Mith the French Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon Bonaparte's subsequent military triumph, not only did the Old Empire collapse, not only did the political map of Europe change dramatically, but waves of political modernisation now swept across the German states in particular. At that time, various ideas of the Enlightenment were to be implemented in practical politics. It was almost inevitable that the Catholic Church would be particularly affected by such modernisation, as it had long been at the centre of Enlightenment criticism. And when Maximilian von Montgelas, the leading minister of the new Bavarian Elector Max IV Joseph, arrived in Munich in 1799 as a particularly determined Enlightenment thinker, it could be assumed that the Church in Bavaria would be exposed to considerable storms.
I.
Since the concordat concluded between the Duchy of Bavaria and the Roman Curia in 1583, the relationship between the Bavarian state and the Catholic Church has been subject to certain fluctuations time and again. Nevertheless, it must be stated that for more than two centuries this relationship rested on a stable basis: the common interest in preserving a Catholic Bavaria, the common interest in preserving the Bavarian state church.
This was to change drastically at the beginning of the 19th century. The system of the Bavarian
The very nature of the state church system in Germany meant that there was essentially no separation of church and state. Instead, state and church were closely intertwined in many respects, but above all the state had long had supervisory rights over the church. These included the state having a say in the appointment of benefices, sovereign visitations, sovereign confirmation of state-supervised prelate elections, the possibility of decimating church assets, state supervision of monasteries and the possibility of extending state jurisdiction over the clergy
and of course the sovereign's approval.
Montgelas, on the other hand, who - as already mentioned - came to power in Munich in 1799, was determined to reform Bavaria from the ground up. His programme, which he had already written down in exile in Ansbach in 1796, included a new, even more controlling approach to the church in Bavaria, state control over the administration of church foundations of all denominations, the improvement of the parish system and the improvement of the training of the clergy. The latter meant that the state was to be given supervision over this training. Added to this was the introduction of confessional tolerance in Bavaria and the dissolution of some monasteries, at least those of the mendicant orders.
The systematic way in which Montgelas proceeded with regard to the tightening of the state church was demonstrated in 1804, when he summarised the state's supervisory rights over the church for the first time in the Ordinance on Relations with Ecclesiastical Power. This ordinance listed the Plazet, the Recursus ab abusu, the supervision of church property management and state involvement in the appointment of ecclesiastical offices. After the first concordat negotiations with the Roman Curia failed four years later, the Edict on the External Legal Relations of the Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bavaria in Relation to Religion and Ecclesiastical Society was published in 1808, which differentiated the state's supervisory rights as follows: a) purely secular, b) purely ecclesiastical and c) matters of a mixed nature. And Montgelas - this brilliant jurist - succeeded effortlessly in establishing that the state had a right of supervision in all three areas!
A further change in the position of the Catholic Church, which had serious consequences for the faithful, was due to Napoleon's power politics: we are talking about the mediatisation of the ecclesiastical dominions. After the French troops had succeeded in shifting the eastern border of France first to the Rhine and then beyond by 1802, the problem arose as to how those secular rulers who had suffered territorial losses on the left bank of the Rhine as a result of the French military triumph could be compensated. It quickly became clear that the territories of the ecclesiastical princes in particular would have to be used for this, i.e. that - in relation to Bavaria - the bishoprics of Freising and Würzburg, among others, would be mediatised, meaning that their territories would from now on be part of Bavarian territory. In 1803, with the approval of the two guarantor powers of the Peace of Westphalia, France and Russia, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and finally the Imperial Diet in Regensburg, Bavaria actually succeeded in appropriating the aforementioned bishoprics of Freising and Würzburg, as well as the bishoprics of Bamberg and Augsburg and - initially - the smaller parts of the bishoprics of Eichstätt and Passau. After the loss of their territories, the mostly aristocratic prince-bishops were unwilling to be restricted to the purely spiritual function of a diocesan bishop and resigned. As a result, these episcopal sees remained vacant for a long time after the loss of princely dignity and secular authority. For years, the dioceses were administered more poorly than well and neither confirmations nor
priestly ordinations and other pontifical acts.
