At the age of twenty-four he was sent, at the head of a deputation, in November, 1799, to Paris, to obtain from the First Consul, in whom Görres already saw the future emperor and despot, the cessation of the oppressive occupation of the Rhine province. In a pamphlet entitled Result of my Embassy to Paris in Brumaire VIII., A.D. 1800, he gave a full account of his mission; but expressed a complete change in his political opinions, after he had clearly perceived the abyss in which the French revolution ended; and he never after this returned to the errors of his youth.
When, at a later date, Görres stood forth as the champion of the rights and freedom of the Catholic Church, his enemies reproached him with having proved a traitor to the cause of liberty, which he had defended in his youth, and tried to represent him sometimes as a revolutionist, and then again as a man of weak, inconsequent, and vacillating character. He was thus severely blamed for an enthusiastic aberration of youth, into which not only Schiller but even the grave and aged Klopstock, as well as many other distinguished Germans of the time, had fallen.
It was a time of such confusion that even the foundations of the earth quaked and the stars from heaven fell. The glorious edifice of the German empire, encircled with the halo of a thousand years of glory, had crumbled in a day; the emperor became a mere shadow; and the nobility, corrupted by despotism, became as immoral as in the days of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. Religious life was torpid; and religious indifference, through the influence of both the French and German press, through liberalism and the aid of the illuminati, had gained the mastery over not only the Protestant but the Catholic mind. Even an Emperor, Joseph II., had placed himself at the head of the most shallow liberals; the principal churchmen sought even to surpass him; in short, so great was the decay and blindness of those who should have been the mainstay of the old Christian order, that God could choose no gentler means of chastising the universal iniquity, than by letting the fires of the mad revolution have full scope. How can we be astonished, therefore, that a youth like Görres should have been carried away with the spirit of the age? But even then he displayed that straightforwardness and purity of character which always distinguished him. In the latter half of his revolutionary life, he had only sought to serve the welfare of the Rhine province, by his struggle against the oppressions of the French generals and officials who persecuted him as well as his country.
But Görres was certainly not blamed most for having doffed his bonnet to the spirit of the revolution; but because, as Paul was changed from a jealous Pharisee into an apostle, the young Jacobin became the great defender of the church and Christian ideas.
Görres gave up politics in the beginning of his twenty-fifth year, and devoted himself exclusively to science and art for a period of ten years. He occupied the chair of natural history and science, in a college at Coblenz, and published during this time many works, the product of his restless activity. Then came to light his Aphorisms on Art, (A.D. 1802;) Aphorisms on Organic Laws, (1803;) Exposition of Physiology, (1805;) Aphorisms on Organology, (1805;) and his book on Faith and Science, (1806;) writings composed under the influence of the Schelling natural philosophy. Görres had not yet reached a full and clear knowledge of Christian truth. In the year 1806 he went on vacation to Heidelberg, where he gave lectures on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and literature in the university. Here he was also led more deeply into a study that exercised great influence on his later development. He studied the Christian middle age of Germany from an aesthetic and poetic point of view. He was led in this direction by his personal acquaintance and friendship with two men, Clement Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who have deserved highly of their country for having awakened the muse of German romantic poetry from her slumbers.
The reformation separated one half of Germany from the past; and the rationalism of the eighteenth century completed the separation. The German people were accustomed to despise, as a period of darkness and barbarism, the most glorious age in their history, when they were the first nation of the earth; when Albert the Great taught divine philosophy, Wolfram of Eschenbach wrote poetry, and Ervinius of Steinbach built cathedrals. This entire schism of German consciousness from the past had much to do in causing that deplorable decay of national feeling and unity. The corruption had reached its height in the eighteenth century, and Germany became the spoil and the contempt of the foreigner. In order that fatherland should be politically free, the German conscience must be aroused. Nothing could have more power, in this respect, than the revival of the hitherto despised Christian-German middle age and its glorious ballad poetry. For this purpose the Pilgrim, a journal, was started by Arnim, Brentano, and Görres. The undertaking failed for the want of cooperation; but produced fruit at a later period. Görres was more successful in obtaining his purpose in the year 1807 by his German Books for the People, in which he held up to the eyes of his contemporaries the mirror of the middle ages.
Plunging his mind more and more deeply into the Christian middle age, his comprehensive intellect turned its attention to another domain of history, namely, to the primeval times of the East. After his return to Coblenz, in 1808, appeared in two volumes, his Mythology of the Asiatic World, a work of great importance, which influenced considerably the ideas of both Creuzer and Schelling. At the same time he explained northern mythology, as contained in the Edda; cultivated the German mediaeval muse, and enriched the literature of the Nibelung Song, by hitherto undiscovered fragments.
While Görres was thus engaged, a great change had taken place in France. The absolutism and godlessness of the revolution naturally begot the unlimited despotism of Napoleon. His was not the tyranny of mere brute force, as in the barbaric times, but a despotism engendered by modern civilization and enlightened egotism. Napoleon made all the forces of the revolution subserve his will, and with them conquered all the degenerate nations of Europe; for the corruption and infidelity of the age of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., which caused the revolution, were more or less extended and felt in the neighboring nations in the eighteenth century. Hence, France was to be punished, first by her own hands, and, through her, the other peoples were to be chastised.
Since Christianity had destroyed the universal monarchy of Rome, God had never allowed another to arise and destroy the autonomy of nations, and with it the independence of the church; for both are inseparable. What was the empire Napoleon tried to found but the same work which the Hohenstaufens failed in accomplishing; what was it else but an attempt to revive the old Roman pagan sovereignty of the world? His work seemed completed; the outside power of all the states of the continent seemed broken; within, minds were enslaved, and, under the appearance of liberal forms, freedom was destroyed; the sciences, the whole instruction of youth moulded, on military principles, to aid the imperial power; religion even became the handmaid of worldly majesty, and a mere affair of policy; the pope himself, the last refuge of religious liberty, was in chains, for refusing to become the court chaplain of the new Caesar.