Elisée Reclus, le site

FERRETTI Federico, Anarchy and Geography : Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. Abingdon, Routledge, 2018, 248 p., ISBN 9781138488120

F.F. — 2019-07-17T12:28:00Z

In the last few years, anarchist geographies had seen an outstanding international rising, and anarchist approaches experience a growing interest in all scholarly disciplines. Nevertheless, many aspects of the international anarchist tradition remain little-known, and English-speaking scholarship remains mostly impenetrable to authors and works from other linguistic traditions. Inspired by relational and transnational approaches in historiography and by works on locations and mobilities of knowledge in historical geography with a special focus on print cultures, this book explores for the first time the relation between a French, Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), a Russian, Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and a region, the ‘British Isles'. It does this through an analysis of their works and networks in this region, based on extensive exploration of primary sources. The respective biographical links with this area and the great variety of their friends, collaborators and political fellows there allow us to conclude that Britain and Ireland were fundamental places for the establishment of the early networks of anarchist geographies. Their social, cultural and geographical context played a decisive role in the formation and dissemination on anarchist ideas on geographies of social inequalities, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminism, civil liberties, animal rights and ‘humane' or humanistic, approaches to socialism.

https://www.routledge.com/Anarchy-and-Geography-Reclus-and-Kropotkin-in-the-UK/Ferretti/p/book/9781138488120

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION : ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHICAL TRADITIONS

1. THE RECLUS BROTHERS : TRANSLATING SCIENCE AND RADICAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Exiles in the ‘British Isles' : discovering social and colonial questions

Reclus in Ireland : discovering colonialism and landlordism

Long-lasting effects of the London experience : dealing with ‘British science'

Reclus in London on numerous occasions

2. EDITORIAL NETWORKS AND THE PUBLICS OF SCIENCE : BUILDING PLURALIST GEOGRAPHIES

Early Kropotkin's networks : John Scott Keltie, Patrick Geddes and Joseph Cowen

Geographers, editors and gentlemen : Henry Bates, Hugh Mill, William Robertson-Smith, Hugh Chisholm

The Nineteenth Century : socialism and evolutionary theorising

Kropotkin : an anarchist in the editorial business

The business world of publishing again : Halford Mackinder and the anarchists

3. ESTABLISHING A GEOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN THE ‘BRITISH ISLES' : EMERGENT SOCIAL AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES

A universal geography, and an amazing traveller's guide

Showing London to the French

The NGU and the Mediterranean metaphor

The new Archipelago and the principle of coastal indentation

Fields, factories and workshops : an anarchist economic geography of England

4. STRIVING FOR FREEDOM : RECLUS'S AND KROPOTKIN'S POLITICS IN THE UK

Charlotte and Pyotr : founding a journal

Anarchism, female activism and women's rights

For ‘subject races' and for Ireland : Nannie Dryhurst and the others

A strenuous anti-colonialist

Freedom for Ireland

Kropotkin and Alfred Marsh : between activism and scholarship

Decolonizing socialism (and geography) : The Black Man's burden

Reclus and Freedom against the Empire

Jingoes and Matabele

Non-European revolutions

5. RIPPLES AND WAVES OF ANARCHIST WRITING : TOWARDS HUMANE SCIENCES

The most ‘humane' collaborator : Richard Heath

Reclus, and Heath's French connection

Heath, and Kropotkin's British connection

Anarchism, humanism and gay rights : Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis

Ethical socialism : Henry Salt, William Morris and Walter Crane

Morris and anarchism

The Scottish connection : James Mavor, the Geikies and the Geddeses

CONCLUSION : THE RELEVANCE OF EARLY CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES

Appendix A : Pyotr Kropotkin, ‘Natural selection and mutual aid', Humane Science Lectures, 1897

Appendix B : Elisée Reclus, ‘War', Freedom, May 1898

Appendix C : [Edward Carpenter] To Peter Kropotkin from Friends in Great Britain and Ireland, 1912

FERRETTI Federico, “Networking print cultures : Reclus' Nouvelle Géographie universelle at the Hachette publishing house”, Journal of Historical Geography vol. 63, 2019

