From Mexico Unexplained, February 10, 2019:
Sometime in the late 1820s a portly French pastry chef known to history as Remontel opened a bakery in the town of Tacubaya which was then on the outskirts of Mexico City. The locals enjoyed Monsieur Remontel’s cream puffs and other sugary baked goods, but the pastry chef endured constant harassment from Mexican officers who were stationed in the town. The taunting and name-calling escalated to threats of physical violence against Remontel and in 1832 his beautiful Parisian-inspired pastry shop was completely ransacked.
The angry French chef did not appeal to local authorities. He did not speak with those higher up in the Mexican military hierarchy. He didn’t even petition the French diplomatic corps stationed in Mexico City for help. Chef Remontel went directly to King Louis Philippe of France to ask for assistance. The French king proved sympathetic to the plight of his subject in that faraway land, so he appointed a small committee to investigate the chef’s claims. The king’s aides discovered many other abuses against French nationals in Mexico, including various lootings of French-owned businesses and even the execution of a French citizen accused of piracy. With claims of damages totaling into the millions of francs, the French monarch instructed his Prime Minister, Louis-Mathieu Molé, to demand that the Mexican government pay 600,000 pesos or 3 million French Francs as reparations. Of those 600,000 pesos, 60,000 of them would go to the Monsieur Remontel, the Tacubaya pastry chef who started this all. The chef’s shop was only worth about 1,000 pesos, and the Mexican government scoffed at such overblown monetary demands. Mexican president Anastasio Bustamante ignored all communications from France. The French responded with military force.
The first French intervention in Mexico is now known to history as the Pastry War. The conflict lasted from November of 1838 to March of 1839 and began with a massive naval blockade cutting off all of Mexico’s eastern ports. The French fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Charles Baudin stretched from the Yucatan to the Rio Grande. On November 27, 1838 the French began bombing the fort of San Juan de Ulúa located on a reef in the Gulf of Mexico overlooking the city of Veracruz, Mexico’s chief port on its eastern seaboard. The fortress was considered invulnerable to naval attacks and earned the nickname, “The Gibraltar of the Indies.”
However, the 186 obsolete and undermaintained guns and the 800 poorly-equipped and half-ill soldiers at San Juan de Ulúa were no match for the superior naval forces of the French. The fort fell the next day and the Mexican government formally declared war on France and ordered all French citizens out of Mexico. In an interesting twist of history, former army general and Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, was living on a ranch near the city of Veracruz at the time of the attack. The government in Mexico City called upon him and General Mariano Arista to lead 3,200 troops to fight the French at Veracruz. When he heard the news of the troops heading for the coast, the French fleet commander prepared to take the city of Veracruz with the intention of capturing General Santa Anna....
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March 9 was the 187th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty.