The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

Humboldt was deeply disappointed with revolutions and revolutionaries. During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’. In the months before the 1848 events in Europe, Humboldt had followed news of the war that the United States had waged with Mexico – shocked, as he said, by America’s imperial behaviour which reminded him of ‘the old Spanish Conquista’. As a young man he had witnessed the French Revolution but also Napoleon crown himself emperor. Later, he had watched Simón Bolívar liberate the South American colonies from Spanish tyranny, only then to see ‘El Libertador’ declare himself dictator. And now his own country had failed miserably. At the age of eighty, he wrote in November 1849, he was reduced to the ‘worn-out hope’ that the people’s desire for reforms had not disappeared for ever. Though it may seem ‘to be asleep’ periodically, he still hoped that their wish for change was in fact ‘eternal as the electromagnetic storm which sparkles in the sun’. Perhaps the next generation would succeed.

we are in a reactionary period