Excerpted from "A Student's History of of North America" by Alfonse McAfferty, Columbus, 1940. editors note, The "North American War" refers to a war in the 1860's and early 1870's stemming from the breakup of the United States of America (actually a small part of an alternate history of the world since 1862 I've been working on over the past few years)
...The events of the North American War were instrumental in the gradual rise of the Mexican Empire as a regional power, albeit as a subordinate party to France. This was directly tied to the breakup of the United States, the demise of the US Monroe Doctrine, and resultant instability in the Confederacy. The Emperor Maximilian, who was installed by France in 1864, had been extremely unpopular with the vast majority of Mexicans except for the small Creole elite. Had the United States been victorious in the War of Southern Independence, it is highly unlikely his rule would have survived.
However, with the recovery of New Mexico as provided by the Treaty of Paris, Maximilian suddenly became a symbol of Mexican resurgence against the hated gringos del norte. Mexican nationalists among the Creole and Mestizo upper and middle classes flocked to his support. Maximilian adroitly exploited this sentiment, promising to recover even more northern lost territories. Always something of a romanticist, he also drew upon Mexico’s ancient past as a source of his authority, and promoted himself as a savior to the Indian lower classes as well. His most clever moves lay in appointing the Oaxaca lawyer and liberal activist Benito Juarez as his Interior Minister and in initiating a series of modest land reforms in central Mexico. This served to blunt liberal/revolutionary opposition to his rule. To compensate conservative Creole landlords, he offered to provide them with new encomiendas carved out of the new northern territories. Other, more symbolic, elements of this nativist movement included a return to Mexico City’s Aztec name “Mexico-Tenochtitlan”, and the elevation of Nahuatl (the aboriginal central Mexican language still spoken by many Indians) to an equal status with Spanish as an official language of the Mexican Empire. Following the unexpected death of his first wife Carlotta in 1875, Maximilian took an Nahuatl-speaking Indian wife and she bore him a son in 1877, who was named Michael-Friedrich-Cuauhtemoc, in memory of the last Aztec emperor and leader of the final Aztec resistence to Cortez. In 1899, at the death of Maximilian, he assumed the throne as Emperor Cuauhtemoc II.
Cuauhtemoc continued the nativist trend of his father, but began to alienate the upper and middle class Creoles by increasing the scope of land reforms. In 1910 he also established the first elected Mexican congress since the days of the old republic, and sought to remold Mexico as a modern constitutional autocracy, along the lines of France. Childless and unmarried (a fact which led to considerable speculation about his virility) Cuauhtemoc sought to provide Mexico with a worthy successor to himself through electoral or administrative processes. In this, he was resisted by his younger brother, Felix-Johann, who felt his rightful place on the throne of Mexico would be denied. Felix-Johann was closely identified with some of the more reactionary elements of Mexican society, and in 1914, he and his supporters attempted to assassinate Cuauhtemoc in a violent coup attempt at a military parade in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Cuauhtemoc escaped serious injury, but the palace coup eventually expanded into a full scale civil war. Concerned by the instability in Mexico, the French intervened forcefully to support Cuauhtemoc in return for his pledge to keep imperial secession within the royal family upon his death. Felix-Johann was exiled to Argentina and his 10-year old cousin, Eduardo-Moctezuma was named Prince Regent and heir to the throne. A side effect of this civil war was the drastic increase in the size of the French army stationed in Mexico, which proved to be quite useful upon the outbreak of war with the US and Britain.
In many respects, the Mexican Empire remained throughout its history supported by the French, who had since the 1870's stationed a large and potent army along Mexico’s new northern frontier with the United States. This army, supplemented by Mexican forces, came in handy as the Confederate States began to disintegrate in the 1880's. A short, quick invasion brought Texas back into the Mexican fold, along with the former Confederate Indian territories. Only forceful US diplomatic action prohibited additional invasions of Confederate Louisiana and newly independent Florida. The US, however, was unable to resist additional French/Mexican expansion to the south, and by 1910, all of the formerly independent republics in Central America, as well as Colombia, had been brought under nominal French control, either as protectorates or outright colonies.
By the outbreak of the World War, Mexico, with French assistance, was on its way to becoming a major economic power in its own right. Joint operation of the Trans-Columbia Canal with France provided a steady source of income to Mexican coffers, and the discovery and subsequent development of the Texas oil and gas fields promised to radically transform the Mexican economy. Also important was the discovery of the world’s only commercially exploitable deposits of nonflammable helium gas, which, with the rapid development of military and naval aerodirigible airships after 1900, soon grew to be of immeasurable military significance. With the outbreak of war in 1922, both the US and British Empire fought many sharp battles with themselves and against the Mexican Empire to gain control of these strategic assets.