a reactionary and a divisive figure. The Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater was his most vocal defender in Switzerland during this time, and Haller would pay tribute to him in an essay after Lavater's death. Vienna and conversion to Catholicism After many wanderings, he came to Vienna, where he was court secretary of the council of war, from 1801 until 1806. 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. When the old aristocratic regime was reinstated in 1814, he became a member of the sovereign Grand Council, and soon after also of the privy council of the Bernese Republic, and he abandoned his professorship in 1817. But in 1821, when his return to Catholicism became known, he was dismissed. This change of religion caused great controversy, and the letter he wrote to his family from Paris, explaining his reasons for the step he had taken, went through about fifty editions in a short time, was translated a number of times, and called forth numerous rejoinders and apologies. 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. Though he had expressed philo-Catholic sympathies for years, the immediate impetus for his conversion was a correspondence he started with Pierre Tobie Yenni, the bishop of Lausanne, in 1819. 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. 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