In July 1866, a distraught woman arrived in Rome demanding an audience with Pope Pius IX. She was Charlotte of Belgium, Empress of Mexico, and she was convinced that assassins were closing in on her from every direction. She refused to drink anything except water carried from the Trevi Fountain, certain that any other water would be poisoned. When the Pope finally received her, she sobbed uncontrollably and refused to leave his chambers, insisting that killers waited for her outside the walls.
With no other option, the Pope allowed her to spend the night in the Papal library, making her the first woman ever to sleep inside the Vatican. The news of her condition reached her brother, who brought her back to Miramare Castle and summoned a psychiatrist. The diagnosis was insanity accompanied by obsessive delusions of persecution. Charlotte had not always been this way.
Born on June 7, 1840, she was the daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, who named her after his late first wife, Princess Charlotte of Wales. That namesake had been destined to become queen instead of Queen Victoria, but her death in childbirth had changed the course of British history. From early childhood, Charlotte of Belgium was lively and outspoken, spending much of her time at Windsor Castle with her cousin Victoria. But her happy childhood ended at the age of ten when her mother died.
Her father, overcome by grief, fled from his children and nearly stopped communicating with them entirely. The cheerful little girl gradually turned into a withdrawn teenager, finding comfort in books and education. By the age of thirteen, her favorite author was Plutarch, and she considered Ovid childish. As the daughter of a king, Charlotte became one of the most desirable brides in Europe, but she was not willing to marry without love.
She rejected a proposal from King Pedro V of Portugal, a match pushed by Queen Victoria and her own father. Instead, her heart was captured by Archduke Maximilian of Austria, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I. After their first meeting in May 1856, she announced to everyone, “He is the man I will marry. ” Maximilian was only the emperor’s younger brother, a spare heir destined for a secondary role, yet Charlotte became convinced that greatness awaited them together.
They married on July 27, 1857. Their marriage brought immediate tensions within the Habsburg family. Maximilian’s mother, Archduchess Sophie, had tormented Empress Elisabeth, known as Sisi, with strict etiquette and constant criticism. Yet Sophie took an immediate liking to Charlotte, writing in her diary, “I feel as if I had always loved her.
” Sisi, already devastated by the death of her infant daughter, redirected her resentment onto Charlotte, calling her a pretentious little Coburg. The relationship between the two women dissolved into open warfare, worsened when Sisi’s dog killed a dog that Queen Victoria had given to Charlotte. More painful still was Maximilian himself. He proved an unfaithful husband and acquired numerous mistresses, likely contracting a venereal disease from one of them, which may have been why the couple never had children.
Charlotte’s dream of a fairytale prince ended in bitter disappointment, but she resolved to remain with him, if not as a passionate lover, then as a partner. In September 1857, Maximilian was appointed governor of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, the Italian territories still under Habsburg control. The couple arrived full of enthusiasm, built the beautiful Miramare Castle, and tried to introduce liberal reforms. But the Italians saw them as foreign occupiers.
Within two years, Lombardy was reclaimed by the Italian liberation movement, and Maximilian was abruptly removed from office by his own brother. The humiliation was crushing for both his ego and Charlotte’s ambitions. It was at this moment of ruin that Napoleon III of France made his tempting offer. The offer concerned Mexico.
Since gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico had suffered through forty different governments in its first twenty-four years as a nation, with General Santa Anna serving as president eleven times. Conservatives and liberals fought a permanent war. When Mexico stopped paying its foreign debts, France sent in troops, and Napoleon III decided to establish a puppet monarchy loyal to France. His choice fell on the humiliated and idle Maximilian.
Max understood that the arrangement smelled suspicious and hesitated, but Charlotte was delighted. Becoming an empress would finally place her on equal footing with the sister-in-law she disliked. Napoleon produced a delegation of supposed Mexicans who begged Maximilian to lead them and showed him false voting results claiming the Mexican people welcomed him with open arms. Persuaded, Maximilian officially became Emperor of Mexico on April 10, 1864, and Charlotte became Empress Carlota.
