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(1993). “Let Them Eat Cake”: The Mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. The Historian: Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 709-724.

Ever since the egregious and tragic failure of Napoleon III's attempt to place the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian on a throne in Mexico, virtually all but the participants have tended to view his enterprise as a species of folly. Whether they believe his motives to have been quixotic or meanly avaricious, historians generally agree in blaming ignorance as the basic cause of the fiasco. Instead of informing himself accurately on the true conditions in Mexico, the argument runs, the emperor allowed himself to be hoodwinked by a handful of self-serving emigres and deluded by the clerical enthusiasms of the Empress Eugenie. "Without a shred of evidence," wrote a prominent British historian of the Second Empire,' he persuaded himself of the existence of a strong monarchist movement that would welcome a prince as a liberator. "He was badly informed because he did nothing to inform himself well," concludes the foremost French authority on the Mexican expedition.2 Hence he failed to recognize

The “Count de Saligny,” as he was usually known to his contemporaries and as he has gone down in history, has long been a vexatious but enigmatic figure. Wherever he went there was trouble, sometimes even tragedy; yet whence he came, why he acted as he did, and where and how he ended his days could not be fathomed. His career has been known only in isolated and ragged fragments. To American historians of the western frontier he appears from the blue as the unpopular and unsuccessful charge d’affaires to the Republic of Texas. Having acquired notoriety in Texas and disapprobation in the French Foreign Ministry for his role in an undignified episode known as the “Pig War,” he disappeared from sight when Texas became part of the United States in 1846. Specialists in the Second Empire of France or of Latin American history encounter him some fifteen years later in his career when, unaccountably, he was designated minister to Mexico. For a few years they have ample evidence to trace his malignant work in urging French intervention and to describe the incorrigible behavior that led to his recall and disgrace in 1863. They have puzzled in vain over the reasons for this aberrant and destructive mission. Yet long before the French expedition to Mexico and the attempt to establish a monarchy in Mexico had born their tragic fruits the “Count de Saligny” had returned to France to vanish once more without trace.

(1985). Class, ideology, and the rights of nobles during the French revolution. History of European Ideas: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 94-94.

Philippe d'Orleans was the son of Louis XIII, the only brother of Louis XIV, the father of the Regent, Philippe II, and the first of the fourth House of Orleans, which endures to the present day. Because the senior, or Bourbon, line died out in the nineteenth century, the present head of the House of Orleans, the comte de Paris, would be king, if France had adhered to the system of hereditary monarchy. Philippe was thus the biological founder of the collateral line that long remained close to the throne and often in opposition to it. In subsequent generations the House of Orleans attracted to it men and ideas that transcended the narrow question of the succession and flowed over into areas of political ideology, economics, and social progress. The role of Orleanism was to propose to, or on occasion to impose on, the French people a more liberal, a more modern alternative. Despite the historical importance of the House, Philippe, or Monsieur, as he was known in court, has been viewed as an insignificant prince. Contemporary memoirs and letters have described him as a fop and homosexual whose ornaments and affectations made him the laughingstock of the court. Always he walked in the shadow of his great brother, and rarely did he seem to engage in any more important activity than the decoration of his palaces or the patronage of his favorites. "He was a pot-bellied little man propped up on heels like stilts; gotten up like a woman with rings, bracelets, and jewels everywhere; a long wig, black and powdered, spread out in front; ribbons wherever he could put them; and exuding perfumes of all kinds, . . ." wrote Saint-Simon, the most famous of the memoirists of the time of Philippe. "With more vivacity than intelli

existence an enormous body of literature of great diversity. Many writers have focused on the lofty grande pensee of the Emperor to unleash the productive energies of Mexico by the creation of a monarchy. Others have emphasized the shadier aspects of the enterprise: the profiteering of the duke of Morny, for example, and the notorious Jecker bonds.1 Yet no scholar has turned his attention to the French subjects resident in Mexico or, with any continuity, to French relations with Mexico before 1860.2 The French in Mexico have been the

The affair of the Jecker bonds is one of the great enigmas in the origin of the Mexican Expedition of 1861. Destined to attain international notoriety, it concerned an exorbitant claim against the Mexican government by the banking house of J. B. Jecker, which had underwritten 15 million dollars in Mexican treasury bonds with a guarantee of payment of one-half of the interest for five years. The bank failed in 1860 and among its assets were the bonds. Jecker demanded full execution of his contract with the Mexican government even though only an insignificant fraction of the bonds, on which he paid interest, had been sold, and even though he had been merely the agent for the bonds and not the holder. This claim should have been of small concern to the