An internationally renowned geographer, Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) is inseparably a scholar, a writer and a poet, who remained on the fringes of the academic institutionalization of his discipline. His writing also corresponds to a political project: to disseminate emancipatory knowledge to a lay public.
At the end of the 1830s, in Dordogne, the servants of the maternal grandparents of the talkative little Élisée made him their official bard: “ Cadet ! Cadet ! A tale ! » Seven decades and a monumental trilogy later, when he died in Belgium, Élisée Reclus was the most famous geographer in the world, recognized as a first-rate writer. His cousin, the geographer Franz Schrader, rightly asserts that “ each delivery of the Universal Geography, from its appearance, immediately entered the treasure of French literature “. And to add that his two stories of poetic and sensualist geography, Story of a stream (1869) and Story of a mountain (1880), are “ works of geographical dissemination, because we cannot speak of ʺpopularizationʺ with regard to literary and scientific gems like these two small volumes “.
Moreover, at the moment when he gives the Revue des Deux Mondes an article on “ Poetry and poets in Spanish America » (1864), Élisée Reclus defines himself as “ man of letters “. In the 1880s he was an admirer of Dostoyevsky and, in June 1891, it was only his affirmed anarchism which caused him to be refused the prestigious Biennial Prize of the Institute with which certain immortals of the French Academy wished to award him. For decades, he wrote his page every day, as an artisan of the pen for whom languages devoid of written literature are doomed to impoverishment, even death.
In this time of emergence of great novelistic cycles, scholars are not rare to combine, in the words of Reclus, the “ sincerity that the studious man owes to science ” And “ the love that the artist owes to his work »: thus Jules Michelet, editor of a flamboyant History of FranceJean-Henri Fabre, author of famous Entomological memoriesor even Camille Flammarion, whosePopular astronomy was a bestseller.
The circulation of knowledge
Through writing, Élisée Reclus aims to be a geographer outside of state institutions, to address everyone through a common language capable of defending a libertarian vision of the world, to make the surface of the globe visible to the imagination and to suggest its beauty through that of the style.
Being a writer is first and foremost for Élisée Reclus the means of making a living from geography on the fringes of the academic institutionalization of the discipline. For forty-five years, most of its income came from royalties paid by Hachette. He published travel stories (1860-1874) and tourist guides (1860-1870), participated in dictionaries (1864-1905), and above all gave his encyclopedic New Universal Geography which ensured him regular remuneration from 1872 to 1905. Reclus was not, however, a supporter of intellectual property rights: the plagiarisms, borrowings and wild translations of his work participated in the circulation of knowledge, with his anarchist-communist approval .
In Evolution, revolution and the anarchic ideal (1898), the geographer believes that “ the scientist has his immense usefulness as a quarryman: he extracts the materials, but it is not he who uses them, it is up to the people, to all the associated men, to raise the building “. Hence the dignity he accords to all genres of writing and all sources of information, including literary and popular ; hence the use of a richly evocative language with simple syntax ; hence the publication of a cheap edition of his treatise Earthor even the initial publication in a weekly serial, like the novels, of the New Universal Geography then Man and the Earth.
Reclus’ encyclopedic works and his numerous articles disseminated in the anarchist press reveal a writing conducive to the widest dissemination of emancipatory knowledge to a lay public, “ both total and fragmentary » and which offers “ an identity between the form of the presentation and its object, the world itself ”, united in its infinite plurality. Hence this desire not to use scientific jargon which multiplies, to the detriment of the public, the signs of corporate recognition and allegiance.
Furthermore, for the geographer, institutionalized specializations diminish intellectually – fragmented knowledge prohibits certain ways of thinking or writing – and degrade morally through the power struggles they generate. The boundaries and the preserves of disciplinary fields do not torment a libertarian given to perpetual movement and a globalizing science open to the people.
Political commitment
Didn’t the historian Jules Michelet also write The Bird (1856), The Insect (1857) and The sea (1861) ? With Man and the Earth (1905), Élisée Reclus proposes a social geography of humanity whose form, a historical and anthropological story, is very little appreciated by university geographers who have just emancipated themselves from historians. The latter do not take it seriously anymore. This is because, following the increase in the quantity and technicality of the means of understanding the world, scholarly legitimacy then passes from “ literati » to those we call “ special men ” Or “ special study men “. Specialists are born.
