Version classiqueVersion mobile

Liens personnels, réseaux, solidarités en France et dans les îles Britanniques (xie-xxe siècle)

 | 
Bates David
, 
Gazeau Véronique

Partie 3. Réseaux artistiques et intellectuels

French connections: the scientific, academic and political networks of Patrick Geddes in France (1870s-1900)

Siân Reynolds

Résumé

Savant, homme de lettres et de culture et pionnier des questions d’environnement, l’intellectuel écossais Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) a aussi été l’un des piliers des amitiés franco-écossaises. Dans un contexte parfois difficile (crise de Fachoda, guerre des Boers, …), sa francophilie ainsi que les relations nombreuses, variées et parfois dérangeantes, qu’il a pu nouer en France n’ont pas toujours été comprises outre-Manche.

À l’aide des différentes versions de sa biographie et de sa correspondance, l’auteur reconstitue les nombreux réseaux qu’il a tissés ou auxquels il s’est agrégé au cours de ses voyages en France, entre 1870 et 1900: sciences dures, sciences humaines, anarchisme. Parce qu’il possédait à « un haut degré l’art d’attirer à lui et de retenir des gens » qu’il avait conquis, il a fait se côtoyer des ouvriers et des aristocrates, d’humbles chargés de cours de province et des grands professeurs de la Sorbonne, des anarchistes et des libéraux.

S’éclaire ainsi d’un jour nouveau le rôle qu’a joué Parick Geddes dans la fondation, en 1895-1896, de la Franco-Scottish Society puis dans l’organisation, à Paris, lors de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900, de l’École internationale de l’Exposition.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Patrick Geddes Archive, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, (hereafter PGA/US): T-GED 6/1/5

1During the summer of 1900, the Scottish scientist, intellectual, and environmental pioneer Patrick Geddes organized a “summer university”, with courses in four languages, at the Paris Exposition Universelie (World’s Fair). His Paris address book1 contained among others the following names with their home addresses: Jules Siegfried, Charles Seignobos, Ernest Lavisse, Émile Duclaux, Paul Desjardins-some of the leading figures in French academic life and, at this juncture, in political life too. By 1900, Geddes knew these men quite well, and hoped to enlist them for various projects connected with the Exhibition. This was probably the culminating point of his Parisian connections, though not of his links with France: he spent his final years in Montpellier in the 1920s and 30s. In his middle years, after 1900, he was increasingly identified with environmental philosophy and town planning on a world-wide stage, but throughout the 1890s he was still chiefly concerned with new ways of delivering education, science and culture to a broad public. His French contacts, dating back over a period of twenty years, were intimately involved in this endeavour, for which he mobilized several pre-existing networks. It is worth noting that at this moment in history, relations between France and Britain were not at all cordial. They had differed, or worse, over the Fashoda incident (1898), the South African War (started 1899), and the outcome of the Dreyfus Affair (1899). Geddes’s Francophilia was certainly not in harmony with the air du temps.

  • 2 In special number of The Edinburgh Review, on P. Geddes, no. 88, summer 1992, p. 3.
  • 3 . H. Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London and New York, Routledge, (...)

2Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is himself an unclassifiable figure. As Murdo Macdonald puts it, “at first glance he is seen nowhere; but with a little digging, he’s hard to miss.”2 He does, though, correspond in some respects to the French term intellectuel, a word coined at this very moment, and in the context of the Dreyfus Affair, to mean those who lived by the intellect and sought to apply it to a wider world than the academy. Geddes is a figure of international stature in the history of urbanization and the human environment, but his writings were so diverse and scattered, his activities so world-wide, and his projects so diverse, that he is less well known than other thinkers influenced by him, who left a more coherent legacy. Lewis Mumford is one example. The reader is referred to Helen Meller’s excellent biography for further details.3

3This brief essay will examine the overlapping circles in which he moved in France up to 1900. How was it that an outsider, a Scot, was able to mobilize so many French networks, resulting in a remarkable degree of international contact, which has passed relatively unobserved both from the French and the Scottish side? With only a little exaggeration, it can be argued that Geddes’s networks had links to the later diplomatic entente cordiale, and certainly had an impact on international exchange of ideas.

  • 4 See for example the contributions by Julien Vincent and Pierre Boudrot to the Table ronde on which (...)

