At Vienna and afterwards Maximilian sturdily opposed any reconstitution of Germany which should endanger the independence of Bavaria, and it was his insistence on the principle of full sovereignty being left to the German reigning princes that largely contributed to the loose and weak organization of the new German Confederation. The Federal Act of the Vienna congress was proclaimed in Bavaria, not as a law but as an international treaty. It was partly to secure popular support in his resistance to any interference of the federal diet in the internal affairs of Bavaria, partly to give unity to his somewhat heterogeneous territories, that Maximilian on the 26th of May 1818 granted a liberal constitution to his people. Montgelas, who had opposed this concession, had fallen in the previous year, and Maximilian had also reversed his ecclesiastical policy, signing on the 24th of October 1817 a concordat with Rome by which the powers of the clergy, largely curtailed under Montgelas's administration, were restored. The new parliament proved so intractable that in 1819 Maximilian was driven to appeal to the powers against his own creation; but his Bavarian "particularism" and his genuine popular sympathies prevented him from allowing the Carlsbad decrees to be strictly enforced within his dominions. The suspects arrested by order of the Mainz Commission he was accustomed to examine himself, with the result that in many cases the whole proceedings were quashed, and in not a few the accused dismissed with a present of money. Maximilian died on the 13th of October 1825 and was succeeded by his son Louis I. In private life Maximilian was kindly and simple. He loved to play the part of _Landesvater_, walking about the streets of his capital _en bourgeois_ and entering into conversation with all ranks of his subjects, by whom he was regarded with great affection. He was twice married: (1) in 1785 to Princess Wilhelmine Auguste of Hesse-Darmstadt, (2) in 1797 to Princess Caroline Friederike of Baden. See G. Freiherr von Lerchenfeld, _Gesch. Bayerns unter König Maximilian Joseph I._ (Berlin, 1854); J. M. Söltl, _Max Joseph, König von Bayern_ (Stuttgart, 1837); L. von Kobell, _Unter den vier ersten Königen Bayerns. Nach Briefen und eigenen Erinnerungen_ (Munich, 1894).