This dissertation deals with the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle by Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). Its scientific problem is at the same time to analyse, with the aid of the postcolonial and deconstructionist literature, a geographical encyclopaedia dealing with the relationship between Europe and its Others in the Age of the Empires, and to clarify the working of a scientific project held by a group of politically heterodox geographers, which included some important scholars and activists like Pëtr Kropotkin, dealing with a cooperative interpretation of Evolutionism. For this purpose, I worked in a dozen of European cities, namely Paris, Caen, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Florence and Moscow to study the archives containing the business correspondences between Reclus, his editors and his collaborators. There, I worked on about one thousand unpublished letters and handwritten documents, from 1858 to 1905, and made a textual analysis of the 19 volumes of the Reclus' encyclopaedic work.
L'Occident d'Élisée Reclus : l'invention de l'Europe dans la Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1876-1894)