The Invention of Nature

Five and a half months later, in late March 1814, when the Allies marched down the Champs-Élysées, even the most frivolous Parisians couldn’t ignore the new reality any more. About 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians arrived in Paris and toppled Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme Column, replacing it with a white flag. British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who visited Paris at the time, described the mad carnival that ensued: half-clothed Cossack horsemen with their belts stuffed with guns, next to tall soldiers from the Russian Imperial Guard ‘pinched at the waist like a wasp’. English officers with clean-scrubbed faces, fat Austrians and neatly dressed Prussian soldiers, as well as Tartars in chainmail armour with bow and arrows, filled the streets. They exuded such an aura of victory that it made every Parisian ‘curse within his teeth’.

On 6 April 1814 Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean. Within a year, though, he had escaped and marched back to Paris, assembling an army of 200,000 men. It was a last and desperate attempt to bring Europe back under his control, but a few weeks later, in June 1815, Napoleon was beaten by the British and the Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo. Banished to the remote island of St Helena, a tiny fleck of land in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Africa and 1,800 miles from South America, Napoleon never returned to Europe.

Humboldt had watched how Napoleon had destroyed Prussia in 1806 and now, eight years later, he observed the triumphal entry of the Allies into France, the country that he called his second fatherland. It was painful to see how the ideals of the French Revolution – of liberty and political freedom – seemed to disappear, he wrote to James Madison in Washington, who by now had succeeded Jefferson as the President of the United States. Humboldt’s position was awkward. Wilhelm, who was still the Prussian ambassador in Vienna and who arrived with the Allies in Paris, thought that his brother seemed more French than German. Alexander certainly felt uncomfortable, complaining about ‘fits of melancholy’ and recurring stomach pains. But he stayed on in Paris.

There were public attacks. An article in the German newspaper Rheinischer Merkur, for example, accused Humboldt of preferring the friendship with the French to the ‘honour’ of his people. Deeply hurt, Humboldt wrote a furious letter to the author of the article but remained in France. As distressing as Humboldt’s balancing act might have been for him, it brought advantages for the sciences. When the Allies arrived in Paris there was much looting and plundering. Some was justified, with the Allies collecting the stolen treasures from Napoleon’s museums to return them to their rightful owners – but more often it was an undisciplined occupying force.

It was to Humboldt that the French naturalist Georges Cuvier turned when the Prussian army planned to turn the Jardin des Plantes into a military camp. Humboldt used his contacts and convinced the Prussian general in charge to locate the troops elsewhere. A year later, when the Prussians returned to Paris after the victory against Napoleon at Waterloo, Humboldt once again saved the valuable collections in the botanical garden. When 2,000 soldiers camped next to the garden, Cuvier began to worry about his treasures. They were disturbing the animals in the menagerie, he told Humboldt, and touching all sorts of rare items. After a visit to the Prussian commander, Humboldt received assurances that the plants and animals were not in danger.

The Jardin des Plantes in Paris which encompassed a large botanical garden, a menagerie and a natural history museum (Illustration Credit 11.1)

Not only soldiers arrived in Paris. Close behind were tourists – especially those from Britain who had not been able to come to Paris during the long years of the Napoleonic Wars. Many came to see the treasures in the Louvre because no other European institution contained so much art. Students sketched the most famous paintings and sculptures before workmen arrived with wheelbarrows, ladders and ropes to remove and pack them, so that they could be returned to their owners.