France Map 1865 Departments Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille

Schonberg and Company of New York published this France in 1865 in Schonberg's Standard Atlas of the World, a 56-map atlas sold through agents including Benj. B. Russell in Boston and R. R. Landon in Chicago, with the copyright entered in 1863. The catalog calls this the second edition, with a different title page from the 1867 issue and simpler, more schematic maps, and each border is drawn as interlocking L shapes with circles at the corners. The sheet is 34 by 29 centimeters at 1:3,500,000, with the regions in full color, relief in hachures, Greenwich and Washington as prime meridians and a list of departments keyed to the map. It shows France in 1865, under Napoleon III, in the year the American Civil War ended.

The map is a political one: each department is tinted so that a reader can match its color to the numbered list beside the map. Paris, Lyon and Marseille are among the major cities marked, and the Seine, the Loire and the Rhône are the main rivers drawn, while the Alps and the Pyrenees mark the frontiers by hachures. Under Napoleon III the capital was being rebuilt by Haussmann, Lyon was the silk center and Marseille was growing with the Suez Canal under construction. The Alpine frontier had moved since 1860, when Savoy and Nice were added to France. Taken together, these details show a nation made up of departments but governed from a single center.

An American collector of Civil War era atlases, a family with ties to Lille, Lyon or Toulouse, or a student of the Second Empire will find a thoughtful gift here. TheMapVault's Morse map of 1856 is hand-colored with Switzerland, Mitchell's of 1860 includes Spain and Portugal, and Cram's of 1883 is later and plainer; this Schonberg sheet of 1865 is the simple, schematic New York view, keyed to a list of departments and bordered with interlocking letters. 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.