The Pastry War, also known as the first French intervention in Mexico or the first Franco-Mexican war (1838–1839), began in November 1838 with the naval blockade of some Mexican ports and the capture of the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa in the port of Veracruz by French forces sent by King Louis Philippe I. It ended in March 1839 with a British-brokered peace. The intervention followed many claims by French nationals of losses due to unrest in Mexico. This would be the first of two French invasions of Mexico; a second, larger intervention would take place in the 1860s.

The Centralist Republic of Mexico, or in the anglophone scholarship, the Central Republic, officially the Mexican Republic, was a unitary political regime established in Mexico on 23 October 1835, under a new constitution known as the Siete Leyes after conservatives repealed the federalist Constitution of 1824 and ended the First Mexican Republic. It would ultimately last until 1846, when the Constitution of 1824 was restored at the beginning of the Mexican-American War.