Niels Ditlev Riegels

The American historian H. Arnold Barton has characterised Riegels, along with Michael Gottlieb Birckner, as being one of "the most original thinkers" of the radical group of authors in Denmark in this period.

Riegels was dismissed with a handsome pension of 1200 Danish rigsdaler for his efforts in the coup, yet he soon became a bitter opponent of the new government, mainly because he was not selected for the post of royal historiographer.

He published a stream of pamphlets, books, journals and articles, most of these containing unrelenting criticism of the aristocracy, the church, the academic world and a wide variety of matters concerning how the government handled affairs.

It was a defense of Arianism and other heretical sects that had been suppressed during the late antiquity, creating parallels to contemporary times and how Riegels perceived the lack of tolerance in the Danish church.

[2] Thanks to the deliberate laxity of the post-1784 government, the restrictive censorship laws of Ove Høegh-Guldberg were rarely enforced; yet, one exception was in 1790 when Riegels was fined 200 rigsdaler for his Julemærker fra Landet og Byen ("Weather forecast from the Country and from the City") which had in effect called for an institution of a General Assembly of the Estates.

Latin version in 1788 De Fatis faustis et infaustis Chirurgiae for which he received honorary medals from Catherine II of Russia, Gustav III of Sweden and the Prussian minister Ewald Friedrich von Hertzberg).