Elisée Reclus (French Edition)
According to Kirkpatrick Sale: 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 , 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 s [3] , 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. Reclus had himself entered a free union in , after the death of his first wife. In he also wrote Unions Libres, a pamphlet which detailed his anarchist and feminist objections to marriage.
Reclus escaped punishment as he remained in Switzerland. 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: His principal objection to clothing was, however, a moral one; he felt that a fixation with clothing caused excessive focus on what was covered.
In , Reclus was appointed chair of comparative geography at the University of Brussels , and moved with his family to Belgium. In , 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.
He died at Torhout , near Bruges , Belgium. Reclus advocated nature conservation and opposed meat-eating and cruelty to animals.
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He was a vegetarian. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Anarchy Anti-authoritarianism Anti-capitalism Anti-statism Proletarian internationalism Class consciousness Class struggle Classless society Common ownership Common resources Commune Consensus democracy Co-operative economics Direct democracy Egalitarian community Free association Free store " From each according to his ability, to each according to his need ".
Prefigurative politics Primitive communism Stateless communism Stateless society Workers' control Worker cooperative Workers' council Wage slavery. Insurrectionary anarchism Platformism Synthesis federations. Anarcho-naturism Anarcho-primitivism Social ecology Veganarchism. Retrieved May 15, A Social History of France L'Homme et la terre.
Retrieved 24 August A Record of Events and Opinions. Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. One of the finest essays ever written in praise of vegetarianism is an article which he contributed to the Humane Review when I was editing it in Company I have kept. They were the compound catalyst which caused Mirbeau's own ideas to crystallise, and they constituted a trilogy of enduring influences.
Retrieved January 23, The Geographer of Liberty". A History of Anarchism. The World That Never Was: Philosophy and Geography 1: Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics. Il mondo senza la mappa: Cybergeo, European Journal of Geography. He warned Gauguet of the dangers of an enterprise managed from afar. He gave him a list of the difficulties he would encounter and the lack of means of transport: I do not know of any exploitation of this kind which has been profitable.
When your project becomes definite, you must not forget to present the other side of the coin to shareholders, difficulties of acclimatization, the plague of mosquitoes and the lack of roads. Exploitation of wood is impossible as long as there is no road from Voladoreito to the nearest port. The inhabitants will be easy to trade with, and the Goijares themselves not unapproachable.
Élisée Reclus
Can we count on developing good relations with the latter and use them for our work? Would it be useful to study their language, and how would it be possible. Would it be useful to use women and children as much as possible? Without claiming to civilize 9 these Indians, do you think we could become friends by doing some good for them, for example, by building a small hospital at Rio Hacha where their sick would receive free treatment.
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He considered the site badly chosen because of the climate and marsh fever, they would need a landing stage at Dibulla and a road needed to be built across marshland: Besides, you must not forget that the meager trade from the mountains is in the hands of a few merchants who you would have to fight straight away and generously compensate. Certainly the Goijares are not unapproachable, but they live on the plain stretching from the East of Rio Hacha and their style of living does not allow them to go into wooded areas.
Racial hostility would oppose their moving. First choose a more favorable place, either at mid slope of the Sierra Nevada, or even in the Sierra at San Pablo, towards the source of the river Enea. There, I think, you will have more chance of finding suitable land with easy access. It is not a response against the main idea. He does not refuse colonization itself, nor the principal of anti colonialism.
He is eager to protect the natives from mercantile exploitation, and all his remarks are the fruit of good sense and harshly acquired experience. There is no significant evolution. In the preface of a collection of militant texts 11 there is a reaffirmed profession of faith in colonialism without ambiguities: The best, the most valiant, the most audacious and at the same time the most anxious to learn, sometimes also those fleeing oppression and proudly bearing their love of independence, these elite men are carrying the torch and are civilizers; thanks to them ideas spread, trade and the arts learned, awareness of humanity becomes closer and closer.
But when it concerns real or supposed colonies obtained through brutal conquest, by cowardly aggressions of the strong against the weak, then these are the worst kind, vomiting the conquered nation and taking possession of its pillaged territory. On the whole this is bad and the agents employed to accomplish it suit this planned work as they are themselves bad. Along with these civilizing bureaucrats are merchants with a special mission to create needs in natives until then accustomed to a simpler life.
He has targets and if he does not accomplish them, if he does not bring ivory, or rubber, or copal gum, or the expected bag of millet, beware the whip, the stick, or even the knife. This difference should be put down to the then fashionable Franco-British rivalry. Reclus started to develop some ideas about the effects of colonization on the people concerned in his writings on India. Nevertheless, he draws back from systematic criticism because he is fundamentally attached to the idea of a European mission to bring civilization to the rest of the world.
To their peaceful insular superhuman pride is added the awareness of global domination, the imperialism the lavish Disraeli was a protagonist for when he crowned Queen Victoria Empress of India. Algeria has real colonists, men who work the land themselves, bringing up their children in the field, guarding their harvest. It is they, rather than the soldiers, who make up the real strength in French Algeria, … they are there of their own free will and they have made it their home.
Those versed in the Code benefit from this rule to ruin whole tribes. As he was in favor of Algerian colonization he does not mention it, and it is difficult to believe that he was not informed when you look at the abundance and quality of the information he collected on each country. He believes in humanistic colonization and he firmly believed in this all his life.
His preface to his writings in proves it Louis Paul The colonial question is reduced to a moral problem, the colonial presence is not contested. I have found absolutely nothing on the colonial question to date in the great founding literary anarchist works. We have seen with Bakounine, for example, that if the nationalist question is present, there is nothing specifically about colonization.
