Anarchist geographers and feminism in late 19th century France: the contributions of Elisée and Elie Reclus Federico Ferretti To cite this version: Federico Ferretti. Anarchist geographers and feminism in late 19th century France: the contributions of Elisée and Elie Reclus. Historical geography, Geoscience Publications, 2016, Feminist Historical Geographies, 44, pp.68-88. hal-01423736 HAL Id: hal-01423736 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01423736 Submitted on 31 Dec 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Anarchist geographers and feminism in late 19th century France: the contributions of Elisee and Elie Reclus Federico Ferretti
[email protected] Abstract Women were part of the political and scientific networks that contributed to Elisée Reclus’ enterprise of the New Universal Geography and built the “Antiauthoritarian International,” although they have been generally neglected by historiography. During the French Second Empire (1851-1870), Elie and Elisée Reclus collaborated with some of the most famous French militant women and feminists, like Louise Michel, Léodile Champseix (known under the masculine pseudonym of André Léo) and Noémi Reclus, including creating and participating in a league for women’s rights. This paper aims to clarify the working of these networks and their specific intersections with geography, in the period of the 1871 Paris Commune and in the following ten years of exile, mainly through an analysis of correspondences by Louise Michel, Léodile Champseix and the members (male and female) of the Reclus family.