Ludwig I of Bavaria

Ludwig I, who lived from 25 August 1786 to 29 February 1868, was King of Bavaria from 1825 until the revolutions of 1848 forced his abdication. As crown prince he took part in the Napoleonic Wars, and as king he pushed Bavaria's industrialization, initiating the Ludwig Canal linking the Main and Danube rivers and bringing Bavaria into the German Zollverein customs union in 1834; the first German railway, between Furth and Nuremberg, opened in his kingdom in 1835. His early liberal policies grew increasingly repressive after the 1830 July Revolution in France, and he faced the Beer riots of 1844 and mounting student and middle class protest during the 1848 revolutions before abdicating in favor of his son Maximilian on 20 March 1848. An admirer of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance, Ludwig spent the two decades of his retirement as an active and influential patron of the arts, commissioning a series of neoclassical buildings across Munich and amassing a large collection of Early German and Early Dutch paintings and Greco-Roman sculpture. Every living legitimate agnatic member of the House of Wittelsbach descends from him.