Currents of Transatlantic Warfare: The European Revolutions and Martial Culture in Mexico, 1848–1867

E. Mark Moreno

     In teaching histories of the Atlantic world or Western liberalism, a convenient point of reference is the mid-nineteenth century wars of liberalism in the Atlantic world. The liberal (and often nationalist) European revolutions of 1848 reverberated through the Americas, where Mexican proponents of liberal republicanism battled monarchists in a three-year civil war and the French Intervention that ended in 1867. Events of these years in Europe and in Latin America were linked: Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic believed they were fighting the same battles against conservative proponents of monarchy, class-based corporatist societies, and the strong influence of organized religion in daily life. In the aftermath of the revolutions, European-modeled "democratic societies" and other such clubs espousing liberal ideals appeared in Colombia and Chile, for example.¹ The effects of the European revolutions on Mexico were less apparent in years immediately afterward. But veterans of such European conflicts later fought on the side of Mexican republicans under Benito Juárez, against European troops supporting the imperial government of Emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg and Mexican conservatives.

     Warfare surrounding the emergence of Western liberalism was not confined to Europe during the 1848 revolutions or the United States during the Civil War, but encompassed most of the Atlantic world at mid-nineteenth century. One figure who embodied this link between Europe and the Americans was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who emerged as President of the Second French Republic, and who later, as Emperor Napoleon III, directed the French military excursion in Mexico. Presented here are suggested points for further study, lecture and discussion on this era of Atlantic history, with a focus on militarism and liberalism as these factors affected Mexico, particularly during years of civil war and foreign intervention, 1857–1867. These events represent historical connections between contemporary European conflicts—with their ideological origins in the French Revolution—and the end of World War I, when the remaining European monarchies fell from power. More immediately, these developments transitioned smoothly into the Age of Imperialism, as the two European states embroiled in the 1848 revolutions—France and Prussia—later consolidated under liberal principles: a unified German constitutional monarchy in one case, and the Third French Republic in the former. Both of these states embarked on the African imperialist project in the 1880s.

Liberalism and Conservatism

In teaching history of the modern Atlantic world, it is necessary to distinguish the strains of liberalism as interpreted in Europe and in Latin America, and how partisans in each region defined "conservative." The continued thrust toward liberalism and liberal republicanism, and the conservative monarchist backlash, developed in relation to the violence and excesses of the French Revolution, and "the Terror" of the early 1790s. European liberals outside of France were largely supporters of constitutional monarchy rather than republicanism in the years leading up to the revolutions. Differing interpretations of the meaning of liberalism were applied to various regional partisans in France, the German states, and the Austrian realms of the 1840s. Nearly all liberals in Europe supported representative government and basic freedoms of speech and association, but with suffrage restricted to male property holders. Such governments would be overseen by monarchs, who were expected to ensure balance between "absolute monarchy on the one hand, and a radical republican regime as had been tried by the Jacobins in France in the 1790s."² Radical liberals retained their greatest followings in France and in the Italian peninsula, where prominent leftist Giuseppe Mazzini exemplified the movement. These groups advocated for democracy and universal male suffrage, and were among the most anti-clerical of European liberals.

     In Mexico—and elsewhere in Latin America—liberals were staunchly anti-monarchist as well as anti-clerical. Anti-clericalism stemmed from centuries of Catholic Church regulatory power and wealth under the Spanish Crown, and its resilient opposition to liberal reforms in the first thirty years after independence. The idea of universal male suffrage was long in development in Mexico, but the Mexican Reform constitution of 1857 codified it, in light of peasant participation in the armed struggle that overthrew pseudo-monarch Antonio López de Santa Anna, and in view of the increasing radicalism of Mexican liberals.³ Yet, despite the rhetoric of egalitarian participation espoused by Mexican liberal state-builders of the nineteenth century, the term "democracy" was rarely in use among them, and they instead referred to "liberty." Mexican liberals during the era of the War of the Reform (see below) and the French Intervention era often concluded letters with the words, "Reform and Liberty." Both European and Mexican liberals also shared a reverence for the idea of private property and enterprise.

