Once again, it's the French

I read an interesting piece some time back (which was actually a review of this book) that proposed that France is the United States' most mortal historical enemy - principally because of its underhanded machinations and moves while publicly calling us "friend". Lowell Ponte has more fuel for the fire of this assertion in a screed concerning the leftist roots of "May Day" and its appropriation for the purposes of forwarding amnesty - no, rather, the rights of full citizenship (without the responsibilities, it must be noted) - for currently illegal aliens:

The French Emperor Napoleon III dared to send troops to occupy Mexico only because the United States was preoccupied with its own War Between the States, a.k.a. our Civil War. When our war ended, we massed a huge American army on the Texas border with Mexico and informed the French Emperor that under the Monroe Doctrine we would not tolerate European control of Mexico.

Napoleon III beat a hasty retreat, leaving his installed 'liberal' Hapsburg puppet 'Emperor of Mexico' Maximilian I to be overthrown and executed by the locals in 1867. But drinking their beer each Cinco de Mayo, educated Mexicans bitterly remember that it was pressure from the United States that liberated their country from French colonial rule. The cultural residue of French influence in Mexico remains in many odd ways, e.g., the hired singers called Mariachis, whose name (despite frantic Mexican nationalist denials) was first used in 1852 and probably derives from the French word for marriage that arrived via the surreal 1838 French incursion known as 'the Pastry War.'

France could also be blamed for Mexico's loss of what is now the western United States. Napoleon I sold the U.S. the Louisiana Territory, which created a potential legal claim to a large, poorly-defined share of the wild West. Napoleon I also overthrew the government of Spain and put his own brother on the Spanish throne, which plunged Spain's colonies such as Mexico into political chaos. The resulting uprisings in Mexico ousted Spain and installed a domestic revolutionary government that could not control the centrifugal forces that broke apart Spain�s old North American empire in Mexico (as well as South America with the uprisings of Simon Bolivar and Jose San Martin).