F.F. — 2018-09-24T08:22:00Z

Historical geographers increasingly address editorial networks as an important element in contextual and situated readings of knowledge production. Recent work has shown that large publishing houses, such as Murray in Britain, Hachette in France and Perthes in Germany, played a primary role in shaping geographical knowledge. This paper's contribution is an analysis of the collaboration between Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) and Hachette over the Nouvelle Géographie universelle (NGU), a classic work in French geography that encompassed nineteen volumes between 1876 and 1894. Drawing upon archival sources, such as the published and unpublished correspondence between Reclus, his collaborators and the publishers, I argue that Reclus' negotiations with this mainstream publishing house were part of a political strategy that was deployed by early anarchist geographers to disseminate their views among broader audiences than just specialist and militant groups. This was a successful bargain for both sides, as there were approximately twenty thousand copies of each volume of the NGU printed. To understand this strategy of public communication and political influence, I examine the international group of anarchist geographers who were involved in Reclus' editorial endeavour within the wider context of Hachette's editorial networks. This involves situating the knowledge they produced in two locations : Paris, where Hachette's headquarters were established, and Clarens, the Swiss village to which Reclus was exiled, and where he worked with collaborators such as Pyotr Kropotkin and Léon Metchnikoff to establish the ‘centre of calculation' for his large encyclopaedia.

Keywords

French universal geographies ; Publishing industry ; Print culture ; Anarchist geographies ; Mobilities of knowledge

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748817302670

FERRETTI Federico, GARCIA-ALVAREZ Jacobo, Anarchist Geopolitics of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) : Gonzalo de Reparaz and the ‘Iberian Tragedy', Geopolitics, 2017 [early view]

F.F. — 2017-12-20T18:56:15Z

This paper addresses an early case in critical and anarchist geopolitics by analysing a body of work from Spanish geographer Gonzalo de Reparaz Rodríguez-Báez (1860–1939). After reconstructing the complex and contradictory figure of Reparaz, a scholar and activist who oscillated between very different political positions in his especially long and productive career, we focus on the geostrategic writings he produced for the anarchist journals, CNT, Fragua Social and Solidaridad Obrera during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. Our argument is twofold : first, in the ideological wanderings of Reparaz, it is possible to identify some elements of coherence around the principles of Iberism, Federalism and Africanism as produced by the Spanish culture of that time. Second, the works he produced for the anarchist press in the last part of his life can provide important insights for present-day scholarship on critical, radical and anarchist geopolitics, especially on what an ‘anarchist geopolitics' might look like and which ways it can contribute to the largely debated problem of exiting the ‘territorial trap'. The case we present contributes to these debates by showing that an anarchist engagement with ‘geopolitics', a term that Reparaz used some times at the end of his career, might draw on challenging clashes of civilization and ‘pure' identities, on questioning statist and administrative frameworks of analysis and on focusing more on grassroots activism than on providing advice for state strategies.

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KnwPuR6Zp8d3UfhY5pdB/full

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2017.1398143

FERRETTI Federico, Tropicality, the unruly Atlantic and social utopias : the French explorer Henri Coudreau (1859-1899), Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 38, 3, 2017

F.F. — 2017-08-01T10:35:50Z

This paper addresses the works of Henri Coudreau, a little-known French explorer of Guiana and Amazonia who was later forgotten by the ‘heroic' histories of exploration because of his unruliness and nonconformist attitudes. Drawing on the literature of postcolonialism and tropicality as well as on recent studies of anti-colonialist geographies, I address for the first time Coudreau's geography from the perspective of anarchist and critical thinking. My main argument is that Coudreau's work is a further example of the complexity and heterogeneity of the European intellectual field during the imperial age. Despite having come of age intellectually among all the European racist and ethnocentric prejudices of his day, Coudreau developed a different outlook thanks to two factors, viz., his personal experience in living for years with the indigenous communities of Amazonia, and his exposure to anarchist anti-colonialist ideas through his collaboration with Elisée Reclus. Coudreau's tropical utopia of an independent Amazonia, and his endorsement of the stateless nature of local communities, ran counter to French imperial politics, occasioning Coudreau's dismissal from the French administration and his professional exile in Brazil at the time of the Franco-Brazilian border dispute (1897−1900).

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjtg.12209/full

FERRETTI Federico, Imperial ambivalences. Histories of lady travellers and the French explorer Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867-1938), Geografiska Annaler Series B - Human Geography, 2017

F.F. — 2017-08-01T08:46:43Z

This article addresses the life and works of a virtually unknown lady explorer, Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867-1938), who continued an Amazonian exploration ‘alone' after the death of her husband, the maverick French geographer Henri Coudreau (1859-1899). It extends and connects two main bodies of scholarship, the first on women travellers and feminist historical geographies, the second on scientific couples and collaborative partnerships in the history of sciences. I argue that, in addition to textual analysis, the social, biographical, cultural and political contexts of these travels allow a better understanding of the ambivalences that characterised Western travellers and scholars, both men and women, in imperial contexts. This helps avoiding essentialism and recovering the experiences of marginalised figures in the history of geography. The story of Octavie Coudreau has elements of originality that can stimulate new reflections on these points, also because her travel experience was not in the hegemonic Anglophone context, and she was acquainted with unorthodox and dissident geographers of that time. This article also contributes to studies on the influence which anarchist geographers such as Elisée Reclus, a supporter of the Coudreaus, exerted on explorers, though Octavie seemed to keep her distance from this former socialist inspiration.

