Heinrich Leo

The murder of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand, however, shocked him out of his revolutionary views, and from this time he tended, under the influence of the writings of Hamann and Herder, more and more in the direction of conservatism and romanticism.

[1] So early as April 1819, at Göttingen, he had fallen under the influence of Karl Ludwig von Haller's Handbuch der allgemeinen Staatenkunde (1808), a textbook of the counter-revolution.

Under the impression of the July revolution in Paris and of the orthodox and pietistic influences at Halle, Leo's political convictions were henceforth dominated by reactionary principles.

[1] As a friend of the Prussian Camarilla and of King Frederick William IV of Prussia, he collaborated especially in the high conservative Politisches Wochenblatt, which first appeared in 1831, as well as in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, the Kreuzzeitung and the Volksblatt für Stadt und Land.

When, however, in connection with the quarrel about the archbishopric of Cologne (1837), political Catholicism raised its head, Leo turned against it with extreme violence in his open letter (1838) to Goerres, its foremost champion.

[1] Later in life he became much less extreme in his religious and political views and participated in the Ut Omnes Unum movement started by Julie von Massow, which aimed at the unification of Protestantism and Catholicism.