| When Mexico Had the Blues: A Transatlantic Tale of Bonds, Bankers, and Nationalists, 1862–1910 | The American Historical Review, 105.3

When Mexico Had the Blues: A Transatlantic Tale of Bonds, Bankers, and Nationalists, 1862–1910

STEVEN C. TOPIK

When Maximilian von Habsburg's gilded coach first entered Mexico City in May of 1864 to an enthusiastic greeting, the future appeared as glittering as his livery. French troops would help the Austrian prince resurrect Mexico's past brilliance. But Maximilian needed more than just soldiers to build his New World empire. The emperor needed gold. He turned to the Paris stock market, where the French regime of Napoleon III put its prestige behind bond issues of 1864 and 1865 worth some 534 million francs, in a stroke tripling Mexico's foreign debt. Alas, time would show that instead of sustaining the empire and cementing friendship and economic cooperation between France and Mexico, these bonds, known as the "petits bleus" because of their little blue coupons, would create persistent friction and ill feelings. The bonds that were introduced with a majestic triumphal march would linger on in the minor key of Mexican blues. Maximilian died in 1867, but the maximilianitos generated discord between the two countries until 1904. But this is not just a story of forsaken ambition. 1

     The story of these bonds says much about Mexico's changing position in the international capital market and, indeed, the transformation of that market during this period of unprecedented expansion. Mexico shed its reputation as an unreliable, financial black hole to become one of the most hotly coveted areas in the world. The bonds' tale also helps illuminate the nature and extent of imperialism, particularly French overseas and budding United States activities, in the Age of Empire. Different layers of overseas ambition, from early modern colonialism to modern colonialism and neo-colonialism, were involved. Today's globalism is not new. During the "hundred years' peace" before World War I, international capital flowed freely over most of the globe.¹ By the end of the nineteenth century, the formerly crippled and outcast Mexico had become one of the principal sites contested by British, French, German, and newly outward-looking U.S. investors.² But the nationalism of these actors, which is always emphasized in studies of the Age of Empire, has been exaggerated. 2

     The lives of the little blue bonds suggest that the contests between financiers were not simply an extension of national rivalries between the Great Powers. They were also very much self-interested private efforts at enrichment. Money did not require a passport. The bonds' tortuous history demonstrates foreigners' and Mexicans' complex and contradictory interests and identities. Often, their nationalities were identifications of convenience, jettisoned or ignored when profit made it advisable. Cooperation between financiers of different nationalities was just as common as competition. Indeed, family allegiance among members of international financial diasporas was just as strong as their patriotism. The international banking houses were precursors of today's multinational corporations. They were founded on a basis of fluid capital and trust more than on technological innovation. The banking houses' bonds played a lead part in a far-flung drama that was acted out on stages all over the world. The "petits bleus," which were supposed to forge imperial harmony, instead inspired a cacophony of competing foreign voices. 3

     This is also a tale of symbols. Although most people love money, few, ironically, like to read its history. Economics, after all, is considered "the dismal science" and banking the most strait-laced branch of that gray field. Philistine money, grimy, quantifiable, and absolute, is often snubbed in favor of free-spirited culture or intriguing politics. We must not let the economists fool us. Money and bonds do not constitute concrete, stable, objective value. A bond is the ultimate symbol. A feathery wisp of paper with virtually no intrinsic use or value, it can unlock whole worlds and conjure up circuses of images. Bonds signify a promise to repay, an imaginative property right that spells out reciprocal rights and obligations based on ethics, honor, and custom as much as law. As fiduciary property, the bond is only valuable because of public confidence and support, a most mercurial foundation.³ Economics and semiotics overlap. 4

     Bonds are socially constructed. Unless we wish to fall into crude commodity fetishism (admittedly an increasingly popular religion these days), we need to recognize that not only does money make the world go round, but people make money and commodities go round. Arjun Appadurai has shown that commodities are "thoroughly socialized" things that have social lives. They can take on different meanings at different points in the circuit of exchange, from use value to exchange value and back, from symbol of wealth to talisman, to heirloom or tool.⁴ His volume does not consider money or bonds, probably because the scope of their uses and meanings seems so constricted. But in fact, historically, bonds sparked the public imagination and led most interesting lives. As Joseph Schumpeter lyrically described the broader phenomenon of public finances: "The public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society . . . The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history . . . He who knows how to listen to the message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else."⁵ Of the various fiscal instruments, bonds most dramatically reveal the international dynamics of the economy. 5

     Such was the case with the "petits bleus." For some French bondholders, these pieces of blue paper were dressed in regal finery, representing an imperial promise of return to Napoleonic glory and a prosperous future; for others, they stood for safe retirement, a comfortable allowance; still others saw them as the foundation for financial riches. For many Mexicans, however, the bonds were aching shackles and a national disgrace. None of these meanings were entirely stable. The shifting political fortunes of Maximilian and his Mexican successors, as well as Napoleon III and later French rulers, in addition to rapid changes in world capital markets, transformed the bonds' personalities from promise to embarrassment. The imperial eagle became an albatross. The bonds' value varied along with their dreams. This, then, is as much cultural history as it is economic and international relations. Actors were moved by many sentiments besides cold calculation of profit and loss. 6

     Bonds often lived secret existences in the subterranean realm of high finance and stock speculation. Tracking them through their almost half-century of life required visits to archives and libraries in six countries on three continents. As the mystery unraveled, it revealed the machinations of conquistadors, swindlers, and fools, anti-Semites, soldiers, haute financiers, and nationalist politicians, arms dealers and land speculators, students, widows, and orphans, in addition to diplomats on four continents. Mexico's little blue bonds lived a most cosmopolitan life. They provide a wide-angle lens to study the mechanics of international history. To write the biography of the "petits bleus," we must follow the sage advice Deep Throat gave Woodward and Bernstein in the movie—"Follow the money."⁶ 7

Before Maximilian's invasion, Mexico and France had had few monetary relations. Some French traders, especially from the small alpine town of Barcelonette, prospered in commerce, and some Frenchmen had invested in land and mines in Mexico, but the scale was small.⁷ Civil wars, coups, riots, and foreign invasions destroyed much of Mexico's earlier fabled wealth in the four decades after the colony gained its independence in 1821. Mexico weighed most heavily in the French "imaginaire" because of the tales the French had heard from Baron von Humboldt and later French travelers of its prodigious mineral wealth and wide fertile plains suitable for cotton cultivation.⁸ 8

     After Louis Napoleon grasped the crown of France, it was natural that Mexico occupied a prominent place in his drive to match the conquests of his famous uncle. As a young man, Napoleon III had been a promoter of a Nicaraguan canal and later continued to find Central America enticing. First sending French troops to New Caledonia, Algeria, Cochin China, Senegal, Lebanon, and China, Napoleon III set out on perhaps his boldest quest when in 1862 he landed French soldiers at Veracruz together with Spanish and English troops.⁹ Ostensibly, they made their uninvited visit to force repayment of earlier loans. Foreign bondholders, whose payments were greatly in arrears, had not received the payments Mexico had promised from funds obtained in the Gadsen Purchase¹⁰ or from the nationalization of church lands. In fact, Mexico's president, Benito Juárez, had declared a moratorium on debt payment. 9

     While this might have been cause for occupying the customs house, it was not grounds for invasion. The debt was largely an excuse. The level of bellicosity was inversely related to the size of each invading nation's debt. The French held only a tiny portion of the recognized debt. They demanded much more in payment of the notorious and largely fraudulent Jecker bonds. Although this was partly because influential men in Napoleon's court had invested in them and sought a windfall profit, the more central motive for the claim was officially to legitimize what was in actuality a drive for colonial conquest.¹¹ 10

     Naturally, the invasion gave French-held bonds a bad reputation in Mexico. But in France, the public applauded the apparent conquest of Mexico. For two decades, France had been undergoing unprecedented economic growth. Its factories were seeking foreign markets and raw materials, and its capitalists were becoming interested in overseas investments.¹² But they continued to be penurious. While they appreciated the prestige of owning this American neo-colony and reveled in its delicious economic prospects, the French did not want to foot the bill for the new relationship.¹³ The people of Mexico were to pay for the privilege of a European monarch. 11

     The mechanism for this payment was the "petits bleus," bonds issued in 1864 and 1865. These were the first large Mexican bonds ever issued on the Paris stock market and the first substantial Mexican loan in Europe since 1825. Despite Mexico's apparently disastrous straits, decades of civil war, and unenviable record of failure in servicing its foreign debt, thousands of French investors of modest means enthusiastically subscribed at a 63 percent discount rate, approximately the same as the first bonds independent Mexico issued in London in 1824.¹⁴ Rentiers, widows, and orphans were reassured by Napoleon III's paternalistic involvement. Moreover, Emperor Maximilian had been widely respected as a progressive ruler while governor-general of Lombardy-Venetia; he would revive Mexico.¹⁵ 12

     One should not assume that the investors were all moved by hard-headed rational calculations of future returns. The purchase of a few bonds offered vicarious participation in a historic quest. The bonds conjured up images of the past—Napoleonic glory and prodigious Habsburg colonial New World silver—as much as they symbolized the launching of a new era of French industrial imperialism. Indeed, their lifetime would span the transition from old-style military empire to the modern reign of finance capital. 13

     The issuance of the bonds signaled the emergence of modern financial institutions in France. The French had had the reputation of being among the most conservative investors on the European continent. The Crédit Mobilier, which underwrote the loans, had been founded in 1852 to coordinate the funds of France's many small investors by serving as an investment bank. Several other investment banks such as the Banque Franco-Egyptienne were founded in the 1860s as France's restrictive corporation laws were loosened.¹⁶ The participation of the financially troubled Crédit Mobilier itself in the "petits bleus" probably stemmed more from the bank's political motives than from confidence in the profitability of the loans. At the time, the Crédit Mobilier was seeking Napoleon's permission to float its own bonds to obtain badly needed working capital.¹⁷ 14

