| Sumario: | The main objective of this essay is to analyze the legislation affecting the press during the French Intervention and the Second Mexican Empire and establish their regulatory effects. These regulations are frequently ignored by the historiography. The article is limited to the origins, innovations, mechanisms and evolution of printing regulations during this period. As a whole, this allows the reader to observe the restrictive conception of press freedom held by the Mexican political class and their willingness, during the second half of the 19th Century, to turn to prohibitive, repressive, authoritarian and centralist legislation. The article also reveals the extent to which Imperial legislation and its logic of censorship were neither unprecedented nor sudden foreign impositions but instead the expressions of a long-lasting desire for government control over the press.
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