Their dreams collapsed on the first day of their arrival, May 13, 1864. The palace where they were meant to live was practically in ruins, and Maximilian spent his first night sleeping on a billiard table. They had arrived in the middle of a civil war and a war of liberation. Thirty thousand French soldiers were scattered across a country four times the size of France and could not control a population determined to reject foreign invaders.
Maximilian genuinely tried to govern, issuing laws and attempting to reconcile the warring liberal and conservative parties. But during his first year he made serious mistakes. He spent the last money in the treasury renovating the castle. He also adopted the grandsons of Mexico’s first emperor, believing this would connect him to the existing royal dynasty.
Charlotte strongly opposed this, especially when Maximilian sent her to take the two-year-old Agustin from his living and loving mother, who was then deported. The scandal further destroyed their already fragile popularity. Maximilian then abandoned liberalism in favor of dictatorship, ordering the mass execution of rebels and putting several hundred people to death without trial. It was the final blow to his reign.
By January 1866, Napoleon III, under growing public pressure, decided to withdraw his troops from Mexico. Without the French army, Maximilian and Charlotte could not hope to remain on the throne. In desperation, Charlotte sailed to Europe and arrived in Paris with twenty pages of arguments explaining why France must continue its support. Napoleon was no longer willing to sacrifice his own position to save the Mexican monarchy.
Charlotte felt horribly betrayed; everything she had been promised had turned out to be a lie, and her world shattered. She refused to beg her own family for help and turned instead to the Pope, believing that as Catholic monarchs she and Maximilian could count on papal support. But on the way to Rome, her condition deteriorated. She saw Napoleon’s agents everywhere and became convinced he wanted her dead.
When her carriage passed a farmer on the road, she began screaming that he was an assassin and ordered the driver to go faster. After her breakdown in the Vatican, Charlotte was brought back to Miramare Castle, where she was diagnosed with insanity and delusions of persecution. Rumors spread that Napoleon had deliberately driven her mad or that Mexican shamans had used potions to destroy her mind. She experienced only brief moments of clarity, locked away in a castle with no real hope of proper treatment.
When Maximilian learned of her condition and saw his empire collapsing, he prepared to return to Europe, but his Mexican supporters pressured him to stay, insisting that abandoning the throne would be shameful. Maximilian announced he would remain. Taking personal command of the army, he no longer called himself emperor, but simply a commander. With only nine thousand men, he held out against a rebel army of forty thousand for seventy-one days until one of his own generals betrayed him and he was taken prisoner.
His supporters offered to help him escape, but he refused to flee alone and abandon his companions. He also refused to shave his famous beard, believing that being caught disguised and clean-shaven would look unmanly. Franz Joseph refused to believe the Mexicans would dare execute a member of the House of Habsburg. The other royal families of Europe sent letters demanding Maximilian’s release.
Nevertheless, he was executed at 6:40 in the morning on June 19, 1867, just seventeen days before his thirty-fifth birthday. Charlotte’s family kept the news from her, fearing it would worsen her condition. Six months later, during one of her brief moments of clarity, she learned that her husband had been killed. She was devastated and announced that she now considered herself dead, saying she would wait for him for sixty years.
That prophecy came true. She outlived him by exactly sixty years, trapped in a madness that only deepened with time. Franz Joseph kept her in isolation, and none of the Habsburg family visited her. Eventually her brother Leopold brought her back to Belgium, though his interest lay more in the inheritance she was entitled to as Maximilian’s widow than in her wellbeing.
She was at least provided with proper care. Years later, Empress Sisi finally visited Charlotte, though their meeting was their first and last, motivated perhaps by compassion, curiosity, or malice. Elizabeth described what she saw as an abyss filled with horror. Charlotte outlived Elizabeth, Franz Joseph, Napoleon III, and even her own brother.
She died in 1927 at the age of eighty-six. Charlotte of Belgium went down in history as Mad Carlotta, the unfortunate Empress of Mexico, whose story still leaves unanswered the question of what truly destroyed her mind: the tragedy of her childhood, the betrayals she endured, the collapse of her empire, or something darker that crept in from the shadows of Mexico.
