Misreading Radical History

...Moreover, though Fleming shows that Reclus spoke of himself as a socialist, all her evidence proves that, certainly in the last 40 years of his life, he firmly believed it was only through stressing the anarchist rejection of all governments, all political organizations, all parliamentary activity, that a true socialism could be achieved...

...In fact, like other anarchists, Reclus was distinctly antiutopian...

...Similarly dismissed is Pierre Proudhon, who mounted a lifelong attack on the state, rejected parliamentary activity and was called by Bakunin "the master of us all...

...Reclus did not always see eye to eye with Bakunin...

...But at no time did anarchists place these socio-economic considerations above their political goal of abolishing the state, since they differed from other socialists in believing the two were interdependent...

...That notable traveler and scientific pioneer, Alfred Russel Wallace, considered him "the greatest of geographers...

...In 1867 the two men joined the League for Peace and Freedom, and subsequently they went into the International Working Men's Association...

...His generosity, his asceticism, his sensitivity to the problems of his associates, gained him—with Kropotkin—the reputation of being an anarchist "saint...

...Nor did Reclus distinguish himself in action, like such anarchist knight-errants as the Italian Malatesta or the Ukrainian Makhno...

...Regrettably, Marie Fleming's thesis that Reclus was more socialist than anarchist—and that his brand of socialism was a more important element in late 19th-century anarchism than the rejection of government and state—involves a misreading of the history of both movements...

...His fame in this field spread far beyond France...

...Small of stature, with brilliant blue eyes, Reclus charmed most people...

...Anarchy is a free order and Utopia a rigid one...

...The Social Democrats realized clearly enough that they had little in common with the anarchists...

...Bakunin himself is regarded as only dubiously ad-missable, although the following he organized during the struggles within the International—particularly the an-tiauthoritarian groups in the Jura, in Spain and in Italy—formed the nucleus of the movement she speaks of...

...and it seems certain Kropotkin developed his theory of mutual aid as a factor in evolution largely as a result of discussions with Reclus...

...Reclus was as aware of this as Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin—and each of these men in his own way refuted the system-makers, whether Utopian or Marxist...

...Curiously, in contrast to his copious production of major geographical works, Reclus wrote no work that would rank alongside Proudhon's What is Property?, or Godwin's Political Justice, or Krdpotkin's Mutual A id as one of the anarchist classics, but he did write some polemical pamphlets that were excellent for their time...

...Unlike Kropotkin, who recognized that the means affected and might pollute the end, Reclus used the doctrine of scientific objectivity to argue that the means were neutral and only the intention mattered...

...Despite his immense influence on the French anarchist movement in the latter part of the 19th century, Reclus has been neglected by English-speaking scholars...

...he was a good friend, a good companion to the three women he informally married, and a passionate lover of cats...

...Now it is true that Reclus and Kro-potkin called themselves socialists, as did their predecessors, Proudhon and Bakunin...

...To justify her conclusion she attempts to prove that the French anarchist movement, which began with the breakup of the International Working Men's Association in 1872 and foundered with the destruction of the anarchist groups after the terrorist attentats of 1892-4, was the true anarchism...

...they have a life of their own that is psychologically and not economically dominated, and for this reason the means to wield power over other men has to be eliminated before a free and just society can emerge...

...He often disagreed with Kropotkin as well during the years after the Marxist-Anarchist schism at the Hague Congress of 1872, when both were among the leaders of the anarchist wing of the International...

...At the other end of the period Fleming is equally sweeping and equally wrong...

...This statement ignores the entire record of anarcho-syndicalism in France, the history of anarchism in Spain (where it remained a potent force until Franco's triumph in 1938), the role of the anarchists in the Mexican Revolution, and the phenomenon of Makhno and his mobile peasant army in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War...

...He cautioned French anarchists who, after 1894, thought the aims of the movement might be furthered by founding Utopian communities...

