Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"It was soon regarded a masterpiece and seen as part of the new Romantic Movement in the arts, which reflected the political and social turbulence after the French Revolution." [1001 Days]
"In a very broad sense virtually every person of education, talent and enlightenment sympathized with the Revolution, at all events until the Jacobin dictatorship, and often for very much longer. (It was not until Napoleon had made himself emperor that Beethoven revoked the dedication of the Eroica Symphony to him.)" [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 78]
"He was attracted to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. In 1804, when Napoleon's imperial ambitions became clear, Beethoven took hold of the title page of his Third Symphony and scratched the name Bonaparte out so violently that he made a hole in the paper. . . . The fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony features an elaborate choral setting of Schiller's Ode An die Freude ("Ode to Joy"), an optimistic hymn championing the brotherhood of humanity." [Wikipedia]