     In fact, on their economic merits, the loans were not promising. Very little went to enhance Mexico's future capacity to service its foreign debt. Virtually all of the proceeds of the "petits bleus" went to finance the French troops garrisoned in Mexico, to guarantee the loans, to cover the cost of floating the bonds, and to pay off past loans. Some 24 million francs' worth of bonds were also given to British holders of earlier bonds, ostensibly to compensate them for the interest they had not received between 1854 and 1863. (In actuality, Maximilian was mostly concerned with buying British acceptance of his regime.) Of the 534 million francs nominally issued, only 34 million—about 6 percent of the total—were actually paid to Maximilian's government.¹⁸ 15

     In the end, the French bondholders backed the wrong side. As the volley of the firing squad in Queretaro put an end to Maximilian's dreams of glory, it also rendered worthless the little blue Mexican bonds held by thousands of the French. Juárez returned to Mexico's presidency with a bankrupt country. But had he been financially able to service the "petits bleus," he would have refused on political grounds. The French had invaded unprovoked, seized the country for five years, caused the death of tens of thousands of Mexicans, and then charged the bill to the Mexican state. If anyone should make restitution, he reasoned quite rightly, it should be the French state. Mexican officials were adamant that the French take financial responsibility for the costs of the invasion. Napoleon's government did accept responsibility to the extent that it took the unprecedented step of paying off one-third of the value of the bonds, probably from loan proceeds set aside to service it, even though France had never officially guaranteed the bonds. But the French sought repayment from Mexico for the rest.¹⁹ 16

     This standoff lasted for thirteen years as the countries refused to resume international relations. The French were not particularly concerned with forcing Mexican repayment of the "petits bleus," but they did not want to face the much more expensive and politically dangerous humiliation of acknowledging responsibility for war damages caused by French troops in Mexico. The impasse seemed finally resolved in 1880 when each side agreed to quit its own claims, and those of its citizens, against the other; the governments of France and Mexico resumed normal relations.²⁰ 17

     This should have put the question of the "petits bleus" to rest and consigned the now apparently worthless little bonds to the dustbin of history.²¹ Had that been the case, the story would be much simpler and shorter—and less interesting. But the bondholders were not consulted. The neglected, forsaken bonds still circulated, ghosts of their former imperial glory. They made the slightest of background music. A small group of speculators would later purchase these specters at a heavy discount. The new owners were unwilling to accept the accord. They had plans for resurrecting the coupons and would be heard from later. 18

     The new French bond speculators were strengthened in their determination by the actions of Mexico's London creditors. Even though, by 1884, the Mexican regime of President Porfirio Díaz had been recognized by all major powers and had gone a long way toward consolidating power internally, his government still suffered a serious revenue shortage. He had to suspend subsidies and debt payments and reduce government salaries as much as 50 percent in 1885. These were the sort of actions that had often led to pronunciamientos (coups) that toppled governments in the first half of the century. The country was thrown into a terrible crisis.²² European capital became vital. 19

     Fortunately for Mexico, the late 1880s found the most abundant European capital markets of the nineteenth century. Europeans—on the continent as well as in Great Britain—had become interested in Latin America after sixty years of reluctance. The countries of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Panama received the most interest, but Mexico also experienced a return to favor.²³ The Mexican government turned to London for a loan. However, the British Council of Foreign Bondholders was able to prevent official recognition of the Mexican state and keep Mexican bonds off the London stock market. (It was not surprising that they would take such a firm stand against Mexico: the council's precursor organization had been born as the Council of Mexican Bondholders to collect on Mexican bonds issued in the 1820s.) 20

     Ironically, the solution of this standoff between Mexico and Britain was initiated by a Swiss-French capitalist, Eduard Noetzlin. This was not just a battle between countries. The Swiss head of a French bank in Mexico negotiated the repayment of British loans that had been used to support an Austrian prince, demonstrating the extensive globalism of the period. An officer of the Banque Franco-Egyptienne, the Banco Ottoman, and the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas, which loaned extensively to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, Noetzlin was also a founder and director of the new Banco Nacional de México and for a time Mexico's financial agent in London.²⁴ The Banco Nacional, founded by French capital, had loaned the Mexican government under President Manuel Gonzalez (1880–1884) some $5,761,000. Noetzlin sought for the Mexican government a 30 million dollar loan in London precisely to repay this debt to his own bank and to consolidate Mexico's other foreign debts. No nationalism was involved. The actual agreement was drafted by the Council of Foreign Bondholders in 1886, which received bonds worth from 15 to 50 percent of the outstanding debt for most claims. The Swiss Noetzlin earned a commission of 1 million dollars for representing Mexico (and his own Franco-Mexican bank) in the British transaction. While the agreement did not pay off the "petits bleus," the agreement did include the principal and interest (at 50 percent) on bonds Maximilian had provided British creditors, arguably recognizing the legitimacy of Maximilian's financial actions.²⁵ 21

     We have a tendency to think of such loan negotiations as tedious technical transactions that bore the public because of their complicated minutiae. But this was not the case in 1880s Mexico, where passions against European imperialists continued to run high. The agreement was denounced in violent language as students and other nationalists took to the streets. The original agreement proposed by Noetzlin caused a heated outcry in Mexico City for the high commissions it charged to French capitalists. In response, President Gonzalez—like Díaz, a general—unleashed a savage repression that killed scores of students. The general was greatly discredited by the loan. As one contemporary observed: "Warrior presidents are now succeeded by mercantile presidents. The National Palace, which under the viceroys was a court and under later presidents was an encampment now has been converted into the stock market building."²⁶ 22

     Gonzalez's successor, Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880, 1884–1911), despite being in principle against contracting new loans and despite popular outrage, agreed to the Council of Foreign Bond Holders' plan two years later. He argued that with it he would "achieve the triumph of a great political ideal: the definitive extinction of pacts of an international character that for many years created many serious difficulties for the Republic."²⁷ To pass the agreement, Díaz had to circumvent the Mexican Congress, resist an inflamed press campaign, and arrest student leaders.²⁸ Apparently, at this point, Díaz considered the friendship of British investors more important to his shaky regime than the support of his erstwhile Mexican nationalist supporters. 23

     Although willing to brave the opposition of Congress and the public in order to accommodate the British Council of Foreign Bondholders, Díaz was not willing to include the "petits bleus" in the accord, even though they also represented a pact with an "international character." He distinguished between the British and the French debt for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that Mexicans had contracted the British bonds, while an Austrian backed by French troops had initiated the French issues. Issues of realpolitik, however, were probably more important. The British bondholders had the support of their government and could close the generous London market to Mexican bonds. The French government, on the other hand, had forsworn support of the "petits bleus," and the Paris stock market was already trading the stocks of the Banco Nacional, which was providing the Díaz government with substantial credits. Within Mexico, the public outcry against repaying the French invaders would have been much greater than the already vociferous complaints against satisfying London bankers. 24

     Díaz had personal reasons to oppose the holders of the little blue bonds. As a hero of the Cinco de Mayo defense of Puebla in 1862, Díaz derived his prestige in no small part from his struggle against Maximilian's forces as the Commander of the Army of the East. Indeed, combat experience against the French was the cement that held together his regime. Almost four-fifths of late nineteenth-century Mexican federal politicians had fought against the French. Díaz relied on comrades-in-arms in the French campaigns as his most trusted political allies throughout his thirty-year rule.²⁹ Moreover, he detested speculators, who had done much harm to Mexico's credit in earlier years. The current owners of the "petits bleus" were seen as speculators.³⁰ But he would eventually have to compromise. 25

     Díaz continuously found himself torn between the liberal populist nationalism of his military youth and his regime's middle-aged need for the support of foreign bankers to consolidate order and progress. He found, as had Genghis Khan long before him, that a warrior can conquer from horseback, but he must dismount and compromise with his enemies in order to rule. These contradictory layers of Mexican history, conflated in the meanings of the maximilianito bonds, troubled Díaz and hindered a settlement, because the "petits bleus" were a palpable link between the financial speculators of the early republic and the demands of contemporary high finance. 26

     Most financiers were willing to overlook the claims of the speculators. Mexico took advantage of international prosperity in 1888 when it contracted a loan for £10,500,000, mostly to consolidate the internal floating debt and the consolidated 1886 London debt. The loan, taken at 70 to 80 percent discount, demonstrated Mexico's rising credit and its concern with diversifying dependence. The major part of the issue (62 percent) was subscribed by the German banking house Bleichröder&Co., 20 percent by the British house of Anthony Gibbs and Sons, and 18 percent by the French-dominated Banco Nacional de México. The U.S. secretary of state, James G. Blaine, proposed an American bank for the loan but was turned down.³¹ Clearly, international capitalists were not discouraged by the outstanding "petits bleus" at this point. The Council of Foreign Bondholders praised the "wise financial policy of Mexico. Dealing in a spirit of equity with all just claims brought under their notice on behalf of Bondholders, the government has materially contributed to raise the public credit of the country."³² By implication, the "petits bleus" were not "just claims" in the eyes of London financiers. 27

     The French were less happy with Mexico's 1888 loan than were the British. The fact that their detested rivals, the Germans, won the concession perturbed the French. The French government had acted forcefully to win the concession for a French bank and thought they were going to succeed until the Bleichröders prevailed at the last moment. 28