     In Europe and in Latin America, conservatism as an ideology, alongside Radical liberalism, developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. By the 1840s, European conservative and monarchist political viewpoints were similar to those of Latin America: adherence to cultural and customary traditions, promotion of agrarian economies, and maintenance of the corporate status quo—in Europe that meant maintenance of landholding (seigniorial) privileges.⁴ In Mexico's case, that system entailed the indigenous peasantry and their collective properties, separate military and clerical legal codes (fueros), and separate legal jurisdictions for Church and state. (In Peru and other Latin American states, the corporate status quo included Afro-Latin slavery.) While Mexican liberals like their European counterparts favored industrialization and modernity, Mexican conservatives rejected normalized trade relations with, and emulation of, the United States. The intellectual architect of Mexican conservatism, Lucas Alamán, believed in the inherent Hispanic and Catholic nature of the Mexican people, who could not flourish in a modern world dominated by the materialist values of the U.S. As historian Charles A. Hale stated, "[Alamán's] defense of the church, his attack upon liberal doctrines and the utilitarian spirit, his evocation of Hispanic values and traditions against the threat of the new society of the United States—all would logically close the door on economic modernization by any means."⁵ Alamán's own European counterparts held very similar beliefs.

The Revolutions of 1848

As with all complex and multi-faceted episodes of history, the causal roots of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe have been interpreted in different ways. As understood by scholars of the past six decades, revolutionary and nationalist movements occurred out of reaction to the potato famine in Europe during the 1840s, a parallel general rise in populations, and limited employment opportunities for middle-sector males, as most of the Continent was in an early industrializing stage. More recent scholarship has indicated that the uprisings of 1848 were driven by economic factors, including falling consumption and manufacturing investment and their effects on the agrarian economies. In much of the regional insurgencies, urban uprisings, notably in the Paris barricades, were fueled by middle-class sectors, including artisans, civil servants, and lawyers. With the exception of Great Britain, compulsory military service in other European states including the Kingdom of Prussia, France and the Austrian Hapsburg realms, created large standing armies and a professional soldiering class.⁶ Such armies would play roles in nationalist insurgencies of this revolutionary epoch, as in the Polish and Hungarian territories of the Kingdom of Prussian and the Austrian Empire, respectively, where local forces were defeated by the end of 1848.

     The year of upheaval began with a Sicilian insurgency in January, in support of constitutional monarchy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Within a few months Parisian republicans set up barricades in clashes with police and soldiers, proclaiming a Second Republic when the National Guard announced its support for the insurgents. Regional revolts broke out in various regions of the Austrian Empire, and in the Kingdom of Prussia. In Vienna, republicans briefly took control of the city, and nationalists in Berlin forced the withdrawal of the Prussian military. A Hungarian National Assembly declared independence and its military kept the Hapsburg forces at bay, until it was overcome and incorporated back into the Empire the next year. German nationalists clashed with Polish nationalists, and also declared autonomy in Denmark.⁷ By the end of the year, forces of the Prussian and Austrian monarchies defeated proponents of liberalism and regional nationalism. French republicans attained their elections through the revolutionary process, but monarchists won the final battle when Louis-Napoleon was elected President. The next year, he sent his armies out to defeat Roman republican forces of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and restored Papal authority, scoring a symbolic victory for European conservatives—and, as it turned out, for Mexican conservatives who later sought his assistance against their liberal enemies. The various liberal, radical, and nationalist uprisings failed in their attempts to establish unified liberal states. Monarchy, it appeared, emerged from the Revolutions more firmly entrenched than before. But in Mexico, such battles were just getting started.

	The 1848 revolution in Berlin, with groups flying flags of both the constitutional monarchists and German republicans, depicted by an anonymous author, ca. 1848–1850 (Wikimedia Commons)

	A Calvary Skirmish during the 1848 revolution in Hungary, by artist Alexander Bogdanovich Villevalde, 1881 (Wikimedia Commons)

Mexican Liberalism and Martial Culture

Mexican liberal and conservative camps arose with a humiliating defeat by the United States in the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. Each side articulated different causes and remedies for Mexico's economically weakened and politically unstable state. For liberals, the only course was modernization, and that would only be possible with liberal republican governance. Both liberals and conservatives bemoaned the lack of national identity that characterized their defeated nation. Alamán lamented the "complete extinction of public spirit … not finding any Mexicans in Mexico and contemplating a nation which has moved from infancy to decrepitude."⁸ Both factions were products of different time frames in Mexican history.

