First Battle of Puebla ("Cinco de Mayo")
Date: 5 MAY 1862
Forces Engaged:
Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico, also often termed the "Second Federal Republic",
Segunda República Federal de México), Elements of the Eastern Army (
Ejercito de la Este).
North of
La Frontera, where a slightly larger fracas was in progress during this time, the "Eastern Army" (which was, presumably, one of at least two - since there must have been a "Western Army" somewhere - or more "armies" of the military forces of the Second Republic) would have been considered roughly the equivalent of a "division". This organization - either the Mexican "army" or the U.S. Civil War "division" - was
not what a modern GI would think of when he or she heard the word "division".
Here's how the U.S. Army organizational chart of the time stacked up:
Today around the globe a "division" is a combined-arms organization capable of independent operations. Typically it is based around one of the two maneuver arms - infantry or armor - but includes it's own organic artillery as well as all the combat support and service support elements needed to move, shoot, and communicate.
An 1862 U.S. division, on the other hand, was a single-branch organization consisting of several infantry or cavalry brigades made up of several infantry or cavalry regiments. No artillery, and probably minimal organic support, i.e. quartermaster, elements.
Several divisions would have been grouped into an army corps, where for the first time infantry, cavalry, and artillery would have been mixed together. For the U.S. Army of that time the corps was typically the lowest level of organization capable of operating independently. Some sort of ad-hoc divisional task force might have been organized, but only for a specific, short-term operation. For real fighting it was the corps and the army that were the center of combat power.
Which makes the
Ejercito de la Este more like a pint-size corps - roughly 8,000 all arms for the Mexican organization, compared to 25,000 or so for a U.S. Army corps of the time - than an American element of similar size. Given the logistical constraints on the government of Mexico at the time it's probably about the best that could be done to confront the invaders.
While the reported May strength of the entire army (in Palou Perez, 2000) was roughly 8,000 the best breakdown of the actual defenders present at Puebla in May I can find suggests that only about roughly 5,000 all arms were present in the field.
Infantry: four elements, three of roughly 1,000 grunts each, and a third, larger fortress garrison brigade. These are supposedly have been termed "brigades", but on the ground were about the equivalent of a U.S. infantry regiment:
First Brigade (BG Berriozabal) - (1st Battalion, Toluca Regiment, 3rd Battalion, Toluca Regiment, Fijo de Vera Cruz)
Second Brigade (COL LaMadrid) - (Rifles of San Luis, Zapadores Battalion
(Note 1), Reforma Battalion of San Luis Potosí)
Third Brigade (BG Diaz) - (Guerrero Battalion, Rifle Battalion)
Fourth Brigade) (BG Negrete) - (Regiment de Morelia, 60th Battalion
Guardia Nacional de Puebla (1 battalion), 4 independent companies)
Note 1: Zapadores are technically what in English would be called "sappers" (as opposed to "miners"; sappers worked the above-ground siege works, miners below), part of the engineer branch. In the Mexican Army, however, the Zapadores were more often used as elite infantry, and appear to have been in this case.
It's worth noting that this breakdown doesn't agree with the organization for February, 1862 as reported by Palou Perez (2000). The only organization that matches is Second Division (LaMadrid). Diaz is not division commander for Third Division but is reported leading the second brigade of that formation.
There is no commander named Berriozabal shown anywhere in First Divison or elswhere in the army lists. I can only presume that the division commander listed for February (one BG de la Llave) was replaced, killed, or wounded some time before May.
Cavalry (roughly 600 troopers under BG Alvarez), including Toluca Lancer regiment (3 squadrons), two squadrons of the mounted carabanier regiment (
Carabineros a caballo), and 1 squadron of the Trujano Regiment.
Artillery: Three six-gun batteries of 12-pound smoothbore cannon, so 18 x 12-pound cannon; one battery each in the forts, and the third accompanying Third Division per the Geo-Mexico article referenced below. Presuming about 150-200 redlegs per battery we're looking at no more than 600 gunners and probably more like 500 (the Mexican Defense Department page says 550).
The first three brigades were the "field force" for the army, while Fourth Brigade - roughly 1,500 infantry - was posted in the chain of fortresses north of the town of Puebla; the "Reforma" battalion (presumably a reserve or re-assembled unit) in Fort Loreto, the other Morelia battalion in Fort Guadalupe, with an approximately 300-man ad-hoc reserve composed of 60th Battalion Nacional of Puebla and the independent companies of Tetela, Xochapulco, Zacapoaxtla, and Apulco.
So a total of roughly 5,600 to 5,800 all arms - 4,500 infantry, 600 cavalry, and 500 artillerymen with 18 x 12-pound cannon under GEN Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.
France (
Empire français, the "Second Empire" of Napoleon III), Mexican Epeditionary Force
The forces of the Second Empire that landed at Veracruz in March were a fairly typical melange' of metropolitan French and colonial troops and the assorted ash-and-trash you'd have found in any other European colonial shore party.
So far as I can tell the portion of that force that made it to the hills north of Puebla included about nine battalions of infantry, a small squadron of cavalry, and three batteries of artillery. The best order of battle I've found lists them as follows:
1 battalion, 1er Regiment,
Chasseurs a PiedNote 2 (strength approximately 720 all ranks)
1 battalion,
Chasseurs de Vincennes (about 700 all ranks)
99eme Regiment
Infanterie de Ligne (about 1500 all ranks in two battalions)
2eme Zouave Infantry Regiment
Note 3 (about 1150 all ranks in two battalions)
2eme
Regiment d'Infantrie Marin (about 1300 all ranks in two battalions)
Naval Infantry
Note 4 (about 450 sailors)
2eme
Escadron (Squadron), 2eme
Regiment Chasseurs d’Afrique (about 170 troopers of North African colonial cavalry)
1er Battery, 9eme Artillery Regt. (6 x 12-pound cannon, probably about 150-200 gunners)
2eme Battery, Marine Artillery (6 x 4-pound cannon, probably closer to 100-150 artillerymen - four-pounder crews were smaller)
Marine Mountain Howitzer Battery (6 x 4-pound cannon - as the Marine Artillery)
Note 2One of the great innovations of the 18th Century European armies was the concept of "light infantry". I can't find a definitive Patient Zero, but it appears that most of the continental powers began tinkering with the idea of sending out a screen of individual soldiers, or pairs of soldiers, in front of their main line of musketeers to screen the main body from observation and to harass and disrupt the enemy's. This seems to have begun with designating one company per battalion as a "light company", but by the late 18th and early 19th Century entire regiments had been tasked and specially trained for skirmishing and screening.
In the French Second Empire these troops were called either voltigeurs - "lights" - or chasseurs - "hunters" - but their tactics and techniques were essentially identical. But, as projectile weapons improved in the 19th Century the infantry of the line increasingly adopted the extended-order and fire-and-movement techniques that had been exclusively the province of the light infantry. By the 20th Century the distinction was purely ceremonial.
