France Map 1886 Relief & Geology Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille

Claude-Joseph Drioux and Charles Leroy compiled this France: Hypsométrique: Relief du Sol for their Atlas Universel et Classique de Géographie, the new edition of 1886 published in Paris by Eugène Belin, with the sheet drawn by Vilpou and engraved by F. Dufour. It is a color hypsometric and geological map across two pages, 43 by 31 centimeters at 1:3,760,000, with relief in gradient tints and spot heights, an inset of Corsica, a smaller France géologique and a cross-section of the earth's crust. The catalog says the atlas was printed and hand-painted in full color and used in schools, and this sheet belongs to its physical maps, which it calls sophisticated and economically informed. It dates from 1886, when geography and earth science sat at the center of Third Republic schooling.

Heights are the subject, so the colors step from lowlands to the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and the Vosges, with spot heights marking summits. The Paris Basin, a wide bowl of sedimentary rock, shows as low ground around Paris, while the Rhône valley runs between the high Alps and the old uplands of the Massif Central. The small France géologique inset sets the rocks beside the relief, and the Corsica inset shows a mountainous island rising steeply from the sea. The cross-section of the earth's crust lets a pupil see what lies below the map. These features turn the sheet into an early diagram of how France's landscape and its stone are connected.

A geographer, a walker who loves the Alps or the Massif Central, or a collector of educational data maps will find a clever gift here. TheMapVault's 1882 Saint-Cyr geological map is a military school sheet that colors rock formations alone, and its 1880 Sonnenschein relief map molds the hills in three dimensions; this Drioux and Leroy sheet is the one that combines height tints, geology and a crust cross-section on one page. 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.