James Baquet

The year is 1832. You are a French pastry chef named Remontel (history knows no other name) with a small shop on the outskirts of Mexico City. Since her War of Independence from Spain (1810-1821), Mexico has become a hotbed of civil disorder.

Finally, the destruction has reached your little shop: Mexican officers have looted it, and when the civil authorities fail to respond to your complaint, you appeal to the only higher authority you can think of: The King of France.

Helping your case is that, after the U.S. and Great Britain, France has become Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, though unequal treaties have left the French paying higher import taxes than the others.

So, though your shop is only valued at around a thousand pesos, you demand 60,000 pesos in reparations. Other complaints by French nationals, including for the looting of other shops, and the 1837 execution of a French national on charges of piracy, lead the French prime minister in 1838 to demand 600,000 pesos in damages — a huge amount when you realize the average daily wage in Mexico City was about one peso at the time.

The Mexicans don’t pay, so the French form a blockade along the Gulf of Mexico, from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Rio Grande — the border with the United States. They also bombard a Mexican fortress, and seize the city of Veracruz, Mexico’s most important Gulf port. In 1838, Mexico formally declares war on France, an action which will come to be called “The Pastry War” (or sometimes “the first French intervention in Mexico”).

As Mexicans begin smuggling goods in through the Republic of Texas (not yet formally part of the United States), the U.S. chooses to assist the French with their blockade. Meanwhile, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a once and future Mexican war hero and several times president of the country, leads the Mexicans against the French, losing a leg to amputation after a battle injury. The French forces withdraw in 1839 after the Mexicans sign a treaty in which they promise to pay 600,000 pesos. Their failure to do so leads to the second French intervention in Mexico (1861-1867).

Vocabulary:

Which words above mean:

1. take a cause to a higher authority

2. cut off a limb due to injury

3. attack with big guns

4. what a person makes in one day

5. place that promotes negative activity

6. fancy baked good

7. steal from a shop

8. suburbs

9. moving goods across a border illegally

10. a sealing off of ships etc.