�s Church (height 92,5m). Together with the 4 towers of the cathedral and the Altportal these two churches dominate the skyline of Speyer.
Between 1906 and 1910 the Historical Museum of the Palatinate was erected. With the neighbouring building of the district archives, the Protestant Consistory, the Humanistic Grammar School and the Bishop�s seat built around the same time, the cathedral square received a character which it has kept to this very day. Another building of the Wilhelmian period worth mentioning is the train station. With the end of World War I and the occupation of the west bank of the Rhine in 1918, French troops once again occupied the town.
As early as the end of 1918 the French occupational forces under General G�rard supported a movement under the leadership of Ludwig Haass which called itself �Free Palatinate.� This was one of several separatist movements in the French occupation zone on the left bank of the Rhine. In early summer of 1919 the Free Palatinate attempted a putsch in Speyer for an autonomous Palatinate. This attempt failed miserably, especially because of the resistance of the deputy chief administrator, Friedrich von Chlingensperg (1860�1944), who could count on the support of the majority of the Palatinate parties. After a few hours the poorly planned coup was aborted.
However, the call for a free Palatinate was not yet dead and Speyer was to remain the focus of such endeavours. Only a few years later, voices were again raised to separate the Palatinate from Bavaria. Among these was former prime minister Johannes Hoffman, who unsuccessfully tried to separate the Palatinate from Bavaria and form an independent state within the Empire on 24 October 1923, while Munich was being rocked by civil-war-like conditions.
At the same time more radical separatist groups were forming with the goodwill of the French, who still occupied the left bank of the Rhine. In a coup in Aachen on 21 October 1923 under Hans