     The main reason the French bank did not receive the 1888/89 loan was, apparently, the alliance of the British house of Gibbs and the French-dominated Banco Nacional de México with Bleichröder. That Frenchmen in Mexico undercut the bid of a French bank infuriated the French ministry of foreign affairs. This action was not an isolated one, however. French consuls consistently complained about the immigrants from the town of Barcelonette to Mexico. They were perceived as narrowly self-interested and unpatriotic to France. The immigrant merchants seemed to have allegiance only to other people from the village of Barcelonette; otherwise, the businessmen were Mexican, for it was in Mexico that they made their fortune. In the various enterprises in which they owned substantial shares, such as the Banco Nacional and the Banco de Londres, the Barcelonettes were satisfied to be silent partners, allowing Spanish or German immigrants to run the companies. The Barcelonettes were mainly interested in making a profit and maintaining good relations with the Mexican government. They rarely communicated with the French government or sought much assistance there.³³ As Joseph Signoret, one of the richest French immigrants observed: "All we heads of great merchant houses cannot make our business prosper without the aid of the Mexican government. Here, where caprice supersedes all regulations, it would be impossible to fight against a hostile administration. How can we formulate free opinions on issues that interest the government when the least criticism exposes us to ruinous vexations?"³⁴ 29

     Some of the "petits bleus" holders began to lose faith in the support of the French government and, like the Barcelonettes, seek other allies—but in the United States rather than in Mexico. In 1887, a group of blue bondholders came together to form a pressure group. They turned to Congressman William Vandever of Los Angeles, who was engaged in speculations of his own. He called for the U.S. Congress to buy Baja California. Apparently, Vandever was working with Los Angeles and San Diego politicians who wanted to separate from Northern California and create a new state while extending their influence southward. This scheme interested "petits bleus" bondholders who had become landowners in Baja California by trading blue bonds for arid land belonging to the Compañia de Colonizacíon de Baja California. One of the bondholders, a Mr. Goldschmitt, supposedly owned some 600,000 hectares of dusty Baja California land. Efforts to convert paper into soil, that is, the imperial bonds into land, seem to have continued for at least a decade.³⁵ But Baja California remained Mexican and the bondholders unpaid. They would have to wait almost two decades for other U.S. capitalists to come to their rescue. 30

     In 1895, Delfin Sanchez, a representative of the Mexican government, offered to pay off the "petits bleus" in return for official permission for a loan from Paris. He was seeking funding to rebuild the Tehuantepec Railroad, which the American Collis P. Huntington was trying to operate. The Mexican government was in a hurry to open effective rail service from the Atlantic to the Pacific in order to discourage the Nicaraguan canal that a U.S. company was building at the time. The turn to Paris at a moment North Americans had shown considerable interest in the Tehuantepec demonstrated Mexican wariness of U.S. ownership of that strategic line, which became manifest later when Americans were forbidden to bid for it. Instead, Mexico awarded it to the Englishman Weetman Pearson. For Mexicans, France became an anti-American alternative. Ironically, the French, who had been so interested in building a Panama canal and purchasing the Panama railroad, refused to fund this isthmian railroad in Mexico. The French minister of finance refused apparently because of dissatisfaction with the terms of the loan, not because of the blue bonds. The enormous scandal over the French Panama Canal company in 1891, which saw Ferdinand de Lessep and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel jailed for corruption, must also have hurt the Mexican proposal to raise money for an isthmian route.³⁶ But the "petits bleus" were not a significant barrier to French investment in Mexico at this point. 31

     However, in 1898, after two decades of ignoring the speculators, for some reason the French government's attitude toward the holders of the "petits bleus" changed. Paris came to support their claims. This is startling because strictly economic reasoning should have convinced France's minister of finance to continue to ignore the bondholders' pleas. After all, the French finance minister applauded Mexico's financial improvement as the federal government began registering budget surpluses. Most capitalists had regained confidence in Mexico. Mexican bonds were now issued on Berlin, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam markets as well as New York at lower discounts (sometimes over standard value, or par), lower interest rates, and less collateral than ever before. 32

     At the same time, French capitalists increased their economic ties with Mexico. In 1896, French investors took a large position in the Banco de Londres, Mexico's second largest bank. Millions of francs of Mexican internal debt bonds payable in silver were unofficially placed on the Paris exchange. The Société Financière pour l'Industrie au Mexique consolidated many of Mexico's largest factories.³⁷ 33

     Under these promising conditions for rapprochement with France, Mexico's minister of finance, José Yves Limantour, a Francophile of French parentage, traveled to France in 1899. Although he claimed to be going to the continent for health reasons (in order to avoid the political fallout of a compromise with the French), in reality his objective was to gain official acceptance of a Mexican loan issue there. He was eager to diversify Mexico's European dependence, rejecting attractive North American overtures to take the loan at the same time.³⁸ Memories of the Texas War and the Mexican-American War, which had cost the country over half its national territory, were still strong. Limantour tried to play on anti-American resentment to combat Mexican memories of Napoleonic imperialism. Probably to secure the loan, he had sent his brother—and partner in the banking house of Scherer and Limantour—before him as an attaché to the Mexican legation in Paris.³⁹ The Mexican finance minister dangled enticing concessions before French officials. Limantour suggested that he would be favorable to a French mortgage bank in Mexico and to the awarding of concessions to French industrialists if a loan were officially endorsed.⁴⁰ Eduard Noetzlin, director of France's largest development bank, the Banque de Paris, and numerous companies in Mexico, was eager to underwrite a Mexican loan in order to open Paris to Mexican investments as he had earlier opened London. Now the French government, which professed itself anxious for French citizens to invest in Mexico, could not claim any economic reason to oppose a Mexican issue. All other major powers accepted Mexican bonds, and French investors had been eagerly purchasing them on the unofficial market.⁴¹ Nonetheless, Limantour was denied official sanction for the loan. Why? For a long time, I found this a mystery. 34

     The rejection was as much a surprise as a disappointment to Limantour. He was stunned because France's minister of finance had already rejected the claims of the French holders of the blue bonds. He wrote to the minister of foreign affairs, Théophile Delcassé, in February 1899, that Mexico's internal bonds were indeed circulating freely on the Paris market. This did not bother him because, he said, "The Civil Society for the Safeguarding of the Rights of the Obligations of the Bonds Contracted in France during the Years 1864–65" (Société Civil), which held two-thirds of the outstanding "petits bleus," was composed of Jewish speculators. Reflecting the virulent anti-Semitism that gained so much notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair, which mesmerized French attention between 1894 and 1906, and which was at its height in 1898 and 1899, the minister concluded that the Jews' claims could be ignored.⁴² He saw no economic reason to oppose an official sanction for a new loan. 35

     At the same time, the minister of foreign affairs, Delcassé, had shown Limantour "extreme cordiality" and "manifested his admiration for the administrative management of the president of Mexico and his government."⁴³ The recently inaugurated French president, Emile Loubet, was even more receptive. In a thirty-minute conversation with Limantour, he said as a native of an area near Barcelonette and a friend of a French immigrant in Mexico, he "had followed with special care the [level] of development our country had reached and judged General Díaz to be an eminent statesman." Loubet concluded that French capital was now becoming interested in foreign bonds and would be available to convert the Mexican debt. Limantour left the interview "with gratitude and satisfaction."⁴⁴ French exporters who traded with Mexico threw a grand banquet in Limantour's honor. It appeared that the Paris Exchange was now open to Mexico. 36

     But not so. Delcassé came to disagree with his fellow minister and insist that the blue bonds be paid before Mexican loans could be officially quoted on the Parisian stock market.⁴⁵ What had turned Delcassé against Limantour was a vast and expensive press campaign (supposedly at a cost of more than 500,000 francs), mounted by the Société Civil against the Mexican government and its loan. The little bonds, which had been born with great fanfare only to be later neglected, were once again the subjects of spectacle. But now, rather than being attended by an elegant monarch and glittering guards, the bonds were serenaded by a loud bourgeois publicity organ.⁴⁶ Major news services such as the Agence Havas and major newspapers such as La matin commonly sold their services to promote bonds. French deputies also served as spokesmen for the blue bondholders.⁴⁷ The foreign affairs minister became afraid of domestic political fallout discrediting the government. 37

     The timing and the method of the Société Civil is revealing. The French government in 1898 and 1899 was particularly susceptible to the influence of the bondholders because the country was rocked by the Dreyfus Affair and appeared on the verge of civil war. The debate over anti-Semitism and the integrity of the armed forces brought the government, which only held a small parliamentary majority, to the point of collapse. There was fear of a military coup on the right (an abortive one did take place) and massive street demonstrations on the left. In the middle of this tumult, just as negotiations for the Mexican loan reached their most critical point, France's president died and was replaced by Loubet, a man with relatively weak support.⁴⁸ 38

     Loubet, as well as many other protagonists in the affair, was a politician who had been discredited by the Panama Canal scandal of 1891, in which over a hundred deputies and other government officials and journalists were found to be in the pay of the company. Loubet was known as the "Panama Premier." He was clearly vulnerable to another stock market scandal. His government was opposed by Bonapartists, who, presumably, would favor recognizing Maximilian's bonds.⁴⁹ Both the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus Affair aroused heated anti-Semitism, as they supposedly involved Jewish financiers and traitors. Indeed, historian Albert Lindemann maintains that "the years 1898–1900 may be considered the high point of prewar anti-Semitism in France."⁵⁰ Anti-Semitism was turned to severe nationalist purposes by the Bonapartists, Boulangists, and royalists who attempted to assassinate France's president.⁵¹ 39

     The Loubet government therefore found itself in a very complicated and delicate position. To curry favor with Bonapartists, it could insist on repayment for the "petits bleus." Nationalists might be pleased that his government favored French bondholders over Mexican creditors. On the other hand, the Jewish speculators who were blocking Mexican access to the Parisian stock market could appear to represent a reincarnation of the Panama scandal and thereby inflame anti-Semitic passions against Loubet's government. Thus the little blue bonds might be transformed from monuments of glorious imperial ambition to tools of base speculation, which, rather than found an empire in Mexico, might overthrow a government in France. Certainly, politics of racist and nationalist symbols seemed to have far outweighed calculations of economic gain in official decision-making. The "petits bleus" were being viewed through the lens of traditional shibboleths rather than the emerging economic formulas of the self-regulating market.⁵² 40

