In the summer of 1866, the Empress Carlota of Mexico arrived in Paris on a desperate mission. The French Emperor Napoleon III, whose army had placed her husband on the throne of Mexico, was losing interest in the troubled empire across the Atlantic. Carlota sought to change his mind. She met with him several times in August, but the emperor refused to recommit French support.
He even suggested that her husband, Maximilian, should abdicate. Carlota then traveled to Rome, hoping to persuade Pope Pius IX to use his influence on behalf of the embattled Mexican monarchy. If the pope backed her cause, Carlota reasoned, the Catholic powers of Europe might follow. But the pope, when she finally received an audience with him in late September, was unwilling to involve himself.
With that refusal, all hope for the Mexican Empire collapsed. It was during these weeks in Europe that Carlota began to lose her mind. Signs of instability had surfaced earlier, in Paris, as her efforts met resistance. On the journey to Rome, witnesses recorded that she became convinced a passing farmer was an assassin.
In Rome itself, she feared being poisoned, refusing to eat or drink. She suffered from fits of hysteria, agoraphobia, and episodes of extreme behavior. At one point, she stole a goblet from the pope’s apartments at the Vatican and used it to drink water from Rome’s public fountains. She was Marie Charlotte Amélie Augustine Victoire Clémentine Léopoldine, born on June 7, 1840, at Laeken Castle near Brussels.
Her father, Leopold I, was the first king of the newly established kingdom of Belgium. Her mother, Louise, was the daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. As the only daughter of the Belgian royal couple, Charlotte was raised within her own household, close to the royal family. When she was ten, her mother died of tuberculosis, and her upbringing was entrusted to the Countess of Hulst, a close noble friend of the family.
Her dynastic marriage was arranged while she was still young. On July 27, 1857, she wed Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a 25-year-old who stood close in the line of succession to his brother, Emperor Franz Joseph. The early years of the marriage were relatively happy. In Vienna, Charlotte was praised for her beauty and her ease with the rituals of the imperial court.
The couple also spent considerable time in northern Italy, where Maximilian served as viceroy of the Austrian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. When those provinces were lost, the couple moved to a residence near Trieste on the Adriatic coast. It was an idyllic start, but events far away in Mexico soon interrupted their lives. Mexico had gained independence from Spain in 1821.
The new state was briefly an empire from 1822 to 1823, then became a republic. But factions within Mexican politics always sought a more conservative regime, possibly a monarchy or a new empire. In the early 1860s, the situation came to a head over debts the Mexican government had accumulated in the 1840s and 1850s. Unable to meet repayments, Mexico was invaded in 1861 by France, Spain, and Britain in an effort to recover their money.
Spain and Britain quickly withdrew, but France remained. Napoleon III began formulating a more concerted intervention in Mexican politics. As early as October 1861, a group of conservative Mexican politicians, with Napoleon’s support, sent a letter to Europe offering Maximilian the throne of Mexico. The archduke seemed a highly suitable candidate.
He was not only a member of a European royal family but a member of the Habsburgs, the dynasty that had ruled Spain when Mexico was first conquered during the sixteenth century. Maximilian and Charlotte were backed by Mexican conservatives and by France. Maximilian was initially reluctant to accept. Only after protracted wrangling over the terms did he agree in October 1863.
Charlotte’s intervention is believed to have been critical. She was strongly in favor of the scheme and was widely understood to be highly ambitious at that point, believing they could thrive as rulers of a Central American state. In the spring of 1864, the young couple set sail for the Americas. Charlotte, the princess who had become an archduchess through marriage, was now known as the Empress Carlota.
Despite their high hopes, they were not received well. Many factions within Mexican politics refused to recognize them, and a civil war soon broke out between the conservatives who backed the new empire and a coalition of liberals and republicans who fought to preserve the republic. Carlota attempted to undertake important work. She learned Spanish and took a genuine interest in Mexican culture, including art, literature, and history.
In 1865, she visited the Yucatan Peninsula to view prominent Mayan ruins. In an effort to secure their position, she and Maximilian adopted two members of the Iturbide family, descendants of Agustín de Iturbide, who had ruled as Mexico’s first emperor over forty years earlier. With no child of their own, the couple used the Iturbide children to demonstrate a clear line of succession. But these efforts were not enough, and their rule did not last much longer.
In the mid-1860s, support for Maximilian and Carlota evaporated. Their rise had been made possible by the American Civil War, which had distracted the United States between 1861 and 1865. But with that conflict over, Mexico’s northern neighbor began taking a more active role in affairs to the south, favoring the republicans who opposed Maximilian. Meanwhile, Napoleon III was increasingly distracted by events in Europe, particularly the threat of war with Prussia, and shifted France’s interests away from Mexico.
Maximilian and Carlota were now extremely isolated. After her failed mission to Europe, Carlota’s mind continued to deteriorate. By the summer of 1867, she was back at the palace at Trieste where she and Maximilian had lived before leaving for Mexico. Her brother, King Leopold II of Belgium, and her brother-in-law, Emperor Franz Joseph, had learned of her deteriorating mental state.
A team of professionals was assembled to determine what was wrong with her. A decision was also taken not to inform her of her husband’s death. The news of that event had reached Europe in late June 1867. Maximilian had been captured in a last stand at Querétaro and executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867.
A new republic was established to replace the short-lived empire. Throughout Europe, there was widespread interest in Charlotte’s case. In 1867, several reports in the British Medical Journal outlined her mental decline. One report on August 24 described how the former empress was suffering from severe melancholia, a catch-all term of the time for what would now be called depression.
She was highly paranoid, suffering from delusions that poison was being put in her food. Diagnosed today, there is little doubt she would have been classified as suffering from a very debilitating form of paranoid schizophrenia. But in the late nineteenth century, with psychology only entering its infancy, little could be done. Charlotte never fully recovered.
In January 1868, she finally learned of her husband’s execution. She became even more morally broken. In a set of nearly 400 letters, she declared herself dead at the fall of the Mexican Empire. The letters, by their number and length, offered testimony of her daily life, punctuated by paranoid attacks and the care given to her in the months that followed.
Charlotte was brought back to Belgium by her family, along with her two adopted sons, who were later sent to England to study. A household was established for her at Bouchout Castle, a royal castle near the town of Meise that dated back to the twelfth century. There, Charlotte completely disappeared from public life, spending the majority of her time in her castle and receiving visitors only from some of her family members. She took walks, did embroidery, played cards, and listened to her gramophone.
In subsequent years, as some of her relatives and servants died, a decision was made not to inform her, in case her condition worsened. Her lady-in-waiting, the Countess of Reineke, wrote of Charlotte that most of the time the unfortunate woman was absorbed in long silences or, on the contrary, in heated discussions in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with imaginary interlocutors – discussions too incoherent, too disjointed to guess what thoughts occupied her brain. Charlotte frequently made confusing remarks, talked to herself, and at times burst into fits of rage, destroying vases and tearing up books, contrasting with periods of calm. She would spend over fifty years at Bouchout Castle.
Although her condition is said to have improved to some extent as the years went by, she was never able to recommence living a normal life. Charlotte died of pneumonia and influenza on January 19, 1927, at the age of eighty-six.