A Political Ecology of the Body: Nature in French Anarchist Pedagogy around 1900

Abstract

This essay historicizes the concept of nature in French anarchist pedagogy around 1900. I argue that anarchist cosmology was not dualist in the sense that it did not neatly separate the natural from the cultural or social. Nature was rather understood as an ever-evolving realm that encompassed nonhuman and human entities. This example should encourage historical scholarship to look more deeply into what anthropologists sometimes call “naturalist ontology”. Instead of conceiving it as a fixed worldview, we should investigate its genealogy, transformations, and contestations.

1. Introduction

“A school that is truly free from ancient bondage can only be seriously developed in nature” (Bulletin de l’École Ferrer 1916, p. 3). One finds this statement in a bulletin of the École Ferrer, an anarchist school in Lausanne that operated between 1910 and 1919 (Wintsch 1919). Above the sentence is a picture showing naked children playing in the open air. The image and sentence were taken from a book by the famous anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) (Reclus 1908, vol. 6, p. 433), then already deceased, who had lived and written in Switzerland in the 1870s and 1880s and who is today described as a pioneer of ecological anarchism (Pelletier 2009; Lefort and Pelletier 2013; Ferretti 2014; Guest 2017; Clark 2019; Oyón 2017).

Such statements were not uncommon in anarchist pedagogical discourse at the turn of the century. For these anarchists, emancipatory schooling did not only take place in nature. The aim of anarchist pedagogy also consisted of educating nature itself, insofar as it focused on bodies and their “spontaneous” and sound development. In the picture from the bulletin, a teacher can only be seen far in the background, for the children were to grow into physically healthy and rationally thinking beings in a self-determined manner without any authoritarian discipline. The director of the school, Jean Wintsch (1880–1943), captured this in one of his most important principles: “Return to nature and life” (Wintsch 1913). And he was not alone: the great anarchist scholar and activist Pëtr Kropotkin also aspired to what he called a “return to nature” (Kropotkin [Krapotkin] 1893, p. 355).

The aim of this article is to historicize the anarchist understanding of nature around 1900 by focusing on the writings of French-language anarchism. This does not mean that transnational connections and transfers are considered irrelevant. As several works have shown, anarchist ideas and practices were always embedded in transnational networks (Bantman 2017; Kramm 2021). They have also to be understood in relation to colonial and imperial ideologies, of which they were only partially critical (Deprest 2012).

This essay asks what was the “nature” to which Jean Wintsch and his comrades wanted to return. Did it conceal a reactionary attempt to tie human actions and ethics back to something supposedly natural? Are we dealing with an ideology that denied the historicity of humans and their environments and that wanted to return to a primitive and harmonious original state? Is there then a fundamental contradiction between the emancipatory claims of anarchist pedagogy and its “ideology of nature”?

I will argue that the contradiction only appears if we impute to the anarchists an understanding of nature that was not theirs. For them, nature was not stable, ahistorical, or preordained. Nor was it identical with what we would call “biology”. Returning to nature rather meant turning to a self-regulating life where humans and nonhumans, body and mind, and nature and culture formed a unity, a life in which freedom, equality, autonomy, and solidarity were already inherent. In the anarchists’ view, nature was not something that had to be transcended to acquire human freedom. Put differently, the anarchists were fighting not only for a different society; that is, different relations between people; their struggle was also directed toward saving human and nonhuman nature from its oppression by capitalism, religion, and the state.

Hence, the example of anarchist pedagogy discloses the heterogeneity and disputes within what the anthropologist Philippe Descola has called “naturalism” (Descola 2013). The “Great Divide” between the sphere of human culture and the realm of nature, typical of Western modernity, did not create unity, as Descola himself acknowledges (Descola 2014, pp. 285, 314). Thus, contemporary debates in social anthropology could benefit from historical research into the complexity and conflicts of naturalist ontologies. Instead of reproducing narratives of supposedly homogeneous Western modernity and its ontology, historical research should focus on parsing the different ways that moderns have related natural and cultural entities (Probst 2020a, 2020b).

