A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Élisée Reclus and the Jews (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Reaction to the broadcast of "Being Right with Élisée Reclus" on August 
5, 2025, on France Culture ---- Readers of Le Monde Libertaire have no 
doubt learned that France Culture will be broadcasting from August 4 to 
8, from 1:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., with repeats in the evening, an 
ambitious five-part series entitled "Being Right with..." dedicated to 
the geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus. Two of our fellow 
geographers, Federico Ferretti and Philippe Pelletier (1), were invited 
to participate in this program, and their talks were broadcast on 
Monday, August 4 and Wednesday, August 6. ---- Listeners wishing to 
listen to the full program were able to hear, on Tuesday, August 5, the 
talk of Béatrice Giblin, geographer and director of the journal 
Hérodote. This intervention, also fascinating, when it comes to evoking 
Reclus's contribution to the geography of his time, and particularly to 
geopolitics, suddenly goes off the rails when the producer, Marie-Lys de 
Saint Salvy asks (about 25 minutes into the podcast): "His work is still 
colossal, can we expect contradictions...?" And Béatrice Giblin answers 
this question that she was probably expecting: "Yes, yes, especially the 
Jewish question, and it's a real contradiction. But he's a man of the 
19th century, and the left, anarchist or not anarchist, Marxist has 
always been a bit anti-Semitic, seeing Jews as bankers, therefore as 
capitalists..." Béatrice Giblin continues by stating that there are 
anti-Semitic pages in Élisée Reclus, without naming which ones of 
course. Anyone can get an idea of the comments by listening to the rest 
of the interview using the following link:
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avoir-raison-avec/geographe-du-peuple-quand-la-geographie-devient-politique-8479043

Is Élisée Reclus anti-Semitic, according to Béatrice Giblin?
Regarding Élisée Reclus, Giblin is no stranger to this, having already 
made similar remarks in 2023, on the show "Concordance des temps," where 
she was a guest of Jean Noël Jeanneney. Listen here: 
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/concordance-des-temps/elisee-reclus-la-terre-et-les-hommes-2520189

Béatrice Giblin wrote her doctoral thesis in geography on Élisée Reclus 
in 1971. Surprisingly, it was only in 2005 that Élisée Reclus's supposed 
anti-Semitism appeared in her writings. Following these allegations, 
which were never documented, but because they cast suspicion on an 
important figure in our movement and our thought, Federico Ferretti, 
Philippe Pelletier, and Philippe Malburet undertook, using their 
rigorous method-that is, going back to the sources, both published texts 
and correspondence-the publication of two documents.

* An article published in 2011 in one of the most prestigious 
French-language geography journals, available online and with free 
access. https://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/23467
* And in 2017, a book, Élisée Reclus et les Juifs, still available from 
L'Harmattan.

A three-point rebuttal
Here are at least three arguments that counter this false and scandalous 
accusation, but there are others that can be found in the two 
publications cited above.

1/ Regarding the Crémieux Decree of October 24, 1870, which declared the 
"native Israelites" of Algeria to be French citizens, Élisée Reclus 
wrote that this "testifies to a considerable evolution, and it is not 
entirely wrong that the civil registry confuses the children of French 
citizens and those of Israelites in most municipal registers" (volume XI 
on Northern Africa of the New Universal Geography, 1886, p. 596).

2/ "Anti-Semitism is above all a vile rivalry, and it is morally 
punished from the outset, since it does not appeal to any principle of 
justice": letter from Élisée Reclus dated April 22, 1898, published by 
the journal Les Droits de l'Homme and republished in full in 1899 by 
Henri Dagan in his Enquête sur l'antisémitisme (1899).

3/ This letter from Élisée Reclus was written following a query from 
this journal about his position on the Dreyfus Affair, which, it should 
be remembered, was initiated by an anarchist, Bernard Lazare (himself 
connected with Élisée Reclus), who defended the captain, even before 
Émile Zola.

The refutation is therefore complete and documented, and the three 
authors conclude with this sentence: "Faced with this avalanche of 
evidence, we can therefore affirm that the term anti-Semitic cannot be 
applied in any way to the character of Élisée Reclus or to his work." We 
can only hope that Béatrice Giblin, as a rigorous academic, will take 
the time to read one or the other of these two texts.

Unfounded accusations that raise questions
Another question remains, beyond the specific case of Élisée Reclus, and 
that is the rather unscientific conflation that allows the geographer 
invited by France Culture to assert that "(...) the left, whether 
anarchist or not, Marxist, has always been somewhat anti-Semitic(...)." 
There is reason to be outraged by such a lack of rigor, and to wonder 
who is being targeted. Could this rather vague "left" of the 19th 
century not always be the one, in its 21st-century constituents, that is 
conveniently disqualified as soon as it makes the slightest critical 
remark (and sometimes very timidly) regarding the policies and crimes 
perpetrated by the Israeli state?

As anarchists, we care very little about being on the left, or belonging 
to any parliamentary party whatsoever. However, for the public and 
non-specialists, Béatrice Giblin's slanderous assertions resonate very 
aggressively in the current political and media context. There's a kind 
of zeitgeist here that allows for all sorts of confusion and easily 
presents the labor movement and the left as definitively anti-Semitic. 
While we must respect the work of historians on certain disturbing 
traces, we must not allow assertions without precise references to pass. 
Especially when political opinions disguise themselves as knowledge to 
legitimize themselves in a terribly divisive context... Today, as 
always, the first duty of revolutionaries is to inform themselves and 
others... and there's work to be done!

Friends of Élisée Reclus

(1) Both are coordinators, with Pauline Couteau and Nicolas Eprendre, of 
the Élisée Reclus primer, the 101 words published by Les Presses du Réel 
in September 2024.

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8507
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