At the time of Puebla the chasseurs would probably have still been closer to their First Empire namesakes, but would have been trained (and prepared) to advance in mass like the lignards, as well.
Note 3One of the results of the French imperial conquest of the North African area which is today Algeria was the recruitment in 1830s of Algerian soldiers into what became known as the zouave units, the term coming from the Arabic word zwawa for the Kabyle Berber tribes in the region. Apparently by the 1840s most of the troopers in the zouave regiments were not actually Berbers but Frenchmen.
The units retained the distinctive dress, however, and became emblematic of the "romantic" aspects of warfare in the mid-19th Century (both factions of the American Civil War raised units of "zouaves" just because they looked so fucking cool...).
My understanding is that the zouave units were similar to chasseurs in having been originally specialist light infantry but by the mid-19 Century were growing increasingly similar to the regular grunts. They still drilled in open order and skirmishing but could and would stand shoulder-to-shoulder and volley with the line dogs.
Note 4Another common feature of European colonial expeditions was the use of sailors as ersatz infantry. These "naval infantry" were typically not "infantry" in any real sense but were just regular bluejackets with boots and rifles. So far as I can tell the sailors present at Puebla in May of 1862 were no different. The French Navy did have salty soldiers - marines - but this doesn't appear to have been the case here.
I cannot find any higher level organization for this force above the regimental level, which seems surprising given that the expeditionary force included something like 5,000 to 6,000 infantry alone.
But, as we'll see, the Comte de Lorencz was a "
Système D" kind of guy, so this isn't entirely shocking.
So about 5,800 infantry, 170 cavalry, roughly 500 artillerymen with 18 (six 12-pound, 12 4-pound) cannon under BG Charles Ferdinand Latrille, Comte de Lorencez
The Sources: This being the 19th Century and both combatant forces being composed of regular troops reporting to military bureaucracies we have official records from both sides. The real problem is that most of these records are just that; records.
Details of the engagement of 5 MAY are difficult to find on-line, and even dead-tree publications aren't immediately obvious. For the English-only-speaking researcher the difficulty is compounded by the absence of English-language original sources.
Despite the ubiquitous presence of newspaper reporters covering European or North American wars, these publications showed little or no interest in, or effort towards providing coverage of, events in Mexico.
We have extensive newspaper coverage of the American Civil War and temporally nearby European conflicts such as the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, but contemporary English sources were hampered by distance and a lack of eyewitness accounts for the affairs in Mexico.
Here, for example, is the
New York Times for 1 MAY 1863 reporting how it has received reports of the Second Battle of Puebla that took place from mid-March to mid-May of that year:
"At length we have intelligence from Mexico which gives us some idea of what is taking place at Puebla, the seat of war in that country. By telegraph from San Francisco we have advices from Puebla to the 6th inst., and per steamer Sheldrake, from Havana, the dates are given up to the 9th inst. The general tenor of these advices is that a good deal of hard fighting had taken place, and the contest was still raging."
Note that despite the publication date the piece was probably written 30 APR (the terms "6th inst." and "9th inst." are archaic expressions for "the Xth day of this same month") so the reporter is providing a telegraph message that came from some unnamed source in San Francisco relaying three-week old news from Mexico that was supported by someone else who's ship had presumably departed a Mexican port three days later.
Unlike the war then going on in northern Virginia (recall that Chancellorsville was being fought that same day) the
Times had no one covering events in Mexico and was relying on second- or even third-hand information.
The Military History section of the Mexican Army has records from the period; none, so far as I can tell, have been published in English or digitized. Likewise the French Army Musée de l'Armée in Paris has the written record from the French side of the hill.
Same problem.
What I'm saying, in brief, is that there's extant primary-source material covering both the period and this engagement but that surprisingly little has found its way through to digitization and/or in English. If I were a serious scholar of military history I would need to spend time learning both French and Spanish and then travel to Paris and Mexico City D.F. where the primary sources are buried. I can't, so I'll try and provide you with the sources I used for this post, with the caveat that there is a
lot more out there if you're willing to really dig hard.
The inevitable starting-point for any online research is the
Wikipedia article. While not as appalling as some Wikipedia work the account is sparse. Tactical detail is completely absent, and the sources appear to be informal, popular web pages, largely in English with a scattering of Mexican sources. It's not a bad view from ten thousand feet but lacks any sort of information on the technical and tactical conduct of the engagement itself.
Perhaps the most detailed online account I found was a
fun little piece at the "Geo-Mexico" website titled
Cinco de Mayo - the Battle of Puebla, 1862 posted by someone going by "TB" on 5 MAY 2013. The author him- or herself provides no citations for their sources but appears to have done some decent homework; their order of battle seems to match what is found elsewhere.
My rudimentary Spanish helped me stumble through the
Mexican SECDEF summary on the larger Second French Intervention,
La Intervención Francesa. Useful in particular for confirming other sources' reports of the order of battle of the
Ejercito de la Este.
Published sources I found useful include a 2000 work by one Pedro Angel Palou Perez,
5 de Mayo: 1862. It's available at Amazon, if you're interested.
And the following:
Barker, N.N.(1972)
From Texas to Mexico: An "Affairiste" at Work: The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, v. 76, No. 1, pp. 15-37. Lots of detail on the checkered career of the diplomatic - if such a word could ever be used for this joker - career of Alphonse Dubois, Comte de Saligny
Priestly, H.I. (1923) The Mexican Nation, A History: MacMillian, New York, 507p. Just a decent generic sort of early-20th Century history; lots of the sorts of preconceptions you'd expect from a history of Mexico written by a non-Mexican of the time, but has the basic facts.
Martin, B.L.H. 1882 A Popular History of France: Estes and Lauriat, Boston, 1882. Now considered obsolete but, again, contains all the basics.
I tried desperately to find an official history from the Mexican side but was defeated by my poor linguistic skills, but it must be there if you have better Spanish and put in the time; I'd be beholden if you do, and let me know.
French histories of the Mexican Invasion include Paul Willings, 1984
L’expédition du Mexique, and Jean Avanel's 1996 work
La Campagne du Mexique (1862-1867): la fin de l’hégémonie européenne en Amerique du Nord.
For the more visually oriented, the good people at Osprey have provided
The Mexican Adventure 1861-1867 with all the usual good unit, uniform, and equipment details.
The Campaign: To get to the hills north of Puebla we kind of have to go back a bit. Well, okay, more than a bit. Let's go back almost ten years in this blog and over 400 years in Mexican history, to the last time we talked about a battle in Mexico;
La Noche Triste, the last defeat inflicted by the
Mexica on Hernan Cortes.