Keywords : Octavie Coudreau, Lady Travellers, Geography and Empire ; Amazonia ; Exploration

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/04353684.2017.1353887

FERRETTI Federico, “Teaching anarchist geographies : Elisée Reclus in Brussels and ‘the art of not being governed'”, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017

F.F. — 2017-07-18T21:29:14Z

This paper addresses the issue of how to teach anarchist geographies, as discussed by the current literature in this field. To this end, I analyse an exceptional archival source, i.e., the notes taken by a student of anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus during the classes that Reclus gave at the New University in Brussels. These notes are the only surviving document able to shed light on the short teaching experience Reclus had at the end of his career (1894-1905). Drawing upon Benedict Anderson's notions of “anti-colonial imagination” and of different “frameworks of comparison”, I show how Reclus tried to perform an anarchist geographical teaching by simultaneously embracing empathy toward cultural differences and universal feelings of justice and international solidarity. Therefore, he taught a non-statist geography by showing his students what James Scott calls “the art of not being governed”, addressing the examples of the egalitarian traditions of some non-European peoples, together with their anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial struggles. Finally, I explain how this case can help to elucidate the present-day debates on performing radical teaching approaches inside and outside the academy.

Keywords : anarchist geographies ; geography teaching ; empathy ; anti-colonialism ; Armenian genocide

“Liberty, though primitive, is a higher stage than servile civilisation.”

E. Reclus, Comparative Geography, Academic Year 1896-97, Lecture 14

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2017.1339587

FERRETTI Federico, BARRERA DE LA TORRE Geronimo, INCE Anthony, TORO Francisco (eds.), Historical Geographies of Anarchism. Early critical geographers and present-day scientific challenges, Routledge, 2017

F.F. — 2017-07-03T14:31:04Z

In the last few years, anarchism has been rediscovered as a transnational, cosmopolitan and multifaceted movement and its traditions, often hastily dismissed in the name of Marxism, Liberalism or post-structuralism, are increasingly revealing insights which inspire present-day scholarship in anthropology, sociology, archaeology, philosophy, biology, social history and, last but not least, geography. This work is the first attempt to provide a historical geography of anarchism, addressing at the same time places and spatiality of historical anarchist movements and key thinkers, and the present scientific challenges of the geographical anarchist traditions in the fields of social movements, environmental struggles, post-statist geographies, indigenous thinking and situated cosmopolitanisms.

This book collects the proceedings of the multiple session “Historical Geographies of Anarchism : situating struggles, studying environments” organised by the Editors for the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference on the theme of ‘Geographies of Anthropocene', which took place in Exeter in September 2015. While in recent years there has been a growing number of sessions on anarchism's relationship with geography, this conference was the first one organised on these specific historical topics and the contributions drew on three main strands of international literature on Anarchist geographic research.

The first strand concerns the recent rediscovery of anarchist geographies, which has occurred increasingly since the special issues consecrated to anarchist geographies by the journals ACME and Antipode in 2012. These journal issues included works on anarchist geographies' genealogies and historical figures like Léon Metchnikoff/Lev Mečnikov (1838-1888), Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921) now addressed by a great number of multilingual contributions. Recent works have also promoted new debates in the fields of anarchist pedagogies and post-statist geographies , among numerous other critical, substantive contributions to existing debates. The second is the literature analysing historical geographies of science and scientific revolutions as a part of the wider context of the spatial turn in social sciences, addressing the localisations and mobilities of scientific knowledge as decisive elements in understanding it. The third strand of the book is the historical literature considering anarchism as a transnational movement based on networks and cosmopolite circulations of ideas, publications and militants, a line of research which has successfully challenged the shortcomings of more traditional histories of anarchism which were dependent on what Davide Turcato defines as a “cyclical pattern of advances and retreats”, leading to false “millenaristic” readings of anarchism that impede a clear understanding of how this movement really worked.

