Juárez refused to hand over Emperor Maximilian's body after the 1867 execution, and his widow's fortune went home to Belgium with her under her brother's control

Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria took the Mexican crown in 1864 with French troops behind him. His wife Charlotte, daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, brought a dowry that paid for their castle of Miramare near Trieste. The French withdrew in 1866. Republican troops captured Maximilian, and he was shot at Querétaro on 19 June 1867. On 3 July Austria's minister in Washington, Count Wydenbruck, wrote to Secretary of State William Seward that "Juarez refuses to deliver up the body". The body was embalmed in Mexico, the procedure went wrong, and it had to be repeated. It was carried home on the frigate Novara and placed in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna on 18 January 1868, about seven months after the execution. His mother, Archduchess Sophie, said the disfigured corpse was not her son. Charlotte had gone to Europe in 1866 to seek help and was living in seclusion at Miramare because of her mental state. In July 1867 Leopold II sent Queen Marie-Henriette and Baron Adrien Goffinet to bring her back to Belgium. The King Baudouin Foundation, which owns Goffinet's diary, notes that some people did not want her to leave with her considerable fortune. Leopold bought Bouchout castle near Brussels for her in 1869. She lived there for 58 years and died on 19 January 1927. Historian Dominique Paoli writes that Leopold II took back part of her inheritance and used it as collateral for his Congo venture.