Naissance of the Kingdom

    
Fig. 6: Bavaria (1804)

It was the activities of France – under the territories-hungry leadership of Napoleon – that sparked the creation of the monarchy in Bavaria. Bavaria, allied with France upon the advice of Montgelas, fought on the side of the French in 1805, and benefited enormously from the 4th Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 6th December, 1805. In this Treaty, Bavaria not only received various Austrian holdings (including the Tyrol and Vorarlberg) and Augsburg, but also by the first article of the Treaty was to be given its first king, Maximilian I, formerly Prince-elector Maximilian IV Joseph.

In 1808, Maximilian I instituted “enlightened changes” in a constitution proclaimed on the 1st May, in which serfdom, exemptions and privileges before the law were abolished. All were now, on paper, equal before the law; all were now subject to taxation. The press was set “free”. A representative assembly was created (not intended as a replacement of the local diets) but it was never actually summoned.

In 1809, Austria again declared war on France, and Bavaria naturally took the side of France, with whom Maximilian was still in alliance. Swiftly, Austria attacked Bavaria with a troop of 170,000, but the Austrians were defeated by Napoleon’s forces in the Battle of Abensberg (Bavaria). Swiftly, though, the time was coming when Montgelas, Maximilian’s canny minister, foresaw that France would not withstand the forces arrayed against her. In 1813, Bavaria joined the Allies against France, and in the first Peace of Paris (1814), ended up ceding various territories (including the Tyrol and Voralberg back again) in exchange for other territories including the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine, and the promise that, if Bavaria’s claim to the Baden succession were ignored in favour of the Hochbergs, compensation would be made in the form of the Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine.

But this promise was not kept, and Bavaria received neither the Baden succession nor the Palatinate in the decisions made at the Congress of Aix (1818). In the same year, Montgelas was dismissed, largely as a result of his resistance to Ludwig, the crown prince of Bavaria’s decision to proclaim a liberal constitution, with parliament now to consist of two houses: one comprising the great landowners and crown nominees, the other comprising representatives of the towns, the small land-owners and the peasants. Its highly uneasy start settled into moderation, and a state of co-operation ensued between king and parliament.

Fig. 7: Ludwig I

Ludwig I succeeded his father as the second king of Bavaria, and came to be well known as a patron of education, the arts and sciences. It was he who moved the University of Landshut to Munich, but his expenditure on art and architecture led to frictions between him and parliament. When the Ultramontanes (Roman Catholics who held a particular philosophy that asserted the authority of the Pope over and above the authority of the local leader) came into power in parliament in 1837, the acts of oppression against non-Catholics in Bavaria caused increasing tensions – but Ludwig dismissed the leader of the Ultramontanes, not so much on behalf of non-Catholics, but because he resented their opposition to his proposal to naturalise his Irish mistress Lola Montez and elevate her to the position of Countess of Landsfeld! Lola Montez’s influence on Ludwig undoubtedly contributed to his declining popularity among his subjects. Riots broke out and Ludwig dissolved the parliament. A new minister, pro-Lola, was elected (but his cabinet was scathingly referred to as the Lolaministerium). Things continued to de-stabilise with more riots in Bavaria in the wake of the 1848 French Revolution, and Ludwig, in despair, abdicated.

    
Fig. 8: Lola Montez

(Lola herself fled first to the United States, then to Australia, where she performed her famous Spider Dance to the miners of the gold-rush in the 1850s. Initial success was followed by infamy when she lifted her skirts so high that she proved she was wearing no underwear. Her fortunes continued to fluctuate, and she ended by moving to New York, where she suffered a stroke and died of pneumonia, not quite 40 years of age.)