From Reclusian Geohistory to New Spatial History:

Pascale Siegrist, MPhil, PhD candidate University of Konstanz
Research Group “Global Processes”, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Osterhammel, University of Konstanz
Paper Proposal for the XVI April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development
Higher School of Economics Moscow, 7 – 10 April 2015
DRAFT – not for citation
From Reclusian Geohistory to New Spatial History:
Towards an Integrated Perspective on French and Russian Geodeterminst Thinking
In 1922 – a year before his student Fernand Braudel would submit his famous thesis presenting
the Mediterranean milieu as a decisive historical factor – Lucien Febvre publishes a book under
title La Terre et l’Évolution Humaine: Introduction géographique à l’histoire (‘The Earth and Human
Evolution: A Geographical Introduction to History’). As part of a series on the evolution of
mankind, Febvre sets out to assess the role played by geographical factors in history. These, thus
Febvre, had been grossly overstated by the German geographical tradition following Friedrich
Ratzel – a tradition which he contrasts unfavourably to the French school of geography as
institutionalised by Paul Vidal de la Blache. In this opposition of geographical ‘determinism’
versus ‘possiblism’, however, one author occupies an interesting position in between the two
camps: The French geographer Élisée Reclus (1830 – 1905), student of Carl Ritter and author of
a nineteen-volume Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, who, in Febvre’s portrayal as a thinker
integrating but overcoming determinism, occupies the place of both mediator and innovator of
French geography.1 This explains the importance of Reclus and the outstanding status of his
work as a ‘Providence so often renounced.’2
Given the momentous impact of the historiographical turn initiated by the Annales historians
Febvre and Braudel, this last reference is not without profound consequences. It leads us to
seriously raise the question to what extent the historically minded geographer Reclus can be
thought of as a precursor to the French tradition of a spatially conscious writing of history, and
by this token, eventually to the ‘spatial turn(s)’ and ‘new spatial history’. From a historiographical
point of view, however, this second affirmation seems difficult to uphold. Convincingly Reclus
can only be put in the position of a forgotten and indirect source of inspiration: firstly, the
German geohistorical tradition whose introduction is ascribed to him becomes rapidly discredited
after the Second World War, leaving German historians until very recently in a ‘strange aversion
[…] to maps’ (Evans, Osterhammel).3 Rather, the new spatial history has yielded some of its
most innovative results in its treatment of Russian and post-Soviet space,4 with its rise since the
J.-B. Arrault, ‘La “référence Reclus”: Pour une relecture des rapports entre Reclus et l’Ecole française de
géographie’, Colloque ‘Elisée Reclus et nos geographies: Texte et Prétextes’, Lyon, 7-9 September 2005, <halshs00100297>, p. 8
2 ‘[…] cette Providence si souvent reniée’, L. Febvre, La Terre et l’Évolution Humaine: Introduction géographique à l’histoire
(Chicoutimi, 2006 [Paris, 1922]), p. 45
3 J. Osterhammel, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Raumes: Geopolitik, Geohistorie und historische Geographie’, pp. 374-379,
Neue Politische Literatur 43 (1998), p. 374
4 For overviews on the literature to spatial history for Eastern Europe see M. Rolf, ‘Importing the Spatial Turn to
Russia, Recent Studies on the Spatialization of Russian History’, pp. 359-380, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 11,2 (2010), N. Baron, ‘New Spatial Histories of Twentieth Century Russia and the Soviet Union:
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1990s often associated to the radical reconfiguration of space since the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and globalisation.5 Secondly, Febvre’s singling out of Reclus is the exception rather than
the rule – as he himself concedes. While the rediscovery of Reclus by leftist geographers took off
in the 1970s, it only reached a considerable level of interest in the past decade. In the main
theoretical works of the spatial turn, moreover, Reclus is seldom granted more than a passing and
hesitant reference;6 to this day, historians have taken even less interest in his writings than their
colleagues in geography departments. An overhasty ascription of Reclus to a set of much later,
independently evolved theoretical assumptions comes with a significant risk of distortions, which
is why I here propose a historicist perspective placing Reclus’ oeuvre within its context of
formulation.
