In Cologne, in 1807, a child was born to poverty. His father was a minor craftsman; his mother worked as a domestic servant. They named him Robert Blum.
The family was Catholic, but loosely so. What Robert learned from his parents was not doctrine but ethics: the dignity of labor, the duty to the poor, the wickedness of cruelty. His earliest memories were of hunger and of his parents' efforts to feed their children despite having little themselves.
He had no formal education beyond what the parish school could provide. But he was intelligent and curious, and he found his education elsewhere: in books borrowed and stolen, in conversations with tradesmen and travelers, in the newspapers that occasionally found their way into working-class hands.
At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. But his interests lay elsewhere. He was drawn to the theater, to journalism, to the ferment of ideas that was reshaping Europe. He read about the French Revolution, about the rights of man, about the dream of a society where birth would not determine destiny.
He also read the old texts. In a friend's attic, he found volumes of Paracelsus, of Boehme, of forgotten alchemists. He did not understand them fully, but he sensed that they spoke of transformation — and transformation was what he craved. Not only for himself but for his world.
Robert later wrote: "I was born in the darkness of poverty, but I caught glimpses of light. Every book I read, every conversation with a thinking person, every moment of beauty in the midst of squalor — these were cracks in the wall, and through them I saw what the world might become."
Historical Sources