The Defenders: "Que en el cielo tu eterno destino" - Mexico, 1520-1861
As we talked about then, it wasn't enough. The Spanish had the guns, the germs, the steel, and the horses. And the political organization and cunning (the
Mexica weren't nice neighbors, to say the least, and their enemies found out too late that after they helped the enemy of their enemy defeat and enslave that enemy he was going to enslave and work
them to death, too.
Surprise!) and the overwhelming greed for land and gold.
So the long tapering isthmus south of the landmass of North America became a Spanish colony for something like three hundred years.
And we've
talked about that, too, about a year later when we talked about the Spanish role in the American imperial adventure in the Philippines, and then the
South American revolt against the mother country.
The bottom line is that, outside of the truly rock-bottom-awful European imperial wannabes like Belgium and Portugal
(whose colonial incompetence was at least partially mitigated by their geopolitical incompetence; they either couldn't really establish any overseas colonies - though the damage the Belgians did in the Congo is hard to underestimate - or their empire was relatively limited in size and transient in time - though the Portuguese did some nasty work in Africa, as well) the Spanish have a track record of astounding incompetence.
Part of this was just colonialism. It's damn deadly difficult for a foreigner to rule decently over people and places they have no attachment to and no real affection for. That's why I keep repeating the thing about how a foreign invader has to either go full Roman or go home.
Either you move in with a rod of iron and kill any and everyone who even thinks of looking at you sideways, enrich your quislings, and hammer everyone else flat...and then stay for hundreds of years until you've utterly changed the native culture. Or you're wasting your time, and wasting the natives' lives.
Imperial rule sucks for everyone but the imperials and their toadies, and there's no way to change that. It's baked in.
Part of the Mexican Problem (which was really the Spanish Problem), however, was uniquely Spanish.
Because the Spanish were insufficiently ruthless.
Yeah, yeah, I know; every Filipino, every Mexican, every Colombian who read that last sentence laughed bitterly.
I'm not saying they weren't ruthless. They were.
They just weren't as ruthless as the English who were doing business in North America.
The English, and then the Americans who followed them, effectively genocided the native inhabitants of North America. I'm not saying they were all bwa-ha-ha, full-Nazi Final Solution. But the effect was essentially the same; there is, and has been since pretty much the middle of the 19th Century, no significant native North American element in American society. The natives were either butchered with disease and with powder and steel, driven into impoverished enclaves, or, rarely, incorporated into the dominant society as powerless individuals.
The Spanish, on the other hand, never really bothered to establish a large-scale African slave trade. Instead they used the natives, and the products of native-Spanish
(ahem) liaisons as their workforce. They used these
indios and
mestizos to duplicate the vicious
hacienda system they'd imported from Spain (and turbocharged here in the New World) and duplicate the social stratification that was the standard back in the home country.
Here's a perfect example, an 18th Century painting that shows the "castes" that largely existed in the heads of the Spanish elite. The idea was simplistic, but the prejudice and social binding were real; colonial Mexico was a tougher place if you were darker than paper, and that was a real problem. We're not the only nation to have troubles today because of our prejudices back then.
Keep in mind this is a ridiculously simplified version of an insanely complex and mutlifaceted history; the story of Spanish colonialism in Mexico alone has produced thousands of volumes of history and sociology and reams of analysis. There's way more to this than I'm giving you.
But the nickel tour is: the Spanish empire was no different than any other European empire in that it was by and for the Europeans, first, last, and always, and because of that it created many, many problems in the places it once held sway once the Europeans were finally kicked out.
And this is worth remembering because at the moment we're hearing a lot about the troubles "caused" by the peoples and places south of the United States. Those troubles - and there are troubles in the lands of the former Nueva España - have a long and tortured history leading back to Columbus and Cortez. There's no easy, simple way to solve them and, by connection, the troubles that we have here.
But to make a long story short, when Mexico finally won its independence from Spain in the 1820s it was saddled with lots of social, economic, and political problems largely revolving around a land with many, many poor (who were also overwhelmingly either largely native
indios, or some form of
mestizo blend of native and Spaniard) who had little hopes of being anything else, and a small, entrenched wealthy (largely
criollo or Spanish-descended i.e. "white") minority who ruled over a nation that had been deliberately under-developed because Spain wanted raw materials, not local industry, and was perfectly happy to let their Mexican possession linger in mechanical, technological, and even agricultural desuetude.
This, in turn, resulted in a fractious political milieu that resulted in a debilitating series of coups and revolutions after independence from Spain. First some joker named Iturbide made himself emperor. He was overthrown by the bad guy from that John Wayne Alamo movie, Santa Anna.
General Antonio López de Santa Anna ruled a sort of federal republic for about a year before giving in to his Inner Caudillo and becoming the, well,
caudillo.
After he screwed the whole Texican pooch he screwed the larger, American War pooch, and capped that off by selling the goddamn gringos the Gadsen Purchase. THAT was a grift too far, and his countrymen 86-ed his ass.
But...those countrymen couldn't agree amongst themselves, either, so the "liberals" and "conservatives" fought a nasty little civil war for three years. Finally in 1861 the liberals won enough that they were able to seat one of their own - Benito Juarez - firmly in the presidential armchair.
But the war, and the other problems in the country, had exhausted the nation and depleted the treasury.
That meant the rent-seekers from outside Mexico that had taken advantage of the struggling nation's troubles to do a little vulture capitalism (greed was good long before Wall Street discovered it) were going to have to take a haircut. Juarez suspended payment of foreign debts in the summer of 1861 - to add insult to injury, those "debts" were cash jobbed largely from British, Spanish, French, as well as some American lenders by the "conservatives" that Juarez' faction had just whipped in battle.
These days defaulting on national debts brings around a suit with a briefcase from the IMF.
Back in the 19th Century it brought warships and landing parties and this time was no different.
The Invaders: "...the second time as farce." - France, 1861
We've met these jokers before, too, back in 2012 when we talked about the
debacle of Sedan in 1870, and I can't sum up the papier-mache "glory" that was the reign of the Lesser Napoleon better than I did then:
"The Second Empire was in many ways the embodiment of the worst of France; vainglorious, slipshod, venal, false, and corrupt."
But that was almost a decade in the future; in the 1860s to a large extent the world took the Second Empire at its own face value. The place looked good if you didn't look too closely, and - the important part for our purposes - the French armed forces were still haloed by the reputation they'd won under the first Nappie back at the turn of the last century. The French Army hadn't lost a fight in the fortyodd years since Waterloo.
One major difference between the emperors, however, was the latter's affection for, and embrace of the idea of, a
colonial empire.
The original Napoleon had no time for the idea of overseas possessions; his biggest impacts in U.S. history are the War of 1812 and the Louisiana Purchase, and the latter was perhaps the perfect symbol of Napoleon I's disregard for anything outside the harbor light at Le Havre.
