France Map 1882 Geological Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Ajaccio

Furne, Jouvet et Cie of Paris published this Carte Géologique de la Région Française in 1882 in the Atlas Universel de Géographie Moderne, the atlas adopted by the Ministry of War for the school of Saint-Cyr, with Lemercier as printer and G. Hue named in the imprint. The sheet measures 48 by 40 centimeters at 1:2,550,000 and is printed in full color, each geological formation given its own tint, with a legend that sorts the periods and relief drawn in hachures. An inset shows Corsica, and the map was made in 1882, when French geology had become a national science tied to mining, railways and the teaching of the Third Republic.

The legend names the great divisions of geological time, including the Quaternary and the Tertiary, and the colors let a reader follow each across the country. The sedimentary basin around Paris, the old crystalline massifs of Brittany and the Massif Central, and the folded ranges of the Alps and the Pyrenees all fall into different color families. The Seine and the Loire cross the basin, the Rhône cuts south between the Alps and the Massif Central, and Corsica, drawn in its own inset, is mainly mountainous rock rather than lowland. Seen together, the tints show that French landscapes, wine regions and mining districts follow the underlying stone.

A geologist, a lover of French wine who knows that vineyards follow the rocks, or a family from the Massif Central or Brittany will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's 1892 geological map from the Nouvel Atlas Illustré is a hand-colored sheet with a Royat vignette, and the 1886 Drioux and Leroy map combines relief tints with a cross-section of the earth's crust; this 1882 Saint-Cyr sheet is the earlier and plainer geological map, printed in full color for a military school. 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.