MEXICO: Cinco de Mayo

In a thousand dusty village squares and in the vast Zócalo before Mexico City’s National Palace, crowds danced, skyrockets sizzled. In historic Puebla, where girls pelted his car with flowers as he passed, President Miguel Aleman laid a wreath at the foot of the statue of General Ignacio Zaragoza.

It was the Cinco de Mayo—the Fifth of May—and all Mexico was celebrating the victory won 86 years ago when General Zaragoza’s troops drove the glittering legions of Emperor Napoleon III down the slopes of Puebla.

In 1862 Benito Juárez was president, and Mexico had just emerged from years of exhausting civil war. But there were die-hards among the defeated, and these had persuaded the ambitious emperor of the French that there was glory to be got in Mexico. There was also a little matter of unpaid Mexican debts in which Frenchmen were interested. Aware that the U.S., torn by its own civil war, could not interfere, Napoleon set out on an adventure that he expected would bring him fresh laurels (he had defeated Austria only three years before) and would put his protege, the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, on the throne of Mexico. His General Charles-Ferdinand de Lorencez landed at the port of Vera Cruz in March 1862, and began the rigorous march to Mexico City.

Mexico’s Master. Lorencez saw nothing but ragged Mexican, scouts ducking over the brown hills ahead. “We are so superior to the Mexicans in race, in organization, in discipline, in morality, and in elevation of feeling,” he wrote the French War Minister, “that I beg Your Excellency to be so good as to inform the Emperor that, at the head of 6,000 soldiers, I am already master of Mexico.”

When he found the army of General Zaragoza drawn up at Puebla, Lorencez did not even bother to maneuver for position. The Mexican priests assured him that the city hated the Juarez government more than any city in the land, and would greet his troops with flowers. Lorencez popped away briefly with his ten cannon, then ordered his men to take the fortified convent of Guadalupe.

Dour General Zaragoza had never expected such folly. There was just time to open fire with the fortress’ guns, and to move the infantry to the top of the hill. As the red-bloomered French Zouaves charged smartly up the slope, the barefooted Indians mowed them down with 1812 muskets. Then machete-waving cavalrymen, led by a young Mixtec Indian named Porfirio Diaz, rushed in from the flanks, and the veterans of Sevastopol and Solferino knew that they were beaten. Leaving 1,000 dead, Lorencez began his retreat toward the Gulf.

Maximilian’s Masters. Twelve months later Napoleon III, having fired his general and studied maps of Puebla himself, sent 30,000 men to take the place (now renamed Puebla de Zaragoza), drive Juárez to the Rio Grande border, and install Maximilian as Mexico’s emperor. But Mexicans had learned the meaning of the Cinco de Mayo. “You have fought the first soldiers of the day,” said a patriot to the ragged victors of Puebla, “and you have been the first to conquer them.”

Juárez never gave up. After the U.S. Civil War ended and the French had marched out of Mexico, Emperor Maximilian was dethroned and shot. Thereafter, Mexico, free and independent, celebrated the Cinco de Mayo as its national holiday.