Part 20

Whatever lustre the international position won by Maximilian I. might add to the ducal house, on Bavaria itself its effect during the next two centuries was more dubious. Maximillian's son, Ferdinand Maria (1651-1679), who was a minor when he succeeded, did much indeed to repair the wounds caused by the Thirty Years' War, encouraging agriculture and industries, and building or restoring numerous churches and monasteries. In 1669, moreover, he again called a meeting of the diet, which had been suspended since 1612. His good work, however, was largely undone by his son Maximilian II. Emmanuel (1679-1726), whose far-reaching ambition set him warring against the Turks and, on the side of France, in the great struggle of the Spanish succession. He shared in the defeat at Hochstadt on the 13th of August 1704; his dominions were temporarily partitioned between Austria and the elector palatine, and only restored to him, harried and exhausted, at the peace of Baden in 1714. Untaught by Maximilian Emmanuel's experience, his son, Charles Albert (1726-1745), devoted all his energies to increasing the European prestige and power of his house. The death of the emperor Charles VI. was his opportunity; he disputed the validity of the Pragmatic Sanction which secured the Habsburg succession to Maria Theresa, allied himself with France, conquered Upper Austria, was crowned king of Bohemia at Prague and, in 1742, emperor at Frankfort. The price he had to pay, however, was the occupation of Bavaria itself by Austrian troops; and, though the invasion of Bohemia in 1744 by Frederick II. of Prussia enabled him to return to Munich, at his death on the 20th of January 1745 it was left to his successor to make what terms he could for the recovery of his dominions. Maximilian III. Joseph (1745-1777), by the peace of Fussen signed on the 22nd of April 1745, obtained the restitution of his dominions in return for a formal acknowledgment of the Pragmatic Sanction. He was a man of enlightenment, did much to encourage agriculture, industries and the exploitation of the mineral wealth of the country, founded the Academy of Sciences at Munich, and abolished the Jesuit censorship of the press. At his death, without issue, on the 30th of December 1777, the Bavarian line of the Wittelsbachs became extinct, and the succession passed to Charles Theodore, the elector palatine. After a separation of four and a half centuries, the Palatinate, to which the duchies of Julich and Berg had been added, was thus reunited with Bavaria. So great an accession of strength to a neighbouring state, whose ambition she had so recently had just reason to fear, was intolerable to Austria, which laid claim to a number of lordships--forming one-third of the whole Bavarian inheritance--as lapsed fiefs of the Bohemian, Austrian, and imperial crowns. These were at once occupied by Austrian troops, with the secret consent of Charles Theodore himself, who was without legitimate heirs, and wished to obtain from the emperor the elevation of his natural children to the status of princes of the Empire. The protests of the next heir, Charles, duke of Zweibrucken (Deux-Ponts), supported by the king of Prussia, led to the war of Bavarian succession. By the peace of Teschen (May 13th, 1779) the Inn quarter was ceded to Austria, and the succession secured to Charles of Zweibrucken. For Bavaria itself Charles Theodore did less than nothing. He felt himself a foreigner among foreigners, and his favourite scheme, the subject of endless intrigues with the Austrian cabinet and the immediate cause of Frederick II.'s League of Princes (_Furstenbund_) of 1785, was to exchange Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands and the title of king of Burgundy. For the rest, the enlightened internal policy of his predecessor was abandoned. The funds of the suppressed order of Jesus, which Maximilian Joseph had destined for the reform of the educational system of the country, were used to endow a province of the knights of St John of Jerusalem, for the purpose of combating the enemies of the faith. The government was inspired by the narrowest clericalism, which culminated in the attempt to withdraw the Bavarian bishops from the jurisdiction of the great German metropolitans and place them directly under that of the pope. On the eve of the Revolution the intellectual and social condition of Bavaria remained that of the middle ages.

The revolutionary wars.

In 1792 the revolutionary armies overran the Palatinate; in 1795 the French, under Moreau, invaded Bavaria itself, advanced to Munich--where they were received with joy by the long-suppressed Liberals--and laid siege to Ingolstadt. Charles Theodore, who had done nothing to prevent or to resist the invasion, fled to Saxony, leaving a regency, the members of which signed a convention with Moreau, by which he granted an armistice in return for a heavy contribution (September 7th, 1796). Immediately afterwards he was forced to retire.