A common topic for a great part of our contributions is an analysis of the transnational and cosmopolitan networks and circulations affecting both social movements and the construction of knowledge by early anarchist geographers : the transnational nature of the anarchist movement can help to explain the anti-colonialist thinking of its early intellectuals, such as Reclus and Kropotkin. Thus, the idea of linking anarchism and its history to its places and circulations is a central one for this collective work, which addresses at the same time the history of anarchism and present-day anarchist movements and their spatiality. Consistent with the transnationalism, cosmopolitism and multilingualism of the anarchist tradition, we include works produced by an international collective of authors who worked (at the date of the conference) in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland, UK and USA. Thus, one of our aims is to give accounts of works and debates outside the English-speaking world, which has become the de facto centre of academic knowledge production, and beyond mainstream academia altogether. Another characteristic of this book is its interdisciplinary nature, as one can find among the authors, historians, historical geographers, cultural and political geographers who have found in the spatiality of anarchism a common ground for research and discussion.

The first part of the book addresses spaces and places in the history of anarchism under a transnational standpoint. Carl Levy traces a wide historical outlook of the city as the place for anarchist experiments in self-government and as a generator of powerful revolutionary imaginaries. The historical experiences raised in this essay include the medieval city, the 1871 Paris commune, the 1936 revolutionary Barcelona and the capitals of 1968 risings, interrogating each case on its significance for the history and development of anarchist thinking. Andrew Hoyt presents a geographical approach to the distribution of the Italian-speaking anarchist journal Cronaca Sovversiva all over the United States, in order to analyse the spatial patterns of distribution of transnational anarchist propaganda by applying the concept of ‘social field'. Davide Turcato likewise addresses the Italian anarchist press in the USA, in this case to investigate the relation between internationalism, cosmopolitan practices and ideas of national cultural belonging among transnational anarchist militants. Julian Brigstocke analyses a body of documents from late 19th century France to open up a discursive critique of the relationship between humour and violence in militant mentality and in wider biopolitical practices of that time.

The second part of the book analyses topics related to the spaces of early anarchist geographers, focusing mainly on the figures of Reclus and Kropotkin. These authors were the inventors of a solidaristic interpretation of evolution, known as the theory of mutual aid, which challenged established theories of the time, such as Malthusianism and Social Darwinism. At the same time, they were committed to the study of the ongoing relations between humankind and environment, refuting the positioning of so-called “human” and “natural” environments as separable domains. Drawing less on ideas of wilderness and protection, these thinkers sought solutions to “harmonise” the coexistence of living beings on the earth's surface, anticipating some of the contemporary themes of more-than-human approaches. Secular and rational “science” was thus considered as a fundamental instrument for that. Problematising all these topics entails also reflexions and new debates on the present coming back of Creationism, Malthusianism and environmental Determinism. Francisco Toro analyses the Reclus's thinking with regard to the intellectual context of present-day degrowth theories, showing Reclus's commitment lead to very effective concerns in today's fields of geography of resources and environmental geographies. Federico Ferretti addresses three cases of analysis by early anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Mikhail Dragomanov [or Drahomanov, or Drahomaniv] (1841-1895) of colonised or recently-decolonised nations in order to understand the complex links between anarchism, nationalism and anti-colonialism in the Age of the Empire. Pascale Siegrist analyses Kropotkin's and Reclus's commitment to the scientific field of their time in order to problematise the definition of “anarchist geography”, a relatively recent label, which did not exist during their period of activity.

The third part of the book addresses the spatiality of present challenges for anarchist geographers. David Crouch analyses the effectiveness of the social geography of Colin Ward (1924-2010), a thinker who is considered as one of the most important references for present-day anarchism, mainly in English-speaking countries. Crouch addresses at the same time his personal experience of collaboration with Ward, the latter's references in the history of geographical thought and his insights for contemporary cultural geographies and urban planning. Rita Velloso analyses the spatiality and “insurrectionary architecture” of the 2013 “Brazilian Spring” as it occurred in Belo Horizonte, its relations with urban spaces and the general social aims of the movement. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera address an innovative linkage between non-statist geographies and de-colonial geographies, matching in this sense the historical tradition of anarchist geographers Reclus and Kropotkin, committed to build a regional science which did not assume the state and the administrative boundaries as its framework of reference. For today's critical and radical geographies, the association with archaeology means a deeper historical reflexion in thinking and questioning recent assumptions and discourses on the dissolution of states, emphasising the necessity for critical scholarship to destabilise the state as an analytical category. Finally, Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre and Narciso Barrera-Bassols analyse the relations between anarchism and indigenous movements, mobilising an anarchist view of Anthropocene which draws on Reclus's idea of the consubstantiality of the terms traditionally considered as “humankind” and “nature”. The authors propose an analysis of contemporary ecological emergencies through the lens of a set of perspectives distinct from the classical European and Eurocentric intellectual tools. In particular, they utilise indigenous thinking and seek to integrate it with a range of anarchist ideas on plurality and social solidarity. Thereby, they target an alternative view of modernity, drawn from what de-colonial thinkers in Latin America call “pluriversality”.