     Conservatives tended to be older, of the landowning and established military classes, predominantly of Spanish ancestry, and identifying with urban culture. They were the generation of the war of independence (1810–1821). Not only did they harbor memories of the French Revolution, but also a massacre of Spaniards and Spanish Americans (creoles) in Guanajuato, carried out by thousands of indigenous and mixed-race peoples under the command of Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who initiated the independence movement. The emergent liberal class tended to be younger, having come of age during Texas rebellion (1836) and the Mexican American War. Like their European peers, they consisted of an emergent middle class, usually centered in areas outside Mexico City: provincial landholders, journalists, lawyers, and younger military officers.⁹ They were a racially and ethnically mixed group. One of them, Benito Juárez, was born in a Zapotec Indian village in the northern mountains of Oaxaca state, and as a child spoke only his native indigenous language. By 1850, he was liberal governor of Oaxaca, having been educated in Mexico's first secular college, founded in that state nineteen years earlier. The intellectual heritage of Mexican liberals grew out of the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Spanish liberal tradition. They believed in representative and elected governments, free enterprise and free markets, and civil registries in place of those traditionally administered by the Church. Liberal republican leaders, including another prominent Oaxacan, future authoritarian president Porfirio Díaz, overthrew the conservative government of Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1855. That would be the last of eleven times the general, known for atrocities in Texas and military defeat in the Mexican American war, was head of state.

     The Mexican Reform was initiated by the new liberal leadership in Mexico City, which created the Constitution of 1857, which enshrined liberal republican principles into national law. The liberal ideological emphasis on private property was in theory opposed to indigenous communal landholdings. However, men like Guerrero state political and militia chief (cacique) Juan Alvarez incorporated Indians and other people of color into his forces during the Ayutla revolution that overthrew Santa Anna.¹⁰ In Oaxaca, which borders Guerrero on the Pacific coast, Porfirio Díaz organized Indians of the Sierra Norte, the homeland of Juárez, into republican National Guard units.¹¹ By his own account, Díaz oversaw construction of a gym and exclusive dances meant solely for National Guard members. Local indigenous leaders were assigned as lower-level commanders. Although they were largely illiterate and not familiar with numerical systems, Díaz arranged for special night classes: "I had to teach them military paperwork, the ordering and maneuvering of infantry." Such methods fostered a culture of militarism among the Zapotecs of the region. Díaz would later lead them into battle against European occupation forces in Oaxaca. Incorporation of indigenous leaders and people into republican units occurred in other states, through similar means of politicking, although indigenous communities had centuries-long experience in negotiating their autonomy, village boundaries, and conditions of allegiance.

     At the end of 1857, conservative military officers led a coup d'état, overthrowing the liberal government in Mexico City. The three-year War of the Reform followed (1857–1860), where liberals retreated to the port city of Veracruz on the Atlantic coast. There they had access to weapons and other resources. Republican commanders became adept at guerrilla warfare, attacking conservatives in areas surrounding Mexico City. Such experience would be utilized during the French Intervention. By December, 1860, liberal forces retook Mexico City, and Benito Juárez became president of the Mexican Republic. But the ouster of conservatives from government did not end the violence. Conservative commanders launched their own guerrilla offensives, and assassinated prominent liberal Melchor Ocampo in Michoacán. Several fled to Paris, where they befriended the Empress Eugenie (Armijo), the Spanish wife of Napoleon III, who had taken power in his own coup and established himself as Emperor. It was the emperor's connection to the conservative exiles, and their appeals to his Catholic sensibilities. By the fall of 1861, conservatives openly sought a monarch who could sit on a Mexican throne.

The French Intervention

Although not the subject of much recent scholarship, various reasons for Louis-Napoleon's military undertaking have been cited over the past several decades. The emperor was at one point seen to have a "grand design" to halt Anglo Protestant influence in the Americas—namely, the United States. His chief propagandist, Michel Chevalier, wrote that France needed to unite the "Latin races" of the Americas against the Anglo American power to the north. More recently, it was argued that the "Mexican adventure" held strategic value for the emperor, who could maintain French channels of trade through Mexico, and maintain order in such a violent region, thereby setting a worldwide example for peace.¹² Whatever the underlying reasons, Mexico had amassed such exorbitant debts as to provide a pretext to European intervention.

