Élisée Reclus

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Élisée Reclus
Born(1830-03-15)15 March 1830
Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde, France
Died4 July 1905(1905-07-04) (aged 75)
Torhout, Belgium
Alma materUniversity of Berlin
Occupation(s)Geographer, anarchist revolutionary, and writer
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Jacques Élisée Reclus (French:

anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork, La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes ("Universal Geography"), over a period of nearly 20 years (1875–1894). In 1892 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society
for this work, despite having been banished from France because of his political activism.

Biography

Reclus was born at

Protestant pastor and his wife. From the family of fourteen children, several brothers, including fellow geographers Onésime and Élie Reclus, went on to achieve renown either as men of letters, politicians or members of the learned professions.[1]

Reclus began his education in

University of Berlin, where he followed a long course of geography under Carl Ritter.[1]

Withdrawing from France due to the political events of December 1851, as a young man he spent the next six years (1852–1857) traveling and working in Great Britain, the United States, Central America, and Colombia.[1] Arriving in Louisiana in 1853, Reclus worked for about two and a half years as a tutor to the children of cousin Septime and Félicité Fortier at their plantation Félicité, located about 80 kilometres (50 mi) upriver from New Orleans. He recounted his passage through the Mississippi River Delta and impressions of antebellum New Orleans and the state in Fragment d'un voyage à la Nouvelle-Orléans, published in 1855.[2]

On his return to Paris, Reclus contributed to the

Revue des deux mondes, the Tour du monde and other periodicals, a large number of articles embodying the results of his geographical work. Among other works of this period was the short book Histoire d'un ruisseau, in which he traced the development of a great river from source to mouth. During 1867 and 1868, he published La Terre; description des phénomènes de la vie du globe in two volumes.[1]

Le Cri du Peuple
in the garden of his home in Brussels, c. 1894–1905

During the

Cri du Peuple.[1]

Continuing to serve in the National Guard, which was then in open revolt, Reclus was taken prisoner on 5 April into Fort Quélern. On 16 November he was sentenced to deportation for life. Because of intervention by supporters from England, the sentence was commuted in January 1872 to perpetual banishment from France.[1]

After a short visit to

A. H. Keane. Reclus's writings were characterized by extreme accuracy and brilliant exposition, which gave them permanent literary and scientific value.[1]

According to Kirkpatrick Sale:[3]

His geographical work, thoroughly researched and unflinchingly scientific, laid out a picture of human-nature interaction that we today would call bioregionalism. It showed, with more detail than anyone but a dedicated geographer could possibly absorb, how the ecology of a place determined the kinds of lives and livelihoods its denizens would have and thus how people could properly live in self-regarding and self-determined bioregions without the interference of large and centralized governments that always try to homogenize diverse geographical areas.

In 1882, Reclus initiated the Anti-Marriage Movement. In accordance with these beliefs and the practice of union libre ("free unions"), which was common among working-class French in the mid-to-late 1800s,[4] Reclus allowed his two daughters to "marry" their male partners without any civil or religious ceremonies, an action causing embarrassment to many of his well-wishers.[1] Reclus had himself entered a free union in 1872, after the death of his first wife. In 1882 he also wrote Unions Libres, a pamphlet which detailed his anarchist and feminist objections to marriage.[5] The French government initiated prosecution from the High Court of Lyon, arrested him and Peter Kropotkin as the International Association's organizers, and sentenced the latter to five years' imprisonment. Reclus escaped punishment as he remained in Switzerland.[6] In a 1913 piece, Kropotkin, in admiration of Reclus, said that if anyone asked about the conflicts of the Middle East, that "I should merely open the volume of Elisée Reclus's Geographie Universelle L'Asie, Russe..."[7]

Reclus had strong views on naturism and the benefits of nudity. He argued that living naked was more hygienic than wearing clothes; he believed that it was healthier for skin to be fully exposed to light and air so that it could resume its "natural vitality and activity" and become more flexible and firm at the same time. He also argued that from an aesthetic point of view, nudity was better: naked people were more beautiful. His principal objection to clothing was, however, a moral one; he felt that a fixation with clothing caused excessive focus on what was covered.[8][9]: 485 

Élisée Reclus

In 1894, Reclus was appointed chair of comparative geography at the

Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.[10]

In 1905, shortly before his death, Reclus completed L'Homme et la terre, in which he rounded out his previous works by considering humanity's development relative to its geographical environment.[9][11]

Personal life

On 11 March 1858, he was initiated in the regular

Masonic Lodge Les Émules d'Hiram, affiliated to the Grand Orient of France. His brother was just initiated and took part in his masonic baptism.[12][13][14]
He remained at the initial degrees of the Masonic spiritual path.

