The Invention of Nature

As the revolutionaries in Berlin took control of the city, a frightened Friedrich Wilhelm IV conceded and promised a constitution and a national parliament. On 19 March he agreed to withdraw his troops. That night the streets of Berlin were illuminated and the people celebrated their victory. Instead of gunshots, there was singing and jubilation. On 21 March, only three days after the fighting had begun, the king displayed his defeat symbolically by riding through Berlin draped in the black, red and gold colours of the revolutionaries.¹ Back at the palace where crowds had gathered, the king appeared on the balcony. Humboldt stood behind him in silence and bowed to the people below. The next day Humboldt ignored his obligations to the king and marched at the head of the funeral procession for the fallen revolutionaries.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV had never minded his chamberlain’s revolutionary leanings. He appreciated Humboldt’s knowledge and avoided their ‘differences in political opinions’. Others were less easy with Humboldt’s position. He was called an ‘ultraliberal’ by a Prussian thinker and a ‘revolutionist in court favour’ by one minister, while the king’s brother, Prince William (later Emperor William I) thought Humboldt a threat to the existing order.

Humboldt was used to manoeuvring around different political views. Twenty-five years earlier in Paris, he had smoothly circumnavigated reactionary and revolutionary lines in France without ever really risking his position. ‘He is well aware that while he gets too liberal,’ Charles Lyell had written, ‘he is in no danger of losing the station and the advantages which his birth ensures for him.’

In private, Humboldt criticized European rulers with his usual sarcasm. When Queen Victoria had invited him during one of her visits to Germany, he mocked that she had fed him ‘hard pork chops and cold chicken’ for breakfast as well as displaying complete ‘philosophical abstinence’. After meeting the Crown Prince of Württemberg and the future kings of Denmark, England and Bavaria at Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s palace Sanssouci, Humboldt described them to a friend as a group of heirs apparent that consisted of ‘a spineless pale one, a drunken Icelander, a blind political fanatic and an obstinate feeble-witted’. This, Humboldt joked, was the ‘future of the monarchical world’.

Some admired Humboldt’s ability to serve a royal master while maintaining the ‘courage to have his own opinion’. The King of Hanover, Ernst August I, however, remarked that Humboldt was ‘always the same, always republican, and always in the antechamber of the palace’. But it was probably Humboldt’s ability to inhabit both these worlds that allowed him so much freedom. Otherwise, as he admitted himself, he might have been thrown out of the country, for being ‘a revolutionary and the author of the godless Cosmos’.

As Humboldt watched the revolutions in the German states unfold, there was a brief moment when reform seemed possible but it was over almost as quickly as it had begun. The German states decided to appoint a National Assembly to discuss the future of a united Germany but by the end of May 1848, a little more than two months after the first gunshot had been fired in Berlin, Humboldt wasn’t sure if he was more frustrated about the king, the Prussian ministers or the delegates of the National Assembly that had convened in Frankfurt.

Even those who conceded that reforms were necessary couldn’t agree what this new Germany should be comprised of. Humboldt believed that a united Germany should be based on the principles of federalism. Some power should remain with the different states, he explained, without ignoring the ‘organism and the unity of the whole’ – underlining his argument by using the same terminology as he did when talking about nature.

There were those who favoured a union for purely economic reasons – envisaging a Germany without tariffs and trade barriers – but also nationalists who glorified a shared and romanticized Germanic past. Even if they were to agree, there were different opinions on where the borders should lie and which states were to be included. Some proposed a greater Germany (Grossdeutschland) that included Austria, while others preferred a smaller nation (Kleindeutschland) led by Prussia. These seemingly endless disagreements made for messy negotiations, as arguments were put forward, then overturned and discussions stalled. Meanwhile the more conservative forces had time to regroup.