His nephew, on the other hand,
luuuurved him some colonies. The Second Empire saw the wholesale expansion of French overseas conquest; beginning with Algeria in the 1830s, France under Napoleon III planted the tricolor of
liberte, egalite', fraternite on brown, black, and tan people all over hell. Tahiti in the 1840s, New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, Vietnam (and much of the rest of Indochina) in southeast Asia, and Senegal in Africa in the 1850s.
And that brought
les gars to the shore of the Gulf of Mexico in the 1860s.
France had loaned the Mexican conservatives a chunk of change - about half of the suspended debt was owed to French banks or the French government - largely because the French monarchists liked the idea of a catholic Mexican monarchy almost as much as they liked the idea of a
FRENCH catholic Mexican monarchy.
It's worth noting here that one feature of Second Empire France was the influence of the so-called
ultramontane faction of French Catholicism, the real hardcore "what we really need is a good, old-fashioned Inquisition" sort of Catholic who thought that Catherine de' Medici was a fucking squish on the damned Prods. The conservative faction in the just-ended Mexican civil war had been similar hardcore clericalists, so you can see how the two groups of God-pesterers would get along like beer and pretzels (or vin rouge and nachos...).
The mess that had been the civil war of the 1850s had caused a bunch more financial trouble for both Mexico and the Europeans. The liberal faction had seized some money from European traders in 1860 and had shorted their promise to pay them back.
Meanwhile, as the conservative faction was getting it's conge' in 1861 the conservative
caudillo Miramon cut a very weird deal. Per the
New York Times, 24 FEB 1868:
"In 1859, when Miramon was on the point of bankruptcy, Jecker, a Swiss banker, entered into a contract with him on the following terms: The State was to issue bonds for 7,500,000 francs, payable in eight years, and bearing six per cent, interest; these bonds were to be received by the Government in the proportion of 20 per cent on all payments made to it; the holders of old bonds were to be able to exchange them for new bonds on paying 85 per cent, in ready money — is, the State was to convert a part of its interior debt, and pocket 18,750,000 francs by the transaction."
Translated out of bankerese the deal was one of those payday lender deals; for a loan of $750,000 Jecker could come back in eight years and ask for a cool $15 million.
The story is that this was not
just a payday loan; that the deal was engineered by the French government as a pretext for claiming arrears on Mexican silver. The banker himself was suddenly naturalized a French citizen in 1862, as part of what was fairly obviously a
Empire français put-up job to make Jecker the front guy for what amounted to an enormous geopolitical extortion racket.
Mind you, the Spanish and the Brits weren't far behind. In October, 1861 the French, British, and Spanish governments agreed (in something called the
Convention of London) to apply a little...pressure...to Mexico. This deal included two major provisions: first, that the three signatories would launch of a joint expedition to take over the important ports of Mexico (the tariffs collected at the ports was a large, and, probably the main, piece of Mexican government revenue) and, second, that none of the participating nations could gain territorial, political or financial advantage or would get involved in Mexican internal affairs.
The allied fleet turned up off Veracruz on 14 DEC 1861. The Spanish fleet landed the first elements of their roughly 6,000-man expeditionayr force, seized the main harbor defense complex of San Juan de Ulúa, and secured the town of Veracruz - which had been the liberal capital during the civil war, remember - on the 17th. Priestly (1923) remarks that the Spanish
"...found that there were no representatives of the new liberal government there to receive it. While there was no open hostility, there was no enthusiasm, nothing but apathy." (FDChief here - why Priestly thought the residents of Veracruz would be enthusiastic about foreign invasion I haven't the slightest fucking idea...) "It was at once apparent that no debts could be collected without a march to the interior. This was no part of the joint plan"
The French and British naval contingents arrived on 7 JAN 1862, the French force with about 4,000 troops embarked, the British only about a battalion (700) marines.
Despite his cluelessness about reasonable expectations for the political enthusiasms of the resident population of Veracruz, Priestly (1923)
does give us some useful information about what then happened there in the early part of 1862. The European powers set up a commission (and, I'm guessing, managed to meet with someone from the Juarez government) to try and work something out. Here the British and Spanish began to realize that something was very, very wrong with their French buddies.
The French diplomatic delegation, led by one Alphonse Dubois, Comte de Saligny this guy...
...immediately set to work ratfucking the intervention.
They hustled in-country their own 19th Century version of Iraqi Quisling Achmed Chalabi (remember him..?) in the persons of a pack of Mexican monarchists and "conservative" types (who were now officially "rebels", mind...) including Jose Gutierrez de Estrada, Jose Manuel Hidalgo, and "General" Juan Almonte - who were already in the bag for Napoleon III's plan to make Mexico his next colony - and one of the Catholic prelates who had been already been kicked out of Mexico when the Juaristas took over for being too huge a conservative pest, one Archbishop Labastida.
Another of these beauties, Don Leonardo Marquez, was farkling about southeastern Mexico somewhere with a conservative "army" of some sort, supposedly about 10,000 all arms, that we'll hear a bit more about later in the spring.
Saligny, meanwhile, had laid out France's non-negotiable position; complete repayment of the Jecker bonds, twelve million pesos in damage claims, and a French armed administration of Veracruz and Tampico with all the duties going to France until the "debts" were fully paid.
The other commissioners/commanders - British Sir Charles Lennox Wyke (the British ambassador to Mexico) and Commodore Dunlop, RN (the British commander of troops) and Spanish General Prim - were blindsided by all of this, but had agreed to sit down with the Mexican government, and did. This resulted in something called the Agreement (or Treaty) of Soledad, which in the main was nothing but an agreement to meet in Orizaba in April.
The two other salient points in it were that 1) the Europeans
did agree to recognize the Juarez/liberal government - which was important to the Juaristas, obviously - and 2), that the Europeans, who wanted to get their delicate troopers out of the coastal fever swamps into the more salubrious mountain air, could march their joes uphill; the French to Tehuacán, the Spanish to Córdoba, and the British to Orizaba, where the next diplomatic meeting was supposed to take place.
Between the initial landings and the meeting in Orizaba BG Lorencez' contingent arrived in Veracruz in March to reinforce the French naval landing force and joined the parade uphill. Here's the commander himself, looking every bit the supercilious aristo; I'm not sure if the expression is accurate or just the product of the artist, but given his performance the following spring I have to wonder...
At Orizaba on 9 APR, though, things went from bad to worse. Napoleon III's government had repudiated the Agreement of Soledad, relieved the French commander of troops that had agreed to it, one Admiral La Graviere, of his dual role as CINC and plenipotentiary, and handed full authority, political and military, over the conduct of the French contingent to Saligny alone.
