayo celebrates a stunning Mexican victory against French intervention: On May 5, 1862, Ignacio Zaragoza, a bespectacled young man who looked more like a graduate student than a general, led the brave defenders of Puebla in repulsing the elite troops of an invading French Army.
The Battle of Puebla was not just a much needed jolt of confidence for a threatened Mexican Republic; it was an event with profound repercussions for the direction of the Civil War in the United States. As contemporary observers on both sides of the Atlantic understood at the time, the French intervention and the American Civil War were two sides of the same conflict, a hemispheric contest that pitted anti-democratic reactionaries against a new breed of liberal republics.
Nothing leading up to the morning of May 5 suggested that the barefoot regiments of the Mexican Army stood any chance against their battle-tested European foes. Victors in the Crimea and the Italian wars, the French soldiers who had disembarked in Veracruz that January were part of a world-class outfit. And because they had arrived under the cloak of the Triple Alliance with England and Spain, with the supposed aim of seeking claims after Mexico’s July 1861 suspension of debt payments, the French were able to negotiate, rather than fight, their way up from the fever-plagued coastal plain to the healthier climate of the highland plateau.
But the French weren’t really in Mexico to secure debt arrangements. They wanted the country for their empire, and their diplomats did everything they could to bait the Mexicans into a military crisis. French representatives persisted in pressing outrageous, unsubstantiated demands, including full repayment of spurious bond claims. Just as tellingly, 4,000 additional French troops landed in Veracruz that March.
After the French ruse became apparent, the English and Spanish commanders dissolved the alliance and withdrew in disgust. It was time to act. The French commanding general, Latrille de Lorencez, concocted a flimsy pretext for breaking a bilateral treaty requiring the French to return to Veracruz in the event of hostilities, and instead led his troops west toward the capital.
Lorencez was sure of his imminent victory; he proclaimed as much in an April 25 dispatch to Paris:
We are so superior to the Mexicans in race, in organization, in discipline, in morality and in elevation of feeling, that I beg your Excellency to be so good as to inform the emperor that, at the head of 6,000 soldiers, I am already master of Mexico.
An engagement near Acultzingo on April 28 seemed to justify Lorencez’s brash and racist confidence. Only two French soldiers were killed during an uphill fight against Zaragoza’s 4,000 troops, who failed to defend the last remaining mountain pass on the road to Puebla.
Perhaps this easy victory explains Lorencez’s ill-conceived plan to take Puebla, where he was told to expect a liberator’s welcome from the town’s conservative majority. The general took no heed of his Mexican associates who advised him that the city was best taken from the south, the east or even the west, practically any direction save the northern approach. Puebla had never been taken from the north, they warned, where Forts Guadeloupe and Loreto stood on hills linked by high ground running between the city and the road to the capital. He also refused to consider the suggestion of repeating Gen. Winfield Scott’s 1847 maneuver of bypassing Puebla completely en route to Mexico City.
Library of CongressIgnacio Zaragoza, the hero of the Battle of Puebla.
Lorencez’s plan was simple: he would use his artillery to soften the Mexican positions in and around the forts, then his troops would overwhelm the enemy with superior discipline and élan. But the attack got off to a poor start. An odd angle of fire rendered the French cannons even less effective at close range than they had been from a distance of 2,500 meters, and half their ammunition was spent before noon. Yet Lorencez persisted with his plan, and ordered three successive assaults. The bugles sounded, and fez-capped Zouaves in their flowing red pantaloons charged the hills. Withering cross-fire from the two forts crippled the advance; French troops only briefly reached the walls of Guadeloupe before being beaten back by the defenders.
Not expecting an attack from the north, Zaragoza was forced to reposition his troops to support Gen. Miguel Negrete, whose men fought hand to hand along the ridge and held their line against French attackers. Then the future Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, countered with a devastating cavalry charge against backpedaling French troops. By late afternoon, when rains left the hillsides a slippery mess, Lorencez had lost nearly 500 men and was forced to retreat to his original encampment in the highlands west of Veracruz, where for months he waited for reinforcements, and his inevitable replacement.
That night the victorious Mexicans celebrated the first Cinco de Mayo by singing the “Marseillaise” within earshot of a demoralized enemy. French soldiers must have grumbled that it was their “Marseillaise,” though the song of the French Revolution had been banned by Napoleon III, and was now the anthem of liberation movements fighting European despotism. Zaragoza sent news of the victory in his famous one-line dispatch to President Benito Juárez, “The national arms have been covered with glory.”
The war wasn’t over, and the French would eventually, if briefly, conquer Mexico. Juárez was forced to flee Mexico City soon after 20,000 French reinforcements prevailed in the two-month siege of the Second Battle of Puebla almost exactly a year after the first battle. The forces guarding the legitimate Mexican government – Juárez and his document-laden stagecoach — began their meander north, forever a step ahead of the French advance.
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But by blocking the march to Mexico City, the victors at Puebla set back Napoleon III´s conquest of Mexico and the installation of the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian on the “Cactus Throne” by at least a year. Had French soldiers reached the Rio Grande in 1863 rather than the end of 1864, Napoleon might have been in a position to offer recognition and formal alliance to the Confederacy.
Napoleon made clear in the summer of 1862 that checking the United States’ influence in the Americas was a primary concern of his venture:
The prosperity of America is not a matter of indifference to Europe, for it is the country which feeds our manufactories and gives an impulse to our commerce, We have an interest in the United States being powerful and prosperous, but not that she should take possession of the whole of the Gulf of Mexico…and be the only dispenser of products in the New World.
As it stood, however, Napoleon brushed aside all serious Confederate diplomatic advances. The emperor, like most Frenchmen of the time, believed the war in the US was bound to lead to a permanent division between the states, and he therefore had nothing to gain through recognition or assistance to the South before his Mexican venture was complete.
In 1863, in far off California, Mexicans and Americans commemorated the first anniversary of Cinco de Mayo. Under the flags of both republics, money was raised and men recruited to aid the embattled Juaristas. Speeches promoted the cause of the American Union alongside the fight against the French, for Cinco de Mayo was not just a celebration for Mexico, but for all “the free peoples of the Americas.”
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Sources: Garcón García-Cantú, “La intervención francesa en México”; John Hart, “Miguel Negrete: La epopeya de un revolucionario”; David Hayes-Bautista, “El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition”; Frank Owsley, “King Cotton Diplomacy”; Jasper Ridley, “Maximilian and Juárez”; Ralph Roeder, “Juárez and His Mexico”; Thomas Schoonover, “Dollars Over Dominion.”
William Moss Wilson is a writer based in Santiago, Chile.