Reclus married and had a family, including two daughters.

He died at Torhout, near Bruges, Belgium.

Legacy

Reclus was admired by many prominent 19th century thinkers, including

Léon Metchnikoff's book La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques, to which Reclus contributed a foreword.[19]

Reclus advocated

social ecology and animal rights movements.[21]

Selected works

Books

L'Homme et la terre (The Earth and Its Inhabitants"), 6 volumes:

  • L'Homme et la terre (1905), e-text online, Internet Archive
  • Élisée Reclus (1876–1894), A.H. Keane (ed.), The Earth and its Inhabitants, London: Virtue & Co.
  • Elisée Reclus (1890). The Earth and Its Inhabitants. D. Appleton and Company.
  • Élisée Reclus (1883–1893), The Earth and its Inhabitants, New York: D. Appleton,
    OCLC 6631001
  • The earth and its inhabitants. The universal geography, ed. by E.G. Ravenstein (A.H. Keane). (J.S. Virtue, 1878)
  • The earth and its inhabitants, Asia, Volume 1 (D. Appleton and Company, 1891)
  • The Earth and Its Inhabitants ...: Asiatic Russia: Caucasia, Aralo-Caspian basin, Siberia (D. Appleton and Company, 1891)
  • The Earth and Its Inhabitants ...: South-western Asia (D. Appleton and Company, 1891)

Anthology

  • Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes et autres textes, Éditions Premières Pierres, 2002 –
    ISBN 9782913534049

Articles

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Chisholm 1911, p. 957.
  2. ^ Clark, John. "Putting Freedom on the Map: The Life and Work of Élisée Reclus (Introduction and translation of Fragment)". Mesechabe. 11 (Winter 1993): 14–17. Retrieved 15 May 2008.
  3. ^ a b Sale, Kirkpatrick (1 July 2010) "Are Anarchists Revolting?" Archived 12 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine, The American Conservative, 1 July 2010
  4. ^ McPhee, Peter (2004). A Social History of France 1780-1914 (Second ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 195.
  5. ^ Ferretti, Federico. "Anarchist geographers and feminism in late 19th century France: the contributions of Elisée and Elie Reclus". Feminist Historical Geographi. 44: 68–88.
  6. ^ a b Ingeborg Landuyt and Geert Lernout, "Joyce's Sources: Les Grands Fleuves Historiques", originally published in Joyce Studies, Annual 6 (1995): 99–138
  7. ^ Peter Kropotkin (1913). "The Coming War". The Nineteenth Century: A monthly Review.
  8. ISBN 978-0-7391-0805-5
    .
  9. ^ a b Reclus, Élisée (1905). L'Homme et la terre. Vol. Tome VI. Paris: Paris, Librairie universelle.
  10. ^ "List of Past Gold Medal Winners" (PDF). Royal Geographical Society. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  11. ^ Chisholm 1911, p. 958.
  12. ^ Léo Campion, Le drapeau noir, l'équerre et le compas: les Maillons libertaires de la Chaîne d'Union, full text
  13. ^ Revue belge de géographie, volumes 110 à 112, 1986, page 10
  14. ^ Jean-Paul Bord, Raffaele Cattedra, Ronald Creagh, Jean-Marie Miossec, Georges Roques, Elisée Reclus - Paul Vidal de la Blache : Le géographe, la cité et le monde, hier et aujourd'hui, L'Harmattan, 2009, page 13.
  15. OCLC 473067997
    .
  16. OCLC 25787010
    .
  17. OCLC 2113916
    .
  18. ^ "...the scales were finally tipped...by Mirbeau's contact with the works of Kropotkin, Reclus and Tolstoy....They were the compound catalyst which caused Mirbeau's own ideas to crystallise, and they constituted a trilogy of enduring influences."Reg Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau Manchester University Press, 1977.
  19. ^ La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques. Hachette. 1889.
  20. ^ "History of Vegetarianism – Élisée Reclus (1830 – 1905)". ivu.org. International Vegetarian Union. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  21. OCLC 490216031
    .

Further reading

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