#reclus

[tastethebloodofmeatthawsmoth]

"Avoid this death at all costs, comrades. If you have a little plot of land, guard it jealously: it is your life and that of your wife and children whom you love. Join with your companions whose land, like yours, is threatened by factory owners, sport hunters, and money lenders. Forget all your little grudges against your neighbors and band together in communes where there is a solidarity of interests and where each clump of earth is defended by all members of the community. If you number a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand, you will be quite strong against the lord and his valets, but you will not yet be strong enough to take on an army. Therefore, each commune must form an alliance with the others, so that the weakest might partake of the strength of all. In addition, you must call out to those who have nothing, to those disinherited people of the cities. You have perhaps been taught to despise them, but you must love them because they will help you to keep your land and to reconquer what has been taken from you. With them, you will attack and knock down the high walls of the enclosures. With them, you will found the great commune of men, where you will work in unison to invigorate and beautify the land, and live happily on this good earth that gives us bread.

But if you do not do this, all will be lost. You will die slaves and beggars. As the mayor of Algiers recently said to a delegation of humble, unemployed people: 'So, you’re hungry? Why don’t you just eat one another!'" - Elisée Reclus, "To my brother the peasant"

[grandboute]

Les Reclusiennes 2025 - BIFURQUER - Festival de la pensée

15-19 juillet à Sainte-Foy-La-Grande

[coolcatsonly]

They turn reverently toward museums, schools, and libraries, and renew their ideals through contact with others who are equally in the thrall of great things. Are they not also immigrants to the cities, and is it not thanks to them that the chariot of civilization continues to move forward through the ages?

When cities grow, humanity progresses, and when they shrink, the social body is threatened with regression into barbarism.

Without having studied the question, one might easily imagine that cities are distributed randomly. And in fact, a number of accounts depict the founders of cities leaving to fate the choice of a site on which to settle and build protective walls. The course of the flight of birds, the spot on which a stag was hunted down and taken, or the point at which a ship ran aground determined where a city was to be constructed. Thus the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik, is supposed to have been founded according to the will of the gods. (5)

In 874, the fugitive Ingolfur came in sight of Iceland and cast into the water the wooden images that served as his household idols. He sought vainly to follow their course, but they eluded him, and he had to establish a temporary camp on the shore. Three years later, he rediscovered the sacred pieces of wood, and moved his settlement to a nearby site, which turned out to be as favorably situated as possible in this formidable “Land of Ice.” (6)

(5): Labonne, Annuaire du Club alpin, 1886. [Reclus’ note] (6): Ingolfur Arnarsson was the first settler of Iceland. After being banished from Norway he set sail for Iceland. He brought along the posts from the high seat, or throne, of his home in Norway. On sighting land, he threw the pillars into the sea and asked the gods to wash them ashore at the appropriate spot for a settlement. He lost sight of the pillars and built a farm on the southeast coast. The posts were finally located along the coast to the west, and the settlement was moved to a spot that was given the Norse name “Reykjavik,” or “Bay of Smoke,” after the geothermal steam that rose there.

Elisee Reclus - "The History of Cities," available at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/.

[meatthawsmoth]

Reclus was admirably consistent in integrating his libertarian and communitarian ideals into his personal life, his political activism, and his scholarly work. His enduring love of life, of other human beings, and of truth is expressed eloquently in a letter written March 25, 1905, only a few months before his death. At the age of seventy-five, though ill and growing increasingly weaker, he could still write of 'two powerful attractions' that gave him the will to live. The first consisted of 'affection, tenderness, the joy of loving, the happiness of having friends and of making them feel that one loves them, that one asks nothing of them but to let themselves be loved, and that every token of affection is a delight freely given.' The second, he says, is 'the study of history, the joy of seeing the interconnection of things. There is doubtless a strong element of imagination in this study, and deceptive Maya also leads us down many false paths. But it is another great joy to recognize one’s errors.'

John Clark and Camille Martin, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus

[marcatextoneon]

"O escravo, e podemos mesmo dizer, de uma maneira geral, o homem cuja vida foi regulada desde sua infância e que não aprendeu a estabelecer claramente a comparação entre dois estados sucessivos muito distintos de seu meio, acostuma-se facilmente à rotina imutável da existência, por mais vulgar que seja: ele pode viver sem se queixar, com a pedra ou a planta invernando sob a neve".

-RECLUS, Elisée. O homem e a terra. Pp.55

[howieabel]

In a word, commercial competition, under the paternal aegis of the law, allows the great majority of merchants - and this fact is attested to in countless medical inquests - adulterate provisions and drink, sell pernicious substances as wholesome food, and kill by slow poisoning… Let people say what they will, slavery, which abolitionists strove so gallantly to extirpate in America, prevails in another form in every civilized country; for entire populations, placed between the alternatives of death by starvation and toils which they detest, are constrained to choose the latter. And if we would deal frankly with the barbarous society to which we belong, we must acknowledge that murder, albeit disguised under a thousand insidious and scientific forms, still, as in the times of primitive savagery, terminates the majority of lives.

Élisée Reclus

[detournementsmineurs]

"Division et Rythme de l'Histoire" encre de Chine et gouache de František Kupka pour le livre "L'Homme et la Terre" d'Elisée Reclus (1905) à l'exposition "Kupka, Pionnier de l'Abstraction" au Grand Palais, avril 2018.

[thecottoncandyprostitutes]

"Esperemos, de todos modos, confiadamente: el día grande vendrá. Vanse los dioses y llévanse consigo a los reyes, tristes representantes suyos en la tierra. Aprende despacio el hombre a hablar el lenguaje de la libertad: aprenderá también a practicarla." La Montaña, Élisée Reclus