     The strapped Juárez government, which owed up to 80 million pesos in debt to Great Britain, France, and Spain, declared a moratorium on payments soon after entering Mexico City in triumph. The three powers then entered into the Tripartite Agreement, and collectively dispatched naval forces and troops to Veracruz in October of 1861. Great Britain and Spain obtained separate agreements from the Juárez government and returned to Europe. The French instead organized a force of around 5,000 soldiers, remained in Veracruz by "agreement" with the Mexican government, and began to advance inland the following spring. In March, defending forces, including indigenous men from Oaxaca, suffered tragedy when thousands of pounds of gunpowder exploded in the state of Puebla. Later accounts estimated that 1,500 people, including soldiers, female vendors, and townspeople, died in the blast. This sacrifice would be remembered as the remnants of this force faced the French invasion force in May outside the city of Puebla.¹³

     During that same month, Mexican intellectuals were busy at work creating war propaganda. Chief among them was Guillermo Prieto, a well-known essayist and poet who would become a cabinet member in the Juárez government. The newspaper he and others produced, La Chinaca, abounded with the language of war and patriotism, and derived its name from "los chinacos," liberal guerrilla fighters of the time who are still little understood by historians. In one poem, called "The March," the anonymous author declared: "Revenge or Perish! War! War! The earth is thirsty for French blood."¹⁴ In many ways, Mexican society was becoming militarized, as local armies and guerrillas prepared for the imminent French advance toward Mexico City.

	Mexican "chinaco" guerrilla commander Nicolás Romero, as imagined in 1896 (In Historia de la Guerra de Intervención en Michoacán by Eduardo Ruiz, 1896)

	Excerpt of a song printed in La Chinaca, a newspaper devoted to war propaganda, three weeks before the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. The words read, "Goodbye to our shops! Goodbye to our women! Our children, goodbye! We will bring victory/The palms of glory/God is with us," followed by a chorus, "In every man a warrior." (In La Chinaca, May 16, 1862)

     Mexican republican forces defeated the French in the famous Battle of Puebla (Cinco de Mayo) on May 5, 1862. But victory celebrations were short-lived. In the spring of 1863, more than 30,000 French reinforcements arrived. Puebla was again attacked, and captured. Soon afterward the national capital, Mexico City, fell to the French. Juárez fled north with his cabinet and boxes of the national archives, operating first from San Luis Potosí, and eventually travelling further toward the U.S. border. Republican leaders in various states waged a campaign of unceasing guerrilla warfare over the next three years. At his home on the northern Italian peninsula, Maximilian accepted the throne of Mexico offered by a delegation of conservatives in October of 1863. He arrived in June with his wife (and now Empress) Charlotte, daughter of, Leopold I of Belgium, who in Mexico was renamed Carlota. As Mexican republican regulars and "chinacos" fought against the French—and also Austrian, Belgian, and North African mercenaries—they were often assisted by European veterans fighting on the liberal side.

European Veterans and Mexican Warfare

The European conflicts at mid-century produced various individuals geared toward perpetual warfare, with liberal ideology the driving force behind their militarism. Veterans of the revolutionary era of 1848 and related conflicts converged on Mexico from the time of the Ayutla Revolution that toppled Santa Anna, through the French Intervention. Nicolás de Régules, a veteran of the Carlist Wars in Spain, was general of the Mexican Army's Third Brigade in the state of Michoacán during 1865. In one particularly fierce battle at the town of Tacámbaro, besieged Belgian mercenaries, the "Regiment of Empress Carlota," held Régules' wife and three children hostage. Disregarding the danger, the general launched an attack, declaring, "The homeland (La Patria) is first!" The Belgian legion commander and his captain were both killed, the survivors taken prisoner, and the hostages were released unharmed.¹⁵

     The most notable veteran of the European conflicts who fought in Mexico was Luis Ghilardi, who would be considered a martyr among Mexican republicans, and whose death was used by Juárez as partial justification for the eventual execution of Maximilian. Ghilardi was a native of Tuscany, and a product of the militant liberalism prevalent on the peninsula. By 1848, he was an ideological disciple of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and fought against French forces during the defense of the Roman Republic. A restless career soldier, Ghilardi traveled to Mexico in 1853, at around 53 years of age. There, he joined the liberal rebels who toppled General Santa Anna. He then became an officer during the War of the Reform of 1857–1860. Severely injured in battle, he returned to his homeland. With Italian unification and Risorgimento, however, Ghilardi again traveled to Mexico, intending to join the republican officer corps. He carried with him a letter of recommendation from Garibaldi, who called Ghilardi "my friend and companion in arms," and presented it to President Juárez, who was an admirer of the Italian unifier.¹⁶