4Recent research into networks has suggested some ways in which we can classify them. They may for example be endogenous (formed from within a certain location and group), or exogenous (linking people from different backgrounds). They may be ego-centric, that is attached to a certain central figure, or sociocentric, focused on an idea or a group. They might be formed gradually and coherently, or haphazardly and accidentally; within a single generation, or across several. They may or may not have been constituted for a defined purpose, and so on.4 The Geddesian networks, like their inspirer, seem to fit almost every category, apparently shifting from informal, affectionate links, made by a man who was already charismatic in his student days, into a series of target-oriented groups. These sometimes crossed frontiers and were attached to projects which were usually clearly-defined, if not always easy to realize.

  • 5 The Geddes papers are in several locations. Two of the largest deposits are in the University of St (...)

5To uncover these networks means undertaking detective work, moving outwards from Geddes’s biography (in its various versions), his correspondence and his papers, mostly lodged in Scottish archives, tracing several clusters of people and their inter-connections across a variety of sources. In his long lifetime, Geddes operated a large number of networks, but for the purposes of this paper I will concentrate on his French connections, with only brief references to the others.5

Academic contacts: science and social science

  • 6 “Student Days in France” Outlook Tower booklet, quoted in Boardman Esquisse, p. 91-2.

6The first French network was a scientific one. In the summer of 1878, aged twenty-four, having studied science at Edinburgh University, Geddes went as a student of marine biology to the station at Roscoff, Brittany. He was made welcome there by the French scientist Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers.6 The scientists he met in Roscoff became friends for life, and urged him to visit Paris, where he went to the 1878 International Exhibition, listened to Louis Pasteur’s lectures, and became fascinated by the French capital, which he saw as a city fusing learning and life:

  • 7 “Paris University”, unpublished manuscript, quoted in Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 34.

“Our true University is thus in the City – nay more it is the City, great Paris herself. She is ever stretching out for us her fresh ideas, in the bright conversations of the salon and of the café and so she diffuses them into the intellectual atmosphere and at every social level.”7

  • 8 Quoted in Boardman, Esquisse, p. 15.

7(Perhaps a rather optimistic view of the diffusion of knowledge in France!) Science was at any rate the context for the first set of links, and as we will see, Pasteur himself would be drawn into a later project. In the 1880s, Lacaze-Duthiers wrote to Geddes, saying “Votre activité dans les recherches… votre savoir en histologie et en physiologie me font présager pour vous un avenir brillant. Soyez professeur et venez à Roscoff et à Banyuls, avec une légion de jeunes naturalistes”8. Geddes did not in the end heed this advice. His scientific background was unconventional; and although he did lecture in Edinburgh during the 1880s, when he finally became a professor of botany at Dundee in 1889, it was with a private endowment and on special terms, leaving him free much of the year for other things. But he maintained his links not only with Lacaze-Duthiers, but also with Charles Flahault, professor of botany in Montpellier, to whom he sent many students, and with Yves Delage, later a professor of zoology at the Sorbonne.

  • 9 See Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 34 ff. and references.

8But the scientific network led, almost accidentally, to other things. In Paris during the winter of 1878, while working on a Mexican botanical survey, Geddes dropped into a lecture at the Sorbonne by Edmond Demolins (1852- 1907), a disciple of the social observer and theorist Frédéric Le Play. He was immediately inspired by certain of Le Play’s ideas and observations of society. The subject is too large to explore here, and certain of Le Play’s ideas were contested and in some respects already outdated by the 1880s, but essentially what Geddes borrowed from Le Play was the need for a proper sociological survey of a region, which became one of his key preoccupations.9 The surveys of working-class households Les Ouvriers Européens, which Le Play first published in the 1850s, were re-published in the late 1870s. Geddes became close friends with Demolins-they were near-contemporaries-and eventually a whole network of Le Play disciples found its way to Edinburgh. This is the “second French network”, that of the social scientists.

  • 10 Demolins printed his impressions in several numbers of his newsletter, Le Mouvement social (supplem (...)
  • 11 The latter had written a monograph on family life in the United States, which was translated by the (...)
  • 12 L. Railion, “Edmond Demolins et la création de l’École des Roches (1897-1903)”, Les Études sociales(...)
  • 13 On this, see Le Musée social en son temps (collectif), Paris, Presses de l’École normale supérieure (...)

