France Map 1872 Provinces Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux

Edward Stanford of Charing Cross, London, published this map of France in 1872 in The Family Atlas, eighty maps engraved on steel under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a body founded in 1826 to publish cheap educational works. The atlas was known for its range, with Murchison's geological map of England and Wales, Lubbock's star maps and plans of London and Paris among its sheets, and this France is a hand-colored steel engraving of 41 by 38 centimeters at 1:3,500,000, with each province given its own tint and the hills drawn in hachures. The catalog calls it a somewhat updated version of the 1865 issue, and it appeared two years after the fall of Napoleon III, in the early Third Republic proclaimed on 4 September 1870.

The title says it plainly: this is France in provinces, the old divisions of Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Provence and their neighbors, which departments had replaced in 1790 but which never left the language or the memory. The English Channel, labeled La Manche, marks the northern edge, and the mountains, rivers, major cities and towns are drawn within the colored provinces. Paris had just endured a siege of four months in the winter of 1870 to 1871, followed by the Commune, while Lyon commanded the Rhône valley and its silk trade and Marseille remained the great Mediterranean port. By tinting provinces rather than departments, the map keeps alive a France of regional identity at the moment the nation was redefining itself.

A student of the Franco-Prussian War era, a family from Brittany or Provence, or a collector who values Stanford's English steel engraving will find a distinctive gift here. TheMapVault's 1865 edition of the same sheet is the earlier state, made under the Second Empire, while this 1872 version is the revision issued after the empire's fall; Tallis's 1851 map decorates its edges with vignettes, whereas this Stanford sheet relies on clean provincial color alone. 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.