Sixty Years of Solitude

The Life of Empress Charlotte of Mexico

By: Gustavo Vazquez-Lozano

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

At twenty-four, she was crowned Empress of Mexico. At twenty-six, she returned to Europe, dethroned and desperate. She would live sixty more years—in silence, in exile, in madness.

In 1864, Charlotte of Belgium and her husband, Maximilian of Habsburg, accepted the imperial crown of Mexico. Three years later, Maximilian was executed. Charlotte, once the most admired princess in Europe, returned to the continent in disgrace—and slowly vanished from history.

Sixty Years of Solitude is the first full biography of Charlotte ever published in English—and the first historical study, in any language, to chronicle what happened next: Charlotte’s long descent into isolation, her confinement in castles and sanatoriums, her strange letters and obsessions, her lucid moments, her hallucinations, and the imperial fortunes that others spent in her name. Drawing from newly uncovered diaries, letters, medical records, and diplomatic archives, Gustavo Vázquez-Lozano reconstructs a life hidden in plain sight.

Beyond biography, this is a story about madness and power, memory and erasure. It is also about the invisible thread that connects the fall of Maximilian’s Mexico to the rise of Leopold II’s bloody regime in the Congo—an empire born, in part, from Charlotte’s ruin.

Editorial reviews

Impressive! The figures of Maximiliano and Carlota are already tragic and romantic enough to guarantee a compelling read. However, Vázquez Lozano accomplishes something challenging: he writes a book about Carlota that sets itself apart from the many, perhaps hundreds of other works (novels, essays, plays, movies, etc.) that have been created about her. He does so by addressing a simple question: What happened to Carlota once Maximilan was shot, and the Mexican Empire vanished? While we knew she lost her mind and lived in Belgium with her family until her death, there is little else known. What was her life like during that time? Who was with her? Was she truly as crazy as history claims? What occurred during her moments of lucidity, which were many and very long? In a well-documented, agile, and captivating style, this book makes us realize, once again, that in history, no one is entirely good or entirely bad.
—GoodReads