After the works of Derek Gregory, we consider as geographical imaginations several ways of knowing or representing the world, which are produced not only by scientific geography, but also by the popular, vernacular or pedagogical expressions of what we call now geographical knowledge.

A recently-uncovered archive found contains the correspondences exchanged by Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), the famous anarchist geographer, and the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-1886), who made know authors like Victor Hugo and Jules Verne. These rather hundred letters, now in course of publication, are an important primary source to uncover the material construction of the geographical knowledge in the public sphere during the 19th century, before the institutionalization of Geography as an academic discipline, and to analyze the related scientific and editorial networks.

Reclus and Hetzel worked together to publish two of the most known works of the geographer, Histoire d’un Ruisseau and Histoire d’une Montagne. Their exchanges dealt with several features of their common intent to present Geography to a wide public, for reasons which were not only economical, but also political. One of the first aims of Élisée Reclus was to promote popular, scientific and rational education not only for the children, but also for the adults belonging to the lowest classes, in order to improve the social propaganda of his “evolutionary anarchism”. The main topics of this correspondence are the problems of a geographical pedagogy; the role of drafts and illustrations in the geographical edition; the geographical construction of the idea of landscape, and the authors’ commentaries on several events of the history of France at the beginning of the Third Republic (during almost all the time of this epistolary exchange, Reclus was first imprisoned and then exiled in Switzerland after his participation in the 1871 Paris Commune).

Which are the common political stakes of the collaboration between a geographer who was at the same time one of the leading figures of the anarchist movement, and a publisher who was considered rather moderate, in spite of his republican ideas? Who were the readers targeted by their operation? Which strategies of communication contribute to build their discourse? Which kinds of geographical imagination emerge from the quoted works?

We’ll try to answer analyzing this archive found, and the other Reclus’ correspondences, helping us with the most recent bibliography on these topics.