Von Haller's work, which was burnt during the Wartburg Festival, was a highly systematic defense both of the principles of dynastic legitimacy and monarchy founded on territorial lordship, as well as of pre-modern republics like those of the Swiss city-states, and considered one of the most consistent rejection of modern political ideas of the social contract, public law, and state sovereignty.

Thereupon he resigned the government office he had held under the revolutionary authorities and established a paper, the Helvetische Annalen, running for 64 issues from April to November 1798, in which he attacked the excesses and legislative schemes of the Helvetic Republic with such bitter sarcasm that the sheet was suppressed, and he himself had to flee to escape imprisonment.

The specific article that led to his being proscribed was Beiträge zum einem revolutionären Gesetzbuch (Contributions to a revolutionary code of law), a political satire.

Public opinion at home resulted in his being recalled by the Bernese Government in 1806, and appointed professor of constitutional law at the newly founded higher school of the academy.

[citation needed] In this document he made known his long-felt inclination to join the Catholic Church and his growing conviction that he must bring his political opinions in harmony with his religious views.

[7] Haller was soliciting advice on the fourth volume of the Restoration of Political Science dealing with ecclesiastical states, whereupon Yenni began correcting his views on sacramental theology and other doctrinal subjects.

After his conversion to Catholicism, his family soon followed him; with them he left Bern permanently and took up residence in Paris in 1822, after his initial requests to Friedrich von Gentz for settling back in Vienna were unsuccessful.

[8] In 1824 the Foreign Office invited him to assume the instruction of candidates for the diplomatic service in constitutional and international law, filling a vacancy left by Chateaubriand.

After the July Revolution of 1830, he went to Solothurn and, from that time until the day of his death, was a contributor to political journals, including the Neue Preussische Zeitung and the Historisch-Politische Blätter.

In 1833 he was elected to the Grand Council of Solothurn and exercised an important influence in ecclesiastical affairs which constituted the burning question of the hour,[clarification needed] and held this post until 1837.

This, considered by some his most important work, impelled Johannes von Müller to offer Haller the chair of constitutional law at the University of Göttingen.

The Handbuch itself was an extended version of his inaugural lecture Über die Nothwendigkeit einer andern obersten Begründung des allgemeinen Staatsrechtes, published on November 2, 1806 and delivered shortly after his return to Bern.

In the succeeding volumes he shows how these principles apply to different forms of government: in the second to monarchies; in the third (1818) to military powers; in the fourth (1820) and fifth (1834) to ecclesiastical states; and in the sixth (1825) to republics.

Moreover, Haller's "Digression on Slavery" in the third volume made a deep impact on the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and surfaced again in his polemical "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question".

[12] Repudiating the abstract juridical conceptions of sovereignty and civil society, Haller based political authority instead on a combination of personal power and acquired rights deriving from possession of property.

Moderate conservatives like members of the German historical school reacted negatively, believing that Haller, instead of defeating the social contract as he claimed, had simply given it a new, cruder form.