During this time our boy "General" Almonte declared himself the "Supreme Chief" of Mexico. According to Barker (1972), Almonte
"...contacted and organized the former adherents of Miramon, and frankly told the British and Spanish commanders that he was preparing the way for Fredinand Maximilian. To their protests that the French sponsorship of Almonte was a violation of the tripartate alliance, Dubois de Saligny replied...that it was useless to treat with the Mexicans...and concluded with his unvarying formula "It was necessary to march on Mexico."
By this time it must have been painfully obvious to the Mexican government as well as the British and Spanish convention delegations that the French weren't there for the cash; they wanted to grab the whole tortilla and would do that or die tryin'.
So as it turned out Saligny got his way but not with the help of the other European powers; neither Britain nor Spain had any interest in installing French rule in Mexico. The Spanish and British troopers countermarched to Veracruz in mid-April and re-embarked on the 24th.
France was in the "Mexican Adventure" on her own.
The Soledad Agreement specified that the Europeans had until 20 APR to vacate Orizaba and return to Veracruz. Supposedly the French contingent began this movement; I'm not sure why; the French geopolitical aims were pretty obvious, they had already rejected the treaty, and there seems to have been little point in pretending otherwise.
And the French force left some of their sick or injured in Orizaba, either to give themselves a
casus belli, out of logistical incapacity to move them, or out of pure
Système D incompetence.
Whatever the reason they were dropped off, the "danger" to these sick-lame-n-lazies was the official excuse BG Lorencez made for his reverse course that took the French force back to Orizaba.
It's worth noting here that, although they're usually not mentioned in the Cinco de Mayo story, the "Free Mexican Army" or whatever the hell they called themselves, GEN Marquez' outfit of conservative quislings, was wandering around the Veracruz area somewhere and was supposed to coordinate their movements with BG Lorencez' force.
This does not seem to have happened and, so far as I can tell, Marquez' outfit did little of note during the end of April and early May; on or about 3 MAY Marquez was reported to GEN Zaragoza to be at Izúcar de Matamoros, located about 45 miles to the south from Puebla, with about 2,500 assorted (mostly mounted) troops. Zaragoza says that these chucklefucks were going to link up with the French force, but a roughly equal-sized Mexican cavalry blocking force from the
Ejercito de la Este seems to have effectively kept them out of the fight, and no more is heard of the Marquez gang until the next French lunge at Mexico City in 1863.
But these Mexican remoras did have at least
one effect; BG Lorencez' "local experts" were the royalist jokers Almonte and his pack. These guys are said to have constantly claimed that Real Mexicans wanted a king, specifically, a French-propped-up sort of king, and that the
grognards would be greeted with flowers and kisses from hot Mexican
chicas if they took part in what would surely be nothing more than a triumphal march to Mexico City and France's newest possession.
They had promised that Orizaba would love them some Frenchies and while it hadn't at least there hadn't been trouble. That made the traitors seem semi-reliable and their pinky-swear that Puebla was a seething hotbed of pro-French sympathies more plausible.
It's hard to know at this remove whether the quislings knew they were bullshitting the French or sincerely believed their nonsense, but the effect was to provide BG Lorencez with utterly incorrect intelligence about the local conditions and the degree of support the French expeditionary force could expect. This, in turn, surely affected the choices the French commander made over the next several weeks.
But first there were simple tactical obstacles to deal with.
Las Cumbres/Acultzingo
So far as I can tell purely from the record of events GEN Zaragoza's initial intent was to use the local geography against the invaders. The topographic map shows how:
Red is high, blue is low, and you can see how as the French force was debouching from Orizaba, which is at the very edge of the coastal plain, they would have to climb over the edge of the escarpment between the plains and the foothills of the central plateau bounded on the east by the
Sierra Madre Oriental, one of the two mountain chains that form the "spine" of the Mexican isthmus.
The road to Pueba, as mountain roads do, led through passes cut by the drainages through this escarpment. If Zaragoza could set up his defenses in whichever of these passes Lorencez intended to use as his route of march he could force the French to spend time and lives assaulting uphill in restricted terrain that would prevent the invaders from working around his troops.
The pass that the French chose to force ran through the Cumbres de Acultzingo.
The curious part of this, to me anyway, is that while this is supposed to be where the "National Highway" - the main road running between Orizaba and Puebla (and from there on to Mexico City) - ran in 1862 the route seems to be different today. Look closely at the map above; the main highway to Mexico City is the thread of dark red that runs almost due west from Orizaba to Maltrata, instead of southwest to Acultzingo. Why the change?
People in 1862 were as lazy as we are today; why climb a steeper hill than you have to? Why isn't this scuffle called "Maltrata" instead of "Acultzingo"? Was there some sort of economic or topgraphic reason the main road looped around to the south in the 19th Century? I haven't the faintest idea.
But for whatever reason, the road
did run through the southern pass rather than the northern one back in the day, and so that's where the French were headed in late April 1862.
And that's where the Mexican defenders intended to meet them. By 27 APR Zaragoza had the bulk of his little army, roughly 4,000 troops and as many cannon as they could drag, somewhere between the little town of Acultzingo and the slopes of the escarpment to the southwest.
The engagement the following day is, frankly, a bit of a mystery. Here's what the Wikipedia entry for the "Battle of Las Cumbres" says:
The Battle of Las Cumbres also known as the Battle of Acultzingo was a skirmish at the Acultzingo Pass between the French invasion force under Charles de Lorencez and Mexican republican forces under Ignacio Zaragoza. It took place on 28 April 1862. Despite holding the high ground, Zaragoza was not willing to risk his forces by engaging the French Army in the open. As the French troops seized the first line of Mexican entrenchments, Zaragoza withdrew his forces to their stronghold of Puebla.
Whut? "Not willing to risk his forces...
in the open"?
Dude!
Ohe', Vato! You've got a defensive position on high ground in restricted terrain! And you just fire a couple of shots and grab a hat? The fuck, Zaragoza, what, you forgot your Sun Tzu already?
"With regard to NARROW PASSES, if you can occupy them first, let them be strongly garrisoned and await the advent of the enemy. With regard to PRECIPITOUS HEIGHTS, if you are beforehand with your adversary, you should occupy the raised and sunny spots, and there wait for him to come up." (The Art of War, Chapter 10, Terrain)
This is, frankly, weird, and I have to think that something that's not in the historical record was going on here. The little
Cinco de Mayo piece at the website Warfare History Network is even more bizarre:
"Early the following afternoon, a company of French Zouaves came over the summit in a skirmish line and the Mexicans opened fire. In a sharp three-hour fight, with a loss of two killed and 36 wounded, the French forced the Mexicans from the pass. Lorencez reveled in the triumph—this was just the sort of easy victory he was expecting."
