The figure of Friedrich Ratzel in contemporary French political geography and geopolitics.
Résumé
The aim of this contribution is to explore the audience given to Friedrich Ratzel in the contrasting imaginary of French political geographies since the 1970s. By 'imaginary', we mean a set of disciplinary myths, legends or didactic values attached to the person of F. Ratzel in France over the past half-century - trying, as far as possible, to remain faithful to their recomposition(s) over time. In this way, we would like to look at the persistent, almost haunting imprint left by Ratzel (and in spite of him) on the disciplinary unconscious of French political geography over the last fifty years. If this imaginary seems today to have stabilised into a body of more or less stereotyped knowledge about the life, work and role played by the German geographer in the foundation of the political geography - this is one of the clichés that frecuently comes up in the texts - this has not always been the case. We would therefore like to better understand the stages through which a disciplinary memory becomes fixed, even codified. All the more as we are dealing here with a scientific figure who is foreign to the national tradition in which he is summoned - which would imply paying attention to the translations and circulations of concepts and meanings and to what they carry or distort when crossing the Rhine. If this memory is still shared today by a large number of so-called 'political' geographers or French geopoliticians, it is nonetheless the result of an endogenous reconstruction of a disciplinary past that is, in spite of which exogenous to the context in which it was developed. From this point of view, we can see how certain French geographers were able to place themselves under the scientific authority of the German, in order to legitimize the sub-field of research that they claimed to be opening up in France, or conversely, to protect themselves from a past that they considered 'dangerous'. For Ratzel is the object, depending on the moment, the authors and the social and editorial scenes in which he is summoned, of antagonistic, or at least differentiated, mobilisations, re-actualisations and receptions. They oscillate between mythified reconstruction and critical distancing - sometimes both - depending on the authors or groups of authors who use them. In view of the frequency of publication of scientific productions that evoke the German geographer since the 1970s in French-speaking geography (or on its margins), a bipartite chronology has been established, reflecting two 'moments' of major interest in Ratzel. This is why the survey is structured around two historical scans.We will first study the years 1970-1980, the scene of multiple scientific labellings in connection with the "political" in the French geographical community. To this end, a certain number of scientific labels were forged, reactivated or exhumed, such as ‘géographie politique’(around Paul Claval (1932-) and André-Louis Sanguin (1945-)); 'géographie du pouvoir' (around Claude Raffestin (1936-) or even 'géopolitique' (centred on Yves Lacoste (1929-) and the scientific journal Hérodote, which he founded from 1976). These various scientific labels, in search of filiations and legacies, do not mobilise the German geographer according to the same objectives or research interests. On this occasion, Ratzel appears as a two-faced Janus. He is deployed in contrasting ways according to the storytelling and editorial windows in which he is displayed. The hypothesis is that Ratzel served, in these decades of effervescence of the "political" in Francophone geography, as a scientific guarantee for certain thurifers (and presented as a prestigious "founder", a model to follow) or, conversely, as a repellent (he prevented the advent of a "healthy" political geography). This pivotal moment is particularly interesting from the point of view of the history and sociology of science, in order to study the ex post reconstructions of a disciplinary past that oscillates between scientific mythification and disqualification, between controversy and points of convergence on a memory that should be safeguarded or, on the contrary, swept aside. These stumbling blocks crystallised around 1988, when two (fragmentary) translations of Politische Geographie were published in French. Two translations for the "same" Ratzel? This is one of the questions that we propose to answer.The study of the reviews that follow these publications is instructive in this respect. It points to controversial readings of Ratzel in his French version.The 2000s and 2010s were more peaceful, and they gave us the opportunity to read about a Ratzel who was ultimately 'consensualised' - or even 'neutralised' or 'smoothed out' in relation to the memorial competitions of previous decades. The idea of a 'pioneer' Ratzel, the undisputed founder of political geography, is accredited to a 'geopolitical' editorial fashion, which can be seen in the multiplication of dictionaries and manuals labelled as such as that have appeared in France in recent years. With rare exceptions, the authors repeat themselves identically, even if it means attributing to Ratzel categories or labels that were not in use at the time he wrote his Politische Geographie. Sometimes presented as the paragon of a 'materialist' school, or, in his own defense, as the inventor of Geopolitk, this historical vulgate reveals, in a hollow way, the often uninhibited relationship - even the free interpretation - that social scientists have with their disciplinary past. Here Ratzel enters the scene in an anecdotal or marginal way. And the history he bequeaths - or rather the historical pastiche that his detractors or thurifers have bequeathed - is now reserved for the cabinets of curiosity from which it is no longer supposed to emerge - until the next disciplinary refoundation?