Letter from P.J. Proudhon to G. Ferrari explaining his federalist program for the ‘Italian Revolution’, Paris, 24 Avril 1859, Milan, Museum of Risorgimento, Giuseppe Ferrari Fund, Folder 17/III

See Federico Ferretti's most recent contributions to Society & Space here: Anarchism, Geohistory, and the Annales: Rethinking Elisée Reclus's Influence on Lucien Febvre and Evolution and revolution: Anarchist geographies, modernity and poststructuralism

In a recently-published paper,[1] I present Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as one of the common references linking the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) and the French historian Lucien Febvre (1878-1957), who was a great Proudhon’s admirer and also collaborator of an important Proudhon’s scholar like Georges Gurvitch (1894-1965).[2]

In the last years, several researchers have progressively rediscovered the historical and epistemological links between Geography and Anarchism, addressing historical figures of anarchist geographers like Reclus and Peter Kropotkin (1841-1921):[3] thus, the aim of this text is to call the attention of English-speaking academic world to another historical figure of the French-speaking anarchist movement and to stimulate new research on these topics.

Proudhon is considered as one of the founders of anarchism, as he was the first person to ever declare himself an anarchist.[4] As I stated in the paper on Febvre and Reclus, Proudhon was a very important figure for the formation of left-libertarian and radical tendencies, influencing authors and political movements all along the 20th century,[5] including the French movement of Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire, very close to Anarchism, which especially interested Febvre.[6]

On Proudhon’s link to geography, Simon Springer has recently stated that he ‘already had a philosophical edifice that was deeply concerned with the ways in which human beings had come to arrange, order, and codify their relations in and across space as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Proudhon railed against property, considering it an institution that sanctioned theft from the commons. By aligning the proprietor with the sovereign, he conceptualized a relational geography between property and the state. Yet his ire was not limited to these two institutions, as Proudhon also attacked notions of profit, wage labor, worker exploitation, capitalism, and the theological idea of the Church, all of which had a profound influence on a then young Karl Marx, which confirms anarchism and Marxism as sharing a lineage within socialist thought. Proudhon applied the term “mutualism” to his version of anarchism, envisioning the workers as being directly involved in and controlling the means of production, which he considered the only legitimate incarnation of “property”’.[7]

Thus, Springer concludes: ‘Given the tacit geographical framework that Proudhon and Bakunin laid alongside the foundations for anarchist thought, it is perhaps somewhat unsurprising that Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, two of anarchism’s most renowned philosophers, were also geographers.’[8]

I would argue that Proudhon inspired anarchist geographers like Reclus and Kropotkin on at least three concepts very central for their approaches: federalism, libertarian education and cooperation, ideas that present anarchists still acknowledge as firstly elaborated by Proudhon.

Federalism is one of the main points where geography and anarchism were linked in the thinking of authors like Reclus: from the beginning of his career, the geographer fumed to the centralism of French State and on the artificial nature of administrative subdivisions like the Départements, and extended then this criticism to all State frontiers, including the colonial ones.[9] It is important to stress that this discourse was based on geographical (and thus, ‘scientific’) arguments, like the historical and cultural unity of fluvial basins and the unifying role played by rivers and other ‘Mediterranean’ features.[10] These geographic conceptions also inspired one of the political stakes of several 19th century anarchists, namely their solidarity with the struggles for national liberation in Eastern Europe, where Slaves, Polish, and Balkans’ peoples claimed for their independence from the empires of Moscow, Wien and Constantinople. One of the most engaged in these struggles was the Ukrainian exile Mikhail Dragomanov (1841-1895), a thinker very close to Proudhon and a geographer who collaborated with Reclus for his Nouvelle Géographie Universelle.[11] At that time, several revolutionaries considered with a special interest the national struggles in course, hoping that they could hasten social revolution, and so they were also solidary with movements like the SpanishSexénio Democrático and the Italian Risorgimento,[12] in the context of the complex relations between anarchism, nationalism and anti-colonialism studied by Benedict Anderson.[13]