Between the French and the Austrians, Bavaria was now in an evil case. Before the death of Charles Theodore (February 16th, 1799) the Austrians had again occupied the country, preparatory to renewing the war with France. Maximilian IV. Joseph (of Zweibrucken), the new elector, succeeded to a difficult inheritance. Though his own sympathies, and those of his all-powerful minister, Max Josef von Montgelas (q.v.), were, if anything, French rather than Austrian, the state of the Bavarian finances, and the fact that the Bavarian troops were scattered and disorganized, placed him helpless in the hands of Austria; on the 2nd of December 1800 the Bavarian arms were involved in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden, and Moreau once more occupied Munich. By the treaty of Luneville (February 9th, 1801) Bavaria lost the Palatinate and the duchies of Zweibrucken and Julich.

French influence.

In view of the scarcely disguised ambitions and intrigues of the Austrian court, Montgelas now believed that the interests of Bavaria lay in a frank alliance with the French republic; he succeeded in overcoming the reluctance of Maximilian Joseph; and, on the 24th of August, a separate treaty of peace and alliance with France was signed at Paris. By the third article of this the First Consul undertook to see that the compensation promised under the 7th article of the treaty of Luneville for the territory ceded on the left bank of the Rhine, should be carried out at the expense of the Empire in the manner most agreeable to Bavaria (de Martens, _Recueil_, vol. vii. p. 365). In 1803, accordingly, in the territorial rearrangements consequent on Napoleon's suppression of the ecclesiastical states, and of many free cities of the Empire, Bavaria received the bishoprics of Wurzburg, Bamberg, Augsburg and Freisingen, part of that of Passau, the territories of twelve abbeys, and seventeen cities and villages, the whole forming a compact territory which more than compensated for the loss of her outlying provinces on the Rhine.[1] Montgelas' ambition was now to raise Bavaria to the rank of a first-rate power, and he pursued this object during the Napoleonic epoch with consummate skill, allowing fully for the preponderance of France--so long as it lasted--but never permitting Bavaria to sink, like so many of the states of the confederation of the Rhine, into a mere French dependency. In the war of 1805, in accordance with a treaty of alliance signed at Wurzburg on the 23rd of September, Bavarian troops, for the first time since Charles VII., fought side by side with the French, and by the treaty of Pressburg, signed on the 26th of December, the principality of Eichstadt, the margraviate of Burgau, the lordship of Vorarlberg, the countships of Hohenems and Konigsegg-Rothenfels, the lordships of Argen and Tetnang, and the city of Lindau with its territory were to be added to Bavaria. On the other hand Wurzburg, obtained in 1803, was to be ceded by Bavaria to the elector of Salzburg in exchange for Tirol. By the 1st article of the treaty the emperor acknowledged the assumption by the elector of the title of king, as Maximilian I.[2] The price which Maximilian had reluctantly to pay for this accession of dignity was the marriage of his daughter Augusta with Eugene Beauharnais.

For the internal constitution of Bavaria also the French alliance had noteworthy consequences. Maximilian himself was an "enlightened" prince of the 18th-century type, whose tolerant principles had already grievously offended his clerical subjects; Montgelas was a firm believer in drastic reform "from above," and, in 1803, had discussed with the rump of the old estates the question of reforms. But the revolutionary changes introduced by the constitution proclaimed on the 1st of May 1808 were due to the direct influence of Napoleon. A clean sweep was made of the medieval polity surviving in the somnolent local diets and corporations. In place of the old system of privileges and exemptions were set equality before the law, universal liability to taxation, abolition of serfdom, security of person and property, liberty of conscience and of the press. A representative assembly was created on paper, based on a narrow franchise and with very limited powers, but was never summoned.

Treaty of Ried.

