He began a republican journal called Das rote Blatt, and afterwards Rübezahl, in which he strongly condemned the administration of the Rhenish provinces by France.

After much delay he received the embassy; but the only answer they obtained was "that they might rely on perfect justice, and that the French government would never lose sight of their wants".

[1][2] During the thirteen years of Napoleon's dominion Görres lived a quiet life, devoting himself chiefly to art or science.

In 1801 he married Catherine de Lasaulx, and for some years taught at a secondary school in Koblenz; in 1806 he moved to Heidelberg, where he lectured at the university.

[4] As a leading member of the Heidelberg Romantic group, he edited together with Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim the Zeitung für Einsiedler (subsequently renamed Trost-Einsamkeit), and in 1807 he published Die deutschen Volksbücher (literally, The Books of the German People).

There was also in the Merkur a demand for a constitution for Prussia,[6] expression of the desire that an Austrian prince should assume the imperial title, and also a tendency to liberalism—all distasteful to Hardenberg, and to his master Friedrich Wilhelm III.

In this work he reviewed the circumstances which had led to the murder of August von Kotzebue, and, while expressing horror at the deed itself, he urged that it was impossible and undesirable to repress the free utterance of public opinion.

That warm genial view of the Middle Age, which, in the same way as antiquity gave life to mountains, springs, and trees, looked on the state in all its members and parts as a thing endued with vitality, and procured for them, as so many essential personalities, love and attachment; that warm ennobling view had long since passed away.

The better part, who residing on their estates, still cultivated many ancient virtues, were, as holding extensive landed possessions in the face of grinding poverty, objects of hatred; and their consideration was undermined by the arrogance and ever increasing wealth of the monied class.

Authority sometimes, with a good-natured imprudence, assisted in the destruction; sometimes terrified, struggled against it in impotent opposition, by means of her police and bastilles, and then again sent her armies over the Atlantic, in order to visit in America the school of freedom.

Its occasion was the deposition and imprisonment by the Prussian government of the archbishop Clement Wenceslaus reportedly due to his refusal to sanction in certain instances the marriages of Protestants and Roman Catholics.

In the Historisch-politische Blätter ("Historical-political pages"), a Munich journal, Görres and his son Guido (1805–1852) continued to uphold the claims of the church.