France Map 1816 Treaty of Paris Departments Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille

William Faden of Charing Cross, London, published this Kingdom of France in 1816, describing the new limits according to the Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815. Faden was Geographer to the King and one of the leading London map publishers of his day, and the catalog describes this sheet as a decorative map of France colored by its modern departments. The map was made to record the settlement imposed on France after Waterloo, and it is engraved and colored in the polished style of the Georgian map trade. It shows France in 1816, when the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, ruled a country reduced to roughly its borders of 1790 and occupied by allied armies.

The treaty of November 1815 was the second Treaty of Paris, signed after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, and it drew France's frontiers close to those of 1790 rather than the larger borders of the Empire. France paid an indemnity of 700 million francs and accepted an allied army of occupation for up to five years. The departments, which the map colors one by one, were the Revolution's administrative gift, and the restored monarchy kept them. Paris on the Seine was the capital to which the Bourbons returned, Lyon led the silk trade, Marseille was the Mediterranean port, and Bordeaux, on the Garonne, shipped the wine for which its region was known. By coloring the departments and fixing the new limits, the sheet pairs the administrative France of the Revolution with the diplomatic France of the Restoration.

A student of the Napoleonic wars, a family with roots in Alsace, Lorraine or Savoy, or a collector of Georgian English cartography will find a historic gift here. TheMapVault's Burr map of 1835 shows France by department a generation later, and its 1812 Meissas and Michelot sheet shows the French Empire at its height, whereas this 1816 Faden is the map of the settlement that ended that empire. Few maps date the end of the Napoleonic age as precisely as one that names the treaty in its title. 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.