After Napoleon's defeat and the return of Mainz to German control, Hofmann moved to his late wife's estates in Winkel. While he was no longer active as a revolutionary, he was suspicious to the authorities as a Jacobin, and his house was searched in the 1830s. Hofmann spent his retirement pursuing activities such as breeding domestic canaries but became a somewhat famous figure among "Vormärz" liberals and was visited by intellectuals such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben and . He died on 6 September 1849, having witnessed the failure of the 1848 revolution, and was buried without a Catholic funeral.