9Its articulations evolved during the later 1880s. Back in Edinburgh, Geddes had begun giving summer school instruction at Granton marine biology station, for local teachers. This was the time of the University extension movement (both in France and Britain, under different names: universités populaires, extra-mural education). In the late 1880s he started, even more ambitiously, the Edinburgh Summer Meetings, which ran through the 1890s. At their peak they attracted about 150 students, but always had a solid core of regular attenders, many of them teachers, from a wide geographical radius. It was perhaps during the early 1890s that the meetings were at their most inspirational. Geddes invited both his scientific and his Le Playist contacts from France. Demolins came as many as three times, in 1892, 1893 and 1895, and in his letters and articles home has left a striking record of the illumination his visits brought him.10 The arrangements for tuition at the Summer meetings were informal, mixing the sexes to an extent that surprised a French observer. And they were pedagogically avant-garde and progressive, in the sense that there were no fixed syllabus or exams, another surprise for those used to French education. There was much stress on field work and environmental studies. Demolins brought some of his fellow-Le Playists over to teach/leam there too (they included the Abbé Felix Klein, Jules Bailhache, and Paul de Rousiers)11. It was here in Edinburgh that Demolins first met Cecil Reddie, headmaster of the progressive school Abbotsholme, and through him also Batley, the head of Bedales. The mind-blowing nature of these encounters resulted in his famous book on British education, published in 1897, À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?, [How are we to explain the superiority of the Angio-Saxons? –i.e. the British]. This book, with a title rather unwelcome in France, characterized British education as child-centred, character-building, non-directive-a view more influenced by the avant-garde than the norm, perhaps. But Demolins put his money where his mouth was, and inspired the foundation of the private progressive school l’École des Roches in 1899 in Normandy.12 We might note in passing that one of the first subscribers to that school was Jules Siegfried, a key player in the Musée Social network. The Musée Social, an institution founded by the comte de Chambrun in 1893, might today be described as a “think-tank on social affairso. Geddes certainly knew several of the founding members of this influential institution, which still exists today13.

  • 14 Revue internationale de I’enseignement, le 15 mai 1896, cutting in PGA/US.
  • 15 The Geddes archives contain many letters from the Bonnet family, based in Montpellier. Another Fren (...)

10The Edinburgh Summer Meetings brought together a varied group of people who met in the kind of circumstances that encourage fast and intense acquaintance. Of the French participants, alongside the Le Playists there were established academics such as Alfred Espinas, professor of literature at Bordeaux and later the Sorbonne, and the moral philosopher Paul Desjardins. They rubbed shoulders with scientists Yves Delage, and Henri de Varigny from the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes. Writers on social science and ethics such as Henri Mazel, Henri Trocmé and Maurice Caudel were there in 1898; a year later there arrived Léon Marillier, specialist in history of religion, and adopted stepson of prominent historian Charles Seignobos. The cross-channel visitors were attached to various French academic institutions, official and unofficial. An observer wrote that 20 % of the participants were foreign, “aussi le Summer-Meeting d’Édimbourg est-il plus connu à Paris qu’à Londres.”14 While the Scottish colleagues whom Geddes invited to teach included a number of women, virtually all the French visitors were men, not surprisingly, given the structure of the French universities at the time. However one woman lecturer was Marie Bonnet from Montpellier, eventually (see below) to be a founding member of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme during the Dreyfus Affair. She was also a friend of the family of historian Gabriel Monod, another early participant15.

Anarchists

11The teachers at the Summer Meetings also rubbed shoulders with some prominent French anarchists. It may seem unusual and surprising that Geddes, who was a radical in many social and cultural respects but who steered clear of politics as much as he could, should have become closely linked to these men, at a time when anarchism was in the headlines. The 1890s were years which saw a spate of individual terrorist attacks by people claiming to be anarchists, including a home-made bomb thrown into the French Assemblée Nationale in 1894. This resulted in the passing of anti-terrorist legislation, sometimes described as les lois scélérates, which brought a crackdown on known activists. Indeed Geddes ended up sheltering one political anarchist from the French authorities under a false name. It should be stressed that, as far as we know, none of his contacts ever sanctioned violence, but they were nevertheless subject to arrest and pursuit by the French authorities for their professed anarchist views. How did this network come about? It is not entirely clear when it began, but there are at least two strands, via geography and painting.

  • 16 Boardman, Worlds, 1978, p. 87 and 105. See also J. P. Reilly on G’s contacts with Geddes.

