Fédéralisme, identités nationales et critique des frontières naturelles : Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) géographe des « États-Unis d’Europe »

Abstract

This paper addresses the ‘geographicity’ of the works of the famous philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, drawing on the critical frame of present studies on the relationship between geography and anarchism, a political theory which includes Proudhon among its founders. Drawing on his published and unpublished texts, we interrogate Proudhon’s relation with geography, mainly through his approaches to federalism and to the problem of nationalities. Within the mammoth Proudhon’s corpus, we focus on the emblematic examples of his federalist writings on Italy and Poland. In a wide documentary appendix, we publish for the first time the chapter "Political Geography" from Proudhon’s unpublished monograph on Poland, whose manuscript version survives in the Besançon public library.

Keywords

• history of geography
• political geography
• epistemology of geography
• Proudhon
• federalism