In this respect, this paper is not primarily about the history of anarchist educational institutions. Several works have already engaged with the history of anarchist schools from a biographical and institutional perspective (Avrich 1980; Grunder 1986; Brémand 1992, 2008; Klemm 2002; Demeulenaere-Douyère 2009; Suissa 2019; Lenoir 2020). The objective of this paper is rather to historicize the concept of nature as it was elaborated in French anarchist pedagogical writings around 1900. After a brief presentation of the historical context, I first problematize common interpretations of the anarchist ideology of nature. I then show how anarchist emancipation can be understood as an attempt to bridge the gaps between humans and nature, body and mind, the naturally given and the artefact, and so on, in order to cultivate nature as an all-embracing and autopoietic entity. This is what I will call a “political ecology of the body”. I conclude this paper by showing that my interpretation does not negate the politically problematic aspects of anarchist pedagogy, such as its references to eugenic and racist discourses. My point is rather that these aspects have to be traced back to a specific—in this case homogenizing and teleological—concept of nature and not to the reference to nature itself. Therefore, not every reference to nature should be rejected because of its allegedly essentializing effect. The challenge is rather to consider the possibility of an emancipatory concept of nature that includes the openness, heterogeneity, incompleteness, and ambivalences of life. In this way, anarchism around 1900 could be brought into a fruitful dialogue with current (eco)feminist approaches.

2. Against Omnipotent Nature

The tradition of anarchist education dates back to the early socialist movement of the 19th century (Brémand 2008; Lenoir 2020; Dupeyron 2021). However, the heyday of anarchist educational projects began only toward the end of the century (Maitron 1975, vol. 1, p. 351). At that time, various anarchist thinkers and activists founded educational institutions that were more or less openly dedicated to anarchist principles. These included the orphanage Prévost run by the anarchist Paul Robin (1870–1945) between 1880 and 1894, the school La Ruche founded by the anarchist Sébastien Faure in 1904, and the educational institution L’Avenir social established and run by the feminist Madeleine Vernet. These projects were part of a transnational network in which the Spanish pedagogue Francisco Ferrer played a significant role. After his assassination in 1909 by Spanish authorities, several “Ferrer schools” were founded in the transatlantic space (Avrich 1980), the aforementioned École Ferrer in Lausanne being one of them. All these projects were supported by famous anarchist intellectuals, such as Élisée Reclus, Pëtr Kropotkin, Jean Grave, Louise Michel, and Charles Malato (Reclus et al. 1898).

This network extended far beyond the anarchist movement and encompassed the broader pedagogical-reform movements of the time (Oelkers 2010). They all shared some fundamental pedagogical principles: the individual child was to be the center of attention; corporal punishment, discipline, and school grades were to be avoided; and knowledge was to be conveyed not abstractly through books but through active and collective learning. Furthermore, the educational institution was not allowed to function in isolation from the rest of society. It was rather supposed to be in a permanent exchange with parents, workers, and the community. Finally, anarchist educators, together with the feminist movement, advocated the principle of coeducating children of both sexes (Heimberg 2006, 2000). This whole program was often called “integral education” by anarchist writers and activists.

Several anarchist educators took up the discourses of nature preservation and conservation that emerged around 1900 (Probst 2019). According to Joachim Radkau, various heterogeneous discourses were assembling around that time, ranging from the hygiene movement, nature conservation, animal protection, and the preservation of cultural heritage (Heimatschutz) to life reform, urban criticism, vegetarianism, and naturopathy (Radkau 2011, p. 58). A lot of these critiques were reflected in anarchist writings and directed against bourgeois-capitalist society as a whole. The aim of anarchist educators was to educate children to treat nonhuman beings with respect. According to the anarchist Aristide Pratelle, for example, the goal was to develop a “natural feeling of man for his environment” instead of dividing flora and fauna into “harmful and useful animals and plants for humans” (Pratelle 1923, p. 111; Pratelle 1908). Jean Wintsch criticized the destruction of natural spaces by capitalist corporations, and the bulletin of the École Ferrer recommended several books on natural history and nature conservation (Guides 1913).

But not only nonhuman nature needed to be protected and nurtured. The interest of the anarchist pedagogues was also focused on the human organism as a whole. Similar to the whole pedagogical-reform movement, anarchist pedagogues absorbed physiological and hygienic discourses, whose goal was to assist the child organism in growing into a healthy, strong, and resistant body (Oelkers 1998). This created a strong proximity to eugenic discourses (Cleminson 2019), even though most anarchists rejected eugenic measures by the state, such as forced sterilizations (Kropotkin [Kropotkine] 1913). Paul Robin played a significant role in the anarchist reception of eugenics as the founder and director of the League of Human Regeneration [Ligue de régénération humaine] (Robin 1896). He intended for his orphanage to prevent human degeneration and optimize the children’s bodies. He hoped that teachers could, with the help of “anthropometric observations”, prevent “permanent or temporary defects of their children” (Robin 1895). Sébastien Faure, for his part, advocated separating “normal” and “abnormal” children so as not to disturb the development of the former. Both Robin and Faure observed meticulously the physical development of their children. Robin even rejected the admission of some children into his orphanage because of their alleged physical handicaps (Valière 2016, pp. 354–55).

