Jacques Élisée Reclus (French: [ʁəkly]; 15 March 1830 – 4 July 1905) was a French geographer, writer, anarchist, and a vegetarian. He produced his 19-volume masterwork, La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes (Universal Geography), over a period of nearly 20 years (1875–1894). In 1892 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society for this work, despite having been banished from France because of his political activism.
Reclus was born at Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde) on March 15, 1830. The Reclus family were part of the Protestant minority in France. His father, Jacques Reclus, was a Protestant pastor in Montcaret and taught at Sainte-Foy's Protestant college; Reclus' godfather was the Protestant pastor Jacques Drillholle. Reclus' mother, Marguerite Zéline Trigant, was a teacher and founded a school at Orthez. Reclus spent his early years at the home of his maternal grandparents in Laroche, until he rejoined his family in 1838 at Castétarbe.
Reclus was the second son in a family of fourteen children. His brothers were Onésime, Élie, Paul, and Armand - who went on to be men of letters, politicians or members of the learned professions.
Reclus began his education in Rhenish Prussia, and continued higher studies at the Protestant college of Montauban, after he had studied for a baccalaureate at Sainte-Foy. While studying at Sainte-Foy, Reclus and his brother lived with their aunt. Reclus felt dissatisfied with his studies at Montauban, moving four kilometers away to study independently in a house with his brothers and their friend Édouard Grimard. In 1849, without authorisation to take leave from the school, Élisée, Élie and Edouard journeyed on foot from Montauban to the Mediterranean Sea; shortly after this episode, the Reclus brothers were expelled from the school, in part because of their political views.
Reclus moved to Berlin in 1851 and completed his studies at the University of Berlin, where he followed a long course of geography under Carl Ritter and also studied political economy and the history of diseases.
Withdrawing from France due to the political events of December 1851, he spent the next six years (1852–1857) traveling and working in Great Britain, the United States, Central America, and Colombia. Arriving in Louisiana in 1853, Reclus worked for about two and a half years as a tutor to the children of cousin Septime and Félicité Fortier at their plantation Félicité, located about 80 kilometres (50 miles) upriver from New Orleans. He recounted his passage through the Mississippi River Delta and impressions of antebellum New Orleans and the state in Fragment d'un voyage à la Nouvelle-Orléans, published in 1855.
On 11 March 1858, he was initiated in the regular Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge Les Émules d'Hiram, affiliated to the Grand Orient of France. His brother was just initiated and took part in his masonic baptism. He remained at the initial degrees of the Masonic spiritual path.
On his return to Paris, Reclus contributed to the Revue des deux mondes, the Tour du monde and other periodicals, a large number of articles embodying the results of his geographical work. Among other works of this period was the short book Histoire d'un ruisseau, in which he traced the development of a great river from source to mouth. During 1867 and 1868, he published La Terre; description des phénomènes de la vie du globe in two volumes.
During the Siege of Paris (1870–1871), Reclus shared in the aerostatic operations conducted by Félix Nadar, and also served in the National Guard. As a member of the Association Nationale des Travailleurs, he published a hostile manifesto against the government of Versailles in support of the Paris Commune of 1871 in the Cri du Peuple.
Continuing to serve in the National Guard, which was then in open revolt, Reclus was taken prisoner on 5 April into Fort Quélern. On 16 November he was sentenced to deportation for life. Because of intervention by supporters from England, the sentence was commuted in January 1872 to perpetual banishment from France.
After a short visit to Italy, Reclus settled at Clarens, Switzerland, where he resumed his literary labours and produced Histoire d'une montagne, a companion to Histoire d'un ruisseau. There he wrote nearly the whole of his work, La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes, "an examination of every continent and country in terms of the effects that geographic features like rivers and mountains had on human populations—and vice versa." This compilation was profusely illustrated with maps, plans, and engravings. It was awarded the gold medal of the Paris Geographical Society in 1892. An English edition was published simultaneously, also in 19 volumes, the first four translated by E. G. Ravenstein, the rest by A. H. Keane. Reclus's writings were accurate and explained topics clearly, making them useful literary and scientific sources.
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 1877-1878, he launched and ran Le Travailleur in Geneva.
In 1882, 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 1800s, 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 1872, after the death of his first wife. In 1882 he also wrote Unions Libres, a pamphlet which detailed his anarchist and feminist objections to marriage. The French government initiated prosecution from the High Court of Lyon, arrested him and Peter Kropotkin as the International Association's organizers, and sentenced the latter to five years' imprisonment. Reclus escaped punishment as he remained in Switzerland.
In a 1913 piece, Kropotkin, in admiration of Reclus, said that if anyone asked about the conflicts of the Middle East, that "I should merely open the volume of Elisée Reclus's Geographie Universelle L'Asie, Russe..."
In 1890, Reclus hosted Luigi Galleani at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, in the Reclus brothers' country house which at that time operated as a safe haven for dissidents fleeing persecution. Reclus offered Galleani a role in writing his Universal Geography, with Galleani going on to contribute to statistics about Guatemala to volume XVII which addressed Central America. Reclus later assisted Galleani, and coordinated support for him, in fleeing Italy to Egypt when he faced persecution from the Italian state.
In 1894, Reclus was appointed chair of comparative geography at the Free University of Brussels, and moved with his family to Belgium. His brother Élie Reclus was at the university already, teaching religion. Élisée Reclus continued to write, contributing several important articles and essays to French, German and English scientific journals. He was awarded the 1894 Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.