From this libertarian and anarchist lineage, for a century and a half the forerunners of Social Ecology and Communalism, this list will present the main works available.
“Where the soil has become ugly, where all poetry has disappeared from the landscape, imaginations die out, minds become impoverished, routine and servility take hold of souls and dispose them to torpor and death.” (Élisée Reclus)
- Élie Reclus (1827-1904), journalist, writer, ethnologist and anarchist activist
- Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), geographer, member of the Paris Commune, anarchist theorist
- Paul Reclus (1858-1941), engineer, professor, anarchist activist and supporter of libertarian communism
- Jacques Reclus (1894-1984), Sinologist, teacher and libertarian activist
Écrits sociaux (Social writings) of Élisée Reclus
The tiger may turn away from its victim, but the bank books hand down sentences from which there is no appeal; men and peoples are crushed beneath these heavy archives, whose silent pages recount in figures the merciless work. If capital were to prevail, it would be time to mourn our golden age, we could then look back and see, like a light going out, all that the earth had of sweet and good, love, cheerfulness, hope. Humanity would have ceased to live.
Contemporary politicians at all levels, taken as a whole, with a few exceptions, represent one of the most vile and narrow-minded classes of sycophants and courtiers that humanity has ever known.
All those who reign and command, complacently turning their gaze upon themselves, reply, “We are the elite; we represent the cerebral substance of the great body politic.” What bitter derision this arrogance of the official aristocracy, imagining itself to be the true aristocracy of thought, initiative, and intellectual and moral evolution!
Those who think must never forget that the enemies of thought are at the same time, by force of circumstance, by the logic of the situation, the enemies of all freedom.
La joie d’apprendre (The joy of learning) by Élisée Reclus
For Reclus, knowledge not only enables us to construct ourselves, but also to belong to ourselves. In his view, it is through the study and observation of our environment that the contours of our earthly existence and condition appear most distinctly. The human person cannot know himself outside of his belonging to nature. Rather than opposing culture and nature, he voluntarily chooses to think of them together.
L’homme et la terre (Man and the Earth) by Élisée Reclus
Or else the oppressed submit, having exhausted their strength to resist: they die slowly and die out, no longer having the initiative that makes life; or else the demands of free men prevail, and, in the chaos of events, one can discern true revolutions, that is to say changes in the political, economic and social regime due to a clearer understanding of environmental conditions and the energy of individual initiatives.
La Commune de Paris au jour le jour (The Paris Commune day by day) by Élie Reclus
A few weeks of pride and freedom for the people of Paris. Despite the vise of the Versailles troops, which tightened by the day, the Communards had time to question the exploitation and humiliation that had been their lot for centuries. As Louise Michel said, “We wanted everything at once: arts, sciences, literature. Life was flamboyant. We couldn’t wait to escape the old world.”
L’évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique (Evolution, revolution and the anarchist ideal) of Élisée Reclus
There are, however, timorous spirits who honestly believe in the evolution of ideas, who vaguely hope for a corresponding transformation of things, and who nevertheless, through a feeling of instinctive, almost physical fear, want to avoid any revolution, at least during their lifetime.
Plus loin que la politique (Further than politics) by Paul Reclus
The activity of the life we dream of is also far removed from what we call work today and what we call theft: we will take without asking and it will not be theft, we will use our faculties and our activity and it will not be work.
Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes (On the feeling of nature in modern societies)
Elisée Reclus is a great help to us, by making us see what we do not want to see, when in this text he shows us that the predatory power of capital goes so far as to attack the infinity of what is priceless. Yet the sensuality that accompanies his feeling for nature proves that we too are bearers of this infinity, and that it is up to each of us to use it as the most disconcerting dissuasive weapon against that which disfigures, diminishes and enslaves. Now that our backs are to the wall facing the abyss, this may be one of our last chances. (Preface by Annie Le Brun)
Contre la morale de l’effroi (Against the morality of fear)
These texts, written in a clear and lively style, remind us, far from any polemical tone, that anarchy – the refusal of all domination – is as old as humanity and that its principles are anchored in the very heart of each individual. Élisée Reclus condemns a society based on permanent coercion, dominated by ideologues or theocrats. He advocates the reconciliation of men and women and the creation of free communities, before discussing experiments attempted and successful throughout the history of the world.
Histoire de la Guerre de Sécession aux États-Unis (History of the American Civil War) 1861-1865 by Élisée Reclus
The American Civil War was a total war. Blood flowed freely during the fighting between the Unionists (Northern States) and the secessionist Confederates (Southern States) who supported slavery. A tutor in the family of a slave-owning planter, the young geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus had lived in Louisiana for three years. There he had gained an intimate knowledge of America “the land of slavery”. Published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, to which he contributed extensively, the historical studies brought together in this volume analyze the forces of the belligerents from a political, social and geostrategic perspective that was original for the time. We discover how a pacifist becomes the chronicler of a “completely useless carnage”, with the hope of seeing “the spectacle of servitude” disappear.
Méditations catastrophiques (Catastrophic Meditations) by Élie Faure
The nephew of Élysée and Élie, and author of a remarkable History of Art, Élie Faure (1873-1937) also committed himself unreservedly to the Spanish Republicans and against the rise of fascism in Europe.
To claim to persuade the world that the association of this high clergy stuffed with gold and ignorance, of these sinister operetta and butchery generals and of these landowners stupefied by centuries of domination without constraint and of unculturedness without elegance, represent the spirit and morality is indeed the most dismal of farces.
It is the teachers of spirit and morality who massacre the innocent.
Now in his sixties, Elie Faure, madly in love with Spain, devoted himself fiercely to the cause of the Spanish Republicans, caught in the pincer movement of the nationalist offensives. Above all, he alerted French public opinion to the European dimension of this civil war, in which he immediately detected the support of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy for Franco’s rebellion. He wrote numerous articles and petitions, and worked to the limits of his strength to raise awareness of the danger and the global catastrophe that was threatening.
“Méditations catastrophiques” brings together all these texts on Spain and its situation since the Asturian Revolt (October 5, 1934), written with the penetrating gaze of the art historian.
La révolte des Taiping (The Taiping Rebellion) by Jacques Reclus
The Taiping uprising (1851-1864) heralded the collapse of imperial power in China. This massive and sudden rebellion against the “celestial bureaucracy” was driven by an ardent egalitarian messianism. Starting in southern China, it spread until it gained long-term control of several provinces, establishing its capital in Nanjing. It could only be contained and then crushed at the cost of millions of deaths and with the active complicity of predatory Western powers. The Taiping Rebellion is the only work available in French on this major historical subject. Jacques Reclus was also the talented translator, among others, of the beautiful “Recounting a Fleeting Life” by Chen Fou, one of the masterpieces of Chinese literature.
The Taiping, like so many other uprisings in history, came up against the contradictions inherent in the definition of a rebel order. Should one limit oneself to harassing the adversary, to making his decline manifest, to fighting, to destroying? Or should one in turn venture to construct a new social machine, necessarily dependent on all kinds of servitudes and obligations? Can revolt be translated and informed into a stable structure, without being reified into an entity that imposes its own demands? The Taiping first waged a war of movement, a people’s war, and huge crowds of peasants rose up to cheer them as they advanced from the distant southwest. But, from the time they settled in Nanjing in 1851, they created a political apparatus. They gave themselves a capital, a political system, a bureaucratic administration, a ruling class; all this meant that the new power demanded more and more from the peasantry, now subject to a government, and no longer the driving force of the movement.
Rebound:
Man and the Earth by Élisée Reclus
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.