Thus, the anarchist project of achieving liberation through a “return” to nature immediately triggers suspicion. Are we dealing with what Jakob Tanner called an “ideology of nature” (Tanner 2016, p. 57)? Is liberation not, on the contrary, the overcoming of the naturally given? Can the reference to nature produce anything other than conservative, misogynistic, or racist effects?

I do not want to negate the problematic aspects of this pedagogical discourse. I would rather argue that, put this way, the critique prevents us from historicizing the anarchist concept of nature properly. By simply attributing eugenics, sexism, ableism, or racism to the “return to nature and life”, we lose sight of the fact that, for these anarchists, nature was not stable, unchangeable, and predefined. Let us listen to the French anarchist Jean Grave: “God did not exist, that was understood; but Nature, Forces, Matter, Natural Laws, all the attributes of the dead Divinity each inherited a part of its omnipotence and became so many entities, acting and willing, substituting for the dead authorities in the brain of man and perpetuating there a frenzied jumble that prevented him from seeing his own conceptions clearly and left him just as much a slave as before, he who thought he had been freed!”(Grave 1897, pp. 261–62).

Here, Grave criticizes the hypostasizing of categories, such as nature or natural laws, and their transformation into metaphysical concepts. By capitalizing “Nature”, man replaced God with another omnipotent entity, thus creating a new authority that hinders human liberation. But what did a nonomnipotent concept of nature look like in Jean Grave’s view? And how did this understanding of nature relate to the “Great Divide” of nature and culture, which began to prevail at that very moment?

3. A Naturalist Pedagogy?

Answering this question requires a short excursion into the history of knowledge. It would be oversimplified to portray the “Great Divide” of nature and culture, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola calls it, as already fully established in the 19th century (Descola 2013, chp. 3). Indeed, if we follow Descola’s genealogy of the modern concept of nature, which spans several millennia, it becomes clear that the dualism of nature and culture was only beginning to be fully developed at the turn of the 20th century. Only then, Descola reminds us, did dualism become autonomous; that is, it became itself an object of scientific inquiry. It was only at the turn of the century that the cultural sciences aimed to relate the realm of human culture—a sphere of social interaction and symbolic representation—with the realm of nature. Anthropology was one of the disciplines that takes this dualism as its central analytical and theoretical object, asking how humans build societies by using and representing the natural entities they are surrounded by (Charbonnier 2015). Descola’s critical intervention into his own discipline and the Western sciences, in general, consists in showing that this dualism is not universal but rather a historically and geographically specific way of relating human and nonhuman entities.

It is important, then, to distinguish dualism—that is, the belief in two separate and incommensurable spheres—from naturalism, a “social and historical context” where the concept of nature is key in that it names the properties of things, their regularities, and their normativity (Charbonnier 2015, p. 23). In fact, scientific naturalism in the 19th century was by no means dualistic in the above sense, as the historian of science Claude Blanckaert points out. Rather, it was framed by a science that was “equally called ‘anthropology’ or ‘natural history of man’” (Blanckaert 2017, p. 41). The naturalistic gaze of the 19th century united heterogeneous fields of knowledge without assuming a radical incompatibility of disciplinary perspectives. Instead, it sought to gradually complement a divided epistemological space (Blanckaert 2017, p. 51). The “nature” of an entity consisted of an “ensemble of properties” that could encompass the most diverse domains, from ways of life to habitats (Bourdeau and Macé 2017, p. 13). The distinctions between the innate and the acquired, the dead and the living, bodies and their environment, and human societies and their natural surroundings were blurred, as Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz emphasize (Locher and Fressoz 2012, p. 581). This is how “life” entered into history, as Foucault puts it, in the sense that “phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species” were integrated “into the sphere of political techniques” (Foucault 1978, p. 142).

Foucault also shows that, through this process, “life”—and we should add “nature” as well—entered the vocabulary of resistance (Foucault 1978, p. 145). It should be noted, then, that in the 19th century at least, nature and life were symbolically and politically contested concepts. They were not only instrumental in conservative discourses. Nature and life could just as well symbolize the resistant, the exuberant, or the untamed (Alaimo 2000). Nor did the term nature and related concepts always imply an essentializing biologism in today’s sense. In his Philosophy of Progress from 1853, the classical anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, defined nature as “movement” (Proudhon 1868, p. 31). From there, he took issue with Cartesian philosophy by postulating that the human subject cannot be thought of as a stable basis for knowledge. As everything moves, cogito ergo sum is a false premise, he contended. We should rather say moveor, ergo fio—I move, therefore, I become (Proudhon 1868, p. 21). Similar ideas were put forward by Mikhail Bakunin. In the posthumously published manuscript God and the State, he contrasted the “vile matter” of the “idealists”—a “stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to everything”—with the matter of the “materialists”, among whom he counted himself. This was a “spontaneous and eternally mobile, active, productive matter chemically and organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it” (Bakunin 1970, pp. 12–13). Hence, returning to nature meant relating to an autopoietic life in humans and their surroundings. The maxim contained a critique of capital, the church, and the state, which were thought to dress, despise, and subjugate the physical and the natural as if they were made of lifeless “lower matter”.1