     In February of 1863, Ghilardi was attached to the republican Army of the East, and participated in the second battle of Puebla. French troops who had retreated in defeat one year earlier returned with thousands of reinforcements, and captured the city after a two-month siege. This particular siege involved a series of trenches dug around the city by soldiers under François Achille Bazaine, who would eventually become commander-in-chief of European expeditionary forces in Mexico. After the French penetrated deep into the city, vicious house-by-house fighting took place, although the Mexican republicans finally capitulated. Ghilardi, Porfirio Díaz, and defeated commander Jesús González Ortega fled rather than present themselves as prisoners of war. Through the fall of 1863, Ghilardi remained an active participant in the war of intervention, organizing guerrilla fighters and cavalry regiments in diverse regions of central Mexico, before apparently resigning his post. Intending to return to Italy, he was captured during an ambush in January of 1864, in Jalisco state on the Pacific Coast. He was considered a guerrilla "with arms," and sentenced to death at his court martial hearing, although several Mexican officers also taken prisoner were freed.¹⁷ In letters to his wife, he explained that the charges against him were false, and that he had renounced his position four months earlier. Ghilardi was taken north to Aguascalientes, a state (at that time imperial department) in north-central Mexico, and executed by firing squad. His death would be remembered by the Juarist liberals at war's end.

     Napoleon III withdrew the last of his occupation troop in February of 1867. Without European assistance, native Mexican imperial troops were overwhelmed by republican armies, who were by that time popularly perceived as patriots. The last stand of the conservative armies occurred in Querétaro, where forces under the command of Nicolás Régules inflicted their final defeat, taking Maximilian prisoner. His execution was a foregone conclusion, although the sentence was couched in contrived legalisms. President Juárez received cables from U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and European luminaries including Garibaldi, all pleading for Maximilian's life. Garibaldi invoked his friend Ghilardi, certain that his execution at Aguascalientes led to Maximilian's own death sentence:

Pardon him! We plead with you, we fellow citizens of (Ghilardi), who was shot on the orders of henchmen, pardon him! Return him to his family composed of our flesh as an example of the generosity of the people who won in the end, but who also pardon.¹⁸

Despite such messages, Maximilian was executed on June 19, along with his generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejia, who like Juárez was ethnically an indigenous Mexican.

     Ghilardi is still remembered, and his death has been commemorated annually in Aguascalientes. At one such event, a local historian called him "the Che Guevara of the nineteenth century," in reference to his revolutionary liberalism and martyr's death. Other European veterans, largely forgotten, who fought for republicanism in Mexico included Jósef Tabachinski of Poland, who died in battle during the Intervention; Carlos von Gagern, a Prussian Army veteran who later became a noted author; a Swiss officer, Erick Wulff; and John Sobieski, an aristocratic Polish émigré and captain of Maximilian's firing squad. Nicolás de Régules' memory has been enshrined as a statue in Tacámbaro. As was the case for their Mexican peers, they were all products of the ideological warfare that engulfed Atlantic world at mid-century.¹⁹

Conclusion: Points to Consider

In world history, the Revolutions of 1848 and the French Intervention coincided with the rise of liberal republicanism in France, and in Europe in general. Two different monarchies took established governments in Paris before the revolutions and subsequent rise to power of Napoleon III. After defeat and disgrace for Louis-Napoleon in the Franco-Prussian War (1868–1871), the Third Republic brought a measure of stability and imperialist expansion as never before. The old monarchies of Europe embraced, to varying degrees, the principles of liberalism. Absolute monarchism in Western Europe was in its death throes by the late nineteenth century, and it would be destroyed with the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I (1914–1918). The Ottoman and Russian monarchies were also gone. That is why the decline and fall of monarchism as a transatlantic phenomenon—and liberal resistance to it—makes understanding of the French Intervention imperative. Within the Atlantic world, Latin America was adopting liberal traditions that grew out of the Enlightenment, and therefore they were "Western" in the political sense. Materialist causes for the European conflicts and Mexico differed, as the latter's economic weakness related to dependency on the West. But the armed struggles involving liberal ideology were of the same nature on both sides of the Atlantic.