     Delcassé's decision to support the bondholders is a striking commentary on the nature and limits of French imperialism. Despite rapidly growing French investments in Mexico—indeed, virtual French control of its commerce and banking and an expanding position in industry—as well as the support of some of Paris's most important financiers, the internal political conjuncture could throw the government's support to a small relatively unimportant group of speculators over a few million francs of indemnity. It is perhaps even more surprising that the government, weathering a storm of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and hatred of speculators, sided with a small group apparently composed of Jewish speculators. 41

     I suspect that the key to understanding the responses of the foreign ministers Gabriel Hanotaux (1894–1898) and Delcassé to Limantour's overtures is to be found overseas—but not in Mexico. Hanotaux and Delcassé were reviving foundering French colonialism in Africa, Indochina, and the South Pacific. This was a "period of unprecedented colonial advancement."⁵³ The two foreign ministers were able to gain the backing of a large colonial bloc of republicans in the Chamber of Deputies. Preoccupied with revenge against Germany's crushing victory over France in 1870, the "new imperialists" sought to regain France's prestige and glory by carving out colonies in Africa and Asia. Although white supremacists in their treatment of Africans, the colonial bloc was not anti-Semitic. Favored by the backing of the Rothschilds, the colonialists sided with Dreyfus.⁵⁴ The religion of the blue bondholders would not bother them. The cause of the speculators, on the other hand, struck close to home. Refusing to support holders of Maximilian's bonds—even though, on economic and diplomatic grounds, their claims were specious—would undermine the government's image as a vigorous colonial power and damage the ongoing colonial project. Other prospective investors in French colonial adventures would come to doubt government protection. 42

     This was particularly important in 1898 and 1899 because an incident in the Sudan during those years brought France's Africa policy much into question. Hoping to create a band of French colonies that would span Africa from Senegal to the Red Sea and still smarting from France's loss of the Suez Canal to the British, Delcassé authorized an expedition to establish a French presence in the upper Nile at the town of Fachoda. The British responded with troops under General H. H. Kitchener. At the end of 1898 and beginning of 1899, France and Britain were preparing to go to war with each other. Ultimately, the French withdrawal from Fachoda was negotiated peacefully. Paris acknowledged British control over Egypt and the Sudan in return for British acquiescence to French domination in Morocco. The settlement was, of course, something of an embarrassment to the French, as they had to rein in their dreams of colonial expansion in East Africa. In this context, it was no time to surrender the interests of supporters of an earlier French expansionist effort in Mexico.⁵⁵ The "petits bleus" were very much linked to French African colonial policy, as was fitting. After all, French expansion into Egypt in the 1860s had been an outgrowth of Napoleon III's imperial vision just like the Mexican adventure was. But now the future of new French investors in Mexico was to be sacrificed to defend past indiscretions there and the future of French capitalists in Africa. 43

     The French minister of finance, then, was forfeiting the potential profits of French capitalists in Mexico in favor of the Société Civil speculators and the more nebulous and far-off returns of African and Asian colonies. Put another way, Delcassé was surrendering the interests of neo-colonialism in favor of direct colonialism. 44

     This case challenges both J. A. Hobson's and V. I. Lenin's analyses of high imperialism, which placed great emphasis on the need to place excess capital abroad. Yet here, at least, high finance was ignored. In fact, for the French government, visceral chauvinistic impulses and old-fashioned territorial aggrandizement seem to have been more important in the short run than rational financial calculations. 45

     U.S. government officials responded quite differently from the French to an attempt by "petits bleus" bondholders to flex their muscle in New York. The United States also was entering into an age of imperialist expansion. For the first time, its banks began to look to Latin American financial markets. When Limantour failed to place Mexico's 1898/1899 loan on the Paris market, he turned to a consortium of British, German, and U.S. banks. The loan marked a new era. As the Daily Mail of London observed: "The strangest fact of all is the appearance for the first time of an American banking house on a foreign loan prospectus. New York is flapping its wings over the new departure of Messrs. J. P. Morgan&Co."⁵⁶ 46

     Concerned about Mexico's new access to New York capital, which threatened to reduce the importance of access to the Paris market and the likelihood that their bonds would be repaid, "petits bleus" strategists targeted New York. A man named Hazzard, claiming to hold 3 million pesos of bonds from Maximilian's 1864 loan, convinced New York State's Supreme Court to block J. P. Morgan's participation in Mexico's 1898/1899 loans. Morgan at first claimed to be unaffected because he was not involved in the loan. In fact, his banking house and its London branch were responsible for about one-quarter of the issue. So the Mexican government intervened. Limantour prevailed on the U.S. attorney general to recommend that the New York court annul its order on the grounds that Hazzard's bonds were worthless. The New York judges concurred.⁵⁷ 47

     The different responses of the French and U.S. governments to bondholders is striking. Although both governments were intimately involved in expansionist enterprises and both coveted the Mexico market, only the United States moved to satisfy the Mexicans. One could conclude that the U.S. government came to Limantour's aid either because it was more interested in Mexican favor and business than the French or that the French government's political position was weaker and its imperial designs more vulnerable to the influence of irate blue bondholders. The latter was probably the case. 48

     But why did Mexico not take bolder steps to defend itself against the bondholders' publicity campaign in France or simply pay them off? Limantour, too, could have hired press agents to defend Mexico's claim as he often did in Mexico and the United States. French publicists certainly were offering their services.⁵⁸ Instead, he intransigently opposed paying off the bonds, even though he might have been able to float them at 4 1/2 percent in Paris rather than the 5 percent he eventually settled on in Germany, which would have more than compensated for the cost of the buyout.⁵⁹ 49

     Limantour had means at his disposal to open the Paris market. The 1898/1899 loans issued by German, British, and Mexican bankers demonstrated the political advantages that Limantour would have offered French lenders had the French government settled the "petits bleus." The same banks that underwrote the international loans were granted the concession to create the powerful and profitable Banco Central, a private rediscount bank.⁶⁰ Limantour wanted to make the lesson even more overt. Still seeking official French acceptance in 1901, he offered in return to purchase military hardware from France for the sum of 15 million francs, and to extend a reciprocal trade treaty, a concession for a dynamite company, and other concessions.⁶¹ He even reneged on his principle and offered to pay off the "petits bleus," though for very little. 50

     The offer of arms purchases is particularly revealing since the minister of war at the time, Bernardo Reyes, preferred German weapons. Limantour, involved in a nasty public fight for prestige with General Reyes, was attempting to flex his political muscle by showing up the war minister. In Europe, the French cannon manufacturer Schneider was locked in a fierce battle with the German Krupp. Indeed, Jean Bouvier asserts that this competition "gave to their rivalry a singular weight in increasing the tensions" between the French and the Germans.⁶² Limantour's offer should have been very attractive.⁶³ 51

     However, Limantour could not come to an agreement with the blue bondholders on a price to buy them out. They demanded £921,750 (about 22 million francs), while Limantour offered 1.6 million francs. Between November of 1901 and March of 1902, the Société Civil lowered its demands, first to 12 million francs, then 8, then 6 million francs.⁶⁴ Limantour would not budge. 52

     He probably felt reinforced by the support of France's minister of finance and the director of consulates and commercial affairs. J. Caillowy, the finance minister, supported official recognition of Mexican bonds because, he said, there was no good economic reason not to. M. Bompard, director of consulates and commercial affairs, concurred.⁶⁵ 53

     But this did not convince France's foreign minister, who responded that the blue bondholders could still create problems for the government; they should be placated first. Despite the fact that major French bankers, weapons producers, and other capitalists supported the official recognition of Mexican bonds—indeed, many were trading in them on the Paris market anyway—and that substantial concessions and trade were attached to the gesture, the French government again sided with the speculators.⁶⁶ France's minister to Mexico, Camille Blondel, was crestfallen. He lamented that the holders of Maximilian's bonds were an obstacle to "our financial rapprochement with Mexico, which would have been very advantageous for our capitalists, our industrialists and important commercial houses installed in Mexico."⁶⁷ 54

     Limantour would not raise his offer, even though only 4 million francs now separated his proposal and the bondholders' price. He purchased the war material in the United States instead. This demonstrates the limits of Limantour's alleged francophilia.⁶⁸ 55

     Limantour's intransigence seems curious. Clearly, official recognition on the Paris market was important to him to offset German, British, and U.S. interests in Mexico. Otherwise, he would not have made so many attempts and offers to settle the controversy. France's minister Blondel offered an insightful explanation for Limantour's conduct. He averred that Limantour sought to succeed Mexico's aged President Díaz. Limantour himself asserted in 1898 that Díaz confessed that he did not want to run in the 1900 presidential race, preferring Limantour for the office.⁶⁹ 56

     Internationally, Limantour was highly respected, but the finance minister's foreign standing was a double-edged sword at home. He enjoyed very great respect abroad because of his fiscal probity. This, however, came at the price of sacrificing short-run domestic interests in Mexico through very conservative monetary and spending policies. Foreign credit was more important to Limantour than domestic demands for social spending and building projects. Many of Mexico's wealthy citizens supported his policy because foreign loans obviated the need to raise domestic taxes. But many nationalists and members of the popular classes, whose support was necessary for a president—if not for a finance minister—resented his policies. Limantour had to begin concerning himself with a larger constituency. 57

     Foreign credit was particularly important at the dawn of the twentieth century because Mexico was in crisis at the time due to the collapse of the price of silver, historically Mexico's principal export. As a result, the peso lost half its value, and foreign debt payments ballooned. The minister of finance needed to act. He could not raise internal taxes because "the influence of large landlords [was] still preponderant," and they would not brook higher taxes.⁷⁰ At the same time, New York and Berlin investors (London was of relatively little importance to Mexico) opposed efforts to reduce Mexico's outstanding debt. That left the possibility of the Paris stock market. 58

