The book is very well written and organized as far as the struggles of the Great Powers and European dynastic alliances are concerned. There is almost nothing concerning Mexican society, culture and history except for a few racist comments of the French officers about the Mexican army. And these were the soldiers--Juaristas, obviously were not made from a different cloth than Imperialists--who, with the help of American weapons expelled foreign mercenaries and installed the Mexican Republic, which existed ever since. Furthermore, this was precisely a complex structure of property and landholding in post-Spanish Mexico, and the lack of support of the imperial cause by the peasantry, which doomed Maximillian's and Napoleon III enterprise, not the minor disagreements among his French military advisers.
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