2: The Anarchist Geographer

Elisée Reclus was born on March 15, 1830, in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, a small town on the Dordogne River in southwestern France. His father, Jacques Reclus, was a minister in Sainte-Foy and a professor at the nearby Protestant college. He was, in effect, a Protestant among Protestants, deciding to leave the French Reformed Church to become the pastor of a “Free Church” in the town of Orthez. By leaving an established church, Jacques Reclus rejected, for the sake of his beliefs, the possibilities of personal advancement and greater material security for himself and his large family. According to Elisée’s nephew and biographer, Paul Reclus, Jacques powerfully influenced his children by his dedication to his principles, by “putting communism into practice” in his daily life, and by showing himself, through his independence from official religion, to be a “precursor of anarchism.”[23] Elisée echoes these sentiments when he says that his father “was not an ordinary man who is content to live in accord with the world: he had the strange fantasy of wishing to live according to his conscience.”[24] Elsewhere, he notes that while Jacques at first dominated the Reclus children through his powerful personality, his lasting influence took the form of creating in them “the ideal of the unyielding conscience.”[25] Elisée’s own independence of thought and his quest for a just community were thus conditioned by his paternal heritage of religious dissent. Indeed, his anarchism can be seen as the ultimate Protestant revolt against two of the most dominant religions of the modern age: the deification of capital and the worship of the state. Moreover, his later ideal of a universal community of love is clearly a transformation of the concept of Christian love that he encountered in his early life.

Other familial influences on Elisée were also very important. His sense of dedication to the general good was fostered by the example of his mother, Marguerite Trigant, who inspired admiration within the family and the community for her tireless efforts in conducting a school for girls, while conscientiously raising thirteen children, eleven of whom reached adulthood. Marguerite also influenced her children through her knowledge of literature, her encouragement of good writing,[26] and her “deep love” for the family.[27] While Reclus later broke with his parents over their conservative religious views, both left enduring marks on his character and ideals. Moreover, his ties with the rest of the family remained unusually strong throughout his life. This was true above all in the case of his older brother, Elie, with whom he maintained a deep personal, political, and intellectual relationship throughout the course of their long lives. While Reclus later launched a fierce attack on the patriarchal authoritarian family, the family as a loving community of mutual aid and solidarity had a strong influence on his vision of the good society.

Reclus was educated primarily in Protestant institutions. At the age of twelve he was sent to the Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he learned German, Latin, English, and Dutch. His budding cosmopolitanism was encouraged not only by his exposure to another culture and to diverse languages but also by his personal experience of nationalistic animosity and prejudice against foreigners on the part of many of his fellow students. These experiences contributed to his growing concern for universal justice and belief in human solidarity. He returned to France, attended the Protestant College of Sainte-Foy, from which he received the baccalaureate, and then went to the Protestant University in Montauban. By this time, the seventeen-year-old Reclus had already developed an interest in radical political ideas and was becoming increasingly disillusioned with his conservative Calvinist environment.

Looking back on this period, he remarks that he, his brother Elie, and their schoolmates began to broaden their horizons as they heard news from Paris “of political struggles” and “then, all at once, of the Revolution itself.”[28] The growing rebelliousness of the Reclus brothers is evidenced by the fact that in the next year they were both expelled from the university for leaving school without permission to travel to the Mediterranean. For Elisée, this event perhaps signaled both his growing rejection of established institutions and his budding passion for exploring the larger world. Elie later described Elisée’s reaction to his first view of the great sea as ecstatic. Despite his restlessness, Reclus managed to return to the school at Neuwied, where he taught briefly. He then completed his formal education with six months of study at the University of Berlin. This stay, though relatively brief, was crucial in his development, for it was in Berlin that he attended lectures by the famous geographer Carl Ritter, who greatly stimulated his interest in his future field of specialization.

