Johann Joseph Görres (Koblenz 1776 – Munich 1848; granted the nobiliary particle “von” in 1839), born into a merchant family, displayed early enthusiasm for the democractic ideals of the French Revolution. His journal Das rote Blatt (1798, later renamed Rübezahl) celebrated these ideals, but disenchantment set in when he witnessed the political developments in France, culminating in Napoleon’s coup d’état. He withdrew to private teaching, and in the process moved to Heidelberg, where he met Arnim and Brentano. In 1807 he demonstrated his own Romantic interest in German popular culture by editing a collection of popular chapbooks, Die teutschen Volksbücher. Based on his personal private collection of a book genre little appreciated at the time, it was dedicated to Brentano and evinced a sense that the apogee of German culture had been in the chivalric period of the medieval Reich, the memories of which had been betrayed by the elite but kept alive in popular culture. Görres also participated with Arnim/Brentano and other Romantics in the Zeitung für Einsiedler (subsequently renamed Trost-Einsamkeit), and in 1811 announced the discovery of German literary classics in the newly-catalogued “Palatine Collection” of the Vatican Library.

Görres failed to get a tenured teaching post in Heidelberg and returned to his native Koblenz in 1813. Here he founded the fervently anti-Napoleonic Rheinische Merkur, the first nationalist newspaper of Germany, in which a unification and reconnection with the medieval Rech was advocated – including the restoration of Cologne Cathedral and the return of Alsace and Strasbourg. Its critical attitude to Prussia and refusal to submit to censorship led to its closure in 1816. Görres, in danger of being arrested, moved to Strasbourg, where his political position became more and more deeply inflected by his renewed Catholic faith.

Called to a chair at Munich University in 1827 by Ludwig of Bavaria, Görres became the leader of Germany’s “Political Catholicism”, an early portent of future Ultramontanism. He supported Boisserée’s initiatives for the restoration of Cologne Cathedral, publishing a pamphlet Der Dom von Köln und das Münster von Strasburg in 1842. His controversialist writings were particularly vehement on issues where Prussian rule clashed with the Catholic religion of his native Rhineland – thus during the 1840s when controversies raged around mixed-marriage legislation, and a pilgrimage to Trier became a mass demonstration of political Catholicism (Die Wallfahrt nach Trier, 1845).