Proudhon was clearly the inspirer of Reclus’ federalism, and even if he was not actually a geographer in the present sense of the term, he used geographical arguments to support his ideas in favor of federalism, as exemplified by his writings on Italy, country which was then struggling against the Pope and the Austrian government to obtain its national emancipation. Taking part in the debate between centralists and federalists who both participated in these struggles, Proudhon questioned the naturalization of a unique Italian nation, considering that only an autocratic gaze could see this peninsula as ‘unified by nature’, namely by the Alps and the sea. ‘Saying this would be like stating that, as the globe is round, all the earth should have a unique master.’[14] He also proposed a critique of natural frontiers, arguing that the only legitimate borders were those which ‘guarantee to the populations the fullest freedom, the most absolute self-government.’[15] Proudhon also considered the different linguistic and cultural features of Italian peoples, concluding that: ‘Italy is anti-unitarian, firstly for its geographic structure, secondly for the fundamental diversity of its population.’[16]

To understand these statements, we must consider that the important leftist and popular tendencies of the Italian Risorgimento were then opposed to the centralism and monarchism of other tendencies within the wider national movement. Among the militants close to Proudhon, we find scholars like Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869) Carlo Pisacane (1818-1857) and Giuseppe Ferrari (1811-1876), who were endorsed by the first Italian anarchists and cited in Reclus’ geography as the inspirers of his critique of the centralism’s effects in Italy after its unification.[17]

In the case of education, Proudhon is considered to be one of the forerunners of the movement of ‘libertarian pedagogy’ for his idea of ‘polytechnic education’, a concept aiming to build a specific form of knowledge for the working class, one which was not limited to ‘high culture’, but which integrated technical and intellectual capacities, to improve the process of social emancipation.[18] After Proudhon, this idea was called ‘integral education’ by Paul Robin, the founder of the first libertarian school in Cempuis (1880-1894). Integral education, endorsed by Reclus, Kropotkin and other anarchist geographers like Charles Perron, proposed pedagogic methods based on the free stimulation of children’s imagination and autonomous capacities, and on a radical limitation of manuals and mnemonic learning at the primary level, to stimulate a direct experience of the world.

In this movement, geography was a very central issue: the didactic walks and trips were a central point in the teaching methods of the several dozens of libertarian schools which were founded all over the world between the 19th and the 20th century,[19] and constituted their specific spatiality, by taking inspiration from writings as the celebrated Kropotkin’s essay ‘What Geography ought to be’.[20] The use of anti-authoritarian methods in pedagogy was thus linked to a project of social emancipation through knowledge and to an anarchist geography which refused maps, manuals and mnemonic methods, considering them as State devices to form subjects, and not citizens.[21]

Proudhon was one of the protagonists of the 1848 revolution in Paris, where he promoted the first mutualistic experiences of workers’ cooperation and self-management, including the Banque du Peuple (People’s Bank), a sort of first experiment in ‘ethical banking’. After the 1851 Coup d’Etat by Napoleon III, the first tentative to reorganize a social opposition against the dictatorship, in the years 1860s, consisted in the constitution of cooperative associations, participated by Reclus and Bakunin. For Reclus, this experience was an important political training, inspiring the radicalization which followed his participation in the 1871 Paris Commune.[22] Cooperation, today considered as relatively moderate in comparison to other more radical approaches to social struggles, interested anarchists because its original spirit was based on workers self-management and self-organization, independent by State apparatus and other institutions. The principles of cooperation were also central in the well-known Kropotkin’s theory of Mutual Aid.[23]

On the side of class struggle, the importance of Proudhon’s works is stressed by Springer, observing that some of the Marxist basic principles, like the critique of property, were directly inspired by Proudhon. ‘Anyone familiar with both would recognize that Marx’s (1867/1976) first volume ofCapital recapitulated many of the ideas first presented in Proudhon’s (1840/2008) What is Property?, but without proper acknowledgement. Proudhon, the anarchist, accordingly played a pivotal role in the development of Marxian thought, and although Marxists tend to claim the Paris Commune for themselves as it is widely regarded as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution, Proudhon’s influence is undeniable.’[24]

Today, a project to digitalize the mammoth Proudhon’s archives is in course in Besançon,[25] city where an important French scholar of the 20th century, like Lucien Febvre, could develop a personal form of socialism close to the Proudhon’s one. These political and scientific issues, like federalism, autonomy and respect of cultural identities, anti-authoritarian and secular education, self-management, cooperation and autogestion to render social struggles independent by institutions and heteronomous powers, can contribute to present social struggles and critical theories about society and space. 