Already during his student years, Reclus’ political ideas were quite radical. In a manuscript dating from this period, the twenty-one-year-old expresses views that already quite clearly defined the course of his future anarchism and its underlying basis. He judges the goal of history to be “complete and absolute liberty,” adding that such liberty will amount to nothing more than “colossal egoism” if it is not united with love.[29] “For each individual man,” he asserts, “liberty is an end,” but in a larger sense “it is only a means toward love and universal brotherhood.”[30] Reclus’ lifelong concern with a synthesis of the ideals of freedom and solidarity are thus already quite evident. Even at this early date the implications of his views were clear enough for him to state, in terms reminiscent of Proudhon, that “our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations will no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or of another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.”[31]

Reclus’ conception of freedom had by this time already extended beyond the political into other realms, including the economic. He asserts that “political liberty is nothing without other liberties” and that freedom is meaningless “for those who despite their sweat cannot buy bread for their families, and for those workers who only incur new sufferings through the revolutions they themselves make.”[32] He also anticipates his later critique of authoritarian socialism in noting that “some communist

varieties [of socialism], in reaction against the present-day society, seem to believe that men ought to dissolve themselves into the mass and become nothing more than the innumerable arms of an octopus” or “drops of water lost in the sea.”[33] Reclus holds, to the contrary, that community and solidarity can never be separated from liberty and individuality. In this his ideas are reminiscent of those of William Godwin, his great predecessor in the tradition of philosophical anarchism. Godwin also emerged from the tradition of Protestant dissent and like Reclus was heir to a legacy of deep concern for the inviolability of individual conscience and respect for personal autonomy.[34]

After leaving Berlin, Elisée joined Elie in a walk across France, from Strasbourg on the Rhine in the northeast, to Orthez in the extreme southwest corner of the hexagon. By this time, both brothers had developed a passion not only for advanced political ideas but also for radical political action. They were enraged by Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, and met to plan a march to the mairie of Orthez to organize resistance. Only a small group of would-be insurrectionists actually set out the next morning for the mairie, and even these few, one by one, abandoned their plan. By the time the dwindling revolutionary mob reached its destination, it consisted of only two participants, Elisée and Elie.[35] Although their rebellion had turned into a fiasco, the authorities seemed to take the matter seriously, and the Reclus brothers found it necessary to leave France and take refuge in England. For Elisée, this flight began over five years of foreign travel, and it profoundly affected his future vocation as a geographer.

Reclus spent most of a year in England and Ireland, working first as a tutor in London and then as a farm worker near Dublin. During this period, he developed the idea of exploring the Americas with the intention of eventually establishing an agricultural community in cooperation with Elie and other friends. By early 1853, he had crossed the Atlantic and was living in Louisiana.[36] His Voyage to New Orleans recounts his passage through the Antilles, his trip up the Mississippi Delta, and his striking impressions of the city of New Orleans. It also chronicles an important stage in the development of his social and political ideas. After working briefly as a dockworker in New Orleans, he found a position as a tutor for the children of the Fortier family of Félicité Plantation. He spent most of his two and one-half years in Louisiana on this plantation, fifty miles up-river from New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi. His experience with the much-romanticized plantation society of the Old South produced in him above all a visceral reaction to the cruel inhumanity of slavery.[37] His revulsion toward the slave system was largely responsible for his decision to leave Louisiana. He wrote that he could not continue to earn money by tutoring the children of slaveholders and thus “steal from the Negroes who by their sweat and blood have earned the money that I put in my pocket.”[38] His strong sense of personal moral responsibility is evident in his judgment concerning his relationship to the system of slavery. He concluded that by remaining in the plantation house even in the seemingly innocuous role of tutor and participating in such an institution, “it is indeed I who hold the whip.”[39]

In addition to intensifying his hatred of racism, Reclus’ visit to Louisiana also strengthened his belief in the inhumanity of capitalism. While his experiences in Europe had already led him to abhor the evils of economic inequality and exploitation, he discovered in America an economistic mentality that far surpassed anything he had experienced in more traditionalist European societies. He concluded that the spirit of commerce and material gain had deeply infected American culture and poisoned it. As he wrote to his brother Elie, he believed the country to be a “great auction house in which everything is for sale, the slaves and the owner into the bargain, votes and honor, the Bible and consciences. Everything goes to the highest bidder.”[40] His loathing for the virtues of free enterprise continued throughout his lifetime.

