The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth

decided to go to London. And if he had any doubts about his decision to leave France again so soon, they were quickly dispelled when he was repeatedly stopped by the police, stationed along the roads to the Channel, and interrogated as to the purpose of his journey.
    From the famed Italian socialist Mazzini, to the little-known German political journalist Karl Marx, London alone offered reliable asylum to the political renegades of the Continent. Although 7,000 had fled there after the turmoil of 1848, there was little sign of Britain’s hospitality diminishing; freedom fighter Joseph Kossuth’s arrival only a few weeks before Reclus, after the revolutionary had been ousted by Russia from the presidency of Hungary, had been greeted by cheering crowds. Reclus, who increasingly counted himself a fellow traveller, could venture out without fear to public lectures by such exiled luminaries as Louis Blanc and the Russian Alexander Herzen, or to rub shoulders with the Freemasons ofthe Loge of Philadelphes, who were pledged to reverse Napoleon’s usurpation of power. Yet amidst the excitement of open debate, it was Reclus’ visits to a showman’s marvel in Leicester Square that left the strongest impression on him.
    Sixty feet in diameter and named after Queen Victoria’s geographer, Wyld’s Globe offered tourists the chance to stand on a central staircase that ran from pole to pole, and gaze up at the contoured map of the world that covered its inner surface. ‘Here a country looks like an immense cabbage-leaf, flattened out, half green and half decayed, with an immense caterpillar crawling right over it in the shape of a chain of mountains,’ reported Punch . ‘There a country resembles an old piece of jagged leather hung up against the wall to dry, with large holes, that have been moth-eaten out of it.’ Whatever the globe’s aesthetic shortcomings, crowds were drawn by the chance to wonder at the glorious extent of the British Empire, or identify the provenance of the many luxuries with which global trade provided them. Reclus saw the construction rather differently. Tutored in Ritter’s holistic vision of the natural world, and inspired by his pioneering work on the relationship between mankind and its environment, his thoughts were animated instead by the globe’s potential as an instrument of humanitarian instruction.
    Growing up in the countryside of the Gironde, one of fourteen children, Reclus had been forbidden by his strict and self-denying father from wandering in the fields around their home, lest his fascination with nature distract his younger siblings from their devotions. The vision that Wyld’s Globe now afforded Reclus, of a world open to curiosity and enquiry, more than vindicated his conversion from the cast-iron certainties of the Church to the empirical values of science. One inheritance from his father that Reclus had embraced, though, was the desire to evangelise. Recalling proposals for a great spherical ‘Temple to Nature and Reason’ made by the visionary architect Etienne-Louis Boullée at the height of Robespierre’s influence during the French Revolution, Reclus began to dream of building an edifice vaster still. It would celebrate a world stripped of such artificial impositions as national borders, and symbolise one in which race, class and property no longer divided mankind.
    In its review of Wyld’s Globe, Punch had commented on how the positioning of the central iron staircase, which impeded a panoramic view, demonstrated ‘how one half of the Globe doesn’t know what the other half is doing’. Several months in London had greatly enhanced Reclus’ understanding of contemporary currents in socialist thought, but his practical ignorance of the world demanded redress. Departing England in thecontinued company of Elie, his scientific purpose was to discover those laws of nature that, throughout history, could explain the relationship between the physical environment and the