In a first part, I thus closely look at one of Reclus chief influences, that of Jules Michelet. Besides
their interest in the interrelationship between history and geography, Michelet and Reclus were
socialising within the same network of intellectuals, which included a considerable number of
exiled and marginalised publicists, such as Aleksandr Herzen. The debate between Michelet and
Herzen on Russia’s nature and prospects serves as an illustration of two different conceptions of
space, which, as I argue in a second part, were both taken up and subsumed under a single theory
of the milieu by Reclus and his (Russian) friends and associates Pëtr Kropotkin, Lev Mechnikov
and Mikhailo Drahomanov. I will then try to show how this circle forged an understanding of
space that transgressed the physical characteristics of geographical entities such as communes,
cities, and large plateaus. This leads me to a third section which deals with the social and political
implications of Reclus’ conception of space and finally brings forth some important parallels to
the new spatial history: an appreciation of the correlation between space and power, making it
both a potential tool of oppression, but also of liberation. This implies changeability and thus
demands an evolutionary or historicist perspective on the spatial dimension. I will conclude with
a brief assessment of the significance of those parallels.
Michelet and Herzen on the Becoming of a Nation
‘The true starting point of our history has to be the political
division of France, shaped after its natural and physical division. At
first, history is all together geography. We can hardly recount the
feudal, or provincial (the latter also being a convenient designation)
age, without describing each of the provinces.’7
Surveying the Landscape’, pp. 374-400, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55 (2007); N. Baron, ‘New Spatial Histories
of 20th-Century Russia and the Soviet Union: Exploring the Terrain’, pp. 433-447, Kritika 9,2 (2008). It is interesting
to note that even general treatments such as B. Schenk, ‘Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion von geographischen
Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung’, pp. 493-514, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 3 (2002), K. Schlögel, Im Raume
lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich, 2003) or, for intellectual history, J. Randolph, ‘Spaces
of Intellect and the Intellect of Space’, pp. 212-231 in D. McMahon / S. Moyn (eds.), Rethinking Modern European
Intellectual History (Oxford, 2014) are most often penned by specialists of Russian history.
5 For example in the introduction to M. Bassin, C. Ely, M. Stockdale (eds.), Space, Place and Power in Modern Russia.
Essays in the New Spatial History, (DeKalb, 2010), p. 4
6 D. Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, (New York, 2001), pp. 118-119
7 ‘Le vrai point de départ doit être une division politique de la France, formée d’après sa division physique et
naturelle. L’histoire est d’abord toute géographie. Nous ne pouvons raconter l’époque féodale, ou provinciale (le
2
Amongst the authors Febvre esteems to be his ‘véritables maîtres’ we find, besides Reclus, the
name of Jules Michelet.8 There are in fact, personal and intellectual connections between the
historical geographer and the historian with far-reaching geographic sensibilities: in the latter’s
famous tableau of France, spatial unities – the regions – supply the underlying foundation for his
narrative of the making of France. If Michelet thus uses (national) space as a synthesising
backdrop to his Histories, he in turn features amongst the most frequently cited authors in
Reclus’ Nouvelle Géographie Univeselle. Their personal relationship was more complicated: Reclus’
sister Louise married Alfred Dumesnil, Michelet’s favourite and son-in-law (by first marriage);
although cordial in the beginning, the two families became increasingly estranged.9 This anecdotal
evidence illustrates the important overlaps in their circles of friends, despite Reclus being of a far
more radical political orientation – no exceptional matter though for Michelet, who also
befriended Mikhail Bakunin and Herzen. Celebrities among the exiles in Western Europe, the
two Russians provide yet another link back to Reclus, whose many Russian acquaintances and
collaborators knew them both well; Mechnikov, for example, an expert on Japan and Reclus’
personal secretary, had written for Herzen’s Kolokol and fought side by side with Bakunin in
Garibaldi’s campaign. Liberals, 1848ers, and marginalised from the academies (Michelet was
dismissed from his position at the Archives and his course at the Collège de France) this
extraordinary group of politically active French and Russian intellectuals cultivated an open and
lively debate.
