drawn to constitutional liberalism. Travels A journey to Paris in 1790 provided him further acquaintance with new revolutionary ideas, and he was present at the Fête de la Fédération. The same year, he was elected to Bern's Kornkammer, responsible for managing the city's granaries. In 1792, he became a member of the Bernese Economic Society, and publishes his first written work, a report arguing against the export ban on butter. As secretary of legation he served several important embassies, for instance, one to Geneva in 1792, about the Swiss troops stationed there; to Ulm in 1795, regarding the import of grain from southern Germany; to Lugano, Milan, and Paris in 1797, regarding the neutral attitude of Switzerland towards the warring powers. These journeys acquainted him with some of the leading personalities of the day, including Napoleon and Talleyrand. When the Old Swiss Confederacy was threatened he was dispatched to Rastatt to allay the storm. It was too late, however, and by the time he returned in February 1798 the French army was already on Bernese territory. He tried to conciliate the authorities by penning a constitutional proposal, Projekt einer Constitution für die schweizerische Republik Bern, and attempted one last mediation with Gen. Guillaume Brune on March 1, 1798, but was unable to stay the dissolution of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Bern would fall definitively four days later at the Battle of Grauholz. Von Haller soon renounced any liberal principles entirely, and became an uncompromising opponent of the Revolution. 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. Featuring lines such as “To slander or overturn any authority means patriotism, and to the patriots one should be loyal, but an ‘oligarch,’ or a citizen from a former capital, or an honest magistrate who has done his duty, is not a man, but a wild animal with which one can do what he wants,” the work did not impress the Helvetic authorities. Henceforth, von Haller was