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Kit home A novel based on the true story by C.M. Mayo Gone with the Wind à la mexicana, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is an epic novel about a family torn apart in the struggle-to-the-death over the destiny of Mexico. In the tradition of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, and Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is based on a true story and extensive original research into a period— the mid 19th century— that was a crucial turning point not only in Mexican history, but for the control of the Americas. This is a novel that touches the tortured question of what it might have meant be a Mexican. Were Mexicans to be subjects or citizens? Under the Republic of Benito Juárez, Mexico was in the thrall of banditry and the Church under attack. While the United States were embroiled in their own Civil War, a clique of Mexican conservative exiles and clergy convinced Louis Napoleon to invade Mexico and install the Archduke of Austria, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor. Maximilian and his consort, Carlota, arrived in Mexico City in 1864. Childless, in 1865, Maximilian took custody of— with all appearances that this would be his Heir Presumptive— the two-year old Prince Agustín de Iturbide, grandson of Mexico's first emperor, a leader of Mexico's Independence from Spain, who had been executed before a firing squad. The boy's father, a Mexican diplomat, and mother, a Washington DC belle, immediately regretted their complicity, however, and Maximilian's reluctance to return the child to his distraught parents, even as his empire began to fall, and the Empress Carlota descended into madness, ignited an international scandal. The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire
is a story both sweeping and intimate, of geopolitics and international
finance, the glamor of royalty, the grit of military command,
of the arrogance of power, the dark labyrinths of ambition, and,
above all, a child who was not, in the end, a prince, but a little
boy who belonged to his parents. |