After Santa-Ana a coloured _caudillo_, Benito Juarez, was the leader of the reformers (1839), and with him the liberal movement took on a profoundly racial character. Juarez represented the natives, the democracy, as against the colonial oligarchy; like Tupuc-Amaru, he was the redeemer of the Indians; like Las Casas, the protector of the vanquished. Better than Guzman-Blanco and Rosas he realised the ideal of those American republics which were oppressed by memories of colonial days; hatred of all privilege, a dream of absolute liberty, war upon the tutelary Church, and a strict despotism designed to create classes and ideals.
He proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and the confiscation of ecclesiastical property. Lerdo de Tejada was the economist and ideologist of the Reformation; Juarez was its muscle, its iron will; he realised without compromise the old liberal programme. Congress, divided into Juarists and anti-Juarists, { 153} elected him President. All the laws against the Church were applied, but that did not enrich the country. Stock-jobbing, scandals, waste, and bankruptcy accumulated and formed a terrible argument against the "pure" liberals; the latter defended themselves by means of proscriptions and new and violent laws of reform. Once more the shadow of the Empire hovered over the turbulent democracy.
It was no longer a question of the national Empire of Montezuma or Iturbide, but of the foreign eagles. Napoleon III., a conqueror by family tradition, intervened in Mexican affairs; like Louis-Philippe, he desired colonies oversea; he defended the Latin civilisation against the Yankee peril, protected the Church against the Reformation, and extended over barbarous countries the amiable empire of the French spirit, the spirit of lucidity, method, and harmony.[2] In 1861 the Mexican Congress suspended the service of the debt, as a remedy against financial bankruptcy, and this measure provoked French intervention; there was a crusade of ambitious creditors against Mexico. England and Spain signed an agreement in London; both were enemies of the insolvent democracy. The hatred of Mexico was then excited against Spain; the Spanish Minister was expelled; the federal Government refused to treat with the Spanish _chargé d'affaires_. The Reformation general, Zaragoza, organised the country for defence against the Spanish invasion; he was victorious at Puebla. The Mexican resistance was concentrated upon the central plateau, where dwelt the _penates_ of ancient Mexico. Zaragoza died; Puebla, attacked by the French, defended itself heroically; the national war became also a civil war. The monarchists desired a prince, the restoration of the Catholic Church, and { 154} the consolidation of the conservative oligarchy; the clergy shared their ambitions. The Archduke Maximilian arrived, to whom the conservatives had offered the throne of Iturbide, and from 1863 to 1864, after some hardly contested battles, the invaders ruled the country. Maximilian, surrounded by the aristocrats, triumphantly entered the Aztec capital, and the people, overpowered by the splendour of the new court, accepted the foreign monarch.