In the summer of 1866, a woman who had been born a Belgian princess and became an Austrian archduchess through marriage set sail from Mexico for Europe. She was on a desperate mission to save the empire she and her husband had been given the year before. The Empress Carlota hoped to convince the courts of Europe to recommit to the imperial project in Mexico, but her pleas would fall on deaf ears, and her mind would soon break under the weight of failure. The story of Carlota begins decades earlier, with the marriage of her parents.
Her father, Leopold I, was the first king of the newly established state of Belgium, and her mother, Louise, was a daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. Born at Laeken Castle near Brussels on the 7th of June 1840, Charlotte, as she was known in her youth, was the couple’s only daughter. She was raised close to the royal family, but her upbringing was entrusted to the Countess of Hulst after her mother died of tuberculosis in October 1850, when Charlotte was just ten years old. Her dynastic future was settled early.
On the 27th of July 1857, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a 25-year-old who stood close in the line of succession to his brother, Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria. The early years of the marriage were relatively happy. In Vienna, Charlotte was praised for her beauty and her ease in navigating the Imperial Court. The couple spent much time in what is now northern Italy, where Maximilian served as Viceroy of the Austrian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia.
When those provinces were lost, they moved to a new residence near Trieste on the Adriatic coast. It was an idyllic start, but events very far away in Mexico would soon interrupt it. Mexico had gained independence from Spain in 1821, and after a brief empire, it was ruled as a republic. In the early 1860s, a dispute over debts owed to several European powers led to an invasion by France, Spain, and Britain in 1861.
While Spain and Britain quickly withdrew, France remained. The head of the French state, Emperor 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, offered the crown of Mexico to Maximilian. The Archduke was deemed suitable because he was a Habsburg, the family that had ruled Spain when Mexico was first conquered in the 16th century.
Maximilian was initially reluctant to accept the offer. It was only after protracted negotiations over the terms that he agreed to become Emperor 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 a highly ambitious woman who believed they could thrive as rulers of a Central American state.
In the spring of 1864, the couple set sail for the Americas. The woman born Princess Charlotte, who became Archduchess Charlotte through marriage, would now be 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 the coalition of liberals and republicans who fought to preserve the republic.
Carlota did attempt to undertake important work as Empress. She learned Spanish and took a genuine interest in Mexican culture, including art, literature, and history, even visiting the Yucatán Peninsula in 1865 to view Mayan ruins. In the absence of a child of their own, she and Maximilian adopted two members of the Iturbide family, descendants of the man who had ruled as Mexico’s first emperor decades earlier, to demonstrate a clear line of succession. But their rule would not last much longer.
Their rise had been facilitated by the United States being distracted by its own civil war between 1861 and 1865. With that conflict over, Mexico’s northern neighbor began favoring the republicans who opposed Maximilian. Napoleon III was increasingly distracted by events in Europe, particularly the threat of war with Prussia, and began shifting France’s interests away from Mexico. By 1866, Maximilian and Carlota were extremely isolated and had lost a great deal of support.
There was one final effort to save the regime. In the summer of 1866, Carlota set sail for Europe while Maximilian remained in Mexico. Her mission was to drum up support among the royal dynasties of Europe. She first headed for Paris in August, where despite several meetings with Napoleon III, she could not convince their closest ally to recommit.
The French Emperor even recommended that Maximilian should abdicate. From Paris, she proceeded toward Rome, hoping to convince Pope Pius IX to throw his support behind Maximilian, a measure which might have led to the backing of Europe’s Catholic powers. But when she was finally granted an audience with the pontiff in late September, he was reluctant to use his influence on their behalf. All seemed lost, and with it, Carlota began tragically losing her mind.
There had been signs that she was unwell from early on in her mission. They first surfaced in Paris in August, but only fully materialized in subsequent weeks on her way to Rome. On one occasion, she became convinced that a passing farmer was an assassin, a possible indication that she was suffering from a form of paranoid schizophrenia. This escalated in Rome itself, where she repeatedly feared being poisoned and refused to eat or drink.
She was also increasingly prone to fits of hysteria, agoraphobia, and extreme behavior. Perhaps her most unusual action was her decision to steal a goblet from the Pope’s apartment at the Vatican and use it to drink water from Rome’s public fountains. Her state of mind would not have been aided by developments in Mexico. The civil war had turned against Maximilian, and he was increasingly fighting a losing battle.
In May 1867, he was captured in a last stand at Querétaro City and executed by firing squad on the 19th of June 1867. A new republic was established to replace the short-lived empire. By the summer of 1867, Carlota was back at Trieste at the palace where she and Maximilian had lived before their Mexican venture. Her brother, King Leopold II of Belgium, and her brother-in-law, Emperor Franz Joseph, had learned of her deteriorating mental state and had her removed there.
A team of professionals was assembled, and a decision was also taken not to inform her of her husband’s death when news of it reached Europe in late June 1867. There was widespread interest in Carlota’s case throughout Europe. In 1867, several reports in the British Medical Journal outlined her mental decline. One report described how the former empress was suffering from severe melancholia, a catch-all term used at the time for what we would now call depression, as well as delusions that poison was being put in her food.
Were she assessed today, she would likely be diagnosed with a debilitating form of paranoid schizophrenia. But in the late 19th century, with psychology still in its infancy, there was little that could be done for her. She never fully recovered. In January 1868, Carlota finally learned about her husband’s execution, causing her to become even more broken.
In a set of nearly 400 letters, she declared herself dead at the fall of the Mexican Empire. In the months that followed, she 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 dating back to the 12th century near the town of Meise. There, Charlotte, as she could again be called, completely disappeared from public life, spending most of her time in her castle and only receiving visitors from some of her family members.
She was known to take walks, do embroidery, play cards, and listen to her gramophone. In subsequent years, when relatives or servants died, a decision was made not to inform her in case her condition worsened. Her lady-in-waiting described how most of the time, the unfortunate woman was absorbed in long silences or, in contrast, in heated discussions in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with imaginary interlocutors, discussions too incoherent and disjointed to guess what thoughts occupied her brain. At times, she would burst into a fit of rage, destroying vases and tearing up books, which contrasted with periods of calm.
She spent over 50 years at Bouchout Castle, and 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. She eventually died of pneumonia and influenza on the 19th of January 1927, at the age of 86.