France Map 1876 School Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nantes

A. Vuillemin drew this Nouvelle Carte Élémentaire de la France for use in primary schools, and the Paris publisher A. Logerot issued it in 1876 within a composite atlas of 25 maps that the catalog describes as a huge folio standing 88 centimeters tall. The sheet is a colored lithograph of 110 by 84 centimeters, far larger than any ordinary atlas page, and the catalog, which takes the 1876 date from the only dated map in the volume, judges the maps very well done and likely to have served in French schools, though a few of them are recorded separately with dates from the 1860s to the 1870s. It dates from the first decade of the Third Republic, when the government was building the school system that would place geography at the center of civic teaching.

French labels mark the Atlantic Ocean, the English Channel as La Manche and the Mediterranean Sea as Mer Méditerranée around the coast, while the Seine and the Rhône are lettered along their courses and the high ground of the southeast is drawn. Railway lines run across the country and are among the sheet's key features, a reminder that the network built since the 1850s was binding Paris to the provinces. Departments are separated by color and by boundary line, so a pupil could find the administrative division in which any town lay. The title and a note on the map's purpose sit at lower left. Together these details turn the sheet into a geography lesson, with coast, rivers, mountains and railways all clearly set out.

A teacher of French or geography, a family with roots in the French countryside, or a collector of schoolroom cartography will find an unusual gift here, perhaps for a classroom or a study. TheMapVault's other French sheets of the century, from Tallis's 1851 map with its vignettes to Cram's 1883 atlas map, were made for the home atlas, whereas this Vuillemin map was made for French pupils, labeled in French and printed at 110 by 84 centimeters, far larger than the atlas pages around 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.