Fields on Bodlet (2024)

Benoît Bodlet contributes to and nuances a growing body of work on the anarchist geographer and writer Élisée Reclus in this dive into two lesser-studied texts, Histoire d’un ruisseau (1869) and Histoire d’une montagne (1890). Across five chapters, Bodlet vehemently pushes back on the consideration of these works as minor, recentering them as “caractéristique d’un nouveau genre, qui émerge au sein de la littérature de jeunesse du XIXe siècle” (14). The Histoires, which themselves employ a quasi-literary style to communicate scientific information, are presented here as works of scientific “divulgation,” a term that Bodlet prefers to “vulgarization” for its more positive connotations. Highlighting the “soucis du partage démocratique du savoir” (15) at the heart of Reclus’ scientific practice and political orientation, Bodlet draws a line for the reader between Reclusian geography and aesthetics and anarchist and libertarian politics, particularly, as the study’s title suggests, along the axes of scientific divulgation and emancipation. While Reclus’ texts have been read by others either through the rubrics of science, politics or literary aesthetics, Bodlet convincingly argues that, for Reclus, the three are inextricably linked.

One of the more convincing elements of this argument is Bodlet’s reading of Reclusian pedagogical ethics. In the Histoires, Reclus offers a new methodology for learning, centered in anarchist-libertarian views on education and the world more broadly. In chapter two, a brief overview of children’s literature of the period, and an outline of other libertarian writing on education allow the reader to contextualize the Histoires. The libertarian writings that Bodlet examines highlight the emancipatory capacity of education as a means of challenging religious obscurantism, the privatization of science, and state power and institutions. Reclus echoes these critiques and offers corrections via aesthetic and organizational choices in his own writing. For example, Reclus’ refusal of French toponymies is read by Bodlet as a questioning of the deployment of patriotic spaces. Instead, by re-situating naming ability with the reader-observer, Reclus re-invests this position with narrative and educational agency, emancipating it from the constraints of science and state. The Histoires consistently trouble the domination of knowledge fields, through their citation of various sources of knowledge (including non-occidental sources, folkloric or mythical stories or characters, non-human agents, such as the river or mountain themselves, and workers, who are presented on equal footing with scientific authorities) and the use of a narrational “nous” that creates a sense of collaborative knowledge, among people (particularly workers and paysans) and between people and non-human actors. This “nous” (which is opposed at certain times to the “ils” of the urban bourgeoisie), allows for the emergence of a new social and political space, through the rubric of libertarian geography.

A critical part of Reclus’ educational model centers on the practice of imagination. As Bodlet fleshes out in chapters three and four, a Reclusian conception of the imagination as a learnable and teachable process rather than a faculty, is generative or realizing (making real) within the space of the milieu. Imagination, a necessary step between the sensible and suprasensible, allows one to perceive things that would not otherwise be perceptible. This sense of imagination-as-knowledge source implicates the reader in her milieu, rendering it an experimental space within which one might imagine different social and political formations (plant communities are described with anarchist metaphors, for example), as well as human and non-human actors. In this way, Reclus proposes imagination as a scientific and political practice through which his young readers may come to see their natural and social worlds differently. 

A particularly interesting framework through which Bodlet proposes to undertake his multi-faceted analysis of the Histoires is a “mesological” mode of reading. Introduced in 1860 (some six years before Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology”), “mesology” refers to the study of milieus and the relationships that exist within them. Bodlet’s use of this concept has multiple advantages. Bodlet notes that Reclus, who closely followed scientific debates of the period, was likely privy to ecology and thus knowingly opted for mesology in its place. Through his adoption of mesology as a critical reading practice, Bodlet avoids the anachronism that contemporary eco-critics sometimes risk when venturing into periods pre-dating more modern environmental thought. The milieu—as opposed to more the more restrictive “environment”—allows the geographer to situate the social and political within his scientific project. This is all the truer in the nineteenth century, a period during which the concept of the milieu flourished in many domains, making it a meaningful point of connection between literary, scientific and lay circles. Bodlet’s conception of a mesological analysis is one that can move across scales of reading, from “micro-lecture” to considerations of broader cultural trends. This framework is well positioned to structure Bodlet’s extremely multi-faceted study, allowing him to incorporate a wide variety of sources and arguments that expand and solidify relationships between geography and anarchist-libertarian politics. Bodlet’s incorporation of a Reclusian concept into his own analysis of Reclus offers an exciting and generative reading practice.

However, the mesological mode also highlights some shortcomings of Bodlet’s study. The structure of the text is quite diffuse, which sometimes leaves one wanting more context or focus. The capaciousness of Bodlet’s scope, while interesting in its ability to highlight the potential implications of Reclus’ writing, sometimes precludes a deeper interaction with the author’s primary claims. Bodlet argues, for example, that Reclus was not (as some readers have claimed) a proto-ecologist, suggesting that the geographer’s mesological intervention might nuance ecological and ecocritical debates. However, mesology and related concepts of “mesopolitics” and “mesosystem,” mentioned in passing remain underdeveloped. Although Bodlet makes brief allusion to ecocriticism and geocriticism, his lack of extended engagement with either of these fields, and the conspicuous absence of space studies, limit the potentials of his more far-reaching claims, in particular his assertion that Reclus might provide a perspective on the Anthropocene debate. In this and other instances, more sustained engagement with primary and critical source material would bring much to bear on Bodlet’s analysis. 

Bodlet makes a compelling case for the scientific, political and literary importance of the Histoires. He brings nuance to studies of Reclus that have focused only on certain of these aspects, paving a path to consider the intersections of these domains. This approach echoes and uplifts nineteenth-century approaches and brings to bear on contemporary multi-disciplinary conversations in literature and science studies. At times, the reader may get the sense that the study attempts to do too much, losing the thread of some analyses in the process. Overall, though, Bodlet provides a useful primer on the Histoires and an exciting methodology for approaching this and other nineteenth-century texts.