References

[1] Ferretti F 2015 Anarchism, Geo-History and the origins of the Annales: rethinking Elisée Reclus’s influence on Lucien Febvre. Environment and Planning D, Society and Space 33(2): 347-365.

[2] Febvre L 1949 Introduction. In: G Gurvitch (ed) Industrialisation et technocratie. Paris: A. Colin, VII-XIII ; Gurvitch G 1965 Proudhon sa vie, son œuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie. Paris: PUF.

[3] See for instance the special issues consecrated to this topic in 2012 by Antipode and ACME or, out of the English-speaking world, monographs like : Ferretti F 2014 Élisée Reclus, pour une géographie nouvelle. Paris: Éditions du CTHS; Pelletier P 2013 Géographie et anarchie, Reclus, Metchnikoff, Kropotkine. Paris: Éditions du Monde Libertaire.

[4] Guerin D 1976 L’anarchisme, de la doctrine à l’action. Paris: Gallimard; Proudhon P-J (1840) 2008What is Property? An Inquiry into the Right and Principle of Government. Charleston: Forgotten Books.

[5] ‘Lectures de Proudhon au 20e siècle. Actes du colloque du 2 décembre 2006’, Bulletin annuel de la Société P.-J. Proudhon (special issue), 2007.

[6] Hayat S 2012 De l’anarchisme proudhonien au syndicalisme révolutionnaire : une transmission problématique. In: E Jourdain (ed) Proudhon et l’anarchie. Paris: Publications de la société P.-J. Proudhon; Lecuir J 2012 L’originalité du syndicalisme français selon Lucien Febvre (1919-1920). Le Mouvement Social 238, 3-15.

[7] Springer S Anarchism and Geography: A Brief Genealogy of Anarchist Geographies. 2013Geography Compass 7: 48. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12022

[8] Ibid., p. 49.

[9] Nettlau M 1928 Eliseo Reclus: vida de un sabio justo y rebelde, vol. I. Barcelona: Edicciones de la Revista Blanca.

[10] Ferretti F Elisée Reclus, pour une géographie nouvelle, op. cit.

[11] Drahomanov M 1952 A symposium and selected writings. New York.

[12] Ferretti F 2014 Inventing Italy: Geography, Risorgimento and national imagination: the international circulation of geographical knowledge in the 19th century. The Geographical Journal180(4): 402–413. doi: 10.1111/geoj.12068

[13] Anderson B 2007 Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination. London: Verso.

[14] Proudhon P-J 1868 Œuvres complètes, vol. XVI. Paris: Dentu, p. 234.

[15] Ibid., p. 236.

[16] Ibid., p. 242.

[17] Ferretti F 2009 Traduire Reclus : l’Italie écrite par Attilio Brunialti. Cybergeo, European Journal of Geography, 14 http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22544.html

[18] Lenoir H 2011 Précis d’éducation libertaire ou Le livre du “ni maître” ; suivi de Victor Considérant,  un utopiste et un éducationniste bien oublié. Paris: Éditions du Monde libertaire.

[19] Avrich P 2006 The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States.Princeton: AK; Codello F 2005 La buona educazione: esperienze libertarie e teorie anarchiche in Europa da Godwin a Neill. Milano: Angeli.

[20] Kropotkin P 1885 What geography ought to be. The Nineteenth Century 18, p. 940-956; Kropotkin P 1901 Integral education, Kropotkin’s view. Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism 15(160).

[21] Ferretti F 2013 Géographie, éducation libertaire et établissement de l’école publique entre le 19eet le 20e siècle: quelques repères pour une recherche. Cartable de Clio, revue suisse sur les didactiques de l’histoire 13, p. 187-199.

[22] Ferretti F 2010 Intellettuali anarchici nell’Europa del secondo Ottocento : i fratelli Reclus (1862-1872). Società e Storia 127, p. 63-91. http://www.francoangeli.it/Riviste/Scheda_Riviste.asp?IDarticolo=39619

[23] Kropotkin P 1902 Mutual Aid. London: Heinemann.

[24] Springer S 2014 Why a radical geography must be anarchist. Dialogues in Human Geography 4(3): 249-270.

[25] Castleton E 2009 L’infréquentable Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Le Monde diplomatique.http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2009/01/CASTLETON/16666; see also the archive’s site:  http://culture.besancon.fr/?id=179