The fact remains that Reclus does cutting-edge science, favored by his polyglotism (French, German, English, Spanish, Italian, notions of Portuguese and Russian), and that he practices all the learned techniques of the profession , with the exception of the theoretical treatise, the interest of which is above all to perpetuate a standardized and reproducible use of institutional knowledge.
His libertarian critique of the reduction of “ to want » of each individual for the benefit of the power secreted by hierarchies – in science as elsewhere – is also at the source of his departure from Calvinism, of his desire to see the free union for all, as well as his criticism of voting in indirect democracy regime. Because he judges the ivory tower to be fundamentally immoral, Élisée Reclus does not hesitate to risk his life and his future work by fighting for the Paris Commune in 1871.
The desire to write for everyone corresponds to a vision of the world which does not give up making beauty a fundamental value of human existence. Hence the evidence, for Reclus, of political and social commitment: the stylist, the scholar, the anarchist, the vegetarian, the feminist and the naturist are facets of the same personality in the fight against injustice dominations that make the world ugly. Because the animal is made hideous by the cruelties of its exploitation, just like the human body corseted by sartorial conventions, the man dominated by the man, the woman by the man, the child by the adult.
“ The impression of beauty precedes the sense of classification and order », writes Reclus. Geographical knowledge, libertarian ethics and literary aesthetics are inseparable for the promoter of a harmonious world whose inventory must bring out and know the meaning and the laws – struggle but mutual aid, search for balance through progress and regression, due impulses to the sovereign decision of individuals. As in all literature, instead of being exhibited, these analytical structures of Reclus’ work are dissolved in an aesthetic, here that of a sensitive geography.
The literary form
In this sense, geography is a relationship to space and landscapes, a “ feeling of nature “. Élisée Reclus punctuates his prose with borrowings from all kinds of languages which give his stories the color of truth and reflect the perception that people have of their environment. If “ to know, it is imperative to see “, However “ our gaze is not broad enough “, “ we must transport ourselves by thought », he writes in Story of a stream. And, in a letter to Franz Schrader:
“ I still remember the day my grandfather told me that the Sahara is a desert where you can walk for days and days without finding anything other than sand. Since he gave me that first geography lesson, I see myself constantly trying in my imagination to ‘realize’ this boundless space, ‘which never ends and always begins again’. »
The evocative power of the literary form makes the invisible visible, which is why it is at the historical foundation of both religion and science. It suits this recommendation of Reclus better than any other: “ The development of our morality requires all the forces of the living being (including) those of love and enthusiasm, which were mixed in various ways with the religion of our ancestors. »
To do this, the geographer uses visual, rhetorical and narrative devices. He even invented some, such as this gigantic globe that he hoped to erect on Chaillot Hill at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, or these “ globular maps » metal reproducing the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Writing, for its part, allows him to deploy a “ great story » naturalist and libertarian, who has his roots in geology and prehistory, and projects into the future his hope of seeing a better world emerge. Just as Michelet says he draws his historical truth from the Archive, so Reclus draws his geographical truth from free Nature, certainly harsh and formidable, but whose beauty and harmony he exalts. His writing is only a mirror, an invitation to experience it through sight, touch, the play of muscles and lungs, sounds and scents: lived experience and intellectual knowledge of the world. mutually enrich.
As a result, the “ I » and his emotions have their place in Elisean science, as so many sharing of sensitive experience with the reader: “ I brought nature back to life around me », announces the preface of the New Universal Geography in 1875. The geographical descriptions of Élisée Reclus are interspersed with positions: he criticizes, recommends, envisages, hopes, in all areas of life. This approach undoubtedly uses the Protestant tradition of justifying one’s actions before God and one’s own conscience, which his father, the pastor Jacques Reclus, and his uncle, the primary inspector Jean Reclus, each practiced through a retrospective account. of their existence.
Mono no aware : L'” emotion of things » invented by the geographer Augustin Berque in Japanese and French condenses in a word the emotion provided by the passage of time and by movement in space. This self-presentation was already that of Élisée Reclus, but, from the end of the XIXe century, it was denigrated by a learned protocol according to which a neutralization of the personality of the specialist before the “ facts » conditions the legitimacy of scientific discourse.
Seen as a madman or a genius, a dangerous fanatic or a secular saint, Élisée Reclus did not leave anyone indifferent. So much so that, even during his lifetime and beyond his appearance in some works of the Extraordinary journeys by Jules Verne, his character is enlisted as a geographer or an anarchist by various novelists. Thus the “ poet of geography “, “ one of our most literary scholars ”, ended up joining romantic literature.