Yet it was precisely on the issue of Russia that Michelet and Herzen were exposed to their
differences: In his Légendes démocratiques du Nord (1854, and reedited in 1863 under the impression
of the Polish uprising), Michelet painted a polemically negative image, not just of the autocratic
government of Russia, but of its people who lacked culture, initiative, and even morality as such:
Russia, quite simply, ‘did not exist.’10 Herzen, who had dedicated his 1852 pamphlet ‘Le peuple
russe et le socialisme’ to Michelet was in dismay. While not denying the authoritarian, centralising
impulse of the tsar, he conjured up an image of the Russian peasant as naturally inclined to
communism, federalism and decentralisation, distinctive of a uniquely Slav character. Reclus,
probably familiar with both accounts, mentions an autocratic as well as a popular tendency
striving to establish the material unity of Russia that for Michelet was inconceivable.11
For the purposes of this paper, it is interesting to note the explicitly spatial mode of
argumentation of this debate on Russia. While closer to the possiblist camp, Michelet did not
deny the geographical environment a role in shaping history that went beyond that of a simple
backstage to the events: ‘[…] in geography, certain regions have been designed according to a
more fortunate plan, are better cut out into gulfs and harbours, into valleys and rivers, are more
structured, that is to say, if I dare, are more capable of accomplishing freedom.’12 It takes little to
dernier nom la désigne aussi bien), sans avoir caractérisé chacune des provinces.’ J. Michelet, Histoire de France, depuis
les origines jusqu’à la fin du XVe siècle, vol. III, (Paris, 1840), p. 162,
8 Cited in F. Ferretti, ‘Review of L. Febvre, 2014, Michelet, créateur de l’histoire de France. Cours au Collège de France, 194344’, http://cybergeo.revues.org/26497, last accessed 28/02/15
9 P. Petitier, Jules Michelet: L’homme histoire, (Paris, 2006), p. 377, p. 410
10 ‘La Russie, n’est pas’, J. Michelet, Légendes démocratiques du Nord, (Paris, 1877), p. 14
11 E. Reclus, ‘Le panslavisme et l’unité russe’, pp. 273-284, La Revue, 4,3 (1903), p. 276
12 ‘[…] en géographie, certaines contrées ont été dessinées sur un plan plus heureux, mieux découpées en golfes et
ports, mieux découpées de vallées et de fleuves, mieux articulées, si j’ose le dire, c’est-à-dire plus capables d’accomplir
la liberté’, J. Michelet, cited in J. Atherton, ‘The Function of Space in Michelet’s Writing’, pp. 336-346 MLN 80, 3
(1965), p. 337
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imagine that Russia did not quit qualify amongst the fortunate nations and that the foul character
of its inhabitants could at least partially be blamed on its physical conditions: ‘The bleak
uniformity of such a climate, the loneliness stemming from the absence of communications, all
that leaves man with an extraordinary need of movement. Without the iron hand keeping them
tied to the land, all Russians, nobles and serfs, would fly; they would leave, come again, travel.’13
This supposed facility of migration brings to mind Mark Bassin’s series of articles,14 showing that
– in a line stretching from Solov’ev to Plekhanov – Russian historicist thought was concerned
with the problem of ‘open spaces’, a geodeterministic interpretation linking Russia’s
backwardness to the vast plains, that had opened the territory for invasion15 and effectively
prevented the formation of culturally and economically boosting centres. However, the originality
of Herzen’s response to Michelet’s position lies in his attempt, while agreeing on its immaturity,
to reinterpret Russia’s youth as an advantage (often in comparison to the United States). The
Russian and Russophile historians found themselves compelled to look for a way of overcoming
their own discomfort with undefined territory and to perceive empty spaces as a field for the
deployment of human creativity, and be it only in terms of their future potential.