...He never quite outgrew the Calvinist past of a French Protestant that he shared with an equally uncomfortable lapsed Huguenot, Andre Gide...

...In this sense Reclus was the heir of community-makers such as More, Campanella, Morelly and Mably...

...Interestingly, anarchism is the only revolutionary movement that has developed sanctified figures, and the strain of religiosity that is part of the anarchist state of mind was strongly developed in Reclus...

...One comes at the beginning of the book: "A reconsideration of the principles of late 19th-century European anarchism will, I feel certain, establish that the emphasis upon government and the state is secondary to the interest in the social-economic structure of society...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism" kin later popularized in such books as The Conquest of Bread...

...They held—and history has proved them right—that no equitable distribution of economic wealth could take place so long as governmental institutions by their very existence created political inequality...

...He confined himself to giving theoretical approval to anarchist bandits and assassins, and did so because —mild and gentle man though he was in his personal life—he felt that in his privileged position he could not pass judgment on the violent anger of the poor...

...The memory of that chivalrous gesture of scholarly solidarity was to remove my personal doubts about accepting election to the Royal Geographical Society when it was offered me almost 80 years later...

...His La Terre (1868-9) and the massive Nouvelle Geographie Universelle, published in 19 volumes over the years 1878-94, were celebrated in their time and remain classics of 19th-century scholarship...

...The anarchists were in "the active struggle" long after 1894, and in 1968 they were back on the streets of Paris where almost a century earlier Reclus had fought among the Communards...

...Indeed, the final division of the two movements in 1896 merely brought to a conclusion the split between the Bakuninists and the Marxists at the 1872 International, and the breach of relations between Marx and Proudhon in 1846...

...He explicitly rejected the French Utopian communists, like Cabet and Fourier...

...Other socialists, emphasizing the economic element, failed to grasp what the anarchists always understood: Power structures are not merely dependent on economic structures...

...The second comes close to the end: "European anarchism was a theory of socialism which aimed, like all socialism, to arrive at a state of anarchy, an order which would spring naturally from the movement of free beings, responding to the needs of their nature...

...Of the anarchists who lived and worked after 1894 she remarks: "With the abandonment of all organizational activity, anarchists pushed themselves out of the active struggle, This is a life of the geographer and anarchist, Elisee Reclus, and it is much more interesting than the title suggests...

...the habit only ceased when the Second International closed its doors on the anarchists at its 1896 Congress...

...And, where More and Campanella planned rigid authoritarian communities, Reclus envisioned a society that would never reach "an ideal perfection" precisely because it would be free to grow...

...This is doubtless because he seemed always to move in the shadow of other men—and particularly of those great barons of Russian and international anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin...

...It was as a geographer that Reclus was best known...

...The title is justified only in the limited sense that the book is also a biographie a these, the thesis being that Reclus was really a socialist whose way to his goal simply differed from that of the Social Democrats of the Second International...

...And it is possible Reclus was saved from arrest during the widespread suppression of French anarchists in 1894 because that year the Royal Geographical Society of England had crowned his international reputation by awarding him its gold medal...

...The Englishman William Godwin, who presented in Political Justice the first reasoned statement of anarchist principles, she rejects out of hand...

...When we come to the nature of his socialism, it is necessary to dispute Fleming's attempt to dub Reclus a Utopian as well as a socialist: "I am using the term Utopian in its traditional sense to refer to a vision of a new society wherein social and political forms would have reached an ideal perfection...

...As for the relationship of "anarchism and socialism, two sentences from Professor Fleming's book fairly summarize her arguments...

...Beginning in 1864, Reclus was associated with Bakunin in his early secret organizations, the International Brotherhood and the Alliance of Social Democracy...

...By socialism they meant the desire to see the socialization of the means of production and industry and the end of exploitation based on the ownership of property...

...Yet Reclus was close enough to Kropotkin for it to be doubtful which of them played the greater part in forming the theory of anarchist communism that Kropotand on to the fringes where they were to remain...