The French geographer, ethnologist and anarchist sympathiser, Élie Reclus was the elder brother of Élisée Reclus, and it was most likely through Élisée that he was recruited as a contributor to The Evergreen, the journal founded by the Scottish intellectual Patrick Geddes. Élisée, also a geographer, had lectured at Geddes’s Edinburgh Summer Meetings in 1893 and 1895, and had contributed to the second issue of the magazine, Autumn (1895). Élie in turn provided a long article in Evergreen no. 4, Winter (1896-7), entitled “Pourquoi des guirlandes vertes à Noël?” [“Why [do we put up] [ever]green garlands at Christmas?”]. Evidently, he took seriously both the title of the magazine and the seasonal theme of the issue, as indeed did all the other contributors to the fourth issue. It is not known whether Élie had met Geddes personally, or visited Edinburgh (although his son, Paul, later became a valued assistant to Geddes, see below). Like his brother Élisée, Élie held political views which led him several times into exile from France, and in the mid-1890s, by now in his late 60s, he was living in Belgium.

Jean-Pierre Michel Reclus, known as “Élie,” was born on 16 June 1827 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, one of fourteen children of a Protestant minister and his wife. Several of his brothers became known as geographers and reformers, and his cousin Pauline Reclus (1838–1925)—later Mme Kergomard—was a pioneering administrator of the new nursery schools in France from 1881: as their first inspecter, she stressed the need for whole child development. Élie Reclus himself was destined for the ministry, and studied theology at Geneva, Montauban, and Strasbourg before being ordained, but he resigned almost immediately and never took up a post in the church. After opposing the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon in December 1851, he spent some years in exile in London, before returning to Paris and marrying his cousin Noémie in 1856; they had two sons. During the 1860s, he earned his living by the pen, writing for a number of journals, in particular for the cooperative movement, of which he was a pioneer in France. With his brother, he joined Bakunin’s Social Democratic Alliance, later affiliated to the First International. He was also a Freemason, and with his wife had joined a feminist group called the Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes [Society for Demanding Women’s Rights], members of which included “André Léo” [Victoire Léodile Béra] (1832–1900), Louise Michel (1830–1905), Paule Minck (1839–1901) and Eliska Vincent (1841–1914), women known for their radical views, and who were at this time particularly concerned with the education of girls.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Élie was unable to join the armed forces because of a hand injury, but worked in welfare services, before becoming a stretcher-bearer during the insurrectionary Paris Commune of 1871, which followed the French defeat. In April, he was asked by the Commune leaders to become the director of the French National Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, in the centre of Paris, but had little time to implement any change there, both because of hostility from the librarians in situ, and because the Commune was defeated at the end of May. For their participation in the insurrection, both the Reclus brothers were sentenced to deportation: Élisée was imprisoned but released into exile after a petition by fellow-geographers; Élie was sentenced in his absence, having left France for Italy and Switzerland, later travelling to the United States, where he made contact with the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker. His attempts to break into journalism there failed, however, so he returned first to London, and then, after receiving an official pardon in 1879, to Paris, where the publisher Hachette employed him as a librarian for some years. He continued to publish in a range of journals and was also at one time personal tutor to Charles Fairfield, the father of the writer Rebecca West (born Cicely Fairfield, 1892-1983).

