“Rediscovering the inebriation of geography”, Book Review Forum on Simon Springer’s The Anarchist Roots of Geography (Minneapolis, 2016)

In 1882, conservative Parisian journalist Abert Delpit commented on the endorsing speech Élisée Reclus pronounced at the “free union” ceremony of his daughters Magali and Jeannie, who publicly celebrated the fact they went to live with two young men without any legal sanction from a mayor or a priest. Given that this event raised a huge scandal in French mainstream press, Delpit tried to explain the contradiction between the generalized praise of Reclus as a world-famous scientist and his deprecation as an “immoral” anarchist, by addressing Reclus's “psychological profile.” Delpit argued that Reclus's wanderings across mountains and forests, and his studies of the Earth's great phenomena, had thrown him in a sort of psychopathological condition that he called l'ivresse de la géographie (the inebriation of geography).