It seems that the radical left, anarchist and communist alike, was not capable of analyzing the phenomena of colonization as a phenomenon in itself.
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It is clear that at that date, the anarchist critic was focused on the militant colonial right, texts are more a criticism of militarism than of colonization itself. But other temperate and even tropical regions of the New World are also peopled and will certainly become even more peopled…: He said himself in , in an undated letter sent to Brussels to Mr. Roch, pastor at Orthez It seems impossible for us to find common ground for the discussion you have invited me to. Nonetheless, we both have an ardent desire to live to be useful to all our brothers… libertarian socialist, or to be even more precise, communist anarchist, in many senses it seems I must be closer to the Evangelical Christians.
I am searching to live in equality with all, Jew or Greek, owner or slave…. It is this same explicitly Christian messiah-ism that is responsible for human destiny, giving the European colonizer the duty of guiding other cultures towards progress. Reclus showed himself definitely partisan to a humanist colonialism. He shares these conceptions with many other anti colonialists and even with declared partisans of colonialism like Leroy-Beaulieu. With the exception of the place he gives to the State and to missionaries in the work of colonizing and without sharing the ideal of planetary racial mix and colonization, Leroy-Beaulieu, champion of colonization; is close to Reclus.
He wants to protect other peoples from the appetite and covetousness of commerce and other traffickers. All his work bears witness to this. He draws back nonetheless before the conclusions he could have made faced with the abundance of facts he relates.
In this way he creates an ideal image of man built on religious and Rousseau-like sources. This is also a contradiction he never resolved, because he was not blind to existing battles of power and violence. Together they were persuaded of the superiority of their civilization. Examples can be found of the way colonizing ideals circulated in society, feeding dreams of glory to the youth of the time. I have still not forgotten the Aventures de Capitaine Corcoran Assolant , great propagator of republican ideas defeating British pretensions in an Indian kingdom. Even if on the whole the French population remained generally and manifestly indifferent to the colonial question, it was not indifferent to the colonial gesture, tales of adventure, the thirst for unexplored countries.
This appetite for knowledge and adventure are inseparable elements of our civilization in themselves. His attempt in Columbia was a failure. Environmental difficulties and illness played a great part. To this can be added his repugnance for the exploitation of his fellow man, because he could never resolve himself to the exploitation of others, to his great honor. We could have expected him to draw other conclusions concerning his failure just like his other pertinent observations, and also that he could have ended with a belief in something other than individual peasant colonization.
Throughout his life, Reclus encountered difficulties in his attempts to set up in business. On his return to France, he took part in the cooperative movement, a new failure. It is only when he decided to earn his living through his pen that he succeeded.
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He suffered his last commercial failure in Brussels, when the cartographic company he started became bankrupt. It seemed that all his attempts in business suffered from over confidence in his associates. This is easy to verify in the accounts of meetings of the International Congress for Peace and in texts by Bakounine. Reclus is almost unique, among analysts, to take up the colonial question in writing.
On analysis, these texts contain but few ambiguities.
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The position of Reclus is clear, rational and logical and in line with his democratic convictions; his morals and his anarchism. Reclus believed in the expansion of western civilization, even if he could see its flaws and defects, he believed in the mission of a West, armed with science, to transform and improve the globe.
The globe had to be improved to relieve a Europe stifled by demography; at the same time it was possible to create the anarchist ideal of harmony between all men in a general racial mixed breeding. It was only one of the two faces of colonialism. Just like Marxism, anarchism could take part in these messiah-ism issues rooted in judo-Christianity which support our societies. Critics or upholders of colonization, all share the same relationship with Nature and the world, whether to exploit or improve it. All share the same sentiment of superiority of western civilization and all give it a role in the education and guardianship of primitive peoples.
Anarchists, like communists and socialists could not really fundamentally criticize colonialism. They could criticize the abuse and this is to their honor. Marxists see this as a necessity. Either willingly or by force peoples of the earth are abruptly or gradually integrated in the modern world.
Of course, colonization is a complex phenomenon, and if we want to avoid Manichaeism, it should be admitted that contact with the outside world for these isolated peoples is not only accompanied by abuse, horrors, exploitation and domination. It is also accompanied by real progress and undeniably positive changes.
It is, however, utopian as Reclus seemed to think, to be able to clean up trade between nations, because it is based on a balance of power where traders possessing information about the market and customers face producers who are ill informed and divided. It is utopian to believe that this balance of power between men or between societies will disappear. On many occasions Reclus broadcast his doubts about the capacity for survival of native societies faced with colonization.
In a text on Oceania, Reclus even recognized that the contact with Europeans had been catastrophic for some peoples: You can sense how right was the response made to the honest Gordon by a people he had regretted having initiated to civilization: Heinrich Barth, Savorgnan de Brazza or Duveyrier, could not escape the dominant idea of progress, of improvement or of a civilizing mission and this is born out in the title of an article by Michel Heffernan , b the limitations of Utopia. Reclus believed in a humanistic project for planetary improvement. He was an apostle for a globalization begun centuries before.
The ideology of development appears thus to be the heir of the ideology of humanist colonization. The reticence of current beneficiaries of development aid, with its ever present air of colonialism, is understandable. France coloniale ou parti colonial. Aventures merveilleuses mais authentiques du capitaine Corcoran. Geografi i Nidaros GIN , 5, 2, pp. Paris, L'Harmattan , pp.
The anarchist way to socialism.