Beethoven was a child of the Enlightenment and remained so his whole life. Late eighteenth-century Bonn, where he was born, was steeped in the most progressive thought of the age: Kant, the philosopher of freedom, was a lively subject of discussion at the university, as was his follower Friedrich Schiller, the poet of freedom, impassioned enemy of tyrants everywhere. The young Beethoven was heavily influenced by Eulogius Schneider, whose lectures he attended. One of the most important of German Jacobins, Schneider was so radical that in 1791 he was kicked out of the liberal University of Bonn, whereupon he joined the Jacobin Club in Strasbourg. (There, he was appointed public prosecutor for the Revolutionary Tribunal, enthusiastically sending aristocrats to the guillotine—until he lost his own head a couple years later.) Schneider’s republicanism stayed with Beethoven, but it was Schiller whom Beethoven worshiped.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-revolutionary-beethoven