12Certainly Geddes had met Pierre Kropotkin, the anarchist Russian geographer resident in France, some time during the 1880s. Kropotkin visited Edinburgh in 1886 after his release from the French prison at Clairvaux, and wrote to his friend, fellow-geographer, and fellow-anarchist Élisée Reclus afterwards, praising Geddes’s installation in the Old Town and his social work with students.16

  • 17 For overviews of Reclus’s life, see M. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus, Lond (...)

13Geddes was already an admirer of Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), with whose thoughts on the environment he had much in common. It seems that he simply wrote to him, possibly mentioning Kropotkin’s name, in the early 1890s, inviting him to come and lecture in Edinburgh. Reclus was world-famous for his works on environmental geography La Terre and La Géographic Universelle (19 volumes, 1876-1894). In the 1890s, he was living and teaching in Brussels, at a privately-financed university, having been refused an official post.17 Now rather elderly but spry, he came to the Edinburgh Summer Meetings in 1893 and 1895, when he lectured both on geography and on anarchism. On 16 August 1895, Reclus wrote to his wife:

  • 18 É. Reclus, Correspondance, Paris, Costes, 1925, vol. 3, p. 188-9.

“Dans quelques minutes, je vais faire ma deuxième conférence. La première s’est très bien passée devant un public sympathique, composé de gens qui me paraissent savoir véritablement le français. Ma quatrième conférence doit se faire en anglais et devant un public composé en majorité d’ouvriers anarchistes. Ce sera l’expérience difficile de la campagne”18.

14Reclus also remarks in the same letter that he has met an abbé (possibly Klein, the Le Playist), who “would like to become an anarchist but does not dare”.

  • 19 On Paul Reclus, see the article in J. Maitron et al., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrie (...)
  • 20 On the Great Globe, see S. Reynolds, “After Dreyfus and before the entente: Patrick Geddes’s cultur (...)

15Presumably as a result of the close friendship which developed between Reclus and Geddes, who admired each other’s achievements, Reclus’s nephew Paul, under the false name “Georges Guyon”, took refuge in Scotland with his family during the middle 1890s when he was wanted in connection with the anarchist outrages (with which he had nothing to do). He became one of Geddes’s right-hand men at the Outlook Tower and later settled in Montpellier; the two families eventually intermarried.19 Geddes and Élisée Reclus had prolonged further contact over the project for the Great Globe, planned for the 1900 Exposition, and remained in touch until Reclus’s death in 1905.20

  • 21 Hamon was a radical thinker hard to pigeonhole. Moving towards socialism at this time, he met Berna (...)
  • 22 Pissarro archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, letters of 22 January and 3 February 1895: my thanks t (...)

16Augustin Hamon (1862-1945) was also on the run from the French police after 1894, and almost certainly came to Edinburgh through knowing members of the Reclus family. Another anarchist writer, particularly interested in painting and literature, he was to be found visiting Edinburgh and meeting Geddes in January 1895. Writing to Lucien Pissarro, he indicated that he had immediately been recruited to give ten lectures on “la France actuelle” i.e. “Contemporary France” at the Summer Meeting in August that year. We know from other sources that Hamon also attended the famous congress of the Second Socialist International in London in 1896, where the anarchists split from the socialists.21 But his links with Geddes appear to relate more to the artistic circle in Edinburgh than to politics: as he put it “il y a autour de Geddes, tout un clan d’artistes”. This is no doubt the place to say en passant that the Geddes circle in Edinburgh was a much more mixed one culturally than his French contacts, who were almost all academics and scientists. In Edinburgh, where his wife Anna was closely involved with all his activities, his circle was of free-thinking progressives, including many artists and especially women, new women, craftswomen, singers. At any rate, Hamon’s correspondence concentrates on the artistic life, describing Geddes as an “ami de [John] Duncan et de moi, qui aime fort l’art, et désire faire d’Edinburgh [sic]… un centre artistique”22.

The Franco-Scottish society

  • 23 PGA/US, T. GED 12/1/15.
  • 24 Barclay to Geddes, 27 March 1895, NLS, MSS 10527.
  • 25 On the history of the Franco-Scottish Society, see T. Barclay, Thirty Years: Anglo-French Reminisce (...)