     But Limantour's presidential ambitions prevented him from submitting to the demands of the "petits bleus" owners. Ironically, the stern, strait-laced minister, who had gained an international reputation for making the hard, rational, unemotional economic decisions demanded by the market, found himself at the mercy of politics of symbolism. The blue bonds raised their voices as more than just tokens of money; they bore the legacy of a historical crime. While a minister of finance need not concern himself much with the bonds' wild youth, a presidential candidate did have to worry about domestic public responses to the bonds' antecedents. In this case, Limantour was particularly vulnerable. As he himself admitted, he was frequently attacked by his enemies for being a Frenchman because of his parentage and his friendship with Europeans. Limantour's principal political rival, General Reyes, launched a campaign while Limantour was in Paris to deny the finance minister's eligibility for the presidency because of his father's French nationality.⁷¹ Limantour continued to seek Mexico's supreme office when Díaz's health and grip on office remained in question. A sizable payment to the "petits bleus" owners, though easily affordable and probably advisable on the grounds of realpolitik, was political suicide.⁷² It could cost him a chance at the presidency. 59

     Nonetheless, Mexico's desperate need for a loan in 1904 seemed to doom the minister of finance to taking the fateful step of settling the maximilianitos. Limantour again entered into negotiations with the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas, this time in conjunction with Bleichröder, for a loan of 40 million dollars. The French bankers thought they had no competition and therefore expected Mexico to pay off the "petits bleus." Germany's minister to Mexico, Freiherr von Wangenheim, assured his foreign minister that Limantour would not borrow from the U.S. competitor—Speyer and Co.—"because the Mexican dislike of strengthening their ties to the United States seems to be growing."⁷³ The Banque de Paris's director, Eduard Noetzlin, assuming that he could again profit handsomely from a Mexican loan, was intransigent on the loan's conditions. Only 1 million francs separated his conditions from Limantour's offer. But that was enough to quash the deal. 60

     Limantour finally found a way to end the pesky life of the blue bonds in 1904 without appearing to give in to the speculators. But instead of just diversifying Mexico's dependence by opening up Paris's capital market, he also pushed Mexico into unwanted closer relations with the United States. Resenting Noetzlin's "exaggerated pretensions," the finance minister turned to New York instead.⁷⁴ For the first time, a U.S. banking house, Speyer and Co., issued a Mexican loan. Speyer succeeded in good part because of the extraordinary conditions it offered: 40 million dollars at 4 percent interest, 89 percent of the nominal amount, repayable in fifty years without prepayment penalty, and with no specific guarantees except the good credit of Mexico. (Previous foreign loans had attached specific revenues such as import duties.) Blondel found Speyer's offer extraordinarily generous—and suspicious. He reported to Delcassé: "There is no doubt that the American offers were some sort of 'war offer,' that is, offers calculated to prevent all European financial activity in Mexico. The conditions are such . . . that the negotiation of the loan can barely cover its costs and only the hope of becoming master of the Mexican market could have caused them to offer them [these conditions]."⁷⁵ Blondel believed that the U.S. government was behind Speyer's loan. It was part of an American "policy of commercial and industrial invasion in order to arrive . . . at a more effective role [ingerence] in the destiny of that country."⁷⁶ Mexico was falling into the orbit of the United States. If Díaz died, he thought, "one can predict that the United States will seize upon the occasion to impose an intervention on Mexico."⁷⁷ Blondel continued that he would not be surprised if the U.S. government had compensated Speyer for the loan's generous terms. 61

     It seems unlikely, for a number of reasons, that Speyer was in league with the American government, however. James Speyer himself had explained to the German minister Wangenheim that he offered such advantageous conditions because of the competition of the Banque de Paris.⁷⁸ Instead of serving U.S. foreign policy, the banking house was pursuing a broad strategy to gain private control over a large share of Mexico's finances. It was a private business decision, not an American diplomatic initiative.⁷⁹ Indeed, the extent to which Speyer can be called an American house is questionable. James Speyer was very much an international financier. Born in New York in 1861, he left for Frankfurt, Germany, at the age of three to be educated and trained in banking, only returning to the United States twenty-four years later to head the American branch of Speyer and Co. He continued to hold an interest in the German house of Lazard Speyer Ellissen. Speyer also had a British branch. The German merchant banking house, the richest in Frankfurt at the end of the eighteenth century, had come to the United States in 1845 and made its fortune financing railways, especially Collis P. Huntington's Southern Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad, by taking advantage of the access its German and English branches had to European capital. By 1900, James Speyer was second in wealth only to J. P. Morgan among New York financiers.⁸⁰ 62

     The house of Speyer became involved in Mexico as an extension of its activity in U.S. railroads. Major lines that Speyer helped finance in the United States began in the 1880s to build into Mexico in attempts to monopolize regional freight routes.⁸¹ In 1901, Speyer moved from railroad financing to actual ownership when it came to the aid of the Nacional Railroad in its competition with Harriman-Rockefeller interests, with whom Speyer had done battle in the United States. Speyer financed the reorganization of the Nacional and its purchase of another major Mexican line, the Internacional, eventually coming to dominate the lines. When Speyer tried to add the Interoceanico line, Limantour balked. Fearing American monopolization of the major Mexican railroads, the minister of finance instead purchased controlling interest in the three companies. He preferred increasing the state's debt to allowing Yankee trusts to dominate Mexico's iron nerve system. Demonstrating that he feared industrial capital more than finance capital, Limantour borrowed from the company from which he was purchasing the rail lines in order to pay for the acquisitions.⁸² The loan was an appetizer to introduce Speyer into the Mexican feast. 63

     That Speyer rather than the Banque de Paris won the 1904 loan was of extraordinary importance. As the Mexican Herald noted: "the loan is based on the gold dollar of the United States. This in a way marks an epoch in international finance."⁸³ For the first time, a major loan was denominated in dollars and based in New York. This loan signaled the future predominance of North American capitalists in Mexico, even though in fact few of the actual funds were supplied by North American investors. Speyer worked with its London and Frankfurt cousins, so Europeans continued to provide most capital for New York enterprises. 64

     The loan was part of two related actions, each tying Mexico closer to the United States. The first was the nationalization of the railroads in 1906, when Limantour purchased the Central Railroad, again relying in large part on Speyer.⁸⁴ The second action was the monetary reform of 1905. On the advice of U.S. economists, Mexico converted to the gold standard, tying the peso to the dollar, not the pound sterling. This gave New York bankers an edge in Mexican finances. The Speyer loan was part of the reform since it partly financed the stabilization fund necessary to maintain the value of the gold peso.⁸⁵ 65

     Because of the monetary reform, foreign investment flooded into Mexico, particularly into banks, an area in which U.S. investors had been almost entirely absent. Speyer took advantage of his privileged position with the Mexican government to found what became one of the country's largest banks, the Banco Mexicano de Comérico y Indústria. As in the 1904 loan, Speyer used this opportunity to combine with German capital, specifically the Deutsche Bank.⁸⁶ Thus because of the French government's intransigence, French companies not only lost Mexican loan opportunities and banking privileges to U.S. companies but lost them to their hated rivals, the Germans. 66

     What does Speyer's entry onto the Mexican scene have to do with the blue bonds? The "petits bleus," which had been conceived as a weapon in France's outward thrust into Mexico and had been nurtured by internal crises in France, surrendered their lives to allow Americans to enter Mexico's capital markets. Ironically, the 1904 loan that sealed U.S. eminence in Mexico also finally opened the Paris market to Mexican bonds. But not because the French government finally relented. Rather, the star-crossed notes that the Austrian pretender to Mexico had issued to French investors finally ended their excited, troubled, and cosmopolitan lives when the American house of Speyer, using largely German funds (and probably French funds through the secondary Parisian market), bought out the French speculators. The settling of this last remaining vestige of Maximilian's presence in Mexico was done quietly. This way, the Mexican government itself did not reach an accommodation with the speculators, and probably few people suspected that Speyer had. Speyer purchased the "petits bleus" for 1.7 million francs, the same amount Limantour had offered to the speculators two years before but they had rejected. Presumably, the Société Civil now felt its position weakened by the entrance of U.S. bankers into the contest for Mexico. The Parisian market had appeared attractive to Limantour as an alternative to New York, but his turn to Speyer demonstrated that the Mexican minister was not willing to avoid American loans at all costs. As Paris lost its allure for Limantour, the bondholders probably decided that this small amount was better than nothing. 67

     France's minister in Mexico, Blondel, was disgusted by the proceedings. For this small amount, he complained, France lost out on two major loans and the sales of goods while the United States became stronger.⁸⁷ Indeed, Speyer not only opened the Paris Exchange to Mexican bonds, he placed the first U.S. bonds on Paris.⁸⁸ Subsequently, many large North American undertakings in Mexico worked partially with French capital and, worse for the French, with German capital—the very enemies most hated by the French—because of Speyer's ties to German financial houses. 68

     The French minister's math was exact when he mentioned the small amount of money that separated France and Mexico, but he had no sense of poetry. He overlooked the significance of the little bonds. No doubt for the speculators who held the bonds, the issue involved simply money. But for both the Mexican and French governments, the golden dreams and tortured lives of the "petits bleus" represented far more than their monetary value. Terms of domination and historic pretensions to empire separated the two countries, not simply a few million francs. 69

The official quotation for Mexican bonds on the Paris stock market opened up Mexico to much greater French capital. Already before official acceptance of Mexican bonds, the French had invested an estimated 100 million francs in Mexican securities.⁸⁹ The amount grew quickly in the next few years.⁹⁰ 70

