France invaded Mexico in December 1861, nominally to collect unpaid debts but with the deeper aim of installing a friendly monarchy, and its army was unexpectedly checked on 5 May 1862 at the Battle of Puebla, where a Mexican force of about 5,000 troops under Ignacio Zaragoza and Porfirio Diaz repelled some 6,000 French soldiers, a defeat still commemorated in Mexico as Cinco de Mayo. Reinforced French troops captured Mexico City the following year, on 10 June 1863, and Mexican conservative elites then invited the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who arrived with his wife Charlotte in the summer of 1864, to reign as Emperor Maximilian I over a new Second Mexican Empire. Republican forces loyal to the exiled president Benito Juarez fought on from the country's periphery and gained momentum after 1865, when the end of the American Civil War freed the United States to support them with material aid, and France, facing rising threats closer to home in Europe, withdrew its troops in 1866. Deprived of French military support, the empire collapsed within months, and Maximilian was captured and executed by firing squad on 19 June 1867, restoring Juarez's republican government and ending France's imperial ambitions in the Americas.
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