Reclus

Reclus, JEAN JACQUES ÉLISÉE, geographer, was born at Sainte-Foix la Grande (Gironde) on 15th March 1830, and educated at Montauban and under Carl Ritter at Berlin. In consequence of his extreme democratic views he left France after the coup d'état of 1851, and spent the next seven years in England, Ireland, North and Central America, and Colombia. He returned to Paris in 1858, and published Voyage à la Sierra Nevada de Sainte-Marthe (1861), and an introduction to the Dictionnaire des Communes de la France (1864). For being concerned in the Communistic outbreak of 1871 he was banished from France, but returned under an amnesty in 1879. Whilst living in exile in Switzerland he began his great masterpiece, Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (17 vols. 1876-94). A professor at Brussels since 1893, he has also written a great physical geography entitled La Terre (2 vols. 1867-68; Eng. trans. 1871 and 1887); Histoire d'un Ruissseau (1866); besides Les Phénomènes Terrestres (1873) and Histoire d'une Montagne (1880).