Utilizing this contradiction, this tension, between word and image in his Kearsarge paintings as a basis for comparison, Manet may quite possibly have distanced his professed political views from those present in The Execution of Maximilian three years later. If Manet abandoned his beliefs in word with the pro-imperialist sentiment on his 1864 Kearsarge canvases, could he not also have exhibited the same propensity on his 1867 Maximilian canvas? He very well could have. We cannot rule out the possibility that past behavior can be a veritable portent of future action. And Maximilian, condemned to death in a strange land, under a strange sun, and by a company of strange Mexican insurgents, was a victim of this very principle: Emperor Napoleon’s repeated attempts, over and over again, to reclaim France’s past imperial glory. Manet’s depiction of this desire gone terribly wrong in Maximilian is, on close examination, not necessarily an anti-imperialist one: instead, as the Kearsarge paintings portend, there exists in the painting, as Georges Bataille notes, a distinct “indifference…without the least concern for the incident itself” (qtd. Brombert, 214). This “indifferent” quality about the execution is exceedingly apparent in, once again, its perspective: the focus is not on the murdered, but rather on a desultory executioner on the right. Maximilian here is visually distanced on canvas which in turn results in a psychological distancing of the prince in relation to every other element in the scene. The executioner on the right fails to acknowledge the spectacle unfolding to his left; he remains preoccupied, detached, and as utterly indifferent as the shining blue sky under which the execution occurs. This executioner, in fact, appears so indifferent to, and distanced from, Maximilian that he views the prince as almost expendable – if Maximilian is “standing up to the ultimate adversity with dignity,” as Brombert notes (Brombert, 217), the executioner does not care. Cocking his rifle for the next round of shots, for him, supersedes any merit the hapless prince may be displaying before his death. Here the executioner undermines the distant Maximilian, along with the set of six “almost amateurish” (Brombert 16) executioners; Maximilian in this instance does not even deserve a professional execution. These six men are so “amateurish,” and Maximilian so psychologically distanced and insignificant, that the six men do not even point their rifles in the direction of the executed. How can Maximilian be, as Brombert contends, worthy of “martyrdom” (Brombert, 217) if, to these executioners, he is unworthy of even being killed? The six executioners do not even properly see him in order to kill him; his presence is that negligible. And so Maximilian stands to die, his face, as John House observes, “treated particularly indistinctly” in the distance despite the “stunning presence” of the “other figures” (qtd. Brombert, 215), utterly undermined. The executioners’ guns succeed in visually pushing the prince farther and farther away into the distance, just as the sailboats push the Kearsarge farther away in The Kearsarge at Boulogne seascape. Manet negates Maximilian’s presence and the execution itself, in turn negating the injustice of the execution and portraying his “senile crew” (qtd. Brombert, 391) as almost justified in their lack of concern for the prince. Here Manet could quite possibly be treating Maximilian as expendable in a pro-imperialist fashion, distancing himself from his stated anti-imperialist political beliefs just as he distanced himself in his Kearsarge depictions. When comparing these works with his words, the true political views he maintained in reality are not readily apparent – nor, as Proust noted, very “clear” (Proust, 25).