After leaving Louisiana, Reclus spent eighteen months in New Granada (now Colombia), where he attempted unsuccessfully to realize his dream of a cooperative agricultural community. His efforts were doomed by yellow fever, inadequate planning, and his partnership with an elderly Frenchman who turned out to be untrustworthy. Reclus was reduced to penury by this disastrous undertaking and ended up “without the means even to buy a pair of shoes.”[41] Despite the setbacks that Reclus experienced in the Americas, his travels on both continents contributed greatly to his development as a geographer. During his stay in Louisiana, he traveled up the Mississippi and into Canada, making observations that would be invaluable for his later writings on North America.[42] In addition, his visit to New Granada formed the basis for his book Voyage to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.[43]

After six years of travel, Reclus decided to return to his home and family and to seek new opportunities in France. He returned with his idealism and creative energy seemingly unaffected by his adversities and with a wealth of experience that would be invaluable in his future vocation. His strong beliefs concerning the desirability of blending races and cultures were put into practice in his personal life when he married, in December 1858, Clarisse Brian, the daughter of a French father and a Senegalese mother. According to Paul Reclus, “there is not the slightest doubt that Elisée’s stay in Louisiana formed in him the idea of marrying a daughter of the despised race.”[44] To whatever degree this may have been his motive, the marriage was also based on personal affinity and was a happy one. Tragically, it ended after ten years with Clarisse’s death, shortly after the birth of their third child, who also died soon thereafter. A year later, Reclus married an old friend, Fanny L’Herminez, according to anarchist principles—that is, without the intrusion of either church or state. This alliance proved to be his closest and most cherished relationship with any woman in his life since the two shared many common values, intellectual interests, and political commitments. There was a deep spiritual affinity between them comparable only to that which Reclus had with his brother Elie. Although Fanny died less than four years after the marriage, he was profoundly affected by her for the rest of his life and for many years included her name or initials as part of his signature. He later entered into another “free union” with his third wife, Ermance Beaumont-Trigant. This relationship was also a personally fulfilling one for Reclus, though it lacked the spiritual depth he had found in his relationship with Fanny.

The testimony of Reclus’ friends and colleagues indicates that his egalitarian and cooperative ideas were practiced admirably in his personal life. His fundamental principles of solidarity and mutual aid were much more than political slogans. According to his friend and fellow anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin, “the idea of dominating anyone at all seems never to have crossed his mind; he hated down to the smallest signs a dominating spirit.”[45] This was true of his relationships not only with his wives but also with other members of his family and his broad circle of friends. He was widely praised for his great humility and his reluctance to present himself as a “leader” or “expert.” While he became well known as both a scientist and a political writer and activist, he vehemently rejected the idea of having followers or of placing himself in a position of superiority. As he once wrote to a young woman who was a would-be disciple: “For shame.... Is it right for some to be subordinated to others? I do not call myself ‘your disciple.’”[46] There are numerous stories of his interactions with others on terms of complete equality and of his unassuming participation in the more menial aspects of political work. Jean Grave notes that Reclus “was able to listen to objections from whatever source they came, and to answer them without any pride and without the sharp tone of one who issues decrees, and admits of no discussion.”[47] His spirit of nondomination extended beyond human beings to all other creatures and, indeed, to nature as a whole. He could not bear the idea of mistreating any sentient being, and he practiced vegetarianism for most of his life, on ethical grounds.

During the 1860s, Reclus published many geographical essays in the Revue des deux mondes and other journals, and he completed the first of his three great geographical projects. The Earth is an extensive fifteenhundred-page work in two volumes, published in 1868 and 1869.[48] This impressive study of the physical geography of the earth established Reclus rather early in his lifetime as an important figure in his field. In 1869, he published The Story of a Brook, a popular work that became a classic of nature writing for young people.[49] It was later followed by a companion work, The Story of a Mountain.[50] Another of Reclus’ activities in this period was his work in the cooperative movement, largely in support of Elie’s initiatives. The two brothers were responsible for the publication of the cooperativist journal L’Association and the creation of a mutual bank, La Société du Crédit au Travail. The journal’s difficulty in finding a public and the collapse of the bank contributed to Reclus’ increasing disillusionment with the cooperative movement.

For Reclus and his circle, the early 1870s were dominated by the events of the Paris Commune and its aftermath. Since he was over forty years of age at the time, he was exempt from military service during the Franco-Prussian War. Nevertheless, he volunteered for the National Guard, believing that it was necessary to defend the Republic against reactionary enemies. He served in the balloonist company of his friend Félix Nadar, but he did not see military action until after the Commune was declared. During the brief life of the revolutionary regime, he actively participated in both its politics and the defense of the city. As Paris fell, his column of the National Guard was captured by the Versailles troops. During the next eleven months, he spent time in fourteen different prisons and was tried and sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia.

