In 1774, in the midst of one of Old Europe’s rare years of peace, a force of about 500 militiamen gathered under arms. They had been called up by the ducal Bavarian Pflegsverwalter (regional administrator) Johann de Stock to suppress a terrifying insurrection in the town of Markt Schwaben. This was a major disruption to the lives of men from villages all over the region as they were required to leave their work, arm themselves, and go out to risk life and limb facing an unknown enemy. Bavaria, like most of Ancien Régime Europe, relied on such locally raised posses to enforce the law, so the peasantry were familiar with the idea. A force of 500 was highly unusual, though. It suggested something had gone very wrong.
As the men marched into town, they came face to face with evidence of the threat to public order that so agitated their leader. In the middle of the marketplace, for all the world to see, stood a wooden stage. The citizens of Markt Schwaben were defying divinely appointed authority to stage a theatre play. It must have been a rather deflating moment as they learned the truth and, happily, refused to raise a hand against their neighbours. De Stock was reduced to writing an angry report to his duke about the breakdown of deference in his district.
If you know your way around the history of German drama, you could be forgiven for expecting a conflict over freedom of speech here. This was when a generation of angry and ambitious young playwrights were upending convention and voicing new philosophies on stage. Aristocratic pretensions were openly mocked, bourgeois characters dignified as heroic protagonists, and soon enough, Lessing pleaded for religious equality and Schiller lionised rebellious criminals and called for Gedankenfreiheit. Were the forces of obscurantism cracking down on this flowering of liberal thought here?
In a word, no. The citizens of Markt Schwaben planned to stage a religious play about the life of St John of Nepomuk. Such religious plays were an important part of Bavarian folk tradition. They were organised by parish communities or towns and some continue to be staged today, often drawing large audiences. There really was nothing untoward about this – if anything, Duke Maximilian saw these as oldfashioned and embarrassingly backward. It looks like the problem at the heart of this confrontation was the ego of one man – Johann de Stock.
The setting in which the Komödienkrieg (comedy war) took place was a very traditional one. Rural Bavaria before the Napoleonic Wars was deeply Catholic, governed by vestiges of feudal laws, and relatively poor. That does not mean ragged peasants living in mud huts. The people lived in farmhouses in villages and small towns, and they did not feel poor. Compared to other parts of Germany – let alone to Bavaria today – it was an existence managed on slender resources, though. People made do, they repaired things, saved food and firewood, and cultivated a mindset that valued security over risk-taking. In this world, a pasta soup made with barley flour was a full meal, and not a poor one. The Baiersches Kochbuch describes one:
Grated Barley Soup
Take as much barley flour on a pasta board (Nudelbrett) as can be moistened with one egg. Break the egg into the flour, salt it, and work it all together to make a very firm dough. Grate this on an iron grater. Slowly boil the barley in a pot for a quarter of an hour before serving. Use one Maaß of good meat broth, stir it frequently, and serve it. For 6-8 people, you use again as much flour and two eggs.
This is a fairly typical representative of the Mehlspeisen, cereal-based, often almost meatless main dishes that rose to prominence in Early Modern Southern Germany. They still commanded respect – there was flour, eggs, and cheese in the house, after all – while sparing the expense of a piece of meat. Eating like this was not hardship. Respectable people had such meals on workdays. But it was a world where you had to make a meal for four out of barley, one egg, a litre of meat broth, and the ubiquitous bread.
Just as they faced their relative poverty with quiet determination, the people of Markt Schwaben navigated a deeply hierarchical world conscious of their individual dignity. Church and state, the nobility and the respectable people were accorded proper deference. At the same time, they stood up for themselves and had a thorough awareness of their rights. Even the few among them who still were serfs – a minuscule percentage by the 1770s – did not behave as we tend to envision the downtrodden masses.
The townspeople had come to Johann de Stock to ask permission to stage their play, as they were expected to. Not finding him, they had received it from his father – by their lights and in a still feudal society, a perfectly reasonable process. On the strength of this, they invested labour and money into a project to make them proud, and were understandably dismayed when de Stock came back from his travels and immediately tried to shut it down, threatening to have people flogged and pilloried. Perhaps he was worried it would make him look bad, perhaps he was just piqued that he had not been asked in person, but his reaction was certainly emotional and excessive. The people of Markt Schwaben refused to knuckle under.
It needs to be pointed out that this was not funny at the time. Stories from Bavarian history often have a folksy, humorous tone, but that is a product of modern history writing. The people who stood up to their governor that day risked painful, humiliating punishments, crippling fines, and the loss of their economic and social existence. Bavaria’s rural militiamen were not ‘Dad’s Army’ types. They had earned a reputation for cruelty they would uphold through much of subsequent history into the 1920s, when the authorities called on them to put down urban working-class rebellions. Things could have ended very differently.
On that day in 1774, though, shared cultural expectations worked to defuse the situation. Everybody understood that de Stock had overreacted and this abuse of authority was not something they felt bound to respect. The eventual decision from the capital imposed a face-saving restriction by forbidding an open air performance, but the play was staged multiple times to much greater audiences than expected. Sadly, we do not know any of it, but the events were turned into a modern folk theatre performance in 2015. People remember such things.
What strikes me about this story is that, like the unrest in Paderborn, it is related in a jocular tone that underplays how serious it really was. This is a common strategy in traditional societies: Conflict is a misunderstanding, a silly thing, a matter of personal failings or foibles. Of course these often play a role in settings where authority is accepted in principle. It’s the ‘few bad apples’ that cause problems, one administrator, one judge or police officer. It is possible to resist in the context of a system like that, even gain concessions, but in the end, it is the system that enables the abuses.