Preface to the First Edition

Elisée Reclus’ life and ideas have been an inspiration to both of us ever since we first discovered his fascinating account of his voyage to New Orleans. We both have a strong interest in French culture and ideas and in the history of the French in America—an interest that was influenced by our Louisiana French family backgrounds. One of us has long been interested in anarchist theory and social ecology, and has written several books on these subjects. For these reasons, we were intrigued by this French anarchist geographer and his acute observations on the land of our ancestors, la Louisiane. We went on to translate the text of Reclus’ voyage, which was published as A Voyage to New Orleans: Anarchist Impressions of the Old South.[12]

As we continued to study Reclus over most of the past decade, we found his writings not only interesting historically but also pertinent to today’s world. We have both been active in the Green movement and in various ecological projects, and for a number of years we edited a magazine concerned with (among other things) bioregional culture and ecological politics. We were struck by the degree to which Reclus’ ideas concerning the relationship between humanity and the earth, his view of history and the struggle for liberation, and his critique of various forms of oppression and domination were relevant to the theory and practice of political ecology. Reclus’ efforts to put his inspiring ideals into practice in his personal life also impressed us greatly. We concluded that despite serious limitations in some areas, he has an important message of freedom, human love and solidarity, and reconciliation with nature that is as meaningful today as ever before. In fact, it takes on even more significance in an increasingly cynical age that is sorely in need of a vision of hope, social creativity, and the universal good. This book is the result of our desire to share Reclus’ vision with others.

The project of selecting excerpts from Reclus’ voluminous writings was rather daunting. His two most important works alone run to twenty-five volumes and more than twenty thousand pages, and he also wrote other important multivolume works. Furthermore, he contributed many articles to geographical journals, intellectual reviews, and popular political magazines, in addition to writing a number of widely circulated political pamphlets. The translated selections and introductory essays draw on many of these works, but most particularly Reclus’ magnum opus of social geography and social theory, Man and the Earth. This 3,500-page book, which was the culmination of his life’s work, has been almost unknown to the English-speaking world. Our translation makes key sections of this work available to English-language readers for the first time. We are also presenting the first English translation of a large section of Reclus’ only full-length political work, Evolution, Revolution and the Anarchist Ideal, and several important short works written over a period of a half-century. In addition, the introductory essays offer the first extensive analysis of Reclus’ social thought ever to appear in English. Our goal is to offer the reader a brief but comprehensive view of Reclus’ life and work, and an appreciation of his importance to philosophy, social theory, and political thought.

The translation of diverse works published between 1866 and 1905 presented certain difficulties. The most demanding of our challenges was to produce a translation that would be readable for a contemporary audience but still capture the flavor of Reclus’ nineteenth-century prose. His final work, Man and the Earth, presented the most formidable difficulties. According to his nephew Paul, Reclus completed the manuscript in 1903, and they worked together on editorial revisions of this vast six-volume work “between October 1903 and Reclus’ death in July 1905.”[13] Certain important discussions, while quite coherent and sometimes reaching the level of eloquence, never received the thorough editing they deserved. We have attempted to remain faithful to Reclus’ meaning while achieving as much clarity as the texts allow.

We have consistently employed English cognates in certain cases in which Reclus’ French usage strongly reflects his culture and historical epoch. We felt that it was important to use the generic “man,” not only because it was the contemporary English equivalent of Reclus’ “l’homme” but also because it expresses very well the tension, and indeed the conflict, between his anarchistic, liberatory aspirations and the conventional, and even conservative, conceptual framework he inherited. The same point applies to such terminology as the “conquest” of various goals as opposed to their “achievement”; the “discovery” of regions by Europeans rather than their “exploration”; and the description of certain cultures as “primitive,” “savage,” and “barbarian” rather than “tribal,” “hunting and gathering,” or “planting.” At times, Reclus explicitly recognized the problematical nature of some of these terms, but he continued to use them, and they certainly express the classic modernist political sensibility that constitutes an important dimension of his outlook.

Language typical of the classical workers’ movement and nineteenthcentury radicalism has also been retained. For example, the term maître has usually been translated as “master,” a term that frequently appeared in English-language anarchist prose of his time, in preference to “ruler” or other more contemporary terms. Reclus uses two terms, camarade and compagnon, for his fellow members of the revolutionary movement. We have translated these terms as “comrade” and “companion,” for even though only the former is common in such a context in English, various cognates of the latter term have been very widely used in the international anarchist movement. Reclus’ pain has consistently been translated as “bread,” even when the terms “food” or “necessities of life” would seem more natural today. It was Reclus who gave Kropotkin the title for his famous work The Conquest of Bread. Although this phrase may now strike one as rather strange, it reflects very well the social imagination of European revolutionaries of the nineteenth century. Finally, it will be noted that in a few cases we have included the original French in brackets when the word is unusual, or when the original might usefully convey certain connotations to readers with some knowledge of French.

We would like to express our deepest thanks to our close friend and colleague Prof. Ronald Creagh of the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, for many hours of discussion of numerous points of translation, for his highly perceptive comments on the introductory essays, and for his assistance in locating important texts. We also wish to express our deep gratitude to M. Pierre Bravo-Gala for his generosity and enthusiasm in discussing our translation, for his friendship and hospitality, and for his many astute suggestions on the interpretation of some of Reclus’ most perplexing passages. We would like to thank Prof. Gary Dunbar for his very helpful comments on the text and for his generous gift of invaluable research materials. We are grateful to Prof. Kent Mathewson for his encouragement and support, and to Mr. Pavlos Stavropoulos for encouraging us to expand our project to its present scope. We would also like to recognize Ms. Deborah F. Justice for outstanding editorial work on the text.

Many others contributed to our work through suggestions, assistance in locating materials, advice on technical issues in their fields, and general encouragement of our project. Included in one or more of these categories are Mr. Alvaro Alcazar of Loyola University; Prof. Myrna Breitbart of Hampshire College; Prof. Maurice Brungardt of Loyola University; Prof. Bernard Cook of Loyola University; Mr. David Crawford; Mme. Françoise Creagh; Prof. Anatol Dolgoff; Ms. Patricia Doran, Loyola University Library interlibrary loan coordinator; Prof. Marie Fleming of the University of Western Ontario; Mr. Jeffrey Harrington; Mr. Tetsushi Hiruma; Ms. Riki Matthews; the late Rev. Thomas Mulcrone, S.J., of Loyola University; Prof. Tom Starnes; and Mme. Stéphane Tiné of the staff of the French Senate. John Clark would also like to thank the Loyola University Grants and Leaves Committee for travel assistance for research. He is also very grateful to Camille Martin for applying her considerable editorial skills to the chapters he wrote.

John Clark and Camille Martin
New Orleans, Louisiana, and Bayou LaTerre, Mississippi