Pyrenees Map 1882 Military Atlas Print - Toulouse, Pau, Bayonne, Perpignan, Pamplona

Furne, Jouvet et Cie of Paris published this Carte Militaire des Pyrénées in 1882 in the Atlas Universel de Géographie Moderne, the atlas known as the Atlas St. Cyr because it was adopted by the Ministry of War for the officer school of Saint-Cyr. Lemercier printed the sheet and J. Geisendorfer is credited as engraver, and the maps are drawn with stippled relief, blue water, and roads, railroads and canals in red and black. It measures 51 by 42 centimeters at 1:900,000, and it covers southwest France and the Pyrenees, with an inset of the western Pyrenees in Spain. It was made in 1882, when the Third Republic was rebuilding its army after the defeat of 1870 and 1871.

The mountains are the frontier, and the sheet shows them as stippled ground with the passes and valleys that officers would need to know. On the French side lay Pau, the old capital of Béarn, and Bayonne near the Atlantic coast, while Toulouse stood on the Garonne at the edge of the plain. Perpignan, the capital of Roussillon, guarded the eastern end near the Mediterranean, and Pamplona, the capital of Navarre on the Spanish side, commanded the western routes. Roads, railways and canals show how the region was connected, since the Canal du Midi linked Toulouse to the Mediterranean. The sheet therefore reads as a working map of a mountain frontier that had been fixed by treaty in 1659.

A walker of the Pyrenean trails, a family from Béarn, Navarre or Roussillon, or a collector of military cartography will find a distinctive gift here. TheMapVault's Mitchell sheet of 1860 shows France, Spain and Portugal at a much smaller scale, whereas this 1882 Jouvet sheet enlarges the frontier to 1:900,000 for officers in training, and where the 1916 Western Front sheet shows a war in progress, this one was made to teach it. Its geological companion from the same Saint-Cyr atlas looks at the rock beneath the country, while this sheet looks at the roads that crossed it. 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.