II.
When talking about the far-reaching cuts in the relationship between the state and the Catholic Church in Bavaria at the beginning of the 19th century, then of course the secularisation, i.e. the dissolution of the Bavarian monasteries, must also be taken into consideration. As a Jesuit student in Nancy in 1790, Montgelas, the spiritus rector of the dissolution of monasteries in Bavaria, had observed how revolutionary France expropriated and dissolved all French monasteries - he was deeply impressed. In his 1796 reform plan for the Electorate of Bavaria, the Ansbach Mémoire, plans to abolish Bavarian monasteries played an important role alongside many other modernisation measures. In 1796, Montgelas considered completely dissolving the branches of the mendicant orders, reducing the number of monks and nuns in the remaining monasteries, while the surpluses generated by the orders were to be transferred to the state. The motives for such measures ranged from the more "ideological" to the fiscal. On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers rejected the supposedly purely contemplative lifestyle of the monks and instead called for active subjects who worked tirelessly for the state and the common good.
On the other hand, Montgelas hoped to be able to avert the bankruptcy of the Bavarian state, which had been looming for years, if he could seize the assets of the monasteries - albeit mostly only presumed - and if the abbeys' real estate and land were sold in favour of the state. A third motive, which can hardly be overestimated, was the enforcement of the state's monopoly on power. The prelate orders, which belonged to the estates, the countryside, stood in the way of this. However, Montgelas did not want to tolerate any other secondary powers alongside the monarchical head of state; he was striving for a strictly hierarchical state structure. And he firmly believed that the entire system of the Landschaft would quickly collapse if he only succeeded in eliminating one of the estates represented there.
Montgelas' campaign against the Bavarian monasteries began in 1802: First, the mendicant orders were abolished and their mostly insignificant property was confiscated by the state. The members of the orders had to leave the monastery buildings and were granted a meagre pension to cover their living expenses. Foreign monks were expelled from the country. Subsequently - in the same year and thus before these measures were sanctioned under imperial law, i.e. before the main Imperial Deputation of 1803 - the land-owning, so-called endowed monasteries were dissolved.
The real problem for Montgelas, however, were those monasteries and convents that belonged to the estates and were the economic and cultural centres of their surroundings. Equipped with libraries and schools, they also acted as centres of the rural infrastructure and as centres of arts and crafts - think of their pharmacies or their function as loan offices. In addition, they held the lordship over around 28 per cent of all farms in (old) Bavaria. In total, there were around 60 such monasteries and 10 collegiate monasteries in Bavaria. Abolishing these ecclesiastical institutions was one of the key points of Montgelas' reform plans: on the one hand, to reorganise the Bavarian finances with the help of the confiscated assets, and on the other, to be able to lay the axe to the entire old corporative constitution of the electorate by abolishing this part of the estates.
At the time of Max Joseph's accession to the throne, however, the monasteries of the estates were still protected by state and imperial law; an imperial law was required to dissolve them. Actually, the dissolution of monasteries was not even discussed in Regensburg, the seat of the Imperial Diet, in 1803, as it was a matter of territorial compensation for those princes who had suffered territorial losses on the left bank of the Rhine, i.e. mediatisation. However, Montgelas and the Bavarian diplomats succeeded, shortly before the end of the negotiations and with French approval, in having wording included in paragraph 35 of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 25 February 1803, according to which all monasteries in Bavaria could be dissolved, in both the old and the new Bavarian territories. The resulting proceeds were then to be made available to the princes for completely free use.
disposition.