In 1809 Bavaria was again engaged in war with Austria on the side of France, and by the treaty signed at Paris on the 28th of February 1810 ceded southern Tirol to Italy and some small districts to Wurttemberg, receiving as compensation parts of Salzburg, the quarters of the Inn and Hausruck and the principalities of Bayreuth and Regensburg. So far the policy of Montgelas had been brilliantly successful; but the star of Napoleon had now reached its zenith, and already the astute opportunist had noted the signs of the coming change. The events of 1812 followed; in 1813 Bavaria was summoned to join the alliance against Napoleon, the demand being passionately backed by the crown prince Louis and by Marshal Wrede; on the 8th of October was signed the treaty of Ried, by which Bavaria threw in her lot with the Allies. Montgelas announced to the French ambassador that he had been compelled temporarily to bow before the storm, adding "Bavaria has need of France." (For Bavaria's share in the war see NAPOLEONIC CAMPAIGNS.)

Relations with Austria.

Immediately after the first peace of Paris (1814), Bavaria ceded to Austria Tirol and Vorarlberg; by the congress of Vienna it was decided that she was to add to these the greater part of Salzburg and the quarters of the Inn and Hausruck, receiving as compensation, besides Wurzburg and Aschaffenburg, the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine and certain districts of Hesse and of the former abbacy of Fulda. But with the collapse of France the old fear and jealousy of Austria had revived in full force, and Bavaria only agreed to these cessions (treaty of Munich, April 16th, 1816) on Austria promising that, in the event of the powers ignoring her claim to the Baden succession in favour of that of the line of the counts of Hochberg, she should receive also the Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine. The question was thus left open, the tension between the two powers remained extreme, and war was only averted by the authority of the Grand Alliance. At the congress of Aix (1818) the question of the Baden succession was settled in favour of the Hochberg line, without the compensation stipulated for in the treaty of Munich; and by the treaty of Frankfort, signed on behalf of the four great powers on the 20th of July 1819, the territorial questions at issue between Bavaria and Austria were settled, in spite of the protests of the former, in the general sense of the arrangement made at Vienna. A small strip of territory was added, to connect Bavaria with the Palatinate, and Bavarian troops were to garrison the federal fortress of Mainz.

Constitution of 1818.

Lola Montez.

Meanwhile, on the 1st of February 1817, Montgelas had been dismissed; and Bavaria had entered on a new era of constitutional reform. This implied no breach with the European policy of the fallen minister. In the new German confederation Bavaria had assumed the role of defender of the smaller states against the ambitions of Austria and Prussia, and Montgelas had dreamed of a Bavarian hegemony in South Germany similar to that of Prussia in the north. It was to obtain popular support for this policy and for the Bavarian claims on Baden that the crown prince pressed for a liberal constitution, the reluctance of Montgelas to concede it being the cause of his dismissal. On the 26th of May 1818 the constitution was proclaimed. The parliament was to consist of two houses; the first comprising the great hereditary landowners, government officials and nominees of the crown; the second, elected on a very narrow franchise, representatives of the small land-owners, the towns and the peasants. By additional articles the equality of religions was guaranteed and the rights of Protestants safeguarded, concessions which were denounced at Rome as a breach of the Concordat, which had been signed immediately before. The result of the constitutional experiment hardly justified the royal expectations; the parliament was hardly opened (February 5th, 1819) before the doctrinaire radicalism of some of its members, culminating in the demand that the army should swear allegiance to the constitution, so alarmed the king, that he appealed to Austria and Germany, undertaking to carry out any repressive measures they might recommend. Prussia, however, refused to approve of any _coup d'etat_; the parliament, chastened by the consciousness that its life depended on the goodwill of the king, moderated its tone; and Maximilian ruled till his death as a model constitutional monarch. On the 13th of October 1825, he was succeeded by his son, Louis I., an enlightened patron of the arts and sciences, who transferred the university of Landshut to Munich, which, by his magnificent taste in building, he transformed into one of the most beautiful cities of the continent. The earlier years of his reign were marked by a liberal spirit and the reform, especially, of the financial administration; but the revolutions of 1831 frightened him into reaction, which was accentuated by the opposition of the parliament to his expenditure on building and works of art. In 1837 the Ultramontanes came into power with Karl von Abel (1788-1859) as prime minister. The Jesuits now gained the upper hand; one by one the liberal provisions of the constitution were modified or annulled; the Protestants were harried and oppressed; and a rigorous censorship forbade any free discussion of internal politics. The collapse of this regime was due, not to popular agitation, but to the resentment of Louis at the clerical opposition to the influence of his mistress, Lola Montez. On the 17th of February 1847, Abel was dismissed, for publishing his memorandum against the proposal to naturalize Lola, who was an Irishwoman; and the Protestant Georg Ludwig von Maurer (q.v.) took his place. The new ministry granted the certificate of naturalization; but riots, in which ultramontane professors of the university took part, were the result. The professors were deprived, the parliament dissolved, and, on the 27th of November, the ministry dismissed. Lola Montez, created Countess Landsfeld, was supreme in the state; and the new minister, Prince Ludwig von Oettingen-Wallerstein (1791-1870), in spite of his efforts to enlist Liberal sympathy by appeals to pan-German patriotism, was powerless to form a stable government. His cabinet was known as the "Lolaministerium"; in February 1848, stimulated by the news from Paris, riots broke out against the countess; on the 11th of March the king dismissed Oettingen, and on the 20th, realizing the force of public opinion against him, abdicated in favour of his son, Maximilian II.

