Glyn Ford on a great visionary
The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity by Andrea Wulf published by Allen Lane
George Forster needed rescuing from history. A singular liberal thinker created by nature and nurture, and a Prussian supporter of the French Revolution, he died in Paris in January 1794, according to the French Monitor, of the long-term effects of scurvy and “domestic sorrows”. Disappointed by its savage turn to the guillotine as the answer to political disagreement, he never disavowed its necessity as the most important revolution of all time. For him, those denouncing the revolutionaries as immoral and bloodthirsty are wrong, because violence and depravity were the cause, not the fruit of the revolution. “Without the rivers of blood, the benefits of the revolution which the world so desperately needs, would never have been realised”.
Forster was living in Mainz, Prussia, when the City surrendered to invading French troops in October 1792. Their commander, General Custine, offered the population the choice of returning to despotism under the Elector of Mainz or becoming a free republic with French support. Forster, as a leading member of the City’s “Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality”, was named by Custine as vice-president of the provincial government. In February, there followed the first-ever election in a German state, and when the Parliament met, it declared Germany’s first independent Republic; Forster was elected vice-president and, as a fluent French speaker, was immediately dispatched to Paris on behalf of the Mainz Republic to seek its incorporation into France. After appealing to the National Convention in the Tuileries, the request was granted.
By now Mainz was under siege, with Forster urging French military support that never came. He was stuck in Paris – a wanted German traitor after it fell to the Germans in July. He spent time with Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and translated the new French constitution into German and English – it promised a radical redistribution of wealth, state education for all and universal male suffrage. Andrea Wulf, in an extraordinary journey, spends several hundred pages following Forster to his date with revolution and death. As a seventeen-year-old, he was a scientist on Cook’s second voyage searching for Antarctica. The lessons he found were not those of his fellow travellers, but of equality, not savagery; diversity, not hierarchy; curiosity, not orthodoxy. He was a great visionary and a man out of time.