Any attempt to deal with the relationship of French science to German science in the Romantic period has to come to grips with the increasingly ethno-national self-consciousness that comes to pervade intellectual and cultural work in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. Artists, poets, and critics measured their work against national origins. They cast themselves in a history of Europe defined by the mixture, conflict, and succession of peoples, each animated by a particular character or spirit, reciprocally determining and determined by physical environment, political institutions, religion, and art. So too did natural philosophers. Neglecting this dimension of cultural activity in the period runs the risk of attributing the prominent role of national categories in philosophical discourse to actually existing national differences and missing their internal, discursive function in the definition of nationhood in this critical period.
Keywords
- German Science
- German Philosophy
- Plant Geography
- Religious Liberty
- Permanent Secretary
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References
Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975).
Dietrich von Engelhardt, Historisches Bewußtsein in der Naturwissenschaft von der Aufklärung bis zum Positivismus (Frankfurt and Munich, 1979) in general makes this point but concentrates on the philosophies of history developed in Romantic physics, biology, and chemistry, and not on the historiographical discourse that formed the more general cultural context for their work.
John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Isbell demonstrates that de Staël’s work systematically distorted her literary and philosophical sources to create “Romanticism” as a unified national counterpoise to Napoleonic France, and that her propagandistic synthesis defined Romantic revolt throughout the European world, including America, after the Restoration.
De l’Allemagne 1: 19.
For Wilhelm von Humboldt’s contribution, see Isbell, op cit. In the late 1790s, Wilhelm von Humboldt was himself busy composing a “panorama of the 18th Century” on the carpentry of national tempers, and spent much of his life articulating the privileged relationship between German and Greek language and literature.
Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften; Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv (Dahlem), I.Rep. 120. Abt.A, Fach IX [Mass und Gewicht], 1, Nr. 2, vols. 1 and 2, ff. 20–66: Anschaffung französischer und westphälischer Normalmaße und -gewichte.
Humboldt was elected correspondant to the physical section on 16 pluviose XII. Procès-verbaux des séances de ‘Académie des sciences (La Hendaye, 1921), vol. 3, pp. 62, 171, 174.
Paris, 14 October, 1804. Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, edited by Anna von Sydow (Berlin, 1907), ii: 265–266.
J. A. Chaptal, Mes souvenirs sur Napoléon (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1893), pp. 382–383.
Paris, 14 October, 1804. Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, ed. Anna von Sydow (Berlin, 1907), vol. 2, pp. 265–266. Chaptal recalled telling Bonaparte the same thing: “M. de Humboldt possède toutes les sciences, et lorsqu’il voyage, c’est toute l’Académie des sciences qui marche…” Op. cit. p. 383.
Humboldt, Essai sur la géographie des plantes, pp. 41–42.
Ibid. pp. 4, 44–45. The Essai was read before the Institut in January 1805.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, XIV: 585–586.
Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer. In Schriften zur Geographie der Pflanzen, edited by Hanno Beck (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 44–45. See also Humboldt’s enthusiastic correspondence with Schelling from 1805 in Briefe der deutschen Romantiker, edited by Willi A. Koch (Leipzig: Dietrich Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1938), pp. 201–204.
Frankel, Eugene. “J.B. Biot and the Mathematization of Experimental Physics in Napoleonic France”. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 8 (1977), pp. 33–72.
Berthollet: “Observations sur l’action que le sulfate de fer exerce sur le gaz nitreux”, Annales de chimie, 39 (An 9 [1801]): 3–17; Laplace to Humboldt, Paris, 8 May 1806, UB Leipzig; Ramond regretted that Humboldt had only measured his barometric altitudes to 1/10th of a line, or +/− 3 meters. Journal de Physique 60 (1805): 280 ff. Ramond’s continuing efforts to correct Laplace’s formula for calculating elevations from barometric frustrated Humboldt no end: “Ramond a lu de nouveaux mémoires sur ces éternels Baromètres. Il y a des méchans qui noyent au coups d’épaules [?]. Il trouve des millimètres de hauteur et finira par mesurer les conscrits au moyen du Barometre, ce qui rendra la méthode tres recommendable sans doute”. (to Pictet, Paris, 30 December [1812?], Fondation Rilliet, Geneva, no. 26) To Humboldt, Ramond’s Laplacian insistence on mathematical completeness and perfection was a prime example of the French penchant for atomism and mathematical realism, and their insensibility to a dynamic view of nature.