Thus, when the anarchists defined the natural as movement and as living matter, they did not aspire to return to an ahistorical primordial state of nature. Apart from some primitivist anarchists (Baubérot 2004, 2014), the majority advocated technical interventions in nonhuman nature. In this respect, there is a striking continuity with early or “utopian” French socialism. As John Tresch points out in his fascinating study, early socialists developed a cosmology in which “science and technology appeared not as enemies of the human, but as integral components—both tools and actors—in the creation of a ‘second nature’” (Tresch 2012, p. 4). They defended a concept of freedom that brought together the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the technical. Tresch calls it a “freedom through connection—with other humans, with the rest of nature, and with machines” (Tresch 2012, p. 6).

It is analytically helpful to understand anarchist pedagogy as a technique in the above sense: as the careful regulation, channeling, promotion, and potentiation of forces inherent in human bodies and minds in order to bring them to fruition, thereby promoting nature to a higher form and not subduing it. Paul Robin, therefore, understood “integral education” as the establishment and cultivation of “continuous relationships” between physical, mental, and moral capacities: “Integral education is not, as one generally imagines, the forced accumulation of an infinite number of notions about all things; it is an education that tends to cultivate, to develop in parallel and harmoniously all the faculties of the human being, health—hence strength and beauty—skill, intelligence, and happiness—hence kindness. It embraces the usual divisions called physical education, intellectual education, and moral education and moreover indicates continuous relations between them” (Robin 1896, p. 1). According to Robin, instead of fragmenting and subjugating the “nature” of the young, it is necessary to recognize the child as a whole and to support children in their development. Integral education thus involved more than just a broad range of knowledge. It was directed toward human life in all its facets. While anarchist educators typically attended to three subject areas—the body, the mind, and morality—they did not do so in order to separate the given from the artificial and to let the realm of freedom begin where nature ends. It was rather a strategy to bring together what, in their view, had been separated by the dominant understanding of pedagogy.

Anarchist pedagogy was thus not naturalistic because it neatly separated nature from culture and derived human development from something given that limited human freedom. It was naturalistic in the sense that the category of nature and related concepts, such as matter, life, or the body, fulfilled a central function. With their understanding of nature, the anarchist pedagogues intervened in the political controversies of their time. From this standpoint, they developed what I would call a political ecology of the body that was directed toward a specific kind of natural body—a body that, like the concept of nature itself, united the physical and the mental, the person and its surroundings.

4. A Political Ecology of the Body

It is significant that the anarchist pedagogues used the metaphor of the gardener to describe pedagogical techniques. Educators had to relate to their children like gardeners to their plants, as Sébastien Faure put it: they had to dedicate themselves to “cleaning, weeding, digging up, sowing, thinning, replanting, replanting, pruning, grafting, supporting, protecting, watering, planting” so that “fragrant flowers” and “tasty fruits” would develop (Faure 1933, p. 7). Growing plants and bringing up children were understood as structurally similar in that both activities support and nurture the autopoietic capacities of beings.2 The pedagogue was someone who literarily grew up children: with care and foresight, he had to assist the young in their autonomous development.

Behind this conception of pedagogy as specific techniques of growing human beings lay an understanding of liberation that I would like to call a political ecology of the body. All the terms are significant here. First, liberation was directed at the body and its organs, which, as I have already shown, were to be developed in their “harmonious” relationships. Instead of disciplining bodies, the aim was to develop them holistically. For anarchists, the body was a contested place of oppressive but also liberating experiences. Starting from the body, its organs, senses, and desires, the subject was able to relate to others and its environment. For, as the anarchists Janvion and Degalvès underscored, the body was “neither a pure spirit nor an automatic machine” (Degalvès and Janvion 1897, p. 2). Humans had to avoid just disciplining and controlling their bodies in order to liberate themselves. The body was a processual, open-ended “project”, as Cleminson writes with regard to anarchist nudism (Cleminson 2004, p. 714).