From horror vacui to Empty Space as Asset
The deterministic element is, to be precise, but one aspect of Michelet’s conceptualisation of the
spatial dimension. As John Atherton already noted in 1965, ‘Michelet perceived two spatial
structures: according to one, France’s greatness was foreordained by her geography, by the
frontiers of the hexagon that served as mold for her future character; according to the other, a
core (the Ile de France) expands and its action creates the entity which is France.’ 16 Paris
represents the culmination of different historical eras and people from different parts of France
and, as a non-space or an entirely created space, emanates back into the regions – the two are
symbiotically connected to another. Reclus is less interested and more ambivalent towards the
city, yet a very similar dialectic is at work in his understanding of the ‘milieu’, including the urban
one. The milieu is the geographer’s preferred category and as an interactive, dynamic relation
between physical and social conditions represents the element that bridges determinism and
possibilism, as identified by Febvre. If in the case of the city, the social factors are
disproportionately predominant, their interdependence with physical features is a constant of all
types of milieu – Reclus vice versa is hardly more interested in the other extreme of the city, that
of uninhabited spaces; there can be no geography without humans. The very notion of an ‘empty
space’ can be said to be largely absent from his writings: In the few instances the term ‘espace
‘La désolante uniformité d’un tel climat, la solitude que crée l’absence de communications, tout donne à l’homme
un besoin extraordinaire de mouvement. Sans la main de fer qui les tient attaché au sol, tous, nobles et serfs, les
Russes fuiraient; ils iraient, viendraient, voyageraient.’, Michelet, Légendes démocratiques, p. 39
14 M. Bassin, ‘Geographical Determinism in Fin-de-siècle Marxism: Georgii Plekhanov and the Environmental Basis
of Russian History’, pp 3–22, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82,1 (1992); M. Bassin, ‘Turner,
Solov'ev, and the “Frontier Hypothesis”: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces’, pp. 473-511, The Journal of
Modern History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (1993)
15 For a very similar argument, Letter P. Kropotkin to P. Eltzbacher, IISH, ARCH00376
16 Atherton, ‘The Function of Space’, p. 345
13
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vide’ is employed in the NGU, it normally designates a void space wilfully construed and used by
humans, such as a top chamber of a building or a space left empty around a tree for gathering.17
Spaces – whether ‘empty’ or not – are thus always thought of as malleable, and, if used to their
full potential, can be the root cause for an upsurge of a region. Unlike Michelet’s teleological
France as a history of becoming, Reclus’ milieux are more transitory, constantly subject to change
inflicted by either nature or humans. Reclus is an early critique of the artificiality of state
boundaries and confronts them to more ‘natural’ divisions.18 These latter change much more
slowly under the impact of migration and even of geological time, yet they are not immutable – in
a book that deeply impressed Reclus, Mechnikov develops a theory according to which different
natural conditions, rivers, mediterraneans, and oceans come to be the base of subsistence and
main paradigm of different types of civilisations.19
While the possibility of the coexistence of various overlapping spatial constructions formed the
core of federalist visions as they were voiced in Reclus’ circle from Herzen to Drahomanov, it is
probably Kropotkin, himself originally trained as a geographer, who presents us with the most
radical account of spatiality: his understanding of the commune goes yet a step further in the
direction of a complete dissolution of space:
‘For us, “commune” no longer means a territorial agglomeration; it is a rather generic
name, a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. […]
The social Commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity […] there will emerge a
commune of interests whose members are scattered in a thousand towns and villages.