Humboldt to Pictet, 1806. Stapfer reported to Usteri (14 October 1804) on the wide variety of results Humboldt was promising soon after his return and the skepticism they were meeting among French scientists. “Allein ich sehe, dass mehrere hiesige Gelehrte in die Genauigkeit und Zuverlässigket dieser Angaben und Resultate kein völliges Zutrauen setzen”, citing specifically Humboldt’s eudiometric results. Stapfer’s Briefwechsel (Basel, 1891), i: 174.
Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, 8 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1858–1867), vol. 1, p. 7. Guizot also made ends meet in Paris as tutor to Stapfer’s children, 1807–1811.
“L’ignorance des moeurs et des habitudes de la vie chez les autres peuples est poussée en France jusqu’aux dernières limites du ridicule”, J. F. Reichardt, Un hiver à Paris sous le Consulat, 1802–1803 (Paris, 1896), p. 87.
“Quelques personnes me reprochent des opinions qu’elles appellent germaniques. Les Allemands sont, de toutes les nations europénnes, celle qui a laissé les avenues les plus libres pour tout ce qui lui venoit du dehors; convaincus que les travaux de l’esprit humain, en quelque lieu qu’ils aient pris naissance, sont le patrimoine de tous les hommes, ils sont toujours empressés de profiter de cet héritage précieux… [Il y a] une disposition générale qui fait de la nation allemande une nation vraiment étrangère à tout égoisme littéraire, vraiment cosmopolite dans ses travaux”. Le Publiciste, 5 August and 29 August 1809; quoted in Wolfgang Leiner, Das Deutschlandbild in der französischen Literatur, p. 266.
In general, Roland Mortier, Les “Archives littéraires de l’Europe” (1804–1808) et le cosmopolitisme littéraire sous le premier Empire (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1957). For instance, in 1804 the Institut created a commission (including Humboldt) to establish a Bibliothèque germanique on the model of the Bibliothèque britannique edited by the Genevan naturalist (and former tribune under the Consulate) Marc-Auguste Pictet, but the interior minister objected to every editorial board put forward, and the project never moved ahead. (Procès-verbaux des séances de l’Académie, iii: 164, 173–174) Stapfer’s and Villers’ attempt to publish a “Mélanges de littérature étrangère” likewise came to nothing, “eben weil wir nur reine Humanitätszwecke im Auge haben”. Stapfer Briefwechsel, i: 173.
“que les allemands ne s’occupent de rien, pas même de chimie et de physique, sans y mêler la politique, la liberté et la révolution”. Hase to Böttiger, 11 March 1805. Hase was diagnosing the failure of a planned monthly digest of German literature and philosophy. See Ludwig Geiger, “Eine deutsche Zeitschrift in Frankreich (1805)”, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, 10 (1896): 350–352, 495–495; Joseph Texte, “Les origines de l’influence allemande dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle”, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 5e année (1898), pp. 1–53.
Charles Villers, Coup d’oeil sur les universités et le mode d’instruction publique de l’Allemagne protestante (Cassel, 1808), quoted in Texte, pp. 20–22. “Il faut absolument se défaire, pour concevoir et juger un tel institut [une université allemande], de toute arrière-pensée d’école ordinaire, de régularité monastique, et de cette discipline de collège qu’on impose à l’enfance. Ce sont ici des hommes qui parlent à des hommes. Toutes les sciences s’appuient mutuellement et se tiennent par une chaine étroite qui ne peut se rompre sans préjudice. C’est par où surtout la forme des universités qui embrassent tout le cycle de l’enseignement nous parait préférables à celui des écoles spéciales ou des facultés séparées qui en tiennent lieu en France. Il est difficile qu’on soit tout purement jurisconsulte, ou médecin, ou lettré. Il manquera toujours à celui qui n’aura reçu qu’un enseignement strict et exclusif dans une science, les vues générales, les connaissances accessoires qui lient sa science à tout le reste du savoir humain, qui le complètent, le relèvent ou l’ennoblissent.
