I, for one, welcome our new Austrian overlord. In all seriousness, though, we like the guy. He was a foreign invader so it was never gonna work out but the dude was alright. Here’s a list of things he did (or rather tried to since the country was at war and it was basically impossible to enforce anything):

1. Jackshit of what the conservatives wanted him to
2. Put a limit on working hours
3. Abolish child labour
4. Pardon most of the peonage debt and forbid sale of peons (so basically abolish slavery)
5. Abolish corporal punishment
6. Restore communal lands to indigenous people

Then he got executed and we had to wait about 50 years and go through a dictatorship to get all of that. He also just generally invested a lot into infrastructure.

Also, I was in Vienna last year, and this is a thing:

It wouldn’t exist if not for Maximilian’s brief run as Mexican emperor and I just think the world wouldn’t be the same without a burrito chain named Max & Benito.

Explanation: Almost immediately after the Reform War, wherein liberal forces in Mexico defeated an attempted conservative backlash against the overthrow of the prior conservative dictatorship, France, assisted by a motley group of European powers, itself attempted to invade Mexico and place a puppet king as ‘Emperor’ of Mexico.

Despite having just went through a nasty bloodletting, Mexico refused to take this laying down, and immediately took up the fight against the foreign invader. Curiously, the Emperor they appointed, Maximilian, was a fairly nice guy (as far as 19th century aristocrats go) who was given a whole elaborate kayfabe by the French coalition convincing him that Mexico wanted him as Emperor, rather than the truth that he was going to be installed as a foreign puppet over an unwilling population.

This happened concurrently with the US Civil War; after the US Civil War was finished, the US spent two years raising objections with the European coalition over diplomatic channels, and ‘very carefully’ losing vast amounts of small arms from American garrisons on the Mexican border, which then magically found their way into the hands of the Mexican Republican forces. Oops!

The Mexican Republican won their struggle, and the liberals, under Benito Juarez, would go on to implement their program over Mexico. Viva la Republica Mexicana!