Francis Joseph’s brother Maximilian—Invited to be Emperor of Mexico—Hesitates, but consents to please his wife—Resignation of his rights as a Habsburg—The Pacte de Famille and the quarrel about it—The compromise—The last meeting of the brothers—Maximilian’s melancholy—He composes poetry—He receives the benediction of the Pope and departs for his Empire.
The tragic circumstances of the death of the Emperor Maximilian—pulled off his imperial pinnacle to be shot to death in a public square—have encircled his memory with a halo to which the bald facts of his case do not entitle him. The word “martyr” has even been used in the connection; and a letter has been published in which his wife, quoting Scripture, compares him to “the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.” He was, in truth, if metaphor be wanted, merely the titular leader of a pack of wolves who came to a violent end in conflict with another pack of wolves; and, if metaphor be dropped, the best that can be said for him is that he was a weak and vain man who allowed himself to be fooled into undertaking a task for which he had no qualifications except an agreeable manner and an historic name.
If an ornamental Emperor had been all that Mexico wanted, Maximilian might have filled the post and shone in it; but he was grossly unfit, both intellectually and temperamentally, to be an Emperor of any other kind. He seems to have felt that, and to have tried to turn back before even setting his hand to the plough; but various considerations impelled him to the hopeless enterprise. He was jealous of Francis Joseph, who had snubbed him in Italy, and made his position in Austria unpleasant. His wife, the Archduchess Charlotte, daughter of the King of the Belgians, was ambitious, and urged him on. Napoleon, and the Mexican exiles of the clerical party, flattered him; and he allowed himself to be made their tool. He did not understand that Napoleon himself had only interfered in Mexico as the tool of unscrupulous cosmopolitan financiers—notably the notorious Baron Jecker, who had bribed de Morny—and was now chiefly anxious to build a golden bridge over which he could withdraw from an untenable position.
We have met Maximilian already as Francis Joseph’s Viceroy in Lombardy and Venetia. We have seen the Italians turning their backs on him, and leaving him and the Archduchess to stand alone, like lepers, in the Square of Saint Mark at Venice; and we have seen Francis Joseph dismissing him from his governorship, because, trying to be sympathetic towards the Italians, he did not govern with a sufficiently high hand. He felt his disgrace, and retired to sulk on his estate, at Miramar, on the Adriatic, where, like so many of the Austrian Arch-dukes, he abandoned himself to the composition of poetry and political pamphlets. He was far more a dreamer than a man of action; but action—or, at least, the attempt at action—was the inevitable outcome of his dreams. The Archduchess Charlotte, being vain and ambitious, saw to that.
Legend—for she has passed into legend, though she is still alive—represents Charlotte as Maximilian’s superior in energy and capacity,—the sort of woman who is resolved to keep her husband up to the mark and make a man of him; but it is hard to see upon what evidence that estimate of her rests. Assuredly, she was more anxious to be an Empress than Maximilian was to be an Emperor; but that proves nothing. She merely egged her husband on in the spirit in which the wife of a city magnate urges her husband to accept a knighthood which he does not particularly want. She foresaw the glory; she did not foresee the responsibilities and the danger. When she did perceive the danger it frightened her, quite literally, out of her wits whereas Maximilian, however incompetent, at least contrived to be calm and dignified in the extreme hour when the penalty of his error was exacted. Then, though hardly till then, he showed himself worthy of the great House which, when it does not defy appearances, keeps them up with admirable magnificence.