Immediately after his accession to power, Max IV Joseph had given the estates' monasteries a guarantee of existence on 11 March 1799. However, in the same year, in November 1799, the Secret State Conference discussed the urgent need to reorganise the Bavarian finances and thus also quickly discussed the possibility of reverting to the property of the monasteries. However, while the abolition of the mendicant orders was supported by almost all members of the Secret State Conference as a boon for the Bavarian state, even staunch Enlightenment thinkers advised against carrying out total secularisation in Bavaria. Firstly, they warned that the Bavarian state would have no chance of taking possession of the monasteries' particularly valuable foreign estates (especially vineyards in South Tyrol).
Secondly, even back then there were fears of a sudden oversupply of land and property that would not be matched by an adequate group of buyers. And thirdly, the state would incur immense pension costs for the former monks and nuns. However, as Bavaria's financial situation was more than precarious in November 1799 (only 5.7 million guilders could be expected in state revenue, compared to 9.8 million guilders in expenditure, with around 30 million guilders in debt), the issue of comprehensive secularisation remained under discussion.
Although Montgelas took note of the counter-arguments expressed at the Secret State Conference, he evidently did not pass them on to the Elector. Instead, in January 1800, a specially appointed commission submitted a report on how it might still be possible to do more than just abolish the mendicant orders. In 1800, i.e. three years before the adoption of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, the commission did not yet see a feasible way to secularise monasteries belonging to the estates. Even the dissolution of non-established monasteries was still considered problematic.
However, in view of the renewed armed conflicts in Europe and the presence of French troops in Bavaria in 1800/1801, preparations continued for the abolition of the monasteries that had previously been under consideration, as waging war costs money. On 10 August 1801, the Commission for Monastery Affairs was therefore ordered to quickly compile a list of all church and monastery assets. On the basis of the results of this survey, Montgelas then wrote a memorandum for the Elector, dated 10 September 1801, in which the Bavarian minister once again tightened up the planned course of action against the Bavarian religious orders. He now recommended not only the dissolution of all non-established monasteries, but also the dissolution of 14 estates. In Montgelas' arguments to the Elector, the financial motive, the aim of having to save the state from imminent ruin, increasingly came to the fore. Max IV Joseph, for his part, agreed with the proposed course of action - with the exception of the measures envisaged for the monasteries of the estates.
In 1802, the mendicant orders were abolished. And when, in January 1803, the Bavarian envoy Anton von Cetto obtained authorisation from the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand for the special wording of the aforementioned paragraph 35 of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, which made it possible to abolish the estates of the monasteries and use the freed-up sums to cover debts, there was no stopping the Bavarian government. The remaining 67 abbeys and collegiate monasteries were quickly taken over by state commissioners and monastic life was extinguished.
Churches and other monastery buildings were destroyed; art treasures and the holdings of the monastery libraries and archives were sifted through, sorted and valuable items brought to Munich, although some were also deemed worthless and squandered or destroyed. There were also bitter short-term social consequences. The monastic properties were taken over by the state, which collected the taxes due from the peasants much more rigorously than the monasteries had done previously. In addition, social benefits for the secular staff of the monasteries were cancelled. The situation was even worse for highly specialised craftsmen and artisans, for whose services no one had any use. In addition, the destruction of the monastery schools that accompanied secularisation left Bavarian Catholics in the 19th century and even in the first half of the 20th century with an almost dramatic educational gap compared to the Protestant regions in Germany.
But did the state at least get its money's worth? Due to the oversupply, the sale of the expropriated estates brought much less money into the Bavarian state coffers in the short term than Montgelas had expected. According to a study by Walter Demel, secularisation brought in an additional 20 million guilders by 1813. This probably just about saved Bavaria from bankruptcy until the end of the Napoleonic era. For Montgelas, however, it was certainly more important that secularisation succeeded in eliminating the prelate state. And it would not be long before the end of the constitution of the estates came.
III.
But there was another profound change with regard to the church and the faithful in Bavaria. At the time of Elector Karl Theodor's accession to the throne in Munich in 1777, when the Electorate of Palatinate-Bavaria came into being, the three Christian denominations of Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed, recognised in the Peace of Westphalia, had long enjoyed equal rights in its mixed denominational territories, i.e. in the Duchies of Jülich and Berg and in the Electoral Palatinate. The situation was different in the Electorate of Bavaria, i.e. in Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate, where the principle of (almost) exclusive Catholicism had prevailed since the Counter-Reformation.