Second, for anarchists, the body did not consist of a homogeneous whole. It was rather a network, or ecology, of different entities, and its limits were porous and open to influences from the surroundings. The body was not insular, as Rosalind Petchesky puts it in another context (Petchesky 1995, p. 400). Free individuals stood in continuous and freely chosen relationships with their fellow human beings and their environments. The anarchist Alexandrea David-Neel wrote in this regard: “Our body is a product of those of our parents, nourished by the daily assimilation of a host of elements borrowed from nature; our thoughts are born and nourished by the thoughts of others; our whole mental and physical organism, in constant communion with the Whole, has no point where it can rest and say I, because everywhere it finds the others in it” (Myrial 1898, p. 29).

Third, this ecology was political because it criticized the observed divisions, isolations, and fragmentations of bourgeois-capitalist society and sought to overcome them. These separations included the dissociation and isolation of mental and physical skills, the epistemological separation of subject and object, and the relations of domination between social groups. This political ecology of bodies was thus one that was supposed to bring the organs, senses, and bodies of acting individuals and of nonhuman entities into a system of “natural” relations. Precisely because it rested on autonomy and freedom, this system was supposed to be strikingly stable, regular, and uniform. Last, it is important to note, that when I call this view a political ecology of the body, I do not mean to emphasize its positive aspects. I understand it primarily as an analytical concept that should help us grasp the specific anarchist conception of emancipation and its relationship to nature and the natural human body.

This enables us to see that viewed from the broader history of political philosophy, anarchist pedagogy broke with the possessive individualism of classical liberalism. Anarchists did not define liberation in terms of an exclusive and absolute ownership of nonhuman nature on the one hand and the ownership of oneself and the body on the other (Macpherson 1962). Rather, they conceived of individual freedom as the result of cooperative relations to the body and its environment. The individual—as an active, feeling, sensing, and corporeal being—should always be interacting with social and natural environments. This was the individual the educators wanted to raise by turning and seeking inspiration from nature and its autopoietic potentialities.

5. Conclusions

In this essay, I have tried to historicize the anarchist concept of nature around 1900. I have shown that the desire to return to nature did not entail an ahistorical and biologistic understanding. To truly understand anarchist cosmology, we must acknowledge that nature was something different for the actors of the time: an autopoietic entity in motion that encompassed both the human and the nonhuman. Only in this way can we understand that, for the actors, there was no contradiction between achieving human freedom and turning to nature.

This example thus encourages us to think more deeply about the concept of nature in modernity. For there was no unanimous conception of Western naturalism, even at the time when the “Great Divide” between nature and culture was being established. It is important to make conflicts about the concept of nature historiographically visible in order to problematize narratives of supposedly homogeneous Western modernity. I fully agree with Pierre Charbonnier when he contends that we should not altogether reject the concept of nature because of its complexity and opacity but rather take the chance and dive into its “historical thickness” (Charbonnier 2015, p. 18). By looking at a political movement that drew a lot of inspiration from scientific disciplines but was not identical to them, we should also feel encouraged to study the ways in which naturalist ontology was reproduced, modified, or challenged in, for example, political movements or social institutions, such as schools. A comprehensive historical anthropology of naturalism and Western modernity cannot only focus on science and scholarly practices, as has most often been the case, but should also look into how people in other social fields have related to nonhuman entities (Mathieu 2022).

In addition, this historical example also offers insights into contemporary theoretical debates. It shows that there is no direct connection between naturalization and essentialization. Nor is there a compelling antagonism between naturalization and emancipation. If nature itself is understood as a mixture of the human and the nonhuman, of the historically evolved and the “naturally” given, then it might be possible to think differently about liberation. Ecofeminists have been drawing attention to this problem for some time (Carlassare 1994; Sturgeon 1997; Larrère 2015). Like some ecofeminists in the 1980s, the anarchists were concerned with discovering and developing a liberating nature behind the “lower matter” that was subdued by capitalism, the state, or the patriarchy. Both movements tried to develop a different “ontology” of nature and the body.

A critical reader might answer that all this does not change the fact that anarchists used the concept of nature to separate the normal from the pathological, thereby reproducing eugenic discourses. This is absolutely true, and this essay does not aim to negate or justify those aspects. I would simply argue that we must properly historize different concepts of nature, because only then can we grasp that its use of the category of nature alone did not make anarchist pedagogy reactionary. It was reactionary when it posited a specific concept of nature, one that was homogeneous and teleological. In fact, most 19th-century theories of development in the natural and social sciences conceived of development as a progression toward maturity (Bowler 2009, p. 570). Anarchist pedagogues in Western Europe were no exception. If we let children grow autonomously, they will all become strong and healthy, they hoped. In their view, spontaneous growth produced astonishing uniformity. Therefore, references to nature should be always open to controversy and contestation from different points of view in order to be truly emancipatory.