On September 30, 1819 Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Prussian king, signed a decree stating that Professor Joseph Görres in Coblenz should be immediately arrested for insulting his own king and foreign rulers with the most disrespectful comments and for attempting to rouse citizens through the most impertinent criticism of government regulations. The decree went to Rhineland officials in Coblenz, which had become part of Prussia in 1815. Before the decree arrived, Görres was able to flee to Frankfurt, and when friends warned him that the decree had also arrived in Frankfurt, he fled to Strasbourg, France, on October 10.

It was Joseph Görres's (1776–1848) work Teutschland und die Revolution (1819) that provoked the king's decree. Görres, who first made a name for himself in a number of radical publications in the 1790s as a Rhenish Jacobin supporting the French Revolution, later became an emphatic opponent of France as a result of his bitter disappointment with the course the Revolution had taken. He then established a reputation throughout Europe as the publisher of the newspaper Der Rheinische Merkur (1814–16), which he used brilliantly to attack Napoleon and to fight for the reinstitution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which Napoleon had dissolved in 1806. However, the Congress of Vienna, which in 1814–15 decided the fate of post-Napoleonic Europe and, especially, the future of Germany, did not fulfill his hopes.