[2] Through their maternal grandmother, born Wilhelmine Luise Herpfer (1730–1788) Johann Georg and Justinius Kerner shared an illustrious pedigree.

One of the other sons, Karl von Kerner served in the Württemberg army, ennobled in 1806 and later becoming Interior Minister, in which capacity he made an important contribution to modernising the steel industry.

In a speech on the Name day of the academy's founder, Württemberg's aging ruler, Duke Karl Eugen, Kerner called for the establishment of a system of state run welfare for the poor.

Other members included Christian Heinrich Pfaff, Ernst Franz Ludwig Marschall von Bieberstein and Joseph Anton Koch.

These and similar actions on the part of Kerner and his friends provoked an adverse reaction in conservative Württemberg among the citizens and the aristocratic French emigrants whom they took to their hearts.

[1] Just as he had before, in Paris he gathered around himself a group of young Germans who shared his commitment to the revolutionary precepts of "liberty, equality and fraternity".

However, like his political friends, Kerner was mistrustful of the radicalisation of the revolution and the accompanying loss of freedom, as a result of which he sometimes found himself aligned with counter-revolutionary currents with which he was not necessarily in sympathy.

[2] By 1794 the revolution was being exported to neighboring states by France's "revolutionary armies", while in Paris the Terror was, at least till it devoured its best remembered author at the end of July, increasingly uncontrolled and unpredictable.

[1] He nevertheless retained links to his like-minded political allies, now extending beyond the German expatriate community: these included Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Jens Baggesen.

Charles-Frédéric Reinhard, like Kerner originally from Württemberg, was appointed by the French Directory (revolutionary government) to a position as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Hanseatic League which involved a posting to Hamburg between 1795 and 1798.

He still backed the expansionist policies of revolutionary France, commending these in liberal and democratic circles in Hamburg, notably the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.

Kerner was back in Paris on a brief visit which coincided with the anti-royalist Coup of 18 Fructidor (5 September 1797) and was, as he wrote, impressed by the role played by the increasingly political General Napoleon Buonaparte in securing the republic.

He armed an ad hoc citizen militia and launched an attack on the insurrectionist inhabitants of Arezzo, during the course of which he was wounded by a shot in his armpit.

[1] However, Kerner's injury did not prevent him from now rushing to Netherlands at Reinhard's prompting, after the two of them had been forced, by the rising intensity of what was becoming a civil was there, to flee from Tuscany to France.

He concluded that an education which balanced mental, physical and practical abilities in equal measure offered a way out of the political dilemmas of the age.

[5] The newspaper was produced only between March and July 1802, after which it was closed down, following the return of Reinhard, now as French ambassador, thanks to its numerous insufficiently veiled criticisms of Napoleon, whom the city senate of Hamburg was by this time keen not to provoke.

He wrote regular articles for the Hamburg weekly paper "Nordische Miszellen" ("Northern Miscellany") in which he gave vent to his political dissatisfaction.

Because of Kerner's long standing contacts with the French Empire, these appointed him to represent them with the occupying authorities who were based in Hamburg.

An obituary appeared in the Hamburgischer Correspondent, which at that time was the most widely distributed German language newspaper in the world, praising Kerner for his "... disinterested selflessness, rare geniality and uncompromising openness which his friends treasured.