     The settling of the "petits bleus" thus encouraged economic relations between France and Mexico. It did not, however, increase French influence. Not only were the Barcelonettes reluctant to take a leadership role, but even Paris capitalists rarely dominated the management of companies in which they invested. They seemed content to allow others to make the decisions. Jean Bouvier argues that, after 1905, French bankers became active entrepreneurs rather than simple rentiers.⁹¹ The movement in that direction in Mexico was slow. French capitalists also had little cooperation with their government, to the chagrin of the foreign and finance ministries. In 1911, the French minister to Mexico, Lefaivre, complained that he had attempted to win concessions for French companies in return for official quotations on the Paris Exchange, but French bankers undercut the minister, using their own influence in Paris to gain official recognition without asking anything in return.⁹² Given the track record of French officials in Mexico, it is not the least bit surprising that French capitalists ignored the foreign ministry. 71

     James Speyer was not long able to enjoy the Mexican opening, either. The Mexican Revolution of 1911 did not perturb him—he simply funded revolutionary generals. But World War I was extremely damaging. A friend of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, Speyer lost his U.S. business connections in the heat of war chauvinism. His cousins in England also lost their banking house for the same reason. After the war, Germany was destitute, unable to supply the capital that had made Speyer and Co. so formidable.⁹³ The rise to power of the Nazis put an end to the German branch of the Jewish Speyers, and the American branch followed a few years later.⁹⁴ Rising to eminence on a current of internationalism, the merchant bankers were drowned by racial nationalism. 72

     The "petits bleus" were cursed. Their fathers, Maximilian and Napoleon III, both of whom ended their lives in disgrace—one more violently than the other—had watched their imperial aspirations crushed. But the apparently innocuous bonds lived on, fueling failed schemes in Paris, Baja California, and New York, exciting speculative hopes and arousing fears among some of the most powerful men in France. The bonds represented conquest and defeat, rapprochement and enmity, quick profit and the foundation of a financial empire. 73

     Following the complicated path of the little blue bonds illuminates the changing nature of the international capital market and Mexico's place in it. Mexico went from being a site for renewed dreams of Habsburg glory and for colonial conquest to an independent and much-sought-after borrower. The country diversified its dependence, improving its financial standing and its autonomy. Limantour was able to play off competing international bankers to Mexico's advantage and could ignore the Parisian speculators, who in another era could have (and in fact had) launched a French invasion of the Veracruz customs house. 74

     Financiers did not work as instruments of national imperialist policies. Dominated by families with ties to numerous countries and continents, bankers were, like Speyer, businessmen for whom profit came first. International alliances were much more common than competition based on birth. Money did not need a passport nor did it have strong national allegiances, despite the efforts of various governments to use the bonds as nationalist weapons. However, politics were not irrelevant. National policies, directed as much by chauvinism, territorial aspirations, and racial nationalism as the hunt for profit, did affect access to capital. States were important actors in this drama, but they often were not associates of financiers. Indeed, domestic politics and international rivalries led to political decisions that often made little economic sense. The market was as much driven by dreams and hatreds as by "rational" calculations of profit and loss. 75

     The bonds were symbols, not just markers of wealth. They lived social lives that dressed them in many different meanings for the people involved. Speculators, widows and orphans, soldiers, diplomats, financiers, nationalist students, anti-Semites, and arms dealers all saw them differently. The bonds were chameleon-like, taking on different identities at different times. They inspired the public's imagination or reminded it of past disgraces. Even such a famed hard-headed "realist" such as José Limantour had to recognize the powerful symbolism of the "petits bleus." They were tailored by sentiment, dreams, and hatreds. 76

     In mid-1910, to commemorate the centennial of Mexican independence, France returned the keys to the city of Mexico that had been presented to General Elie-Frédéric Forey when he entered with French troops in 1863.⁹⁵ The French sought to exorcise the ghost of Maximilian that had haunted French-Mexican relations for half a century. The keys to the city had not sufficed to establish a successful French colonial empire on the American continent. Neither had the "petits bleus." French neo-colonialism was not much more successful, because the French state continued to side with adventurers rather than their own haute bourgeoisie, and French bondholders were willing to buy Mexican bonds issued on London or Berlin. French immigrants in Mexico considered themselves Mexican, and even French bankers were willing to ally with German and U.S. bankers in search of profit, even when their actions undercut their own government's diplomatic initiatives. Mexico could certainly withstand French pressures since Díaz and Limantour diversified their dependence. This policy made short-run sense, but they were not gifted fortune tellers. Ultimately, Mexico would fall under the sway of the United States. When the "petits bleus" finally ended their perturbed and exciting social lives and Mexico's door to the Paris Exchange was at last opened, Yankees were standing there in wait. The Mexican blues ended . . . to enter into the Jazz Age. 77

Steven C. Topik is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. His primary interests are international political economy and world history, especially in regard to Mexico and Brazil. He has authored Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire (1996), The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, with Kenneth Pomeranz (1999), co-edited with Allen Wells The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930 (1998), and co-edited with David Smith and Dorothy Solinger, States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy (1999). He is currently working on an international history of coffee.