Each individual will find the full satisfaction of his needs only by grouping with other
individuals who have the same tastes but inhabit a hundred other communes.’20
As the physical dimension of the commune – the houses, factories, and the land – falters, one is
left with only the socially construed and contingent component of a purely imagined space, a
thought that appears to be anticipating much of the spatial theory since the 1970s.
The Historicity of Space
The Reclusian understanding of space parallels the postmodern geographies of Henri Lefebvre
and, following him, David Harvey, in no less than three significant ways: space is socially
produced and as such is imminently political and historically contingent. Looking at each one of
these points in more detail, I hope to show in this last section, that while there are indeed
instances of congeniality, we should be careful not to overlook the significant differences that are
due largely to their very different context of formation. The main achievement of Lefevbre’s
model of the production of space is without doubt its integration of the categories of ‘space’ as
E. Reclus, La Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, 19 vols. (Paris, 1876-1894)
For example Reclus, La Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, Vol. I., p. 31 or E. Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (Paris 1990
[1905]), t.2, p. 462
19 L. Metchnikoff, La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques (Paris, 1889)
20 P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, (New York, 1902)
17
18
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well as the ‘city’ within a larger social theory21 – a theory that he consistently re-examined and
refined in what was an exceptionally long and prolific academic career. Searching for a similarly
elaborated system in Reclus would be a vain quest: he hardly produced any theoretical writings
and what can be deduced from his empirical material can be meaningfully interpreted with
Lefebvre’s model, but this relationship should not be inversed. Reclus’ account of the social –
and he does indeed deserve to be credited for being one of the first to take the social seriously as
a category in geography – thus does not refer to a (Marxist) theory of production. Reclus speaks
of ‘collective personalities’ capable of imagining belonging within a given space – the city, the
tribe, the region22 – and sees ‘class struggle’ as one of three dialectic laws, this collective aspect is
confronted to a second law of the ‘free development of the individual.’ The tension between the
individual and the collective, productive as it is, however, is resolved by its subsumption under a
fairly vague notion of natural harmony.
This last point, the prominence of the individual, is crucial when it comes to an assessment of the
political nature of Reclusian space. Looking at Reclus and his close circle, one is immediately
struck by the – almost exclusive – presence of intellectuals with overt anarchist tendencies. Of
course, at a first glance, they share many of the assumptions and raise similar questions to the
newer spatial approaches: that of space as a means of exercising power and control through
borders, private property, claims to sovereignty, urban planning, etc. Yet their anarchist thrust
places them at the odds not just with the imperialistic geo-politics of their contemporaries but
also with the Marxism of Lefebvre and Harvey. As Yves Lacoste and others have convincingly
argued, Reclus and his colleagues more or less explicitly directed their model that privileged the
spatial, multidirectional perspective against the linear, time-centred vision of Marxist theory.23 A
serious debate about the role of space and non-simultaneity only slowly and painfully emerged
within Marxist circles, across generations from Plekhanov to Lefebvre to postcolonial theorists
(scholars who, perhaps, find themselves in a position not so far removed from that of
nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals in Western Europe). If some recent summarily accounts
of ‘radical geographies’ now try to bring together this work with that of nineteenth-century
anarchists, they often skate lightly over the very serious differences between a spatial theory that
tries to explore bottom-up ways of (re-)appropriating space and one that is concerned with a
critique of the manifestations of the interconnectedness of spaces created by the global flow of
capital.24 In Harvey’s words: ‘The universality of that experience [of the homogenizing heel of the
circulation and accumulation of capital] demands a global political response born out of more
powerful universal understandings of the dynamics of capitalism than Reclus constructed.’25
See, for example, the very helpful introduction, C. Schmid, Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie
der Produktion des Raumes, (Stuttgart, 2005), p. 9