17We now have to jump to a somewhat different circle, and it is not entirely clear how Geddes managed to reach such eminent people in the French system so quickly. But the enterprise was not his alone. This concerns the setting up of the Franco-Scottish society in 1895-96. Already in 1890, after the 1889 exhibition-where many further academic contacts had been made in connection with student exchanges and learned conferences-Geddes had formed an embryonic idea and had linked up with the historian Ernest Lavisse and Louis Pasteur (no less) to form a “Comité franco-écossais”, mainly concerned to promote student exchanges, with Paul Melon as administrator. But the lift-off seems to have come when a Scottish lawyer in Paris, Thomas Barclay (1853- 1940), gave it a push a few years later. Barclay and Geddes were both world-class networkers. Geddes, writing to Barclay in 1895, gave him a tip-off list of “the most effective people to whom I am accustomed to send students”: a list including his old friends Varigny, Delage, Lacaze-Duthiers, and Demolins.23 Barclay wrote to Geddes in the same year listing the top French names he had managed to interest in the plan.24 The first meeting of the Franco-Scottish Society, held in Edinburgh in October 1895, combined both reliable academics and representatives of Scottish and French high society. The second meeting, the official inauguration, was held in the Sorbonne in 1896. Pasteur of course had died in 1895, but the roll-call of members at the first two meetings sounds like a branch meeting of the “République des professeurs” combined with the “high heidyins” of Scottish society.25 To stay with the French members, they included a swathe of eminent academics and administrators, some of whom we have already encountered: Octave Gréard, Rector of University of Paris, the historian Lavisse, the Hellenist Alfred Croiset; the scientist Émile Duclaux, Pasteur’s successor at the institute; Émile Boutroux, Charles Gide, the comte de Franqueville, etc. By 1898 the committee included all these, plus higher civil servant Louis Liard, architect of university reform in France, and many more. The honorary president of the French branch was a former President of the Republic, Casimir-Périer.

  • 26 See Barclay, Thirty Years, op. cit., passim.

18Geddes promptly added these figures to his bulging address book. It is not evident that he knows many of them very well before this particular initiative. Thomas Barclay later claimed that the Franco-Scottish society was a dry run for the entente cordiale, a question which we will not seek to resolve here.26 However there is no doubt that the great and good from both sides were involved in the early manifestations of the Franco-Scottish Society. Its subsequent history, while interesting, had a less high profile than its beginnings. Neither the political clout desired by Barclay nor the culturally progressive role envisaged by Geddes ever really came about, though it has remained a focus for friendly exchanges between Scotland and France for over a hundred years.

Making the networks work: the Paris Exhibition of 1900

  • 27 See P. Geddes, Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress, Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1887. For full (...)

19For the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, mentioned at the start of this essay, Geddes orchestrated his most ambitious project yet, the International Assembly or École Internationale de l’Exposition: in effect a four-language summer school running throughout the exhibition. A larger version of the Edinburgh Summer Meetings, drawing on some of the usual lecturers plus many more, the summer school organized talks on every conceivable subject, visits to pavilions and sites, museums and galleries, industrial locations, etc., with the aim of making the exhibition a centre of knowledge.27 Geddes had enlisted the support of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in autumn 1899. Enthusiasm on both sides of the Channel resulted in an eminent set of patrons: Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925), the former French prime minister and minister of education, was president, with support from a number of professors and educationists, some of them only recently encountered during the Franco-Scottish launch: Charles Gide, Émile Duclaux, Lavisse, Gréard, Liard and others, including the ubiquitous Dick May. The lecturers were numerous, of several nationalities, including American, but with a “hard core” of regular and devoted Geddes helpers.

  • 28 C. Prochasson, Les Années électriques, Paris, La Découverte, 1991, p. 230-1. Dick May (Jeanne Weill (...)

20The success of the whole enterprise was summed up by historian Émile Bourgeois (no relation to Léon) in his report: it operated for 4 months, employing 100 lecturers, eight secretaries, and ten other staff, laying on 300 formal lectures, 800 talks, and 450 guided visits to a total of visitors/students running into tens of thousands: “Many a university does not offer as much in a semester”, as Geddes later remarked. Geddes was also an active participant at the International Conference on the Social Sciences held during September 1900, another of Léon Bourgeois’s pet projects, at which almost all his academic contacts were present (including Seignobos, Charles Gide, Émile Durkheim, etc.), a gathering described by Christophe Prochasson as the “Republican establishment in session. “28 In the course of the summer, Geddes also made contact with Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, though on an individual basis, rather than as members of a group.

