This grisly photograph depicts the bullet-riddled shirt of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian I, who was appointed Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in 1864. Maximilian's puppet regime lasted only three years; when the French army withdrew from Mexico in 1867, he was captured, tried, and executed by the nationalist supporters of Benito Juarez. Aubert, a French photographer working in Mexico, photographed Maximilian's corpse and clothing, producing a sensational and somewhat gruesome record of the execution and the politically charged relics of the slain emperor.
