Élisée Reclus

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Élisée Reclus ( Nadar , around 1900)
Reclus reading Le Cri du Peuple in his Brussels garden, around 1900

Jacques Élisée Reclus (born March 15, 1830 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande , Gironde department , † July 4, 1905 in Torhout near Bruges ) was a French geographer and anarchist .

Life

Élisée Reclus was the second son of the Calvinist pastor Jacques Reclus , who had a total of fourteen children; several of the siblings later held prominent positions in French society: the geographer Armand Reclus (1843–1927, explorer of the Panama Canal zone ); the ethnologist , journalist and anarchist Élie Reclus (1827–1904); the surgeon Paul Reclus and the geographer Onésime Reclus (1837-1916, inventor of the term Francophonie ). The anarchist Paul Reclus (1858-1914, son of Élie Reclus) was a nephew of Élisées.

Élisée Reclus began his training in the Prussian Rhineland , continued it at the Protestant college of Montauban and finished it at the Berlin University , where he took part in a course in geography from Carl Ritter .

After Reclus withdrew from France in response to the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, he toured Great Britain , the United States , Central America, and Colombia until 1857 . On his return to Paris he wrote numerous articles for Revue des deux mondes , Tour du monde and other magazines in which he published the results of his geographical work.

Élisée Reclus took part in the World Exhibition in London in 1862 , where the idea of ​​forming an international workers' union came up. In September 1864 the brothers Élisée and Élie became members of the Batignoller section of this newly established International Workers' Association . In the same year he met Mikhail Bakunin and the two became good friends and later together part of the anti-authoritarians in the International.

One of his works from this period was a brief Histoire d'un ruisseau , in which he describes the development of a great river from its source to its mouth. From 1867 to 1868 he published La Terre in two volumes ; description of the phenomena de la vie du globe .

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War , Reclus took part in the aerostatic tests of Nadar . After the formation of the Paris Commune , he turned down a post in the newly formed government and instead served in the National Guard to defend Paris . In the magazine Cri du Peuple he criticized the government in Versailles in a manifesto .

As a revolutionary National Guard, he was captured on April 5th, sentenced shortly afterwards and was to be deported to New Caledonia . At the urging of influential personalities, especially from the USA and England (including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace ), the sentence was set to permanent exile in January 1872.

After a short stay in Italy , Reclus settled in Clarens ( Switzerland ), where he resumed his literary work. After he had written a counterpart to the earlier history of a river with a Histoire d'une montagne , he wrote almost all of his great works here, including La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes , 19 vol. (1875-1894). This is an extensive summary, illustrated throughout with maps and other illustrations, and awarded a gold medal by the Paris Geography Society in 1892.

Extreme accuracy and convincing presentation are the most important characteristics of all of Reclus' works; they have enduring scientific and literary value. He can also be considered a thought leader in various fields. The author Matthias Rude writes, for example, that Reclus had already fully understood speciesism when he wrote in an article published in 1901: "It is only one of the saddest results of our habit of eating meat that the animals sacrificed to human appetite are systematically and methodically declared hideous, misshapen beings and degraded their intelligence and moral worth. "

In 1882 Reclus initiated an anti-marriage movement and allowed his two daughters to marry without any civil or canonical confirmation. This was hard to bear even for his supporters and led to persecution of anarchists by the French government, particularly by a high court in Lyon . In addition to Reclus, Peter Kropotkin was seen as the leader. Kropotkin was sentenced to five years in prison, while Reclus was able to evade punishment due to his Swiss residence.

From 1892 Reclus held a chair for comparative geography at the University of Brussels .

Shortly before his death, Reclus completed L'Homme et la terre , which can be seen as the culmination of his earlier work on the position of man in his environment.

reception

Romain Gary has set a lasting monument as an anarchist author to Reclus, who has become quite unknown in Germany, in his novel Lady L. In addition, the Reclus Peninsula in the northwest of the Antarctic Peninsula is named after him.

Fonts (selection)

  • Élisée Reclus: History of a Mountain . 1st edition. Edition AV , Lich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86841-087-7 (French: Histoire d'une montagne .).
  • Elisee Reclus: On the vegetarian way of life (1901), in: “End the slaughter! On the criticism of violence against animals. Anarchist, feminist, pacifist and left-wing socialist traditions ”, Verlag Graswurzelrevolution , Nettersheim 2010. Page 85 ff. And page 79 ff. On Elisee Reclus by Lou Marin.
  • Élisée Reclus: Anarchy, Geography, Modernity. Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus . 1st edition. PM Press , Oakland 2013, ISBN 978-1-60486-429-8 .

literature

  • Henriette E. Chardak: Elisée Reclus. Un encyclopédiste infernal! . L'Harmattan, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-7475-9841-1 .
  • Alexandre Chollier: Les dimensions du monde. Élisée Reclus ou l'intuition cartographique , Genève: La Bibliothèque de Genève 2016 (Collection "Le monde dans une noix"; 1), ISBN 978-2-86742-257-7 .
  • Marie Fleming: The geography of freedom. The odyssey of Elisée Reclus . Black Rose Books, Montréal 1988, ISBN 0-921689-17-9 .
  • Peter Jud: Elisée Reclus and Charles Perron, creators of the “Nouvelle Géographie Universelle”. A contribution to the geographic science history of the 19th century . Stadler, Konstanz 1987 (also dissertation, University of Zurich 1987).
  • Peter Meusburger u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon of Geography. In four volumes . Spectrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8274-1652-3 (here especially volume 3).
  • Max Nettlau : Elisée Reclus. Anarchist and Scholar (1830-1905) (Contributions to the History of Socialism, Syndicalism, Anarchism; Vol. 4). Topos-Verlag, Vaduz 1977, ISBN 3-289-00115-6 . Reprint from 1928
  • Jean-Didier Vincent: Élisée Reclus - Géographe, anarchiste, écologiste . Editions Robert Laffont, 426 pp., Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-221-10648-8 .
  • Benno Werlen: social geography. An introduction (UTB; Vol. 1911). Haupt, Bern, 2004, ISBN 3-8252-1911-9 .

Web links

Commons : Élisée Reclus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Today part of the Institut Protestant de Théologie in Montpellier
  2. ^ Matthias Rude: Antispeciesism. The liberation of humans and animals in the animal rights movement and the left, Stuttgart 2013, p. 59.
  3. ^ For a new translation with a different title see Lemma Gary