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5

THE EMPEROR’S ANTIQUARIAN

A Collection Takes Shape

Moving on from appropriating and selling church property to raise money, in 1861, President Juárez took steps to suspend interest payments on loans from European powers. The holders of that foreign debt were not at all happy about this decision and pressed their governments to take action, with surprising results. Later that year England, France, and Spain signed the Treaty of London. As the historian William Spence Robertson explains, with this treaty, these governments “undertook to press vigorously the claims of their citizens against Mexico which aggregated untold millions of dollars” (Robertson 1940: 167). They were, in effect, signing an agreement to force Mexico to pay what it owed its creditors.

These nations were encouraged to interfere in Mexico’s economic policies by groups in the country who were still loyal to Spain’s monarchy, including, not surprisingly, the Catholic Church. As journalist Jonathan Kandell writes in La Capital, “The Mexican Church and its allies encouraged the [European] intervention and sought to broaden their scope into a full-fledged invasion that would replace Juárez with a foreign ruler, who would support their conservative program. Defeat in the civil war had led the Mexican clergy and conservatives to openly advocate monarchism as a solution to the country’s ills” (Kandell 1988: 334). In essence, the conservatives preferred to have a foreign ruler who served their interests than to accept their democratically elected president.

Then without much warning, Spanish troops invaded Veracruz from Cuba in December 1861. The British and French invaded a few months later, in early 1862. England and Spain soon recalled their armies. France, however, then governed by the impetuous and ill-fated Emperor Napoleon III, chose to leave its troops in place.

The French suffered an initial defeat at the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862, a date called simply Cinco de Mayo and now commemorated by colorful celebrations in Mexico and the United States. They then retreated to the port of Veracruz and held it for several months. Their commander, General François Achille Bazaine, who had fought bravely in Algeria, the Crimea, and Italy, eventually defeated the Mexicans, despite their early victories. Juárez fled Mexico City, heading north with his cabinet on the last day of May 1863; he never left Mexican territory, however.

This invasion of a sovereign nation, which has since become known by the euphemism the “French Intervention” in Mexico, lasted from 1862 to 1867. It was an undisguised attempt by the French government to extend its influence to North America by establishing a monarchy in Mexico, supported by the Mexican conservative party and backed by the French army. The United States was in the midst of its own civil war and could do little to help Mexico, aside from Abraham Lincoln’s steadfast refusal to recognize any government other than that of Benito Juárez. After the French captured Mexico City in 1863, Napoleon III installed Maximilian von Habsburg, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, as emperor of Mexico. This takeover was accomplished with the full agreement and collaboration of Mexico’s conservative party and the Catholic Church.

As a Habsburg, Maximilian was related to the Spanish kings, who had conquered and ruled Mexico from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The conservatives and the church saw him as the answer to the problems created by Juárez and the Reform Movement; the monarchists had achieved their long-held dream of returning royalty to Mexico.

The French intellectual community that had become so captivated by the books and artifacts documenting Mexico’s precontact civilizations during the previous decades sought to capitalize on the opportunity handed them by the armed invasion of the country. Immediately after Emperor Maximilian took the throne, the French government established the Commission Scientifique du Mexique to study the occupied territories. Just as his uncle Napoleon I had taken scholars to Egypt with his invading armies in 1798, Napoleon III sent his own scientists, linguists, and historians to learn about Mexico and collect artifacts and specimens for research and exhibition in France.

Victor Duruy, a historian and reformer of French public education, assembled the commission and outlined its goals in February 1864. According to historian Paul N. Edison, from Duruy’s standpoint, the commission “was intended to simultaneously advance scientific knowledge, civilize Mexico, and bring commercial profits to both nations. Evoking the memory of the ‘colony of scholars’ who accompanied ‘the bravest soldiers in the world’ in Egypt, [Duruy] said that Napoleon III wanted to do in Mexico ‘what was done on the banks of the Nile’” (Edison 1999: 201–2). The commission consisted of four committees: one to research the natural and medical sciences; another to explore the physical and chemical sciences; a third for history, linguistics, and archeology; and a final committee to study the political economy.

