May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Napoleon’s Last Word, and the World’s Most Misunderstood Holiday

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On this date in 1821, Napoleon died on a rock in the Atlantic. In 1862, Mexico won a battle that became a holiday in a country that isn’t Mexico. And somewhere, right now, someone is eating a burrito in celebration of a military engagement they cannot name.

The Day

May 5th is Cinco de Mayo, and it is not Mexican Independence Day. This is worth stating clearly because approximately 62% of Americans surveyed by the National Today research firm in 2022 believed it was. Mexican Independence Day is September 16th. Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla (1862), in which a significantly outnumbered Mexican army defeated a French expeditionary force that had not lost a battle in 50 years. It is a minor civic holiday in Mexico — mostly observed in the state of Puebla — and a major commercial holiday in the United States, where it generates an estimated $600 million in beer sales annually.

The date also marks the death of Napoleon Bonaparte (1821), who expired at Longwood House on the island of Saint Helena at the age of 51. The official cause was stomach cancer, though arsenic poisoning theories have persisted since hair samples analyzed in 2001 showed elevated arsenic levels. Whether the arsenic came from deliberate poisoning, contaminated wine, or the green wallpaper in his bedroom (which contained copper arsenate pigment, common in the period) remains a genuine historiographical debate.

Also Today

• Cinco de Mayo (1862 —) — The full story deserves its own section below. But the short version: Mexico won a battle, the French came back the next year and won the war anyway, and 150 years later the battle became the third-largest beer-drinking occasion in the United States after the Super Bowl and St. Patrick’s Day.
• Napoleon’s death (1821) — His last words are disputed. The commonly cited version is “France, armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine” — France, army, head of the army, Joséphine. His valet reported the final coherent word as simply “Joséphine.” His physician recorded nothing particularly profound.
• Liberation Day (Denmark, Netherlands) — Both nations celebrate May 5 as the anniversary of their liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945. In the Netherlands, Liberation Day (Bevrijdingsdag) alternates between a national holiday with a day off (every five years, on round anniversaries) and a regular observance. The celebration includes music festivals across 14 cities, each built around the theme of freedom.
• Kodomo no Hi — Children’s Day (Japan) — Originally Tango no Sekku (Boys’ Day), redesignated as Children’s Day in 1948. Families fly koinobori (carp-shaped windsocks) — one for each child — from poles outside their homes. The carp represents perseverance because of the Chinese legend that a carp swimming upstream and leaping a waterfall transforms into a dragon. Display kabuto (samurai helmets) and eat kashiwa-mochi (rice cakes wrapped in oak leaves, symbolizing prosperity across generations because oak leaves don’t fall until new growth replaces them).
• Cartoonists Day — Commemorating the first newspaper comic strip, Hogan’s Alley by Richard F. Outcault, which debuted in the New York World on May 5, 1895. The strip’s main character, the Yellow Kid, helped spark the phrase “yellow journalism” — though the connection is more complicated than most accounts suggest.
• Karl Marx born (1818) — In Trier, Prussia. Whatever your opinion of his legacy, the factual record is that his work remains the most cited in the social sciences, his face appears on currency he would have found ideologically objectionable, and his grave in Highgate Cemetery, London, charges £6 admission — an irony that writes its own commentary.
• May 7

The Backstory: How a Minor Mexican Battle Became an American Drinking Holiday

The Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) is genuinely remarkable as a military engagement, which makes it all the more ironic that its celebration has been almost entirely divorced from its content.

The context: Mexico was in financial ruin after the Reform War. President Benito Juárez declared a two-year moratorium on foreign debt payments. Britain, Spain, and France sent forces to collect. Britain and Spain negotiated and withdrew. France — under Napoleon III, who had ambitions to establish a French-aligned empire in the Americas — did not.

The French force that marched on Puebla was 6,000 strong, including the Foreign Legion and Zouave regiments. They had not been defeated in a major engagement since Waterloo. The Mexican force under General Ignacio Zaragoza numbered roughly 4,500 and was significantly less equipped. The Mexicans won. The French lost approximately 500 soldiers to Mexico’s 83.

It did not end the war. France returned the following year with 30,000 troops, captured Mexico City, and installed Maximilian I as Emperor. He lasted three years before being captured and executed by firing squad. The French intervention ultimately failed, but the Battle of Puebla was not the reason — it was a symbolic moment in a war Mexico won through persistence rather than a single decisive victory.

The holiday’s migration to the United States is a 20th-century story. Mexican-American communities in California began celebrating it in the 1960s as an expression of ethnic pride during the Chicano movement. Beer companies recognized the commercial potential by the 1980s. By the 2000s, Cinco de Mayo had become the largest Hispanic-themed commercial event in the United States — celebrated more widely in Los Angeles and Chicago than in most of Mexico.

The cultural dynamics are worth noting without editorializing too heavily: a holiday commemorating a Mexican military victory against colonial intervention has been substantially transformed into a marketing vehicle for American beer companies. The Puebla Chamber of Commerce has, on multiple occasions, expressed bafflement at the American version of the celebration.

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May 5: A Mexican battle, a French emperor’s nephew’s hubris, Napoleon’s death, Japanese carp flags, and the world’s most misunderstood drinking holiday.

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Sources: Henderson, Timothy J. “A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States” (2007). McLynn, Frank. “Napoleon: A Biography” (1997). Sommerville, Donald. “World War II Day by Day” (2004). National Today survey data (2022).

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