In May 1911, six months after the outbreak of the armed insurgency that sparked off the complex process that we now know as ‘The Mexican Revolution’, the 81-year-old Porfirio Díaz resigned the presidency of Mexico and sailed for France, where he died four years later. By 1911 he had served as president for no fewer than 31 years, first for a four-year term in 1876–80, after which he stood down, as the 1857 constitution required, but in favour of his nominee, and thereafter from 1884 without interruption for 27 years. His eventual departure from Mexico, although welcomed by disparate groups of opponents, including disaffected elite families such as that of Francisco I. Madero, who headed the 1910 rebellion and succeeded Díaz in the presidency until his assassination in 1913, was lamented by conservative interests, which had admired the capacity of ‘Don Porfirio’ to bring peace, order, and prosperity (at least for them) to a country whose first half-century or so of independent existence had been marred by the profound political turmoil which had reached its nadir in the 1858–60 War of the Reform, followed shortly thereafter by the French armed intervention in support of conservative interests, including, in 1864–67, an ultimately futile attempt to prop up the monarchical regime of Maximilian of Hapsburg. The departure of Díaz was applauded, however, by liberals (and genuine revolutionaries) at home and abroad who had coined the derisive term ‘Díazpotismo’ to describe his manipulation, as and when required, of the genuine liberalism enshrined in the 1857 constitution, not least to permit his frequent re-election to the presidency.

Like many, but by no means all, powerful Mexicans of the second half of the nineteenth century, Díaz built his political power upon a successful career in the army. Having enjoyed a close relationship with Benito Juárez in the war against emperor Maximilian and his French army, at the conclusion of which, in 1867, he had led the victorious liberal forces into Mexico City, Díaz first turned against Juárez in 1871, when the president sought re-election for a second term of office, thereby abrogating a key tenet of liberal ideology enshrined in the 1857 constitution. The sudden death of Juárez in mid-1872, and the succession as president of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, took the wind out of this protest.