Notes

I would like to thank Martha Marcy Topik, Allen Wells, Carlos Marichal, and Daniel Schroetter for their comments. Versions of this article were presented at the Universidad Autónomo Nacional and the Instituto José María Mora conference "Coloquio sobre formas de fiscalidad," Mexico City, February 14, 1992, which gave rise to the volume Los negocios y las ganancias de la colonia al México moderno, Leonor Ludlow and Jorge Silva Riquer, eds. (Mexico City, 1993), and at the United States–Mexico Center of the University of California, San Diego, October 15, 1997. I would like to thank the University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities for a grant in 1989, the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship in 1990, and the UCMexus Research Fellowship in 1993–1994, which made possible the research for this article.
¹ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1943), 10, observed: "Haute finance, an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, functioned as the main link between the political and the economic organizations of the world in this period."
² See Steven Topik, "The Emergence of Finance Capital in Mexico," in Five Centuries of Mexican History, Virginia Guedea and Jaime E. Rodríguez O., eds. (Mexico City, 1992), 227–42; Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago, 1981).
³ In theology, a fiduciary refers to one who depends for salvation on faith without works. The case of the petits bleus demonstrates that many bondholders had to work to recover their investment; they did not simply leave it to faith.
⁴ Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York, 1986), 6.
⁵ Joseph Schumpeter, "The Crisis of the Tax State," in International Economic Papers: Translations Prepared for the International Economic Association, Alan T. Peacock, et al., eds. (New York, 1954).
⁶ All the President's Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula (1976). It turns out that Deep Throat's advice, which plays such a central role in solving the Watergate puzzle in the movie, does not appear in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book (1974).
⁷ Auguste Génin, Les français au Mexique du XVI^e siècle a nos jours (Paris, 1933), passim. In 1849, of the fourteen conventions Mexico agreed to, only one was with France, and it was for $1,035,527; Jan Bazant, Historia de la deuda exterior de México (1823–1946) (Mexico City, 1968), 84, 86. Eugène Duflot de Mofras, Exploration du territoire de l'Oregon, des Californies, et de la mer Vermeille, exécutée pendant les années 1840, 1841, et 1842 (Paris, 1844), 85, claimed the total was $1,179,274.
⁸ See, for example, de Mofras, Exploration du territoire; Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (1836; rpt. edn., Princeton, N.J., 1944); Gabriel Ferry, Scènes de la vie mexicaine (Paris, 1855); Nancy Nichols Barker, The French Experience in Mexico, 1821–1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979).
⁹ James Matthew Thompson, Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (New York, 1955), 212, 214.
¹⁰ The Gadsen Purchase was the U.S. purchase of some 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory west of El Paso in 1854 that today constitutes about one-quarter of Arizona's territory.
¹¹ According to Nancy N. Barker, "France Disserved: The Dishonorable Career of Dubois de Saligny," in Barker and Marvin L. Brown, eds., Diplomacy in an Age of Nationalism: Essays in Honor of Lynn Marshall Case (The Hague, 1971), 72, France's minister to Mexico was told to push the Jecker claim because "the French government has real need of a claim of this importance as the sum of what he has presented would not suffice to justify armed intervention." On France's exaggerated claims, also see Gustave Léon Niox, Le expédition du Mexique 1861–1867: Récit politique et militaire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1874), 35; Carl H. Bock, Prelude to Tragedy: The Negotiation and Breakdown of the Tripartite Convention of London, October 31, 1861 (Philadelphia, 1966), appendix; Egon Caesar Corti, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico, Catherine Alison Phillips, trans., 2 vols. (New York, 1928), 1: 132.
¹² François Caron, An Economic History of Modern France, Barbara Bray, trans. (New York, 1979), 11, 12, 60.
¹³ Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on the United States and Mexico, 1860–1867: Extracts from the Reports of the Procureurs Generaux (1936; Hamden, Conn., 1969), passim.
¹⁴ According to Phillip L. Cottrell, "La Coopération financière Franco-Anglaise, 1850–1880," in Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, ed., La position internationale de la France: Aspects économiques et financiers XIX^e–XX^e siècles (Paris, 1977), 183, 184, the petits bleus were issued on London as well as Paris, but only 115 shares were sold in the City compared to 80,072 in Paris. For more on the 1824 loan, see Jaime Rodríguez O., "Los primeros empréstitos mexicanos, 1824–1825," in Pasado y presente de la deuda externa de México (Mexico City, 1988).
¹⁵ The historiography of Maximilian has too often treated him as a fool or an innocent. Robert Duncan, in the PhD dissertation he is currently finishing at the University of California, Irvine, "Building a New World Monarchy," demonstrates Maximilian's sagacity and breadth of vision. Bazant, Historia de la deuda, 92, 93.
¹⁶ An excellent treatment of the rise of French finance banking in the 1860s and the relationship to imperialism is David S. Landes, Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). For a brief overview, see Hubert Bonin, "The Case of the French Banks," in International Banking 1870–1914, Rondo Cameron and V. I. Bovykin, eds. (New York, 1991), 72–89.
¹⁷ Bazant, Historia de la deuda, 105; Caron, Economic History of France, 41, 42, 53; Rondo Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914 (1961; rpt. edn., New York, 1975), 190–93.
¹⁸ Bazant, Historia de la deuda, 93–96.
¹⁹ Clipping [Frankfurter Tagenblatt?], October 24, 1904, in Ausländisches Amt 1740, Deutsches Zentralarchiv, Potsdam (hereafter, DZP), Germany. According to the Nouvelliste de la Bourse of October 18, 1899, in the Archivo de la Embajada Mexicana en Francia (hereafter, AEMF), legajo 31, expediente 4, no. 50, in the Archivo Histórico Diplomático Mexicano (hereafter, AHDM), the French government paid off 5,915,876 francs for 886,236 obligations in 1868, leaving only some 40,000 bonds outstanding. Edwin Borchard and William H. Wynne, State Insolvency and Foreign Bondholders (1951; rpt. edn., New York, 1983), 30.
²⁰ Daniel Cosío Villegas, ed., Historia moderna de Mexico (Mexico City, 1955–74), 6: 609–84; and Nouvelliste de la Bourse, October 18, 1899.
²¹ Théophile Delcassé to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Paris, January 4, 1901, Correspondance Politique: Mexique, Finance Publique (hereafter, CPMxFP), vol. 25, Archives de la Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (hereafter, MAE), Paris.
²² Carlos Marichal, "El Banco Nacional de México y el manejo de la deuda publica: Análysis preliminar de la crisis financiera de 1884–1885," in Ludlow and Riquer, Los negocios y las ganancias de la colonia. Lorenzo Meyer, Su Majestad Británica contra la Revolución Mexicana, 1900–1950: El fin de un imperio informal (Mexico City, 1991), 56, notes that in 1888 "the chapter on the British debt closed."
²³ See Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820–1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Steven C. Topik, "Brazil's Bourgeois Revolution," The Americas 48 (October 1991): 245–71.
²⁴ Noetzlin was actually Swiss, but his career had been based in France, where he became one of the country's most prominent bankers. Jean Favre, Le capital française au service de l'étranger: La Banque de Paris et Pays Bas et son oeuvre anti-nationale (Paris, 1917), 19; Revue des deux monde (July 15, 1888): 478.
²⁵ United States, Department of State, The Foreign Relations of the United States for the Year 1881 (1881), 801; Bazant, Historia de la deuda, 123, 125. For more on the founding of the Banco Nacional, see Leonor Ludlow, "La construccíon de un banco: El Banco Nacional de México (1881–1884)," in Ludlow and Carlos Marichal, eds., Banco y poder en México (1800–1925) (Mexico City, 1986), 299–345. British-Mexican relations were also hurt by a boundary dispute between Yucatan and British Honduras and British sales of arms to rebel cruzob Maya Indians. See Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, 1876–1915 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 46.
²⁶ Quoted in Donald M. Coerver, "The Mexican Department of Fomento during the Boom Years, 1880–1884," Inter-American Economic Affairs 31 (Autumn 1977): 43. For a fine, detailed analysis of the 1884–1885 conjuncture in Mexico, see Marichal, "El manejo de la deuda pública," 419–44; and for early banking in Mexico, Leonor Ludlow, "La primera etapa de formación bancaria (1864–1897)," in Ludlow and Riquer, Los negocios y las ganancias de la colonia, 330–62.
²⁷ Mexico, La hacienda atraves informes presidenciales, 232, from speech of September 16, 1890.
²⁸ Porfirio Díaz to General Luís Mier y Teran, Oaxaca, December 9, 1884, P. Díaz to Eduardo Herrera, Mexico City, December 24, 1884, P. Díaz to Octavio Rosado, Mexico City, December 5, 1884, copiador, Archivio Porfirio Díaz, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City; Kenneth Cott, "Porfirian Investment Policies, 1876–1910" (PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1978), 117, 245.
²⁹ Roderic Ai Camp, Political Recruitment across Two Centuries: Mexico, 1884–1991 (Austin, Tex., 1995), 62, shows that 81 percent of the leaders in Díaz's government in both the 1876–1880 and the 1904–1910 administrations had fought against the French.
³⁰ Díaz wrote to Eduardo Herrera, December 24, 1884, copiador, Archivo Porfirio Díaz, that he had received three loan offers from U.S. and European "speculation houses," but he wouldn't accept any "that would injure the susceptibility of the country, hurting its dignity and national decorum."
³¹ Cott, "Porfirian Investment Policies, 1876–1910," 250.
³² Council of the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, Annual Report 1888 (London, 1888), 113.
³³ Ministère de Finance to Gabriel Hanotaux, Paris, August 7, 1896, Benoit to Hanotaux, Mexico, June 13, 1897, CPMxFP, vol. 1; Delcassé to Camille Blondel, Paris, May 12, 1905, A. Dumaine to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Mexico, March 8, 1908, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
³⁴ Dumaine to S. Pinchon, Mexico City, July 28, 1908, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
³⁵ Matias Romero to Ignacio Mariscal, Washington, January 17 and February 3, 1890, in Archivo de la Embajada de México en los Estados Unidos de América (hereafter, AEMEUA), legajo 392, no. 63, and legajo 393, no. 159; R. Fernandez to Mariscal, January 23, 1888, legajo 18, expediente 1, B. 15; Baz to Mariscal, August 11, 1900, legajo 32, duplicado 107 pares AHDM. J. Petiteville to Hanotaux, Mexico, April 10, 1895, CPMxFP, vol. 1, and Ministre de Finance to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, February 6, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE; Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna, 6: 696.
³⁶ Boulard Pouqueville to Hanotaux, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Mexico, April 10, 1895, CPMxFP, vol. 1; Ministre de Finance to Delcassé, Paris, February 6, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE. C. P. Huntington to R. B. Gorsuch, Mexico City, June 6, 1893, in Collis P. Huntington Archive, San Marino, California, series 2, reel 34. On the scandal, see Jean Bouvier, Les deux scandales de Panama (Paris, 1964).
³⁷ Benoit to Hanotaux, Mexico, August 5, 1896, and June 13, 1897, CPMxFP, vol. 1; Ministre de Finance to Hanotaux, Paris, February 6, 1899, June 10, 1899; French Ambassador to Germany to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Berlin, March 1, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2; Pouqueville to Hanotaux, Mexico, October 8, 1900, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
³⁸ Limantour told the French ambassador to Mexico: "I have always resisted the attempts of the United States government which wants to convince us to modify our financial system relative to banks so that it resembles the American model. I have tried, on the contrary, to distance our practices as far as possible from those adopted by our neighbors in order to make the establishment of American banks in Mexico more difficult. Unfortunately, the wealth of our soil tempts the capitalists of the United States and they will not refrain from any sacrifice to conquer it." Blondel to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Mexico City, August 5, 1909, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
³⁹ Baz to Mariscal, Paris, October 3, 1899, and Mariscal to Baz, Mexico City, June 28, 1899, AEMF, legajo 31, exp. 4, no. 42, and legajo 31, exp. 4, no. 169. This was a true wedding of finance and diplomacy, as the wife of Julio Limantour was Elena Mariscal, daughter of Ignacio Mariscal, Minister of Foreign Relations.