This makes even less sense than Wikipedia. The defenders were positioned so that a single French assault company could get over the top of the pass? Zaragoza was a smart, experienced officer and is extremely unlikely to have made that sort of rookie mistake; he would have had his guys dug in on the slope above and across the road, presumably on the "military crest", the spot below the topographic high ground so his troopers weren't "skylined" for the French gunners.
I don't believe that the entire French force, let alone a single company, crested the pass. But, still...I don't get it; there just doesn't look like there were that many good options for Lorencez, and I have to think that something must have malfunctioned for the Mexican defenders that day.
Morale was shaky and the
compañeros just weren't feeling it, the position wasn't that strong - they'd only had a day or so to dig in and I'll bet the ground was hard and stony and the digging difficult - the French were somehow clever and got some sort of tactical advantage Zaragoza hadn't thought of...I can't tell which.
Whatever the reasons, after a short firefight Zaragoza pulled his guys out before they could get overrun and withdrew in good order.
Five days later a telegram to his government puts Zaragoza and his troops back in Puebla:
"I arrived today in the city with 3,000 men that make up the rear guard of the Eastern Army. The enemy is still at Acatzingo (sic) and probably will continue its march tomorrow. I have given orders to occupy the San Juan and Loreta hills, which are passably fortified. I will cover the hills with the garrison..."
Zaragoza telegraphs the War Ministry several times after that particularly requesting entrenching tools, noting that he intends to defend the city as much as possible (that and bitching about the worthless Pueblans who aren't helping...)
The following day he reports that the French have "set up camp three quarters of a league from the city gate".
He also notes that one of his subordinates had seen off a force of about 1,200 conservative quislings from the town of Atlixco southwest of Puebla (he adds that the "remainder of the reactionary rabble" (i.e. the gaggle I assume are the Marquez quislings) are at Matamoros (remember, this is the Izúcar de Matamoros a couple days march south of Puebla, not the one way up north near the Texas border) and that the Eastern Army is "ready to attack and resist".
Well...maybe not "attack", given whatever the hell happened at the Cumbres de Acultzingo. But certainly to resist; the Eastern Army had occupied the fortifications around Puebla, including the two forts on the hilltops north of town that will feature prominently in our story, and connected the two with earthworks (which suggests that the Eastern Army had been at work improving other parts of the fortifications, as well).
It's not mentioned directly in the accounts of the engagement, but Zaragoza wasn't exactly wrong about the initial contact as the Cumbres de Acultzingo being in the "open field", at least compared to Puebla. Because the town was fortified in a late-17th-to-early-19th-Century-fashion.
Here's a French map from 1863 that shows the city plan and the surrounding fortifications:
Here I've marked up the original to give you a better sense of the defenses. The curtain walls are red lines, the individual forts the red diamonds:
You can see the problems for Lorencez.
On the north side you have a pair of volcanic cones with forts on top. Here's aerial photos of the two hilltop positions to give you a sense of what the Mexican defenders were working with, first Fort Loreto...
...which looks like your basic square-keep-with-round-towers stonework sort of thing that wouldn't have looked out of place in 1650 or even 1550, although the original construction is supposed to have been some time in the late 18th Century (1795-ish is one number I've read, and 1816 is another).
That seems peculiar. When we discussed the
1683 Siege of Vienna we did a lot of talking about the effects of the better cannon artillery had in the 17th Century on fixed fortifications:
"That's why, beginning in the middle of the 15th Century (and really going wild in the 17th) - that is, when cannon artillery began to mature - you began to see what was known as the "bastion fort" all over Europe. The walls of these forts were lower, and thicker, than the old medieval walls. They were often made of brick, or, better yet, rammed earth, which soaks up cannon fire, crumbling in place around the shot rather than shattering. The old-fashioned square or round towers were replaced by pointed bastions, which served the same purpose - to provide enfilading fire along the curtain walls between the bastions - but without providing the dead space in front of the tower/bastion that an enemy could hide in.
Because the walls had to be lower, the ground outside the walls and bastions had to be lower still, so a deep moat (wet, or dry, depending on the availability of water) would be dug at the base of the walls, and the spoil thrown up onto a long slope called a glacis leading up to the moat. This slope provided cover from direct fire for the base of the walls as well as, usually, leading up to the outermost line of defense that would be located right along the top edge of the moat."
The Loreto fort as it stands today - and, presumably, as it stood in 1862 - is
not really one of these post-modern-artillery "Vauban"-type forts.
The walls are way too tall, way too vertical, and the open gun platforms, the round towers, and single-line-of-curtain-walls - the lack of outworks like lunettes or hornworks - look closer to 1462 than 1862. My guess is that the shell of Fort Loreto dates considerably older than even the 18th Century. But it gave the defenders some cover to hide behind, so there's that; even an outdated old wall is better cover than no wall at all.
Now, here's Fort Guadalupe:
Now
this is more like a Vauban fort.
That, or something between the Vauban type - that's the diamond bastions and the low profile - and something close to the Montalembert-style "Third System" forts that were built in the first half of the 19th Century in the United States, with thick masonry walls and covered casemates for the cannon. Either way, it looks a lot more modern.
The fortifications around Puebla, presumably similar to the two hilltop positions, presented Lorencez with some tough choices.
He had several options to assault the town - assuming that a long static siege was out, and with his relatively small force there's no way the French commander would have given a moment's thought to even trying to encircle and starve the defenders out even if he'd had the time, which he didn't - and most of them weren't good.
He could sic his boys straight at the closest part of the city, but the difficulties there were ugly; the assault troops would have to fight through what looks like some sort of little neighborhood or suburb, which assuming his opponents weren't total idiots (and they hadn't been, at least so far) would be loopholed and strong-pointed to a faretheewell that would force his first wave to fight house-to-house just to get to the main line of defense.
While they were doing that the French attackers would be under fire from the fort-mounted cannon along this stretch of the defense; forts "Independence" to the north, "Saragossa" in the middle, and "Engineers" to the south.
Then, after fighting through all this mess the assault would have to ford the Rio de la San Francisco and scale the curtain wall along the west side.
Nope. Sod that for a game of soldiers. There had to be a better option than
that.
Another option might be to loop around the city and assault the west side; I've shown this as a movement to the north and an attack from the northwest, but similar issues apply to a movement around the south side of the city. This option avoids the whole "house-to-house-fight-then-ford-the-fucking-river" thing, but exposes the French force to several other risks. Any lateral movement in the face of an alert enemy risks a sudden attack on the flank of the moving force. To prevent this Lorencez's troop would have to loop well wide of the defenses and lose valuable time and fatigue the troops.
And once the French had circled around the city, they would be putting their backs to any potential relieving units coming down from Mexico City. It doesn't sound like the Mexican government had much in the way of troop strength there, but getting bushwhacked from behind is a pretty terrific way to multiply your enemy's combat power.
