The Invention of Nature

The reason why Humboldt had chosen Paris as his new home was simple – no other city was so deeply steeped in science. There was no other place in Europe where thinking was allowed to be so liberal and free. With the French Revolution the role of the Catholic Church had diminished, and scientists in France were no longer bound by religious canon and orthodox beliefs. They could experiment and speculate free from prejudice, questioning all and everything. Reason was the new religion, and money was flooding into the sciences. At the Jardin des Plantes, as the former Jardin du Roi was now known, new glasshouses had been built and the Natural History Museum was expanding with collections that had been pillaged from all over Europe by Napoleon’s army – herbaria, fossils, stuffed animals and even two live elephants from Holland. In Paris Humboldt found like-minded thinkers, along with engravers as well as scientific societies, institutions and salons. Paris was also Europe’s publishing centre. In short, it was the perfect place for Humboldt to share his new ideas with the world.

The city was buzzing with activity. It was a true metropolis with a population of around half a million, the second largest city in Europe after London. In the decade after the revolution, Paris had been plunged into destruction and austerity, but now frivolity and gaiety prevailed again. Women were addressed as ‘Madame’ or ‘Mademoiselle’ instead of ‘citoyenne’, and tens of thousands of exiled French were permitted to return home. There were cafés everywhere, and since the revolution the number of restaurants had burgeoned from one hundred to five hundred. Foreigners were often surprised how much of Parisian life happened outside. The whole population seemed to live in public ‘as if their houses are only built to sleep in’, the English Romantic poet Robert Southey said.

Along the banks of the Seine, near the small apartment that Humboldt rented in Saint-Germain, hundreds of washerwomen with rolled-up sleeves scrubbed their linen watched by those crossing the city’s many bridges. The streets were lined with stalls offering everything from oysters and grapes to furniture. Cobblers, knife grinders and pedlars offered their services noisily. Animals performed, jugglers played, and ‘philosophers’ lectured or perfected experiments. Here was an old man playing the harp, and there a small child beating the tambourine and a dog treading an organ. ‘Grimaciers’ contorted their faces into the most hideous shapes, while the smell of roasted chestnuts mingled with other less pleasurable scents. It was, one visitor said, as if the whole city were ‘devoted solely to enjoyment’. Even at midnight the streets were still full, with musicians, actors and conjurors entertaining the masses. The whole city, another tourist noted, seemed in ‘eternal agitation’.

Paris street life (Illustration Credit 9.2)

What amazed foreigners was the fact that all classes lived under one roof in large houses – from a duke’s apartment on the grand first floor to the servant’s or milliner’s quarters in the attic on the fifth floor. Literacy also seemed to transcend class as even the girls who sold flowers or trinkets had their heads deep in books when no customer needed their attentions. Bookstall after bookstall ribboned the streets, and the conversations at the tables that cluttered the pavements outside restaurants and cafés would often be about beauty and art, or a ‘discourse on some puzzling point of higher mathematics’.

Humboldt adored Paris and the knowledge that pumped through its streets, salons and laboratories. The Académie des Sciences¹ was the nexus of scientific enquiry but there were many other places too. The anatomy theatre in the École de Medicine could hold 1,000 students, the observatory was equipped with the best instruments and the Jardin des Plantes boasted a menagerie, a huge collection of natural history objects and a library in addition to its large botanical garden. There was so much to do and so many people to meet.

The twenty-five-year-old chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was enthralling the scientific world with the daring balloon ascents that he used to study terrestrial magnetism at great heights. On 16 September 1804, only three weeks after Humboldt’s arrival, Gay-Lussac conducted magnetic observations as well as measuring temperatures and air pressure at 23,000 feet – more than 3,000 feet higher than Humboldt had climbed on Chimborazo. Unsurprisingly, Humboldt was keen to compare Gay-Lussac’s results with his own from the Andes. Within a few months Gay-Lussac and Humboldt were giving lectures together at the Académie. They became such close friends that they travelled together and even shared a small bedroom and study in the attic of the École Polytechnique a few years later.