⁴⁰ This seems to have been a common practice. It was probably not a coincidence that the Banco Nacional, a French-owned bank, received its concession right after France recognized Mexico. There is reason to believe that part of the settlement of the British debt was a concession to the Banco de Londres y México. See Leonor Ludlow, "La formación de las bancas provinciales en el Porfiriato y la fundación del Banco Central Mexicano," in Ludlow and Riquer, Los negocios y las ganancias de la colonia. When Bleichröder and Deutsche Bank issued the 1898 loan, they received the concession to the Banco Central, and James Speyer received a concession for the Banco de Comercio y Industria after issuing the large 1904 loan.
⁴¹ Pouqueville to Hanotaux, Mexico City, August 5, 1896, and October 4, 1896, CPMxFP, vol. 1, MAE; Pouqueville to Delcassé, Mexico City, January 3, 1899, February 28, 1899; French Consul, Frankfurt, to Delcassé, Frankfurt, February 19, 1899; French Ambassador to Germany to Delcassé, Berlin, July 5, 1899; Benoit, Chargé d'Affaires, to Delcassé, Mexico, April 2, 1899, and July 25, 1899; French Ambassador to Germany to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Berlin, March 1, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 1. José Yves Limantour, Apuntes sobre mi vida política (Mexico City, 1965), 122. Baz to Mariscal, Paris, May 19, 1899, AEMF, legajo 21, exp. 4, B. 152, and May 31, 1899, leg. 21, exp. 4, B. 157, AHDM.
⁴² Ministre de Finance to Delcassé, Paris, February 10, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁴³ Baz to Mariscal, Paris, May 19, 1899, AEMF, legajo 31, exp. 4, no. 152, AHDM.
⁴⁴ Baz to Mariscal, Paris, May 1899, AEMF, legajo 31, exp. 4, no. 157, AHDM.
⁴⁵ When the 1899 loan was announced with Bleichröder, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Bank, and the Banco Nacional as its underwriters, France's minister of finance was surprised. He asked the minister of foreign affairs if he had attempted to put Limantour in contact with his finance ministry. Ministre de Finance to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, June 10, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁴⁶ For more on the politics of spectacle, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (New York, 1994); and Jean Duvignaud, Spectacle et société (Paris, 1970).
⁴⁷ Michael B. Palmer, Des petits journaux aux grandes agences: Naissance du journalisme moderne, 1863–1914 (Paris, 1983), 186, 187; AHDM, France, legajo 32, exp. 2, 103, Paris, March 2, 1900, notes that Deputy Stanislas Ferrand was a representative of the "petits bleus" holders. Marjorie H. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, Calif., 1999), notes: "the centralized monopolistic structure of the news and advertising business in France madeit remarkably vulnerable to infiltration by foreign or domestic agents who sought to destabilize public opinion or manipulate the market."
⁴⁸ Ministre de Finance to Delcassé, Paris, February 6, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE; Baz to Mariscal, Paris, March 2, 1900, legajo 32, exp. 2, Copia 103, and October 17, 1899, legajo 31, exp. 4, AHDM; Jacques Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisième République, Vol. 3: La république triomphante, 1893–1906 (Paris, 1955), 162, 163, 173; Eugen Weber, France fin de siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 113, 114, 118, 122, 123; Auguste Soulier, L'instabilité ministérielle sous la Troisiéme République (Paris, 1939), 76 and appendix; Palmer, Des petits journaux, 130, 186, 187; Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present (New York, 1995), 258.
⁴⁹ Chastenet, La république triomphante, 162, 163. Baz reported to Mariscal, Paris, June 9, 1899, AEMF, legajo 31, exp. 161, no. 161, AHDM, that there had been an assassination attempt against Loubet and then a large demonstration against the president.
⁵⁰ Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894–1915 (New York, 1991), 116.
⁵¹ Nancy Fitch, "Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France," AHR 97 (February 1992): 84.
⁵² Jean Bouvier, René Girault, and Jacques Thobie, L'impérialisme à la française (Paris, 1986), 276: "Because French governments maintained a policy of colonial conquest after the defeat of 1870, they were sensitive to political morale, religious considerations and accessories to the machinations of speculators."
⁵³ Alf Andrew Heggoy, The African Policies of Gabriel Hanotaux, 1894–1898 (Athens, Ga., 1972), 3. Also see Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy, 1898–1905 (New York, 1968); and Charles W. Porter, The Career of Théophile Delcassé (1936; rpt. edn., Westport, Conn., 1975).
⁵⁴ James J. Cooke, New French Imperialism, 1880–1910: The Third Republic and Colonial Expansion (Hamden, Conn., 1973), 10, 11, 19, 44, 52, 68, 158; Gabriel Hanotaux, Mon temps, 3 vols. (Paris, 1933), 2: 28–32.
⁵⁵ Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa (Thetford, Norfolk, 1974), 81–85; Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900–1945, Till Gottheiner, trans. (New York, 1971), 118; Gabriel Hanotaux, Fachoda (Paris, 1909), 80, 97–99, 103–04.
⁵⁶ Quoted in Vincent Carosso and Richard Sylla, "U.S. Banks in International Finance," in Cameron and Bovykin, International Banking, 1870–1914, 60.
⁵⁷ Benoit to Delcassé, Mexico, July 26, 1899, November 20, 1899, Benoit to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Mexico, March 5, 1900; French Consul to New York to Delcassé, New York, April 20, 1900, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁵⁸ Baz reported to Mariscal, Paris, August 22, 1900, AEMF, legajo 32, no. 22, AHDM, that the director of the Agence Journier had offered his services, but Baz had turned him down: "I did not have the funds to spend on publicity. My opinion is that this expenditure is useless in the sections of [International] Relations and would perhaps be more appropriate for Finance [secretariat]."
⁵⁹ Ministre de Finance to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, February 6, 1899, and June 10, 1899; Société Civil pour le Sauve-Garde des Doits . . . to the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, January 26, 1898; Delcassé to Ministre de Finance, Paris, April 27, 1901, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE; Freiherr von Wangenheim to von Bülow, Mexico, December 14, 1906, Ausländisches Amt 1741, DZP. On Mexico's publicity campaigns, see Limantour, Apuntes, 102; La nouvelliste de la Bourse, October 17, 1899, AEMF, Paris, October 18, 1899, legajo 31, exp. 4, no. 50, AHDM.
⁶⁰ Pouqueville to Delcassé, Mexico, February 28, 1899, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁶¹ Blondel to Delcassé, Mexico, August 31, 1901, and January 27, 1902, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
⁶² Bouvier, Gerault, and Thobie, L'impérialisme à la française, 277.
⁶³ Katz, Secret War, 60, argues that German arms manufacturers could not win a dominant position in Mexico because of the close links of some científicos with French financiers. This study brings into question the influence of French financiers in Mexico.
⁶⁴ Blondel to Delcassé, Mexico, January 27, 1902; J. Caillowy, Ministre de Finance, to Delcassé, Paris, March 12, 1902, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
⁶⁵ Caillowy to Delcassé, Paris, March 12, 1902, and M. Bompard to M. Benc, Directeur de Mouvement Général des Fonds, Ministre de Finance, Paris, October 10, 1901, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
⁶⁶ Caillowy to Delcassé, Paris, April 24, 1901, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁶⁷ Blondel, Mexico, March 9, 1901, CPMxFP, vol. 2, MAE.
⁶⁸ Katz, Secret War, 60, 61, argued that "the most important cause, however, for the inability of the German arms manufacturers to gain a dominant position in Mexico was the close links between some of the científicos and the French financiers." The German foreign minister believed that Limantour preferred French manufacturers.
⁶⁹ Blondel to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Mexico, December 2, 1902, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE; Limantour, Apuntes, 106.
⁷⁰ Blondel to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Mexico, December 2, 1902, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
⁷¹ Wells and Joseph, Summer of Discontent, 59–60.
⁷² Blondel to Directeur des Consulats et des Affaires Commerciales, Mexico, December 2, 1902, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE; Limantour, Apuntes, 109, 112, 124, 132, 135.
⁷³ Wangenheim to von Bülow, Mexico, September 27, 1904, and Sternberg to von Bülow, Mexico, October 20, 1904, Reichsamt des Innern 4383, DZP.
⁷⁴ Blondel to Delcassé, October 18, 1904, CPMxFP, vol. 25, MAE.
⁷⁵ Blondel to Delcassé, October 18, 1904.
⁷⁶ Blondel to Delcassé, October 18, 1904.
⁷⁷ Blondel to Delcassé, October 18, 1904.
⁷⁸ Wangenheim to von Bülow, Mexico, October 29, 1904, Reichsamt des Innern 4383, DZP.
⁷⁹ James Speyer before the U.S. Senate in 1932 discussed a loan: "if we had not had the thought that we could make some money it is not likely that we would have been interested." Congratulated by a senator for his frankness, Speyer answered, "we are businessmen." Sale of Foreign Bonds or Securities in the United States: Hearings before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 72d Congress, 1st session, pt. 2, January 4, 5, 6, 7, 1932 (Washington, D.C., 1932), 615–16.
⁸⁰ Sale of Foreign Bonds or Securities in the United States, 609, 611; Vincent P. Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 11, 26, reports that before the rise of the Rothschilds, between 1770 and 1800, the Speyers were the richest Jewish bankers in Frankfurt. Gene Z. Hanrahan, The Bad Yankee, El Peligro Yankee: American Entrepreneurs and Financiers in Mexico, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 1: 113, 122, 123; Paul H. Emden, Money Powers of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1938), 274–77.
⁸¹ Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge, 1985).
⁸² Rakowitz to von Bülow, Mexico, December 21, 1907, Ausländisches Amt 1747, DZP; Carlos Díaz Dufoo, Limantour (Mexico City, 1910), 133; Luís Nicolau D'Olwer, "Las inversiones extranjeras," in Villegas, Historia moderna de Mexico, 2: 1068–70. Werner Hegeman, Mexico' Übergang zur Gold Wahrung (Stuttgart, 1908), 106; Lorena Parlee, "Porfirio Díaz, Railroads and Development in Northern Mexico: A Study of Government Policy toward the Central and National Railroads, 1876–1910" (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1981), 243–46; Hanrahan, Bad Yankee, 1: 123.
⁸³ Clipping in Ausländisches Amt, 1740 DZP. Also, in same file, a clipping from the Monthly Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American Republics notes that "for the first time an important foreign loan is made payable in dollars."
⁸⁴ Lefaivre to Pinchon, Mexico, May 12, 1911, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE. McNeely, Railroads of Mexico, 18.
⁸⁵ Greville to Lansdowne, Mexico, December 6, 1904, Foreign Office 204 308, Foreign Office Archive, Kew, London. Von Duering wrote to von Bülow, Mexico, November 2, 1904 (Ausländisches Amt 1740, DZP): "Through timely and forward-looking action, the United States has permanently won the financial dependence of the Mexican Republic. When the monetary reform makes the fineness [gold content] of the ten and twenty-peso gold pieces the same as five and ten [dollars], the dependencies and colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines will offer more than enough business and expansion opportunities for the home industry and for North American commerce and immigration."
⁸⁶ Director of the Deutsche Bank to Wangenheim, Berlin, July 19, 1906, Ausländisches Amt 1746, DZP.
⁸⁷ Blondel to Delcassé, Mexico, April 10, 1905, and Directeur de la Banque Française pour le Commerce et l'Industrie to Directeur des Affaires Politiques, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, March 27, 1905, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
⁸⁸ Carosso, Investment Banking, 84. This is fitting since, according to the New York Times (November 1, 1941): 15, the Speyer house had been the first to introduce U.S. government bonds to the European market.
⁸⁹ Ministre de Finance to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, April 10, 1905, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
⁹⁰ Rakowitz to von Bülow, Mexico, December 1, 1910, Brestlow to von Bülow, Mexico, October 2, 1906, and Greigueil to von Bülow, n.d., Ausländisches Amt 1746, DZP. Ministre de Finance to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, December 30, 1910, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
⁹¹ Greigueil to Pinchon, Mexico, March 19, 1909; Lefaivre to Pinchon, Mexico, August 31, 1909, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE; Bouvier, Girault, and Thobie, L'impérialisme à la française, 331.
⁹² Lefaivre to Pinchon, Mexico, May 12, 1911, CPMxFP, vol. 26, MAE.
⁹³ Speyer testimony, Sale of Foreign Bonds or Securities in the United States, 615.
⁹⁴ Hanrahan, Bad Yankee, 1: 123.
⁹⁵ Mix to Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Mexico, June 17, 1910, Correspondance Politique: Mexique, Politique Interne, vol. 1, MAE.

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