ABSTRACT
The revival of royalism owed a great deal to the discrediting by the autumn of 1919 of the Socialist-led Bavarian republic, with its unimpressive showings in maintaining public order and in defending Eigenstaatlichkelt. The trauma of the Soviet regime, the “chains” of Versailles, and the Weimar Constitution’s truncations of states’ rights fueled disaffection for the parliamentary Free State among the mostly middle-class Bavarian population. Like a great many Bavarian royalists of the time, the Bavarian Royalist Party (BKP) founders equated the venerable Wittelsbach monarchy with Eigenstaatlichkeit. The BKP sank into even deeper disrepute with some Royalist figures’ continued open advocacy even after the affair of at feast a “temporary” Bavarian separation from the Reich, should the “Prussian” North degenerate further into disorder. The mantle of Bavarian royalism in any case had passed to other groups at the beginning of the 1920s.
