His grandfather Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst (1713–1786) and his father Johann Ludwig Adolf (1753–1823) protested several times against arbitrary acts by the landgrave's administration and were reprimanded for them.

Back in the garrison, Schulz joined the group around Darmstadt lawyers Heinrich Karl Hofmann and Theodor Reh, which included opposition craftsmen, workers, students and officers.

In contrast to the radical fraternity members, the “Darmstadt blacks” do not rely on overthrow by an elite of staunch revolutionaries, but turned to the people and called on citizens and peasants to passive resistance by refusing to pay taxes.

The pamphlet, forerunner of the Hessischer Landbote, was written in the form of a catechism: "Is an emperor, king, prince, or whatever the highest authority is called, also paid and received by the people?"

As long as a citizen and farmer has to suffer from hunger and grief, it is absolutely wrong for princes – parasites, comedians, whores, horses and dogs to feed, hunt and feast and gossip and indulge in the sweat of the country."

When the demagogue persecution began after the murder of August von Kotzebue by the fraternity member Karl Ludwig Sand, Schulz was identified as the author of the book, arrested and charged with high treason after a year in custody.

With the series of articles published there, Errors and Truths, from the first years after the last war against Napoleon and the French, he distanced himself from the political romanticism of the fraternities and their “over-German national pride, in which one could for a short time even despise other peoples had fantasized ".

He even went so far as to approve of the Karlsbad resolutions, which he later regretted, as it earned him an honorable mention in Goethe's diary, but it cost the friendship with his fellow campaigner Heinrich Karl Hofmann, who was affected by the "incomprehensible aberration of a man from such mind and heart ”wrote.

When political life began to move again in Germany after the July Revolution in France in 1830, Schulz took part in various Cottas newspaper projects that temporarily took him to Augsburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe.

As an employee of the General Political Annals founded by Friedrich Wilhelm August Murhard and published by Cotta, Schulz became friends with the Baden liberals Karl von Rotteck and Carl Theodor Welcker.

In January 1832 Cotta made the newly minted doctor juris editor-in-chief of Hesperus, but dismissed him that same month when Schulz tried to convert the magazine into a political daily newspaper and a liberal campaign organ.

His main work from this time, published under his full name, dedicated to Germany's unity through national representation, Rotteck and Welcker, was only banned in Prussia and Württemberg, but served as evidence in the subsequent trial against him.

His defense lawyers August Emmerling and Theodor Reh could not prevent that he was tried as a civilian before a non-public military tribunal and sentenced to five years of strict arrest on 18 June 1834 "for continued attempt to commit the crime of violent alteration of the state constitution".

The energetic movement that began with the rural population, which in 1831 had bloodlessly eliminated the domination of the nobility and patricians in the so-called Regeneration and had given several cantons, including Zurich, liberal constitutions, corresponded to his ideal.

In contrast to him, he viewed bourgeois property relations as an unchangeable result of historical development and, like Lorenz von Stein, whose writings he knew, expected the social contradiction to be abolished from the welfare state and Christian ethics.

The communist and anarchist movements seemed to him to be an inevitable reaction of the poor to the exploitative economic system and its support, the absolutist state, but their methods were reprehensible, their goals illusory and their leaders therefore dangerous fantasists and fanatical enthusiasts.

But that did not close the file: “The waves of excitement over the judicial murder of Weidig were still high in the revolution of 1848.” In fact, the elimination of the inquisition process and the secret justice system are among their few lasting successes.

His biographer writes: "The introduction of orderly jurisdiction, which was in the interests of the general population and without which a modern state is unthinkable, was in no small part due to the struggle of Wilhelm Schulz and his companions."

He met Georg Herwegh, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Gottfried Keller and Ferdinand Freiligrath in the Follenschen house "am Sonnenbühl", the center of the Zurich emigrants.