France Map 1794 Military Governments Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes

Samuel Dunn, a London mathematician and mapmaker, published this France, Divided into Military Governments in 1794 in Dunn's New Atlas or Mundane System of Geography, and the catalog describes it as a detailed map of the country divided into its provinces. The title shows the old military governments, the great provincial commands of the French monarchy, set out on one sheet. It was issued in London in 1794, in the middle of the war that Britain and the French Republic had been fighting since 1793. The map therefore presents the France of the old regime, with its governments and provinces, at a moment when the Revolution had already replaced them with departments four years earlier.

The military governments were the commands through which the crown ruled its provinces, among them Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Languedoc and Provence, each with its own governor and its own history. Paris stood in the Île-de-France, Lyon was the second city of the kingdom, Marseille the Mediterranean port of Provence and Bordeaux the Atlantic port of Guyenne. In 1790 the National Assembly swept the old divisions away in favor of 83 departments, so that a map still drawn by government and province was already a picture of a vanished France. English readers wanted such maps to follow the war, and Dunn's atlas supplied them with the old names. The sheet thus records a country as British mapmakers still saw it, through its old provinces.

A student of the old regime, a family with roots in Brittany, Burgundy or Guyenne, or a collector of English eighteenth-century atlases will find a thoughtful gift here. TheMapVault's Carey map, also of 1794, shows the new departments of the Revolution, whereas this Dunn sheet of the same year still draws the old governments, so that the two together show a country in transition. Basset's 1852 map shows the provinces as a historic memory, while this London map was drawn while the old divisions were still fresh in the reader's mind. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.