Article: "How the German Peasants’ War Exposed 16th-Century Europe’s Fragile Foundations"

Peter Turchin has argued that civil wars and successful revolutions are conflicts between elites. Peasant rebellions are never successful because they are the one thing that will unite elites. So the article "How the German Peasants’ War Exposed 16th-Century Europe’s Fragile Foundations" from LitHub was interesting to me because it seemed to confirm this. Keep in mind that this rebellion arose because of and during the Reformation when German elites were split between Catholicism and emerging Protestantism. From the article (bold added):

    The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. Like a vast contagion it spread from southwest Germany through Württemberg, Swabia, the Allgäu, Franconia, Thuringia, and Saxony to Alsace in what is now France, Austria, and Switzerland. Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellion would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months, they won. Authority and rulership collapsed, and the familiar structures of the Holy Roman Empire were overturned, exposing the fragility of the existing social and religious hierarchies. People even began to dream of a new order.

    But this moment did not last. In spring 1525, the ‘Aufruhr,’ or ‘turbulence,’ as contemporaries called it, had reached its height, rolling all before it. By May the tide had turned. The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. That summer of blood, maybe 1 per cent of the population of the area of the war was killed, an enormous loss of life in just over two months. 

While the peasants assumed that Luther would support them, they were wrong, "for this was the moment when Luther came out in support of the princes and against the ‘mad dogs’, the rebelling peasants."

From then on, the Reformation in Germany would be conservative. Mainstream reformers would go on to ally with rulers to advance the goals of the Reformation, and when the new church was set up after the war, it would have the backing of those in power. 

This is why the elites came down so hard in the J6 protestors: it was, in their eyes, a peasant's rebellion.