22 For the city, Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, Vol. V, p. 355; for tribes, Ibid., Vol. I, p. 248; for regions: E. Reclus,
‘East and West’, pp. 475-487, The Contemporary Review (1894)
23 Y. Lacoste, Paysages politiques (Paris 1990), P. Pelletier, Géographie et anarchie, Reclus, Kropotkine, Metchnikoff (Paris,
2013)
24 For example S. Springer ‘Reanimating Anarchist Geographies: A New Burst of Colour’, pp. 1591–1604, Antipode
44,5 (2012). Even David Harvey himself plays down the differences between anarchists and Marxists on
geographical issues (http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-david-harvey/ last accessed
03/05/15). It could be argued that the anarchist understanding of space is in fact closer to J. Scott, The Art of Not
Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, (New Haven, 2009)
25 Harvey, Spaces of Capital, p. 119
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For a link between such a micro- and a macro-perspective the category of experience, both
individual and collective, can be brought into play. The most important commonality between
the anarchists’ way of thinking about space in the late nineteenth century and that of theorists
since the 1970s is their attempt to challenge the boundaries between time and space as distinct
entities. Harvey’s concept of space-time-compression, linking it to the condition of (post)modernity, represents without doubt the most explicit articulation of this endeavour. Employing
such notions can help clarify much of what Reclus tends to phrase in a rather aphoristic manner
– ‘Geography is nothing else but History within space, the same as History is Geography in
time’ 26 – on both the level of the experience of modernity undergone by him and his
contemporaries, but also as a way of articulating this experience. His discussion of the city, of
colonisation and communication, of progress and its effects on man and nature is both a source
and a contribution to current debates. Insisting on the constant changeability of space as a
protean category, the generations of Michelet and Reclus prepared much ground for the type of
spatial investigation that brings forth exciting new research questions to this day.
In this paper, I have tried to review the temptation to draw a parallel between the spatio-political
visions of the late nineteenth century and those of the 1970s. Enticing as it may be, without
Febvre as a bridging figure between the two generations, evidence for an actual – that is, textual
and explicit – connection remains rather weak. As a result, proponents of the ‘new spatial history’
feel no need to expound their differences or to acknowledge, like Febvre, their debt to Reclus.
Reclus’ thinking about space as a historical agent was much closer to the concerns of the
historicist tradition. The fact that French and Russian (and one might add, US-American)
historians have always displayed a particular proclivity towards space comes as no coincidence
here; as I have illustrated with the example of Michelet and Herzen, Russians and Frenchmen
within Reclus’ social environment were debating these very issues with regard to the future of
Russia. In so doing, they moreover endowed space with a political connotation, with a ‘capacity
of accomplishing freedom’, as well as a social one. Yet, while Russia surely provides an
interesting case for anyone thinking about spatial categories (Orient-Europe, nation-empire) and
France has produced an astonishing number of influential spatial theorists across generations
(Braudel, Lefebvre, Nora), the case of Reclus makes it difficult to uphold an image of ‘national
schools’: next to his host of Russian colleagues, he was strongly influenced by his early German
mentors 27 and stood in contact with British geographers, urbanists and geopoliticians from
Patrick Geddes to Halford Mackinder. That these intellectuals found enough common ground
for a debate with many points of contact is however indicative of the significant transformations
they were experiencing in their respective environment. It is here that a much broader
connection to the factors leading up to and conceptualised in the spatial turn can be found. This
experience deserves its place in our construction of genealogies.
‘La Géographie n’est autre chose que l’Histoire dans l’Espace, de même que l’Histoire est la Géographie dans le
Temps’, Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, Vol.I,. p. i
27 J. Osterhammel sees the whole project of Febvre’s spatial history as ‘effectively neo-ritterian’, J. Osterhammel,
‘Raumerfassung und Universalgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert’, pp. 51-72, G. Hübinger / J. Osterhammel / E. Pelzer
(eds.), Universalgeschichte und Nationalgeschichten. Ernst Schulin zum 65. Geburtstag (Freiburg, 1994), p. 68 26
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