Ludwig I of Bavaria

Ludwig became King of Bavaria in 1825 with plans to modernize: he dug the Ludwig Canal linking the Main and Danube, watched the first German railway open between Fürth and Nuremberg in 1835, and brought Bavaria into the Zollverein customs union a year earlier. After the July Revolution shook France in 1830, his rule grew harder - liberal policies gave way to repression, erupting in the Beer riots of 1844. When students and the middle classes took to the streets in March 1848, he abdicated to his son Maximilian and stepped aside. He spent the next twenty years as a private patron, filling Munich with neoclassical monuments and amassing paintings and Graeco-Roman sculpture, an admirer of Athens and the Renaissance to the end. Every living legitimate male-line member of the House of Wittelsbach descends from him.