The Man Who Read Rousseau and Gave Up Meat

Gustav Struve was born on 11 October 1805 in Munich, and grew up to become a German surgeon, lawyer, publicist, and revolutionary who led the radical democratic wing of the 1848 uprisings in Baden alongside Friedrich Hecker. In 1832, well before the barricades, he became a vegetarian after reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. He carried that conviction into print in 1833 with Mandaras Wanderungen, the first German vegetarian-themed novel, whose protagonist is a young Brahmin scandalized by Europeans who preach Christian mercy while eating meat and hanging criminals. Decades later, in 1868, he founded the Vegetarische Gesellschaft Stuttgart, one of Germany's first organized vegetarian societies, and in 1869 published Pflanzenkost, die Grundlage einer neuen Weltanschauung, arguing plant-based eating as the foundation of a new worldview.