The mid-1890s witnessed the French government’s anti-anarchist laws, in the wake of several terrorist attacks, and the Reclus family came once more under suspicion. In particular, in 1894, Élie’s son Paul (1858-1941), an engineer, and like his father and uncle, an intellectual and anarchist, fled from France, since his name had been linked to that of the anarchist Auguste Vaillant, who went on to throw a home-made bomb into the Chambre des Députés. Paul later took refuge, under an assumed name, in Edinburgh with Patrick Geddes, whose assistant he became on and off for many years, bringing the two families into lifelong contact, and cementing the connection with Geddes’s projects. On his son’s account, Élie Reclus was briefly imprisoned, and as a result left France again, this time for Belgium, where he taught until his death, as professor of ethnography and history of religions, subjects of his scholarly interest, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Élie Reclus was a wide-ranging author, less famous than his younger brother in his lifetime, perhaps because his writings were dispersed in so many different journals (French, English, and Russian), and because several more substantial works were published only posthumously. One of his earlier pioneering works was Les Primitifs (1885), largely devoted to hunter-gatherers such as the Inuit, and seeking to frame a discourse that considered different cultures relatively, while stressing the contradictions of colonialism and “civilisation” (see Ferretti, 2016). Among the titles which appeared (with Paul’s help) after his death were works on marriage, popular beliefs, the history of bread, and the physiognomy of vegetable species. Of particular relevance to his Evergreen connection is the short pamphlet about Geddes’s Edinburgh projects as a blueprint for utopian renewal, which he and Élisée published jointly in 1896: Renouveau d’une cité (see the biography of Élisée Reclus for more details; it seems that Élisee provided the facts about Edinburgh, while Élie put it all into words.)

Élie’s article (in French) for The Evergreen about the use of evergreen decorations at Christmas takes the form of a dialogue (a monologue really) as a grandfather answers a question from his little granddaughter, Fiona. The scene is set in a snow-covered Edinburgh, as they sit in front of a Christmas tree, and the article sets out to explain the significance of celebrating the darkest time of year with symbols of growth and life. There is relatively little mention of the Christian feast: the grandfather describes rather the declining sun in northern latitudes, the properties of conifers, whose needles allow them to withstand extreme temperatures, the uses of resin, and the various customs of peoples of the world who venerate forests. He speaks at some length about trees, cedar and juniper in particular (neither of which would have been usual Christmas decorations in Edinburgh), so perhaps it is not surprising that Fiona asks him at the end why he has not yet told her about holly and mistletoe (which would). But the piece clearly illustrates Élie Reclus’s broad ranging interests in geography, botany, and anthropology: he was very much a polymath, and this would have appealed to Geddes. In person, like his brother Élisée, Élie “was a man of infinite sweetness and goodness,” as Havelock Ellis reported (in Ishill, 1927, 54).

©2023, Siân Reynolds, Emerita Professor of French at the University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom.

Siân Reynolds is the author of Paris-Edinburgh: Cultural Connections in the Belle Époque, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and a contributor to Patrick Geddes: the French Connection, eds. Frances Fowle and Belinda Thompson (White Cockade, 2004). She is one of the editors of the New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Selected publications by Élie Reclus

• Les Primitifs: études d’ethnologie comparée, G. Chamerot, 1885.

• [English edition]: Primitive folk: studies in comparative ethnology, translated by Mrs Wilson, Walter Scott, 1891.

• “Pourquoi des Guirlandes Vertes à Noël.” The Evergreen; A Northern Seasonal, vol. 4, Winter 1896-7, pp. 79-90. Evergreen Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2016-2018. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019.
  https://1890s.ca/egv4_reclus_pourquoi/

• Renouveau d’une Cité, [with Élisée Reclus], Éditions de la Société Nouvelle, 1896. [read via Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France].

• La Commune de Paris au jour le jour: 1871 19 mars-28 mai, Schleicher Frères, 1908.

• Les croyances populaires : leçons sur l’histoire des religions, professées à l’Université nouvelle de Bruxelles. Première série : la survie des ombres, V. Giard & E. Brière, 1908.

Selected publications about Élie Reclus

• Joseph Ishill, ed. Elisée and Élie Reclus: in memoriam, Oriole Press, 1927. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/reclus/ishill/ishill27-29.html

• Cordillot, Michel. “Élie Reclus (Reclus, Jean-Pierre Michel, dit Élie).” Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Editions de l’Atelier, 2009. https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article24355

• Ferretti, Federico. “‘The murderous civilisation’: anarchist geographies, ethnography and cultural differences in the works of Élie Reclus.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 24, no. 1, 2016.

• Fauconnier, Gérard. Élie Reclus (1827-1904): Le génie des frères Reclus, Les Éditions Gascogne, 2018.