In 1799, when Max IV succeeded Joseph, despite the military triumph of the French far across the Rhine, some mixed-confessional areas were still part of the new ruler's territory. For this reason, Montgelas had the religious edict of 1803 proclaim not only tolerance but also parity of the three recognised Christian denominations throughout the entire electorate. After the Bavarian ruler changed sides in 1805 and joined Napoleon, more and more purely Protestant or mixed-denominational territories came to Bavaria, so that the Munich government could no longer go back on the commandment of tolerance, freedom of conscience and equal rights if it did not want to jeopardise the integration of the Protestant new Bavarians.
The Curia in Rome perceived this development as quite threatening. As early as 12 February 1803, Pope Pius VII protested strongly - albeit unsuccessfully - against the Bavarian measures. And yet both sides, the state and the Curia, strove to put their relationship, which had been deeply shattered by mediatisation and secularisation, on a new, sustainable footing. After long negotiations and despite problems that remained unresolved to the end, this was finally largely achieved in 1817 with the signing of the concordat.
But let us return to the parity of the three Christian denominations introduced in Bavaria in 1803: Even before the Bavarian seizure of the largely Reformed Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine around Speyer in 1816, there were 750,000 Lutherans and Reformed in the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1815 out of a population of around 3.16 million. They therefore made up around a quarter of all Bavarian subjects. These 750,000 Protestant subjects were organised into 774 parishes and were looked after by 911 clergymen. Munich was not allowed to treat them all as second-class subjects in its own interests.
However, a change in the way non-Catholics were treated in Bavaria had already become necessary years earlier because the Electress - Karoline Friederike Wilhelmine von Baden - who moved into Munich with Max IV Joseph in 1799, was a Protestant. With her came her own clergyman, cabinet preacher Dr Ludwig Friedrich Schmidt, to the Bavarian capital and royal seat. He initially held his services in Nymphenburg Palace, partly due to the lack of a Protestant church and partly out of consideration for the still almost exclusively Catholic inhabitants of Munich. A small, still unofficial Protestant congregation quickly formed at the electoral court. Max Joseph, who came from the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, also brought Protestant civil servants with him; in addition, there were ladies-in-waiting and servants of the electress as well as various refugees who had fled from the French revolutionary troops.
Both the Elector and Minister Montgelas were determined to grant the new Protestant subjects the same rights as the long-established Catholics. Therefore, just one year after Max Joseph became Elector of Bavaria in 1800, it was decreed that from then on Protestants were to be treated in the same way as Catholics when buying land in Bavaria. The settlement of new Protestant subjects did not always go smoothly: in 1801, Max IV Joseph had to personally order, against the opposition of the Munich magistrate and the countryside, that Johann Balthasar Michel, a Protestant from the Palatinate, more precisely from Mannheim, be granted Munich citizenship. In such cases, however, it was often not so much denominational as economic concerns that played a role, in this case on the part of the Munich magistrate. Similar cases also occurred, but in reverse, in Protestant cities in New Bavaria, such as Nuremberg, when Catholics wanted to settle there.
The question of how to deal with the Protestant subjects on the one hand and the problem of a uniformly organised Bavarian Protestant state church on the other became much more explosive after the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting territorial changes - as already mentioned - resulted in further mixed-denominational or purely Protestant territories becoming part of Bavaria. This finally raises the question of what measures the Bavarian state took to integrate the new Protestant subjects in Bavaria.
It all began with the aforementioned Edict of Religion of 10 January 1803, which established religious freedom for members of the three Christian denominations, the Catholics, the Lutherans and the Reformed, in Bavaria. Furthermore, from then on there was parity, meaning that no one was allowed to be favoured or disadvantaged because of their affiliation to one of these three Christian denominations. In this way, full civil equality was achieved for all subjects, so that - to name just one example - the highest civil servant positions in the state could now be filled regardless of the denomination of the individual applicant. In addition, the Edict of Religion of 1803 granted the Protestant faithful in Old Bavaria, like the Catholic faithful in previously purely Protestant territories, the right to form their own parishes.
