France Map 1880 Relief School Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux

W. Swan Sonnenschein and Allen of Paternoster Square, London, published this map in 1880 as the first edition of their Royal Relief Atlas of All Parts of the World, also known as the Plastic School Atlas, a set of 31 maps with physical, political and statistical descriptions facing each one. The catalog credits G. P. Bevan, notes that the raised-relief method resembles Woldermann's relief atlas in German, and records later editions in 1881 and 1885. This France measures 29 by 25 centimeters at 1:3,900,000, and the image was rescanned with directional lighting so that the molded hills and mountains cast shadows, in muted greens and earth tones, with the frontiers in red. It dates from 1880, the year the Third Republic made 14 July its national holiday and granted an amnesty to the exiled Communards.

The sheet is a physical map, so the land itself is the subject: the Alps and the Pyrenees rise as the great walls of the east and south, and the Seine, the Loire and the Rhône are traced across the lowlands between them. Paris, Lyon and Marseille are lettered among the inscriptions, together with the regions of Normandy and Brittany, while the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean Sea are named around the coast. Lyon sits where the Rhône meets the Saône, and Marseille, the old Mediterranean port, had grown with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The raised Armorican hills of Brittany and the Alpine chain show how the country's landscape divides into an ancient west and a young east.

A hiker who knows the Alps or the Pyrenees, a teacher of geography, or a collector of unusual school atlases will find a tactile, shadowed gift here. TheMapVault's Drioux and Leroy hypsometric map of 1886 shows France's relief in flat gradient tints, and Vuillemin's 1876 school map is a political map of departments, whereas this Sonnenschein and Allen sheet is the one that was molded in relief and lit to throw real shadows across the mountains. 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.