These contributions present a heterogeneous panorama in their historical and geographical span, but they also share important points in common. First, their common understanding of anarchism as a transnational, cosmopolitan and multilingual tradition which has to be studied in its places, networks and flows. Second, the importance of the historical tradition of the ‘classical' anarchist geographers to provide insights for present day revival of anarchist scholarship in geography : this legacy, as several of our authors argue, should not be taken uncritically, but to be first historically and spatially contextualised to interact with recent debates while avoiding anachronism. Third, there is a common commitment to rethink the epistemological framework of geography questioning the long-lasting hegemony of readings based on the state, or on state-like territories, as the privileged framework of reference. Networks, material and immaterial flows, diverse localisations of intellectual and political movements addressed in this book show how much more complex the spatialities of these phenomena are ; likewise, present-day global and reticular protest movements all over the world, and the left/libertarian revolutions which occurred in regions like Chiapas and more recently in Rojava, show that state and state reason are increasingly intellectually unfit to explain reality and to inform scholarship committed to social transformation. Through the contributions of this book and its authors, we therefore seek to open up new analytical frameworks and frontiers of study for the future development of historical geographies in general, and anarchist historical geographies in particular.

https://www.routledge.com/Historical-Geographies-of-Anarchism-Early-Critical-Geographers-and-Present-Day/Ferretti-Barrera-de-la-Torre-Ince-Toro/p/book/9781138234246

FERRETTI Federico, “Publishing anarchism : Pyotr Kropotkin and British print cultures, 1876-1917”, Journal of Historical Geography vol. 57, July 2017, 17-27

F.F. — 2017-05-11T16:54:20Z

This paper addresses the relationship between the famous anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin and his most important British editors, John Scott Keltie and James Knowles. It analyses their unpublished correspondence, which has survived, for the most part, in the state archive of the Russian Federation. Drawing on recent literature on anarchist geographies, transnational anarchism and historical geographies of science, it examines the material construction of Kropotkin's works on mutual aid, decentralisation and 'scientific anarchism', which were originally published as articles for British periodicals. The paper argues that Kropotkin's acquaintance with liberal editors was not only a matter of necessity but a conscious strategy on his part to circulate political concepts outside activist milieus, thereby taking advantage of the public venues then available for geographers. In this way, Kropotkin succeeded in getting paid for working almost full-time as an anarchist propagandist. The paper also contributes to the wider field of critical, radical and anarchist geographies by providing early examples of knowledge struggles against Creationism, Malthusianism and environmental determinisms which have lessons for the present.

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1V5xe15XEnfKrf

FERRETTI Federico, Evolution and revolution : anarchist geographies, modernity and post-structuralism, Environment and Planning D-Society and Space, 2017 DOI : 10.1177/0263775817694032. Online first

F.F. — 2017-03-05T19:02:32Z

This paper addresses the recent rediscovery of anarchist geographies and its implications in current debates on the ‘foundations' of science and knowledge. By interrogating both recent works and original texts by early anarchist geographers who have greater influence on present-day literature such as Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), I discuss the possible uses of a poststructuralist critique for this line of research by first challenging ‘postanarchist' claims that so-called ‘classical anarchism', allegedly biased by essentialist naturalism, should be entirely dismissed by contemporary scholarship. My main argument is that early anarchist geographers used the intellectual tools available in their day to build a completely different ‘discourse', criticising the ways in which science and knowledge were constructed. As they openly contested ideas of linear progress, racism and European supremacy, as well as anthropocentrism and dichotomized definitions of ‘man' and ‘nature', it is hard to make them fit simplistic definitions. The body of work I address stresses their possible contributions to critical, anarchist and radical scholarship through their idea of knowledge, not limited to what is now called ‘discourse analysis', but engaging with social movements in order to transform society.

Keywords

Anarchist geographies ; More-than-human geographies ; Evolutionism ; Mutual Aid ; Postanarchism

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775817694032

FERRETTI Federico, “Political geographies, unfaithful translations and anticolonialism : Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography”, Political Geography, 2017, vol. 59, pp. 11-23

F.F. — 2017-02-17T08:45:49Z

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus (1830-1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism', postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles' as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer P€etr Kropotkin (1842-1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.

Full text available :

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1UZqA_LupurBx~