Despite his refusal to submit to the new regime, and largely because of his prestige as a scientist and intellectual, his friends and supporters succeeded in having his sentence reduced to ten years in exile. As a result, he was allowed to immigrate to Switzerland. Ironically, this exile at the hands of a reactionary regime contributed powerfully to his development as a radical political theorist and a force within the European anarchist movement, for in Switzerland he began his association with the anarchists of the Jura Federation and developed close ties with the major anarchist theorists

Bakunin and Kropotkin. After some initial differences in outlook, Bakunin and Reclus became close collaborators in the First International and in the anarchist movement (including Bakunin’s International Brotherhood). Bakunin once said of the Reclus brothers that he had never known any persons more “modest, noble, disinterested, pure, and religiously devoted to their principles.”[51] These principles were close enough to Bakunin’s own that the three remained strong political allies until Bakunin’s death. Elisée delivered a eulogy to the great revolutionary at his funeral in Berne in 1876.

It was also in Switzerland that Reclus began his greatest geographical work, the New Universal Geography.[52] This monumental achievement appeared in nineteen large volumes between 1876 and 1894. The reader is struck not only by the quality of the writing, which, according to Patrick Geddes, “raised anew geography into literature,”[53] but also by the expansive scope of this seventeen-thousand-page work, the exhaustiveness of its details, and the magnificence of its illustrations. Geographer Gary Dunbar, in his biography of Reclus, concludes that “for a generation” this work “was to serve as the ultimate geographical authority” and that it constituted “probably the greatest individual writing feat in the history of geography.”[54] Reclus remained in Switzerland until 1890, heavily occupied with his extensive scholarship and political activities, and then finally returned to France after almost two decades of exile.

In 1894, he began a new phase of his career when he accepted an invitation to become a professor at the New University in Brussels. Reclus had originally been invited to teach at the Free University of Brussels, but because of increasing public reaction against anarchist “propaganda by the deed,” he was judged too controversial, and the invitation was withdrawn. This chain of events produced considerable dissension within the Free University and contributed to the decision to found the New University.[55] Despite the rather dissident character of this institution, Reclus had some reservations about entering even the remotest corner of the academic world, having remained an independent scholar, following his own political and intellectual path, until quite late in life. He wrote that although the “noble war cry” of the New University was “Let Us Make Men!” he feared that “to a certain degree it would also contribute to making exploiters.”[56] Despite these misgivings, he finally accepted the challenge with enthusiasm and was a great success, achieving renown as a teacher and winning the enduring admiration of many students.

At the conclusion of the New Universal Geography, Reclus comments that from “the myriad facts” of that vast work he would like to “extract a general idea, and thus, in a small volume written at leisure, justify the long series of books now ended without apparent conclusion.”[57] The “small volume” turned out to be Reclus’ final major work, the six-volume, thirty-five-hundred-page Man and the Earth.[58] This impressive undertaking constitutes a grand synthesis of Reclus’ ideas on geography, history, philosophy, science, politics, religion, anthropology, and many other fields. While the work reinforced his reputation as a major figure in the history of geography, it also expanded social geography beyond the conventional limits of the geographical into a comprehensive worldview. Since his publisher had compelled Reclus to avoid in the New Universal Geography any lengthy “digressions” on social and political topics, he reserved many of his most important theoretical reflections for this final work.[59] It is thus both the culmination of his life’s work as a social geographer and the most developed expression of his anarchist social philosophy.

Reclus was admirably consistent in integrating his libertarian and communitarian ideals into his personal life, his political activism, and his scholarly work. His enduring love of life, of other human beings, and of truth is expressed eloquently in a letter written March 25, 1905, only a few months before his death. At the age of seventy-five, though ill and growing increasingly weaker, he could still write of “two powerful attractions” that gave him the will to live. The first consisted of “affection, tenderness, the joy of loving, the happiness of having friends and of making them feel that one loves them, that one asks nothing of them but to let themselves be loved, and that every token of affection is a delight freely given.” The second, he says, is “the study of history, the joy of seeing the interconnection of things. There is doubtless a strong element of imagination in this study, and deceptive Maya also leads us down many false paths. But it is another great joy to recognize one’s errors.”[60]

Reclus died in the countryside at Thourout near Brussels on July 4, 1905. It is reported that his last days were made particularly happy by news of the popular revolution in Russia. He expired shortly after hearing of the revolt of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin.