France Map 1865 Provinces Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Strasbourg

Edward Stanford of Charing Cross, London, published this France in Provinces in 1865 in The Family Atlas, whose eighty maps were engraved on steel under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with J. & C. Walker credited beside Murchison, Lubbock, Philip Smith, S. P. Woodward and T. Hewett Key. The catalog calls it a very interesting atlas, notable for a map of the San Juan Islands boundary dispute between the United States and Canada, and tabs mark each map section. This sheet is hand-colored, 41 by 38 centimeters at 1:3,500,000, with provinces tinted separately, hachured relief and a clear grid of latitude and longitude, and it shows France in 1865, at the middle of Napoleon III's Second Empire.

Paris, Lyon and Marseille are the major cities named, and the Loire, the Seine and the English Channel, labeled La Manche, are among the marked features. Paris in 1865 was in the middle of Baron Haussmann's rebuilding, which cut broad boulevards through the old city, while Lyon was the capital of the silk trade and Marseille was growing with the Suez Canal under construction. France had gained Savoy and Nice from Sardinia in 1860, which pushed the Alpine frontier eastward. Hachures make the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Massif Central read as shaded high ground. The map therefore shows a country being rebuilt, enlarged and tied together by railways.

A reader of Victorian atlases, a family with ties to Savoy or the Loire, or a collector of the Society's steel engravings will find a good gift here. TheMapVault's 1872 sheet of the same map is the revision made after the empire fell, and Stanford's France II of 1865, from the same atlas, takes the northeast at twice the scale; this earlier edition shows the whole country under the Second Empire in its original state. 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.