Throw in that the French supply and communications would have to pass an enemy-held strongpoint, making the chance of enemy disruption of, or, worse, severing those support systems dangerously likely.
So east, northwest, and southwest seem...suboptimal.
And, remember, the quislings had been filling Lorencez's head with the notion that Puebla was jam-packed with French-loving tortilla-benders longing for the moment when they could light up their first Gauloise and knock back a stiff Pernod to the glory of
L'Empereur.
So it must have seemed pretty straightforward to the French commander. Slide around to the north. Hammer the strongpoints on the hilltop. Send in the line dogs, and watch the beaners run the way they had back in the mountain pass, their morale broken because you've just casually destroyed their strongest defensive position. Then kick back and enjoy a victory feast in downtown Puebla served by lucious native girls in skimpy serapes or whatever lacivious French image of "Sexy Mexican girl" was. I mean, GIs, right? Sheesh.
So on Monday the War Ministry in Mexico City received the following telegram from Puebla:
The Battle of Puebla had begun.
The Engagement: As GEN Zaragoza reported; the first cannon round went downrange about midday on Monday, 8 MAY 1862. Here's roughly what the tactical dispositions of the two sides looked like at that time:
The main line of defense was obviously the hill; Negrete's Fourth Brigade had posted two battalions of the Morelia Regiment with two batteries in the fixed forts; one in each fort plus one 6 x 12-pound cannon battery. Presumably the remainder of Fourth Brigade, the national guardsmen and the rag-end of independent companies, were strung out in the earthworks along the saddle between the hilltops.
The remainder of the Eastern Army was strung out to the east of the hilltop, presumably to prevent a turning maneuver around the Mexican right. I don't know how this force was organized other than given other evidence the Third Brigade was the far right element of the line.
One report I've read suggests that this deployment wasn't as reckless as it might otherwise seem; at least one of BG Diaz' units is reported as anchored in and around a brickwork complex, providing a strongpoint for the exposed flank.
BG Lorencez' assault plan was simple; hey-diddle-diddle-straight-up-the-middle-of-the-hill-right-at-Fort-Guadalupe.
The 2eme Zouaves made up the core of the initial French assault force, supported by two battalions; sailors of the naval infantry to the right, part of the 2eme Fusiliers Marins to the left. The remainder of the expeditionary force was held in reserve.
BG Lorencez' intent was simple; batter the strongpoint with artillery, assault and seize Fort Guadalupe, punch through the defensive line, and roll up the Mexican troops when they broke.
The assault began with the traditional artillery prep fire, initially from roughly 2000 meters - which is reported to have inflicted some damage to the Guadalupe fort and casualties to its defenders - and then the guns pushed forward to their final assault positions, about a kilometer from the hilltop.
Although the French redlegs pounded the hilltop for over an hour (and are reported to have expended roughly half their ammunition reserve in so doing) the defenders showed no sign of going anywhere. So the guys in the fancy North African dress must have grimaced and tightened their harness straps; it was time for
la bayonette.
Only from the sound of it the
pieds noirs never got close enough to give a Mexican the pointy end of Rosalie.
Despite the disparity of infantry small arms - the Mexican forces were armed with smoothbore muskets (and I'll bet there were still some flintock versions amongst the national guards and the smaller contingents), the French regulars with the model M1842T Minié rifle similar to the better-known Springfield Model 1861 then in use to the north - the defenders were firing from behind at least breast-high covered positions and downhill, the French columns struggling uphill and with a relatively small front from which to put down a base of fire.
The French artillery would have had to cease fire relatively early in the infantry's approach to reduce the hazard of short rounds, so the assault columns would have been hammered with fire without effective response for what must have seemed like an endless slog towards the Mexican guns that would have shifted to case and then canister, the enormous shotgun rounds tearing bloody holes in the zouave column, shredding sailors and fusiliers.
Unsurprisingly, the first assault failed; the zouaves and their supporting units tumbling back downhill some time probably around 1300hrs.
BG Lorencez now committed some of his reserve to a second attack some time between 1300 and 1400hrs.
This time Lorencez added the
Chasseurs a Pied to the hilltop assault, and sent another of his light infantry regiments, the
Chasseurs de Vincennes, along with a battalion from the
99eme Ligne and his cavalry out wide to his left of the storming columns in an attempt to do what GEN Zaragoza had worried about, turn the hill forts to the east.
It might have worked; the Mexican commander had shifted First and most of his Second Brigades to his left to support the fortified lines, leaving only Third Brigade and the elite sappers, the
Zapadores, to hold the eastern slope.
But Diaz's troops dug in the heels and supposedly the
Zapadores did the work of heroes, so the French left made no headway while the attack on the hilltop forts ran into the same firestorm the first assault had and was beaten back again.
By this time it was mid-afternoon. Around 1500hrs Lorencez ordered his unit leaders to attack again, only to be informed by his Fire Support Officer that the cannon had expended all rounds.
This would kind of amaze me - how the fuck do you
invade an entire country and not bring enough Class V for more than four hours firing - if I didn't know what was coming eight years on and the clusterfuck that would be the French war effort against Prussia.
Système D, remember?
So, yeah. Some supply guy at the depot at Rennes or wherever the hell the artillery outfits railheaded out of didn't bother to do more than toss the unit basic load onto the last flatcar before heading into town for a hookup with the flirty little barmaid down at
Le Coq Sportif. And six months later a whole bunch of his fellow soldiers paid in blood for it.
Without prep fire the French attacked again. The story goes that one of the attackers, a standard bearer from either the 2eme Zouaves or the Chasseurs, made it to the top of the outer wall of Fort Guadalupe. That was as far as the assault got; the zouave or
chasseur was killed, the
tricolor taken, and the assault beaten back again.
This time GEM Zaragoza judged his opponent was beaten; he turned his cavalry loose from both the lower slopes of the hilltops, and advanced the First and Second Brigades through the saddle and down the hill. Supposedly the
Chasseurs a Pied were still in good enough order to form square to hold off the enemy cavalry as the remainder of the French expeditionary force retired in good order to the southeast as the spring afternoon thundershower slicked the ground and put a period to the first French attempt to make Mexico the responsibility of the
Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies
GEN Zaragoza took a moment to inform his political masters of the events of 5 MAY:
The Outcome: Decisive Mexican tactical victory.
The Impact: Well, if nothing else, it sure as hell put paid to the Mexican military career of Charles Ferdinand Latrille, Comte de Lorencez, as well it should have.
Lorencez made the same mistake the Braddock made at the Monongahela, that St. Clair made at the Wabash, that Navarre made at Dien Bien Phu; he underestimated his enemy.
