Patrick Geddes’s Influence on France and Beyond

The subject of this article is the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and his international context with specific reference to France. Geddes’s follower Lewis Mumford gives us a sense of this when he wrote ‘Geddes’s Scotland embraced Europe and his Europe embraced the World’ (Mumford 383). Geddes was an inheritor of the Scottish enlightenment philosophical tradition of interdisciplinary thinking and aspects of that Scottish tradition, in particular the work of Thomas Reid, were models for French thinkers, inspiring among others Victor Cousin. The influence of Scottish ideas in France was balanced by the influence of French ideas in Scotland and, by the time Geddes was working, what has been described as the Edinburgh-Paris axis had been active since the early nineteenth century as a means of importing French political and scientific radicalism. This article explores that interrelationship between Scotland and France through Geddes’s work, not least through his activities in both Paris and Montpellier. Geddes found in French thinkers such as Élisée Reclus, Paul Reclus, and Charles Flahault both inspiration and audience for his own thinking. Geddes’s commitment to France was fundamental both to his intellectual development and to his career as a whole, whether one considers the growth of his ideas, his friendships, the cities he responded to, or the colleges he built. With respect to communicating his ideas internationally, his close involvement with the Paris Exposition of 1900 was invaluable. There one can note in particular his influence on India via Swami Vivekananda’s disciple Sister Nivedita, and on the USA via Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago. He died at the Scots College (collège des Écossais) he had designed in Montpellier.