“Let us become beautiful ourselves”: Élisée Reclus on vegetarianism, anarchism, and colonial violence

The great geographer and theorist of anarchist communism was part of a radical milieu that engaged a wide range of social issues, from capitalism and colonialism to free love and animal rights

~ Spencer Beswick ~

In his classic essay “On Vegetarianism” (1901), Élisée Reclus wrote a stirring defense of it as an ethical and aesthetic necessity with the potential to end colonial violence by transforming humanity’s relationship with the world.

Reclus’s anarchism sought to “mak[e] our existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the aesthetic conditions of our surroundings.” This includes our relationship with animals. Reclus decried abattoirs as well as the display and consumption of dead animals as ugly and violent. These disquieting displays are interwoven into everyday life in a manner which cannot help but deaden our senses and diminish the beauty of our lives. Like the unsightly scar of a concrete dam blocking a river, the slaughter and consumption of animals dams the potential of a life well lived. Reclus called to end violence against animals and instead recognise them as “respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship.”

Violence against animals was intimately connected to the violence of colonialism. The slaughter of colonised people was justified by their dehumanising reduction to the level of animals. Reclus argued that brutal treatment of animals at home thus enabled colonial violence around the globe through “direct relation of cause and effect”, for “the slaughter of the first makes easy the murder of the second” and “harking on dogs to tear a fox to pieces teaches a gentleman how to make his men pursue the fugitive Chinese”. If Europeans could learn to relate ethically to animals at home, he maintained, it would destabilise the practice of colonial violence abroad. Vegetarianism would transform humanity’s relationship with the world in a way that precludes all violence and exploitation directed at both human and non-human animals.

While the argument may have appeal, it rings somewhat hollow to our ears today. The Israeli military, for example, uses its self-proclaimed label of “most vegan army in the world” as proof of its ostensible dedication to peace, wielding veganism as a shield to justify its violence against the supposedly “backwards” (in part because non-vegan) Palestinians. Some activists thus add veganwashing to greenwashing and pinkwashing as “progressive” justifications for colonialism. It seems clear from our vantage point in the twenty-first century that Reclus was overly optimistic in his belief that ending animal exploitation would end colonial violence.

Yet there is still power in Reclus’s call for an ethical and beautiful life free of exploitation of human and non-human animals alike. He reminds us of the importance of what some veganarchists call total liberation: dismantling all of the interconnected forms of oppression and domination that demean humans, animals, and the natural world. To end with Reclus’s words: “Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature — this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful”!

Image: Digital Museum of Learning

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