The assault on the hills north of Puebla only makes sense if you believe, as Lorencez seems to have believed, that the defenders were going to fold as soon as they were pushed hard. Certainly the action at Acultzingo may have convinced the French commander that he was facing a rabble of peasants in arms led by an incompetent. If so, that was an over-hasty conclusion and one that failed to account for the difference between a hasty defense of a topographic choke point and a deliberate defense of a fortified position.
Admittedly, Lorencez was confronted with a series of poor choices given the defenses, the terrain, and his tenuous position as a relatively small force in a large, hostile country. It is to his discredit, however, that he failed to make the best of those bad options and compounded his errors with his credulity towards the self-serving lies told him by the Mexican quisling leaders.
Of course, the responsibility for the failure at Puebla flows upwards, too. To Saligny, whose intransigence and arrogance helped begin the war and lose his allies. And, of course, to Napoleon III, who was the ultimate cause of the disaster in his quest for Mexican silver, Catholic theocracy, monarchic ambition, and imperial glory.
The ill-fated "Mexican Empire" of the doomed Maximilian contributed another bloody chapter to the history of internal dissention in Mexico, empowering the church and the wealthy conservative landowners against the liberals and "reformers" and the poor. The hatreds engendered during that period added to the ruin and merciless hatred that had so often torn the country apart since it was carved out of the original Mexica by the steel and powder and smallpox of the
conquistadores.
What makes the ridiculous misadventure even more pathetic is that a sensible imperialist should have known that as soon as the North Americans worked out their little dispute that any sort of French imperial ambitions in Mexico would be as dead as the dodo.
There was no way in hell that the United States government would allow an outpost of imperial France to look covetously at the former northern possessions of the old Spanish colony. And, of course, as soon as southern treason was crushed the U.S. government
did shut down the farcical little show that ended with the stubborn fantascist Maximilian facing a line of riflemen.
Of course, it's worth remembering that all the victory at Puebla did was buy the republican government some time. No colonial power worth its
souffle' could tolerate some raggedy-ass dusky natives showing it their whole ass. The French would return.
First, though, Lorencez's expeditionary force withdrew to Orizaba, where the French held the pass until something like 30,000 more French troops arrived at the port of Veracruz between September and October of 1862.
About the same time the architect of the victory of First Puebla, GEN Ignacio Zaragoza, contracted typhoid fever and died on 8 SEP 1862 at the age of 33.
Along with the reinforcements - and the passing of his enemy - came Lorencez' relief; MG Élie Frédéric Forey. Forey took charge of the now-corps-sized expeditionary force, reorganized and resupplied the force and planned a spring campaign.
The French pushed out of Orizaba in March and invested Puebla on 16 MAR.
A Mexican relief column under GEN Comonfort was defeated in April, and the city surrendered in May. On 31 MAY President Juárez and the national government evacuated Mexico City, firest northward to Paso del Norte and later to Chihuahua where they remained until 1867.
The
Wiki entry describes what happened next:
"French troops under Bazaine entered Mexico City on 7 June 1863. The main army entered the city three days later led by General Forey. General Almonte was appointed the provisional President of Mexico on 16 June, by the Superior Junta (which had been appointed by Forey). The Superior Junta with its 35 members met on 21 June and proclaimed a Catholic Empire on 10 July. The crown was offered to Maximilian, following pressures by Napoleon. Maximilian accepted the crown on 3 October, at the hands of the Comisión Mexicana, sent by the Superior Junta."
And so began the tortured road to Queretaro.
Today the events of 5 MAY 1862 are remembered primarily as "Mexican Fourth of July"; something like forty percent of us ignorant
norteamericanos think that the day is the Mexican equivalent of "Independence Day". That was the conclusion of a two-year-old survey of one thousand American citizens. Another 26% thought Cinco de Mayo is a "celebration of Mexican-American culture".
13% of people thought it was just an excuse to drink.
The survey also asked these people how they planned to "celebrate" the occasion.
"Eat Mexican food" was the top answer.
"Drink margaritas" was second.
Other than the purely-expectable-and-expected-gringo-derpitude, the thing about Cinco de Mayo is I find it kind of fascinating that Mexico celebrates what was effectively only a forlorn victory.
When you think of "famous battles", fights that pass into legend, you usually think of events like Waterloo or Yorktown or Vienna or Adowa; decisive battles, battles that changed history. Not engagements that were just a hiccup in a brutal foreign conquest.
But perhaps that's what makes Puebla so iconic to Mexico, a land that has so often been tragic and grieved rather than triumphant and vaunting.
Perhaps it is that it
is a sacrifice; not a ringing triumph but a promise, a marker laid down against a long and painful fight that would end in the eventual defeat of the invaders and the destruction of their works.
That the heart of the sudden, unlikely victory was the promise that hope could well from the most unlikely and unlooked for places, and that even the stoniest and difficult path could lead to the heights of Puebla, where the heads of the proud could be brought low, and the guns of the powerful beaten into silence.
And then, of course, we can drink some margaritas.
Touchline Tattles: I don't have much of anything lighthearted or entertaining to tell about Puebla.
A big part of that is that the English-language version of the events themselves lack much human detail; without a deep understanding of the local works the painting of the engagement is drawn with a broad brush, and at most we can see the participants through a distant mirror. It's not exactly surprising that most
Yanquis see this day through the bottom of a glass.
So perhaps the only tale I can pull out of the whole sorry business is CPT Danjou's wooden hand.
During the second attack on Puebla in the spring of 1863 a company of the
Légion étrangère, the latest and last of the foreign units in French service, was tasked with convoy escort. They encountered a force of Mexican national guardsmen that forced the legionnaires back into a farmstead near the village of Camarone, where the heavily outnumbered French soldiers were wiped out.
The Legion is a peculiar organization. It is more than half in love with its own pledge of death and suffering and so it was and is still utterly delighted with this gruesome epic slaughter. The company commander , a man named Danjou, had lost a hand in Algeria almost a decade earlier (one interesting thing about this is that I assumed without looking that it was hacked off in some desperate struggle. Nope; he blew it off when his weapon malfunctioned in a particularly spectacular way)
The story is that he designed a wooden prosthetic himself, bolted it onto his arm, and was still toting it when he intercepted a high-velocity projectile and became a hero and martyr. The hand was found (Found? How the hell do you "find" a dead guy's wooden hand? I'll bet the guy was looking for some loot and was fascinated by the creepy thing) by a Mexican farmer on the site of the fight after Danjou's and the bodies of the rest of his command had been buried.
The Mexican was arrested and the hand sent on to the Legion, where to this day it is treated as a holy relic and paraded with great ceremony every April 30th, the anniversary of the butchery at Camarone.
So maybe it's
not so weird that Mexico that celebrates hopeless victories and glorious defeats.