Maximilian von Montgelas was confronted with another problem in view of the many Protestant territories that had been acquired since 1802/1803. In the meantime, there were to be over 90 different Protestant churches in Bavaria due to the mediatisation of Lindau and Nuremberg, Ansbach and Bayreuth, Nördlingen and Rothenburg, and so on. Each of these Protestant territories had previously organised its own Protestant regional church. These regional churches differed from each other in terms of confession, rite and church organisation; there were different hymnals and prayer books, different catechisms, etc. But the goal was clear: a unified Protestant church for the whole of Bavaria, subject to the supervision of the Munich state.
In 1808, the time had come: the new Protestant regional church of the Kingdom of Bavaria was headed by the Catholic Bavarian king as the sumptuary episcopus, the supreme bishop. A supreme church leadership authority was also established. A "Section for Ecclesiastical Affairs" was formed in the Ministry of the Interior, which exercised state sovereignty over both the Catholic and Protestant churches. A year later, in 1809, the Protestant parishes were granted the status of separate public corporations - previously they had been subordinate to the political parishes.
After the end of the Napoleonic era and the Wars of Liberation, and after the Palatinate was annexed to Bavaria in 1816, the Lutheran and Reformed churches in the Palatinate, known as Bavaria on the left bank of the Rhine, united to form a church union in 1818. In Bavaria on the right bank of the Rhine, such a union was considered unnecessary, as there were only 9 Reformed congregations here, which (until 1853) were co-administered by the Lutheran church organisation. In 1817, the previous joint church section for the Catholic and Protestant churches within the Ministry of the Interior was dissolved and the ministry itself now exercised direct supervision over the churches. In 1818, the so-called Oberkonsistorium of the Protestant Church, which had been in existence since 1817, was placed under the leadership of a president of Protestant denomination, to whom five Oberkonsistorialräte were assigned. However, this new authority continued to receive its "commissions and orders" from the responsible ministry.
Finally, to give a better idea of how the integration of Protestant new Bavarians gradually took place, an episode from the first few months after Max IV Joseph's accession to the throne is described. It has already been mentioned that Electress Karoline, a Protestant, had come to Munich. Max Joseph, who had grown up in Zweibrücken in the Palatinate in a mixed-confessional territory, did not waste a thought on suggesting that his wife convert to the Catholic faith. In fact, he had expressly guaranteed his wife the "private exercise of her religion", a large number of Protestant ladies-in-waiting and a Protestant preacher and confessor in the marriage contract. Before moving to Munich, the aforementioned Dr Schmidt had had to share the church in Birkenfeld in the Palatinate with the Catholic priest. Schmidt's obviously peaceful character had made this possible without any crises, which in turn made him particularly suitable for the post of confessor to the Electress in Montgelas' eyes.
On 12 May 1799, Schmidt held the first Protestant church service in Munich, in a hall at Nymphenburg Palace. At that time, only the electress and - expressly as guests only - around 150 court servants were present. This was intended to avoid the impression that there was already an institutionalised Protestant congregation in Munich. The new court preacher also seems to have mastered this tricky task brilliantly, which ultimately led to curious Catholic Munich residents flocking to Schmidt's sermons after a short time. The prince-bishop still residing in Freising at the time - it was the mediatisation of the prince-bishops in 1802/1803 that was to ensure that the previous prince-bishops resigned - took note of this curiosity among Munich's citizens with obvious scepticism, but without being able to intervene in any way. And since the Edict of Religion of 1803, Protestantism had ultimately been irrevocably part of Bavaria - the Concordat of 1817 could no longer change this. This must also be taken into account when talking about the transition from the old to the new Bavaria.