  • 29 A. Picard, Rapport général: le bilan d’un siécle 1801 -1900, Paris, 1906-7, 6 vols., vol. 6, p. 288 (...)
  • 30 Cutting in PGA/US, T. GED 6/3/5.

21While the International Assembly was uncontroversial, the last of Patrick Geddes’s Paris schemes in 1900 was both quixotic and ambitious. The specially-erected and much-admired national pavilions, displaying cultural artefacts from each country, ran along the left bank of the Seine opposite the Grand Palais, the “Rue des Nations.” Geddes proposed (as is mentioned in Alfred Picard’s official report) to save them in permanent form after the close of the Exhibition in the autumn, as international museums: one for peace, one for the sea, experimental science, etc.29 The idea was to de-nationalize them, with their original national identities being absorbed into international concepts. During the latter part of 1900 and early 1901 Geddes campaigned energetically, and activated his address-book. No doubt he started by calling on his original contacts, for Lavisse, Gréard, Liard and Duclaux all helped him; Léon Bourgeois also threw his not inconsiderable weight into the balance. Eventually, the proposal was supported by a range of diverse personalities, including four ministers in the French cabinet, one of whom, significantly, was the future architect of the entente cordiale, the foreign secretary Théophile Delcassé. The scheme foundered in part on legal and technical grounds, but also no doubt because the new nationalist majority of the Paris municipal council was against it-as indeed was Édouard Drumont, an extreme anti-semitic fore-runner of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and ferocious opponent to anything that smacked of internationalism. Drumont wrote a ferocious article, saying “Si j’allais à Édimbourg… [et que] je m’avisais de soumettre aux habitants des plans pour embellir les bords du golfe du Forth, on m’enverrait prestement coucher.”30 Defeated by a mixture of bureaucracy and real technical problems as well as political opposition, this was one project Geddes had to abandon, and in the years thereafter he turned to pastures new-international ones which took him to Ireland, India and Palestine among other places.

22This last initiative of 1900, the Rue des Nations project, may help us to decipher some of the hidden reasons behind Geddes’s networking. Although he was studiously non-affiliated to any political party, he could not help being attached to liberal progressive causes. During the late 1890s, as noted earlier, Britain and France were particularly at odds, each country considering the other to be in the wrong over Fashoda, Dreyfus, South Africa, etc. Geddes’s contacts were chiefly among those who took the side of “justice”, peace and liberalism against the prevailing mode of their own country’s official policy. His British contacts (about which space does not permit discussion here: they include the Liberal MP, James Bryce and the campaigning journalist, W. T. Stead) tended to be radical, i.e. non-Unionist and non-colonialist Liberals, opposed to the Boer War. His French contacts tended almost without exception to be Dreyfusists, that is supporters of the French Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of spying. They were not all early Dreyfusists (Lavisse took his time) but some were very strongly committed, (e.g. Duclaux), and many had joined the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. Ex-premier Léon Bourgeois is a particularly important figure; a freemason, a slightly late Dreyfus supporter in 1898, he was the key figure in “Solidarism”, the philosophy of mutual help between the different classes of society which dominated the Social Science congress, and was indeed the prevailing ideology of the radical republicans of the time. He had also been France’s delegate to the peace congress at The Hague in 1899. By contrast, we have already noted that one of the most ferocious nationalist and anti-Dreyfus campaigners, Drumont, had taken a dislike to Geddes’s schemes.

  • 31 The pre-existing networks of French intellectuals, with special reference to the Dreyfus period, ha (...)
  • 32 Firmin Roz, quoted by Boardman, Esquisse, p. 61.

23There was therefore a sort of “freemasonry” of a less formal kind linking Patrick Geddes’s networks. They almost all consisted of people to be found on the side of Dreyfus in the famous Affair.31 And they cut across the usual hierarchies which marked the French university system, for example, so that humble lecturers from the provinces and unofficial anarchist intellectuals taught alongside eminent professors from the Sorbonne at the Summer Meetings. Geddes, with the particular advantage in France of being a foreigner, was equally at home whether talking to the marquesses and earls he enlisted in the Franco-Scottish society, to the mild but determined anarchists, to the workingmen whom he encouraged to come to his summer school, or to a whole procession of French academics and politicians. He spoke French well: “un francais très pur, elegant, savoureux, releve d’une pointe d’anglicisme”32 and as Demolins said: “J’ai rarement rencontré un homme possédant à un plus haut degré L’art d’attirer à lui et de retenir des gens qu’il a une fois conquis”: “I have rarely met anyone possessing to such a high degree the art of attracting and keeping people he has once conquered”.

