The Invention of Nature

There had been a few exceptions. As he had crossed Venezuela on his way to the Orinoco, Humboldt had been impressed by his host at Lake Valencia who had encouraged the progress of agriculture and the distribution of wealth by parcelling up his estate into small farms. Instead of running a huge plantation, he had given much of his land to impoverished families – some of them freed slaves, others peasants who were too poor to own them. These families now worked as free independent farmers; they were not rich but they could live off the land. Similarly, between Honda and Bogotá, Humboldt had seen small haciendas where fathers and sons worked together without slave labour, planting sugar but also edible plants for their own consumption. ‘I love to dwell on these details,’ Humboldt said, because they proved his point.

The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because ‘what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.’ Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.

Nature was Humboldt’s teacher. And the greatest lesson that nature offered was that of freedom. ‘Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

¹ In the previous year Napoleon had abandoned the idea of a French colony in North America when most of the 25,000 soldiers whom he had sent to Haiti to quash the slave rebellion there had died from malaria. Napoleon’s original plan had been to transfer his army from Haiti to New Orleans but in the wake of the disastrous campaign and with few men left, he abandoned the strategy – and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States instead.

PART III

Return: Sorting Ideas

9

Europe

IN LATE JUNE 1804, Humboldt left the United States on the French frigate Favorite, and in August, a few weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. He had been away for more than five years and returned with trunks filled with dozens of notebooks, hundreds of sketches and tens of thousands of astronomical, geological and meteorological observations. He brought back some 60,000 plant specimens, 6,000 species of which almost 2,000 were new to European botanists – a staggering figure, considering that there were only about 6,000 known species by the end of the eighteenth century. Humboldt had assembled more, he boasted, than anyone else.

‘How I long to be once more in Paris!’ Humboldt had written to a French scientist from Lima almost two years previously. But this Paris was different from the city that he had last seen in 1798. Humboldt had left a republic and found a nation ruled by a dictator on his return. After a coup d’état in November 1799, Napoleon had declared himself First Consul and with that had become the most powerful man in France. Then, just a few weeks before Humboldt’s arrival, Napoleon had announced that he would be crowned Emperor of France. The sound of tools ricocheted through the streets as the building works for Napoleon’s grand vision for Paris began. ‘I’m so new that I need to orientate myself first,’ Humboldt wrote to an old friend. Notre Dame Cathedral was being restored for Napoleon’s coronation in December and the city’s timber-framed medieval houses were razed to make room for public spaces, fountains and boulevards. A canal, one hundred kilometres long, was dug to bring fresh water to Paris and the Quai d’Orsay was constructed to prevent the Seine from flooding.

Most of the newspapers that Humboldt had known had been closed or were now run by editors loyal to the new regime, while caricatures of Napoleon and his reign were forbidden. Napoleon had established a new national police force as well as the Banque de France which regulated the nation’s money. His rule was centralized in Paris and he kept all aspects of national life under his tight control. The only thing that didn’t seem to have changed was that war still raged throughout Europe.

Humboldt on his return to Europe (Illustration Credit 9.1)