France Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Calais

The London and New York firm of J. & F. Tallis issued this map of France in The Illustrated Atlas, and Modern History of the World, edited by R. Montgomery Martin, an atlas of 82 maps drawn and engraved by John Rapkin and his fellow engravers. Tallis atlases were sold on their decoration, and this sheet shows why: J. Wray drew the illustrations and J. Rogers engraved them, so the map is surrounded by small views and bordered with leafy ornament, while the departments are picked out in hand-applied outline color at 1:4,815,360. The catalog dates the sheet to 1851, the year Louis-Napoléon, president of the Second Republic, seized power on 2 December in the coup that opened the road to the Second Empire.

Two vignettes tie the sheet to named places. Calais Harbour appears at lower left, the port nearest England, held by the English crown from 1347 until 1558 and linked to Dover by the first lasting submarine telegraph cable in November 1851. The Palace of Fontainebleau appears at lower right, a royal residence for centuries, where Napoleon signed his first abdication in April 1814. Between the views, the eighty-six departments created in 1790 to replace the old provinces are outlined in color, with the Seine passing through Paris, the Loire crossing the middle of the country and the Rhône running down to the Mediterranean. Together the views and outlines present France as a land of ports, palaces and orderly administration.

A traveler who has crossed from Dover to Calais, a family from the Fontainebleau district or the Channel coast, or a collector of Tallis's pictorial maps will find a lively gift here. TheMapVault's Stanford maps of 1865 and 1872 show France province by province on a larger sheet with no pictorial ornament, and Cram's 1883 map is a plain schoolroom outline, whereas this Tallis edition was made as a decorated showpiece in which the picture and the border carry as much weight as the geography. 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.