with the title An meine Mitbürger ("To my fellow citizens"), in which he strongly denied having been pleased at the King's death. At the same time he condemned the excesses of the Revolution as "anarchy, intrigues, disobedience of the law, irreligiosity, cruelty and murder", but did not declare himself fundamentally opposed to the principles of the Revolution, based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. His business partner Voght, on the other hand, went further: he later accepted the title of "Baron" and argued for a restriction of the freedom of the press. In a letter to Magdalene Pauli, Voght wrote soberly in 1794: "Wie ein entzückender Traum schweben die Jahre 89 und 90 vor meiner Seele. Ich bin schrecklich erwacht." ("The years 89 and 90 hover before my soul like a delightful dream. I have awakened terribly.") Special envoy in Paris Imperial war, Le Hoc's expulsion and the embargo When the War of the First Coalition (1792–1797) against France was officially declared an imperial war (Reichskrieg), restrictions came into force for the trade between Hamburg and France. Specifically the export of grain and meat, which were vital for the war, was prohibited. A number of merchants – including Sieveking – attempted to circumvent this rule by transporting their goods to the Danish port of Altona, and shipping them to France from there. The relations between the Hamburgers and France, until then the city's most important trading partner by far, were still strong despite the prohibitions: this provoked the ire of Austria and its ally, Prussia. In February 1793 the Lower Saxonian circle, led by Prussia, and supported by the imperial envoy Binder von Kriegelstein, demanded the expulsion of the French envoy in Hamburg, François Le Hoc. At the end of 1792, he had founded a reading society in Hamburg with the journalist Friedrich Wilhelm von Schütz on the model of the Jacobin club of Mainz, of which Sieveking had been elected president, and for this reason alone was suspected of incitement. When the Hamburg Senate finally submitted to the pressure and expelled Le Hoc, he cancelled the trade treaty concluded between Hamburg and Paris in 1789 in his letter of protest. Furthermore, the National Convention ordered the confiscation of all Hamburg ships in French ports and imposed a trade embargo on the Hanseatic city. Although the embargo was subsequently imposed quite mildly by the French, and the Hamburg merchants continued