     The topics addressed above may be approached as one broad theme in Atlantic history, with each theme described being part of the lesson plan. This author is not by training a Europeanist, but the above topics have fit nicely within his own lesson plans of the past few years. One can probably spend whole academic semesters or quarters discussing the 1848 revolutions, liberalism, and warfare on the Continent. But for instructors of high school seniors or college undergraduates who believe their world history courses lack adequate coverage of Latin America, this epoch offers a means an ideal place to discuss trends and events common to both Europe and the Americas. The subject of warfare is, if nothing else, tangible, accessible, and integral to understanding modern world history and transatlantic currents of politics and social change.

E. Mark Moreno is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Commerce, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Latin America and world history. His current research is on print culture, literacy, and the application of war propaganda and imagery in nineteenth-century Mexico. He can be reached at Mark.Moreno@tamuc.edu.

¹ Guy Thomsen, ed., The European Revolutions and the Americas (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002), 15.

² Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [2005]), 64.

³ Alicia Hernández Chávez, Mexico: A Brief History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 154–155.

⁴ Sperber, The European Revolutions, 74.

⁵ Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 289.

⁶ Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1952); Peter Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974); Helge Berger et al., "Economic Crises and the European Revolutions of 1848," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 61: 2 (June, 2001), 293–326; See also Sperber, The European Revolutions, mentioned above, fn 2.

⁷ Sperber, in The European Revolutions, provides an overview of the Revolutions in a format accessible to undergraduates, as well as a detailed timeline to the events of 1848.

⁸ Quoted in Enrique Krauze, Mexico: A Biography of Power (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 148.

⁹ E. Mark Moreno, The French Intervention: Warfare and the Making of Mexico (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing), 9–10.

¹⁰ See Pete F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996)

¹¹ See Patrick J. McNamara, Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

¹² Michelle Cunningham, Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2; Nancy N. Barker, "Monarchy in Mexico: Harebrained Scheme or Well-Considered Prospect?" The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 14:1 (March, 1976), 51–68; See Alfred Jackson Hanna et al., Napoleon II and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); See J.M. Thompson, Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1955).

¹³ Manuel Santibañez Reseña Histórica de Cuerpo de Ejército de Oriente, Vol. 1 (Mexico; Tipografia de la Oficina Impresadora del Timbre, 1892), 47–50; Moreno, The French Intervention, 87–89; McNamara, Sons, 52.

¹⁴ La Chinaca, Vol. 1:8, May 8, 1862, 2.

¹⁵ Eduardo Ruiz, Historia de la Guerra de Intervención en Michoacán (Mexico City: Oficina Tipografica de la Secretary de Fomento, 1896), 332–352; Jack Autrey Dabbs, The French Army in Mexico: A Study in Military Government (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963), 235; Moreno, The French Intervention, 28–29.

¹⁶ Antonio Peconi, "Luis Ghilardi, Republicano, Italiano, Heroe Mexicano" (Unpublished manuscript: State Archives of Aguascalientes, Mexico, March, 1995), 2; Moreno, The French Intervention, 30–31.

¹⁷ Agustín R. Gonzalez, Historia del Estado de Aguascalientes (Mexico City: Libreria, Tipografia, y Litografia de V. Villada, 1881), 349.

¹⁸ Benito Juárez, Documentos, discursos, correspondencia, Vol. 12 (Mexico City: Secretaria del Patrimonio Nacional, 1967), 173.

¹⁹ See Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, "Voluntarios extranjeros en los ejércitos liberales mexicanos, 1854–1867," Historia Mexicana, Vol. 37:2 (Oct.–Dec., 1987), 223; John Sobieski, The Life Story and Personal Reminisces of John Sobieski (Los Angeles: John L. Sobieski, n.d. [ca. 1900]), 135. The manuscript can be viewed at: http://books.google.com/books?id=uFElAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+sobieski&hl=en&sa=X&ei=
EQpVU7GdMqeX8QHZhoDAAQ&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=john%20sobieski&f=false (accessed April 20, 2014).