Appendix: principal members of Geddes’s French networks

Annexes

[MS = attached to the Musée Social; D= identified as being pro-Dreyfus]

  1. Scientific: H. Lacaze-Duthiers; L. Pasteur; C. Flahault (Montpellier); Y. Delage; later Émile Duclaux (D).

  2. Le Playists: E. Demolins; P. de Rousiers; Abbe Klein; Bailhache; Poinsard [links to Jules Siegfried (MS)].

  3. Anarchists: P. Kropotkin; Élisée Reclus; Paul Reclus; A. Hamon.

  4. Summer meetings: All those in 2 and 3 above, plus A. Espinas (D) (MS); Paul Desjardins (D); G. Monod (D); H. Trocmé; H. Mazel; L. Marillier (D); Firmin Roz; Delvolvé; Caudel; Mlle Marie Bonnet (D), etc.

  5. Franco-Scots: E. Lavisse; Pasteur; Bardoux; Beljame; Bichat; Boutmy (MS); Boutroux; Bréal (D); Brouardel; Bufnoir; Alfred Croiset (D); Duclaux (D); Espinas (D); Comte de Franqueville; Ch. Gide; Himly; Gréard; Liard; Jules Simon; Paul Meyer (D); de Vogue (and others).

  6. Paris International Assembly 1900: patrons/committee (not lecturers): Léon Bourgeois (D); Émile Bourgeois (D); Gréard; Liard; Prince R. Bonaparte; Espinas (D); Lyon-Caen (D) (MS); Malet; Melon; Brouardel; Lavisse; H. Poincare; J. Claretie; Mabilleau (MS); Ch. Gide; G. Perrot; J. Siegfried; P. Melon; Mlle Dick May (MS), etc.

  7. Rue des Nations project: Millerand; Delcassé; Cauvin; L. Bourgeois; Liard; Duclaux; Prince R. Bonaparte; Coppée (non-D); E. Bourgeois; L. Herbette; G. Moch; Ch. Normand; J. Labusquière; F. Schrader, etc.

  8. Patrick Geddes’s address book, 1900: Caudel; Siegfried; Seignobos (D); Lavisse; Duclaux; Delage; Desjardins; Schrader; Planes; Le Foyer; Plessat; Metin; Guerard, etc.

Notes

1 Patrick Geddes Archive, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, (hereafter PGA/US): T-GED 6/1/5

2 In special number of The Edinburgh Review, on P. Geddes, no. 88, summer 1992, p. 3.

3 . H. Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, full bibliography. The paperback edition (1993) is used for further references. I am indebted to Helen Meller’s biography for the context for these networks, but have taken further than she does exploration of Geddes’s contacts on the French side of the Channel. See also P. Boardman, Esquisse de l’œuvre éducatrice de Patrick Geddes, Montpellier, Pierre-Rouge, 1936; P. Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes, Biologist, Town Planner, re-Educator, Peacewarrior, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

4 See for example the contributions by Julien Vincent and Pierre Boudrot to the Table ronde on which this collection is based.

5 The Geddes papers are in several locations. Two of the largest deposits are in the University of Strathclyde (PGA/US); and the National Library of Scotland (NLS), in Edinburgh. As his wife Anna Geddes remarked, “All Pat’s enterprises are linked”, copy of letter dated 5 August 1900, NLS, MSS 10577.

6 “Student Days in France” Outlook Tower booklet, quoted in Boardman Esquisse, p. 91-2.

7 “Paris University”, unpublished manuscript, quoted in Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 34.

8 Quoted in Boardman, Esquisse, p. 15.

9 See Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 34 ff. and references.

10 Demolins printed his impressions in several numbers of his newsletter, Le Mouvement social (supplement to La Science sociale) in 1892 (p. 77-86; 97-106; 126-33). See also B. Kalaora and A. Savoye, Les inventeurs oubliés: Le Play et ses continuateurs, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1989, esp. p. 150-9; and Les Études sociales, no. 127-8, 1998.

