Gorres

Gorres, Joseph Johann, was born at Coblentz in 1776 of a Catholic family. As a boy he picked up the revolutionary ideas then current, and he gave expression to them in a journal entitled Riibezahl. Taking up strongly the grievances of his fellow-countrymen under French rule in the Rhine Provinces, he went in 1799 on a deputation to Napoleon. In 1814 he brought out the Rheinischer Merkur, which soon became the organ of German unity, and received the support of Stein, Varnhagen von Ense, the Grimms, Gentz, and other politicians.

His Liberalism and his anti-Prussian feeling led to the suppression of the publication in 1816, and to his own expulsion from his educational office. He then became a violent partisan writer, and his pamphlet Beutschland und die Revolution provoked such animosity that he had to escape into Switzerland. Ultramontanism was his next phase, and he thus won the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria, who invited him to Munich. Here he produced Athanasius, a powerful assertion of the supremacy of the Church, and he edited a journal supporting clericalism. His death took place in 1848.