Anti-Prussian policy.

Before his abdication Louis had issued, on the 6th of March, a proclamation promising the zealous co-operation of the Bavarian government in the work of German freedom and unity. To the spirit of this Maximilian was faithful, accepting the authority of the central government at Frankfort, and (19th of December) sanctioning the official promulgation of the laws passed by the German parliament. But Prussia was henceforth the enemy, not Austria. In refusing to agree to the offer of the imperial crown to Frederick William IV., Maximilian had the support of his parliament. In withholding his assent to the new German constitution, by which Austria was excluded from the Confederation, he ran indeed counter to the sentiment of his people; but by this time the back of the revolution was broken, and in the events which led to the humiliation of Prussia at Olmutz in 1851, and the restoration of the old diet of the Confederation, Bavaria was safe in casting in her lot with Austria (see GERMANY: _History_). The guiding spirit in this anti-Prussian policy, which characterized Bavarian statesmanship up to the war of 1866, was Ludwig Karl Heinrich von der Pfordten (1811-1880), who became minister for foreign affairs on the 19th of April 1849. His idea for the ultimate solution of the question of the balance of power in Germany was the so-called _Trias_, i.e. a league of the Rhenish states as a counterpoise to the preponderance of Austria and Prussia. In internal affairs his ministry was characterized by a reactionary policy less severe than elsewhere in Germany, which led none the less from 1854 onward to a struggle with the parliament, which ended in the dismissal of Pfordten's ministry on the 27th of March 1859. He was succeeded by Karl Freiherr von Schrenk auf Notzing (1806-1884), an official of Liberal tendencies who had been Bavarian representative in the diet of the Confederation. Important reforms were now introduced, including the separation of the judicial and executive powers and the drawing up of a new criminal code. In foreign affairs Schrenk, like his predecessor, aimed at safeguarding the independence of Bavaria, and supported the idea of superseding the actual constitution of the Confederation by a supreme directory, in which Bavaria, as leader of the purely German states, would hold the balance between Prussia and Austria. Bavaria accordingly opposed the Prussian proposals for the reorganization of the Confederation, and one of the last acts of King Maximilian was to take a conspicuous part in the assembly of princes summoned to Frankfort in 1863 by the emperor Francis Joseph (see GERMANY).

Maximilian was succeeded on the 10th of March 1864 by his son Louis II., a youth of eighteen. The government was at first carried on by Schrenk and Pfordten in concert. Schrenk soon retired, when the Bavarian government found it necessary, in order to maintain its position in the Prussian _Zollverein_, to become a party to the Prussian commercial treaty with France, signed in 1862. In the complicated Schleswig-Holstein question (q.v.) Bavaria, under Pfordten's guidance, consistently opposed Prussia, and headed the lesser states in their support of Frederick of Augustenburg against the policy of the two great German powers. Finally, in the war of 1866, in spite of Bismarck's efforts to secure her neutrality, Bavaria sided actively with Austria.

Union with German Empire.