Stapfer Briefwechsel, ii: 43.
Humboldt, Essai sur la geographie des plantes, pp. 34–35.
DA 3: 5. De Staël shared with the Institut’s Class of Moral Sciences this interpretation of Leibniz as well as Kant principally as moralists. See Mortier, op cit. pp. 154–173.
Humboldt to Philippe Albert Stapfer, “ce mardi” [24 January 1815], Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, MS#40. (mistakenly dated “1809”) The review is in Moniteur universelle, 22 janvier 1815. Stapfer was the Helvetic representative to Bonaparte’s court. Rodolphe Luginbühl, “Alexander de Humboldt et Philippe Albert Stapfer”, Denkschrift der historischen und antiquarischen Gesellschaft zu Basel (Basel: Schweigerhauserische Buchdrückerei, 1891) recites the circumstances surrounding the review and partially quotes Humboldt’s response, pp. 162–168.
Cuvier’s Humboldt closely resembles the heroes and heroines of de Staël’s novels—all nomads or barbarians of the drawing room—as well as Cuvier’s own self-image (see n. 31 below). Isbell, op cit. pp. 50–53. The two touchstones for this double-movement of sensation and reflection, turning outward and turning inward, in the German literature are Schiller’s Uber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (1796) and the second part of Kant’s Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1791), where Kant explains true sublimity not as terror before nature’s immensity, but as a final realization of the human soul’s superiority to nature. Stapfer’s praise of Humboldt as “Leibniz and Cook dans un seul homme” (in a mistaken eulogy of 1811) reflects a similar appreciation of Humboldt as a symbol of moral liberty.
Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fonds Cuvier, MS 3159, 2r–3v, 6v. La division du travail attache chacun à son bureau, à son atelier, où à son glèbe; rien n’y varie l’occupation des individus et n’excite pas la reflexion; de là une autre tournure dans les esprits: une dependance absolue des hommes entre eux et des moeurs qui ressemblent aussi peu à celles des grecs que nos chanteuses publics diffèrent a l’homère our nos professeurs de philosophie à Socrate et Platon; de là aussi une toute autre police pour maintenir et diriger cette grande fabrique ou personne ne garde son individualité et ne doit avoir jamais une impulsion propre.
See Outram (1984), pp. 143–147, for Cuvier’s religious opinions, so far as they are known, and a brief summary of his role in official French protestantism as member of the nominating committee of the Protestant Consistory of Paris (under the Empire) and Grand-Master of the Faculties of Protestant Theology in the Université de France and Director of non-Catholic Religions under the Restoration.
On the occasion of the Concordat of Bologna, Cuvier wrote to Charles de Villers, whose Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la Réformation de Luther (Paris, Metz, 1804) won the prize: “What say your Protestants and above all your Kantians about all the fine things we’re up to here? Here are our materialists [ideologues] who, wanting nothing to do with noumena and pure understanding, are now obliged to swallow transubstantiation with all its charms; besides, they say that a god made of bread suits them as well as any other, it’s all matter”. (18 floreal an X, quoted in Texte, p. 23).
Outram (1984) describes the Romantic persona Cuvier crafted in the “Preliminary Discourse” of Recherches sur les ossements fossils (1812), the solitary explorer of space and time, attaining views over natural and civil history. This persona is close cousins with the Humboldt of Ansichten der Natur and with the “solitary man” he conjures at the end of the Essai sur la géographie des plantes, who, though “isolated on an arid coast”, can nonetheless survey all of nature through the tools of civilization and science.
Humboldt to Bonaparte, 1 February 1808, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.
Quoted in Maurice Crosland, Society of Arcueil, pp. 44–45. Cuvier admired German “cosmopolitanisme”, where “on s’attachait a la justice universelle plus qu’aux interets parrticuliers d’un etat”. (quoted in Outram 1984, p. 69).
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Dettelbach, M. (2007). Romanticism And Resistance: Humboldt And “German” Natural Philosophy In Napoleonic France. In: Brain, R.M., Cohen, R.S., Knudsen, O. (eds) Hans Christian Ørsted And The Romantic Legacy In Science. Boston Studies In The Philosophy Of Science, vol 241. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2987-5_13
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