When, in 1798, the French army marched into Rome, Görres was loud in his rejoicings over the fall of the city and the collapse of the temporal power of the Pope. He writes in _The Red Journal_: "We will tear the mask from ecclesiasticism, and set healthy ideas in circulation everywhere. We too have sworn eternal hatred to priestcraft and monasticism, and work for the good of the people. We at the same time work for the monarchs, by proving their inutility and helping to relieve them from the burden of government." His style is youthfully audacious and witty, a genuine demagogue and journalist style. But in his scorn we distinguish a certain fanaticism, which, like all fanaticism, is significant of the possibility of a complete revulsion. When the transactions of the Congress of Rastadt had made it easy to forecast the abolition of the three spiritual electorates, of bishoprics, abbacies, &c., Görres advertised in his paper, under the heading of "For Sale," the following wares: "A whole cargo of seed of the tree of liberty, the flowers of which make the best bouquets for princes and princesses.... 12,000 human cattle, well broken in, who can shoot, cut and thrust, wheel to the right and wheel to the left. A splendid drilling with cudgel and lash, for twelve years, has brought them to the point of allowing themselves to be shot dead for their masters without so much as a grumble.... Three electoral mitres of finely tanned buffalo hide. The croziers belonging to the same are loaded with lead, conceal daggers, and are decorated with artificial serpents. The eye of God on the top is blind." In December 1799 the French occupied Mayence for the second time. When the news reached Coblentz, Görres wrote his wild song of triumph over the collapse of the Roman-German Empire: "At three o'clock in the afternoon of the 30th December 1799, the day of the crossing of the Maine, the Holy Roman Empire, of ever foolish memory, passed peacefully away at the advanced age of 955 years, 5 months, and 28 days; the cause of death was apoplexy and complete exhaustion, but the illustrious deceased departed in full consciousness and comforted with all the sacraments of the Church.... The deceased was born in Verdun, in June 842 (843). At the moment of his birth a comet (_Perrückenkomet_), pregnant with disaster, was flaming in the zenith. The boy was brought up at the courts of Charles the Simple, Louis the Child, and their successors.... But his inclination to a sedentary life, combined with an excess of religious ardour, weakened his already feeble constitution ... and at the age of about 250, at the time of the Crusades, he became quite imbecile," &c., &c. Görres here strikes the note which we hear again a generation later in Börne's _Letters from Paris_. He contemptuously opens and reads the will of the deceased, according to which the French Republic inherits the left bank of the Rhine, His Excellency, General Bonaparte, being appointed executor.