11 The latter had written a monograph on family life in the United States, which was translated by the geographer A. J. Herbertson, Geddes’s pupil, in 1892. See Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 126.

12 L. Railion, “Edmond Demolins et la création de l’École des Roches (1897-1903)”, Les Études sociales, no. 127-8, 1998, p. 51-67.

13 On this, see Le Musée social en son temps (collectif), Paris, Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1998 and J. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: the Musée Social and the origins of the welfare state, Duke University Press, 2002.

14 Revue internationale de I’enseignement, le 15 mai 1896, cutting in PGA/US.

15 The Geddes archives contain many letters from the Bonnet family, based in Montpellier. Another Frenchwoman whom Geddes certainly knew was the pioneer of social science, Dick May, pseudonym of Jeanne Weill (1860-1925). See C. Prochasson, “Dick May et le Social”, in Le Musée social en son temps, op. cit., pp. 43-58. Marie Bonnet (who did not approve at all of Dick May) reported that Geddes had met Célestin Bougié at May’s house, letter of 6 December 1899 to Anna Geddes, NLS, MSS 10577.

16 Boardman, Worlds, 1978, p. 87 and 105. See also J. P. Reilly on G’s contacts with Geddes.

17 For overviews of Reclus’s life, see M. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus, London, Croom Helm, 1979; B. Griblin, “Élisee Reclus” in Geographers: Biobibliography, vol. 3, London, Mansell, 1979; the Geddes archives contain many letters to and from the entire Reclus family.

18 É. Reclus, Correspondance, Paris, Costes, 1925, vol. 3, p. 188-9.

19 On Paul Reclus, see the article in J. Maitron et al., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier, under his name.

20 On the Great Globe, see S. Reynolds, “After Dreyfus and before the entente: Patrick Geddes’s cultural diplomacy at the Paris Exhibition of 1900”, in M. Cornick and C. Crossley, eds, Problems in French History, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000, and references in the Reclus papers, BNF, Département des manuscrits, NAF, 22916.

21 Hamon was a radical thinker hard to pigeonhole. Moving towards socialism at this time, he met Bernard Shaw in London and eventually, with his wife Henriette, translated all Shaw’s plays into French. For details see P. Gaillou, doctoral thesis, “G. B. Shaw et Augustin Hamon: les premiers temps d’une correspondance”, universite de Bretagne occidentale, Brest, 1998, and the same author’s “Un itinéraire politique, Augustin Hamon”, Kreuz, no. 10, 1999, p. 200-27.

22 Pissarro archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, letters of 22 January and 3 February 1895: my thanks to Belinda Thomson for this reference.

23 PGA/US, T. GED 12/1/15.

24 Barclay to Geddes, 27 March 1895, NLS, MSS 10527.

25 On the history of the Franco-Scottish Society, see T. Barclay, Thirty Years: Anglo-French Reminiscences 1876-1906, London, Constable, 1914, chapters 11 and 13; and The Franco-Scottish Society Bulletin, no. 24, May 1995 (Centenary Year), especially the article by A. Steele. The Society’s archives are deposited in the National Library of Scotland.

26 See Barclay, Thirty Years, op. cit., passim.

27 See P. Geddes, Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress, Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1887. For full references for this and the other projects connected with the 1900 exhibition, see Reynolds, “After Dreyfus and before the entente”, p. 149-67.

28 C. Prochasson, Les Années électriques, Paris, La Découverte, 1991, p. 230-1. Dick May (Jeanne Weill) was the organizational secretary of this conference.

29 A. Picard, Rapport général: le bilan d’un siécle 1801 -1900, Paris, 1906-7, 6 vols., vol. 6, p. 288. See Reynolds, “After Dreyfus and before the entente”, for further details and references.

30 Cutting in PGA/US, T. GED 6/3/5.

31 The pre-existing networks of French intellectuals, with special reference to the Dreyfus period, have been the subject of much recent research, too complex to summarize here. See for example C. Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels11 1880-1900, Paris, éditions de Minuit, 1990; C. Charle, Paris fin de siècle, Paris, Seuil, 1998; C. Prochasson, Les Années électriques, op. cit., C. Prochasson, Paris 1900, essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999.

32 Firmin Roz, quoted by Boardman, Esquisse, p. 61.

Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont sous Licence OpenEdition Books, sauf mention contraire.

Cette publication numérique est issue d’un traitement automatique par reconnaissance optique de caractères.
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search