The history, linguistics, and archeology committee included some of the most famous French scholars of the period, among them the former diplomats Baron Gros and Léonce Angrand, in addition to Adrien de Longpérier, curator at the Louvre. There were two renowned architects, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-Leduc and César Daly. The two most highly regarded experts in pre-Columbian manuscripts, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg and Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin, both of whom were scholars of pre-Columbian cultures and had collected in Mexico for many years, also joined the commission (Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Mexique, vol. 1, 1865: 12–13). As odd as it may seem, with the exception of Brasseur, none of these men actually traveled to Mexico during the tenure of the Commission Scientifique du Mexique, being content to oversee its activities from the other side of the Atlantic.

As the Commission Scientifique was being organized in Paris, General Bazaine, who remained as commander of French forces in Mexico, formed a second commission to provide more hands-on assistance. The Commission Scientifique, Littéraire et Artistique du Mexique was comprised of some two hundred Mexican and French scientists and army officers residing in the country. Bazaine appointed Col. Louis Toussaint Simon Doutrelaine to oversee this group. The Paris-based commission also chose Doutrelaine to oversee French voyageurs journeying to Mexico and act as an intermediary with Mexican authorities (Edison 1999: 204–5).

For a man of Boban’s ambition and temperament, the French Intervention presented a golden opportunity to bring his collection to the attention of a much wider audience. Within a short time, he became friendly with leaders of the occupying forces and showed them his extensive archeological and natural history specimens, in addition to the books and manuscripts he had amassed. In October 1863, a few months before being named chief of the Commission Scientifique, Littéraire et Artistique, Col. Doutrelaine, then commander of the French army’s engineering corps, wrote a long letter referencing Eugène Boban to Marshal Vaillant, who presided over the physical and chemical sciences committee of the Parisian Commission. “There is an industrialist here, who has a remarkable collection. A Frenchman, who has travelled throughout Mexico, the Yucatan, Sonora, and California and was even a bit married in Chiapas” (Le Goff and Prévost-Urkidi 2011: 63). The 29-year-old “industrialist” seems to have made quite an impression on the head of the Mexican division of the Commission Scientifique.

Recognizing that Boban’s materials represented an unusually comprehensive collection that had taken years to assemble, Doutrelaine evidently thought that it would be more efficient for the French government to purchase it than to have the Commission Scientifique attempt to replicate it. He understood that it was of paramount importance to document the objects in the collection through catalog notes and illustrations, so he assigned one of his draftsmen from the engineering corps to begin drawing the archeological specimens.

Doutrelaine’s letter to Marshal Vaillant continues,

He would give his collection to the Museum at a cost of 20,000 francs, very discreet, he alleges. I told him that the first thing he must do, in support of his offer, is to make an inventory of its parts, categorical and analytical, with descriptive details and historical and archeological information. He has begun and asked me to promise to send his work when he is finished. I promised, but he has several months before completing it. The collection, which I think quite valuable indeed, is a mess (Le Goff and Prévost-Urkidi 2011: 63).¹

It is noteworthy that at this early date, Doutrelaine is already acting as an intermediary for the potential sale of Boban’s collection to the “Museum,” presumably the Louvre. His description of Boban’s having been a “little bit married” to a woman from Chiapas is an indication of how close the two men had become. In fact, in his later writings, Boban refers to him as “mon ami, M. Doutrelaine” (HSA: B2244, Box V—Preface).

The two men were soon working together overseeing the discovery and excavation of archeological artifacts uncovered when Doutrelaine’s engineering corps began constructing earthen fortifications intended to protect the French army from attack. Their working relationship seems to have been that Boban provided the necessary expertise to recognize what should be saved, and in exchange many of the objects uncovered became part of his collection. The colonel’s reports provide details of artifacts recovered from digs carried out in Metlatoluca, a site near Huauhchinango in Veracruz, and another on the hill of Las Palmas, west of Mexico City. In March 1866 he announced in the official reports of the Commission Scientifique du Mexique, “the sending of several drawings of antiquities from the Boban collection,” adding that he planned to transport the objects themselves later via the French expeditionary corps (Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Mexique, vol. 2, 1865: 360; Riviale 1999: 329; Riviale 2001: 353).

By this time Eugène Boban was also becoming known to Emperor Maximilian and his circle, who had arrived in Mexico in 1864. His initial introduction may have caused some awkwardness, however, since he was being investigated as an apparent draft dodger for having left France without reporting for duty with the “class” of 1854. There are two documents, written in March and September of 1864, which discuss the problem of French expatriates in Mexico, who are referred to as insoumis