Louis II

Louis II (born August 25, 1845, Nymphenburg Palace, Munich—died June 13, 1886, Starnberger See, Bavaria) was an eccentric king of Bavaria from 1864 to 1886 and an admirer and patron of the composer Richard Wagner. He brought his territories into the newly founded German Empire (1871) but concerned himself only intermittently with affairs of state, preferring a life of increasingly morbid seclusion and developing a mania for extravagant building projects.

Louis was the elder son of King Maximilian II of Bavaria and Marie of Prussia. Politically a romantic conservative, he came to the throne after his father’s death in 1864 before he had completed his studies. Louis entered the Seven Weeks’ War (1866) on the side of Austria but, on his defeat, signed an alliance with Prussia (1867) and, through his prime minister, Chlodwig, Fürst von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, worked for a reconciliation between Germany’s two great powers. A German patriot, he resisted the overtures of Napoleon III for a Franco-Austrian-Bavarian alliance and immediately joined Prussia in the war of 1870–71 against France. In December 1870, on the initiative of Bismarck, Louis addressed a letter to Germany’s princes calling for the creation of a new empire. His fears for the independence of his crown were allayed by a number of special privileges for Bavaria, although his demands for a substantial territorial increase and the alternation of the imperial title between Prussia and Bavaria remained unfulfilled. Disappointed with the empire, alarmed by the Bavarian population’s Pan-German enthusiasm, and weary of feuding with his ministers over his moves to strengthen the church, he retired more and more from politics, devoting himself increasingly to his private pursuits.

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Soon after his accession, the king called Richard Wagner to Munich. After little more than a year, however, he was forced to expel the composer because of governmental and popular objection to the friendship and Wagner’s own improprieties, though Louis remained a lifelong patron of the musician. The king worshiped the theatre and the opera, and henceforth concerned himself almost exclusively with his artistic endeavours, developing an extravagant mania for building in the Bavarian mountains that he loved. The palace at Herrenchiemsee (Herrn-Insel), constructed from 1878 to 1885 and never completed, was a copy of Versailles; the Linderhof Palace (1869–78) was patterned after the Trianon palace; and Neuschwanstein, the most fantastic, was a fairy-tale castle precariously situated on a crag and decorated with scenes from Wagner’s romantic operas.

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In the early 1880s the king withdrew from society almost completely. Finally, on June 10, 1886, he was declared insane by a panel of doctors. His uncle Prince Luitpold became regent. Removed to Schloss Berg near the Starnberger See by the psychiatrist Bernhard von Gudden, he drowned himself in the lake on June 13. Gudden also perished attempting to save the king’s life.