The Invention of Nature

Paris was ‘less disposed than ever’ to be a centre for the sciences, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Geneva, as the funds for laboratories, research and teaching were slashed. The spirit of enquiry was stifled as scientists found themselves having to curry favours from the new king. The savants had become ‘pliant tools’ in the hands of politicians and princes, Humboldt told Charles Lyell in 1823, and even the great George Cuvier had sacrificed his genius as a naturalist for a new quest for ‘ribbons, crosses, titles and Court favours’. There was so much political wrangling in Paris that governmental positions seemed to change as quickly as in a game of musical chairs. Every man he met now, Humboldt said, was either a minister or an ex-minister. ‘They are scattered thick as the leaves in autumn,’ he told Lyell, ‘and before one set have time to rot away, they are covered by another and another.’

French scientists feared that Paris was going to lose its status as a centre for innovative scientific thinking. At the Académie des Sciences, Humboldt said, the savants did little and what little they did often ended in quarrels. Even worse, the scholars had formed a secret committee to sanitize the library there – removing books that propounded liberal ideas like those written by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. When the childless Louis XVIII died in September 1824 his brother Charles X, the leader of the ultra-royalists, became king. All those who believed in liberty and in the values of the revolution knew that the intellectual climate could only become more repressive.

Humboldt himself had changed too. Now in his mid-fifties, his brown hair had turned silver-grey and his right arm was almost paralysed by rheumatism – the long-term effect, he explained to friends, of sleeping on wet ground in the rainforest at the Orinoco. His clothes were old-fashioned, tailored in the style of the years just after the French Revolution: fitted striped breeches, a yellow waistcoat, a blue tailcoat, a white cravat, tall boots and a shabby black hat. No one in Paris, a friend remarked, dressed like that any more. Humboldt’s reasons were as political as they were parsimonious. With his inheritance long gone, he lived in a small plain apartment overlooking the Seine, consisting only of a sparsely furnished bedroom and a study. Humboldt had neither the money nor the taste for luxuries, elegant clothes or opulent furniture.

Then, in autumn 1826, after more than two decades, Friedrich Wilhelm III finally ran out of patience. He wrote to Humboldt that ‘you must already have completed the publication of the works, which you believed could only be accomplished satisfactorily in Paris.’ The king could no longer extend permission for him to stay in France – a country that, in any event, ‘ought to be an object of hatred to every true Prussian’. As Humboldt read that the king was now awaiting his ‘speedy return’, there could be no doubt that this was an order.

Humboldt desperately needed the money from his annual stipend because the cost of his publications had left him, he admitted, ‘poor as a church mouse’. He had to live on what he earned but he was useless when it came to his finances. ‘The only thing in heaven or earth that M. Humboldt does not understand,’ his English translator had remarked, ‘is business.’

Paris had been his home for more than twenty years and his closest friends lived there. It was a painful decision but in the end Humboldt agreed to move to Berlin – but only under the condition that he was allowed to travel to Paris regularly for several months at a time to continue his research. It was not easy, he wrote to the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in February 1827, to give up his freedom and scientific life. Having only recently accused George Cuvier of betraying the revolutionary spirit, Humboldt now became a courtier himself, entering a world in which he would have to negotiate a fine balance between his liberal political beliefs and his royal duties. It would be almost impossible, he feared, to find ‘the middle ground between the oscillating opinions’.

On 14 April 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin but not without one of his usual detours. He travelled via London, in what may have been a last desperate effort to convince the East India Company to grant him permission to explore India. Nine years had passed since his last visit in 1818, when he had stayed with his brother Wilhelm. Since then Wilhelm had been recalled from his diplomatic posting in Britain and now lived in Berlin,³ but Humboldt quickly reconnected with his old British acquaintances. He tried to make the most of his three-week visit.