Elisée Reclus (1830–1905) was a renowned French geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his nineteen-volume masterwork La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes (“Universal Geography”), over a period of nearly twenty years (1875–1894). In 1892 he was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society for this work, despite having been banished from France because of his political activism.