The Invention of Nature

Humboldt believed in the power of learning, and books such as his Views of Nature were written for a general audience rather than for scientists in their ivory towers. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, Humboldt tried to establish a school of chemistry and mathematics at the university. He corresponded with colleagues about the possibilities of laboratories and the advantages of a polytechnic. He also convinced the king that Berlin needed a new observatory equipped with the latest instruments. Though some believed that Humboldt had become a ‘sycophantic courtier’, it was in fact his court position that enabled him to support scientists, explorers and artists. One has to get the king ‘during an idle moment’, Humboldt explained to a friend, and not let go of him. Within weeks of his arrival he was busy implementing his ideas. He had, as one colleague said, the ‘enviable talent for constituting himself the centre of intellectual and scientific converse’.

For decades Humboldt had criticized governments, openly voicing his dissent and opinions, but by the time he moved to Berlin, he had grown disillusioned with politics. As a young man he had been electrified by the French Revolution, but in recent years he had watched how the ultra-royalists of the Ancien Régime were turning back the clock in France. Elsewhere in Europe the mood was also reactionary. Wherever Humboldt looked, he saw how hope of change had been quashed.

In England, on his recent visit, he had met his old acquaintance George Canning, the new British Prime Minister. Humboldt had seen how Canning had struggled to form a government because his own Tory Party was split over social and economic reforms. At the end of May 1827, ten days after Humboldt arrived in Berlin, Canning had found himself turning to the opposition party, the Whigs, for support. From what Humboldt could gather from the Berlin newspapers, the situation in Britain became worse at every turn. Within a week the House of Lords had shelved an amendment to the divisive Corn Laws which had been a key issue in the reform debates. The Corn Laws were so controversial because they enabled the government to impose high import duties on foreign grains. Cheap corn from the United States, for example, was so heavily taxed that it became prohibitively expensive, allowing wealthy British landowners effectively to eliminate any competition while at the same time keeping a monopoly to control prices. Those who suffered the most were the poor because the price of bread remained exorbitant. The rich stayed rich and the poor remained poor. ‘We are on the brink of a great struggle between property and population,’ Canning predicted.

The situation was similarly reactionary on the continent. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German states had entered a phase of relative peace but of few reforms. Under the leadership of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the German states had established the Deutscher Bund during the Congress of Vienna – the German Confederation. It was a loose federation of forty states that replaced what had once been the Holy Roman Empire and then under Napoleon the Confederation of the Rhine. Metternich had envisaged this form of federation in order to rebalance the power in Europe and to counter the emergence of one individual powerful state. There was no head of state and the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt was less a governing parliament than a congress of ambassadors who all continued to represent their own states’ interests. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia had regained some economic power when its territory expanded again, now comprising Napoleon’s vassal state, the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia, as well as the Rhineland and parts of Saxony. Prussia now stretched from its border with the Netherlands in the west to Russia in the east.

In the German states reform was regarded with suspicion and as the first step on the road to revolution. Democracy, Metternich said, was ‘the volcano which must be extinguished’. Humboldt, who had met Metternich several times in Paris and in Vienna, was disappointed by these developments. Though the two men had corresponded about the advancement of the sciences, they knew each other well enough to avoid political discussions. In private the Austrian Chancellor described Humboldt as ‘a head that’s gone politically awry’ while Humboldt called Metternich a ‘mummy’s sarcophagus’ because his policies were so antiquated.

The country to which Humboldt had returned was decidedly anti-liberal. With few political rights and a general suppression of liberal ideas, Prussia’s middle classes had turned inwards and into the private sphere. Music, literature and art were dominated by expressions of feelings rather than revolutionary sentiment. The spirit of 1789, as Humboldt had called it, had ceased to exist.