The rapid victory of the Prussians and the wise moderation of Bismarck paved the way for a complete revolution in Bavaria's relation to Prussia and the German question. The South German Confederation, contemplated by the 6th article of the treaty of Prague, never came into being; and, though Prussia, in order not prematurely to excite the alarm of France, opposed the suggestion that the southern states should join the North German Confederation, the bonds of Bavaria, as of the other southern states, with the north, were strengthened by an offensive and defensive alliance with Prussia, as the result of Napoleon's demand for "compensation" in the Palatinate. This was signed at Berlin on the 22nd of August 1866, on the same day as the signature of the formal treaty of peace between the two countries. The separatist ambitions of Bavaria were thus formally given up; she had no longer "need of France"; and in the war of 1870-71, the Bavarian army marched, under the command of the Prussian crown prince, against the common enemy of Germany. It was on the proposal of King Louis II. that the imperial crown was offered to King William.

This was preceded, on the 23rd of November 1870, by the signature of a treaty between Bavaria and the North German Confederation. By this instrument, though Bavaria became an integral part of the new German empire, she reserved a larger measure of sovereign independence than any of the other constituent states. Thus she retained a separate diplomatic service, military administration, and postal, telegraph and railway systems. The treaty was ratified by the Bavarian chambers on the 21st of January 1871, though not without considerable opposition on the part of the so-called "patriot" party. Their hostility was increased by the _Kulturkampf_, due to the promulgation in 1870 of the dogma of papal infallibility. Munich University, where Dollinger (q.v.) was professor, became the centre of the opposition to the new dogma, and the "old Catholics" (q.v.) were protected by the king and the government. The federal law expelling the Jesuits was proclaimed in Bavaria on the 6th of September 1871 and was extended to the Redemptorists in 1873. On the 31st of March 1871, moreover, the bonds with the rest of the empire had been drawn closer by the acceptance of a number of laws of the North German Confederation, of which the most important was the new criminal code, which was finally put into force in Bavaria in 1879. The opposition of the "patriot" party, however, reinforced by the strong Catholic sentiment of the country, continued powerful, and it was only the steady support given by the king to successive Liberal ministries that prevented its finding disastrous expression in the parliament, where it remained in a greater or less majority till 1887, and has since, as the "centre," continued to form the most compact party in an assembly made up of "groups."

Meanwhile the royal dreamer, whose passion for building palaces was becoming a serious drain on the treasury, had been declared insane, and, on the 7th of June 1886, the heir-presumptive, Prince Luitpold, was proclaimed regent. Six days later, on the 13th of June, Louis committed suicide. His brother, Otto I., being also insane, the regency was confirmed to Prince Luitpold.

Since 1871 Bavaria has shared to the full in the marvellous development of Germany; but her "particularism," founded on traditional racial and religious antagonism to the Prussians, was by no means dead, though it exhibited itself in no more dangerous form than the prohibition, reissued in 1900, to display any but the Bavarian flag on public buildings on the emperor's birthday; a provision which has been since so far modified as to allow the Bavarian and imperial flags to be hung side by side.

AUTHORITIES.--_Monumenta Boica_ (44 vols., Munich, 1763-1900); G.T. Rudhart, _Aelteste Geschichte Bayerns_ (Hamburg, 1841); A. Quitzmann, _Abstammung, Ursitz, und alteste Geschichte der Bairwaren_ (Munich, 1857), and _Die alteste Geschichte der Baiern bis 911_ (Brunswick, 1873); S. Riezler, _Geschichte Bayerns_ (Gotha, 1878-1899); Ad. Brecher, _Darstellung der geschichtlichen Entwickelung des bayrischen Staatsgebiets_, map (Berlin, 1890); E. Rosenthal, _Geschichte des Gerichtswesens und der Verwaltungsorganisation Bayerns_ (Wurzburg, 1889); A. Buchner, _Geschichte von Baiern_ (Munich, 1820-1853); _Forschungen zur Geschichte Bayerns_, edited by K. von Reinhardstottner (Berlin, 1897 fol.). Much valuable detail will be found in the lives of Bavarian princes and statesmen in the _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_ (Leipzig, 1875-1906 in progr.) (W. A. P.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See _Reces de la deputation de l'empire ... du 25 fevr, 1803_, &c., S II. vol. vii. p. 453 of G.F. de Martens, _Recueil des Traites_, &c. (Gottingue, 1831).

[2] Text in de Martens' _Recueil_, viii. p. 388.