France Map 1892 Geological Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg

J. Migeon directed the publication of this geological map of France for the Nouvel Atlas Illustré, Géographie Universelle, issued in Paris in 1892 by the Direction et Administration at 11 rue du Moulin-Vert, with L. E. Desbuissons credited among the atlas's makers. Charles Lacoste drew the sheet, Lecocq engraved it, Fontaine drew the waters and A. Bizet lettered it, and Fillatreau and Barbier made the small vignette view that decorates it. The color work is the real distinction: the atlas is hand-colored at a date when printed color was taking over, and here each rock type is given its own tint on a 1:3,700,000 sheet of 43 by 34 centimeters, with hachured relief and an inset of Corsica. It records France in 1892, under the Third Republic and three years after the Paris Exposition that raised the Eiffel Tower, when geology was a young science tied to mining and railway building.

The vignette shows the Grotte de Royat, at the spa town of Royat in the Auvergne, where mineral springs rise through the volcanic country around Clermont-Ferrand. Colors distinguish the granite and older rocks of the Massif Central and Brittany from the layered sedimentary basins that surround Paris and Aquitaine. The Alps and the Pyrenees, built of folded rock, rise along the eastern and southern frontiers, while the inset of Corsica shows the island's largely crystalline mountains. Parts of Germany appear along the northeastern edge because the sheet extends past the French border. The color key turns the map into a record of what lay beneath each region, from the coal fields of the north to the limestone of the Paris Basin.

A geologist, a mining engineer, a wine lover who knows that vineyards follow the rocks, or a family from the Auvergne will find a distinctive gift here. TheMapVault's other France sheets are political or physical maps by Teesdale, Pinkerton, Morse, Mitchell and Cram, whereas this 1892 sheet is the only one that colors the country by rock type. Its companion from the same atlas, the Roman map of Gaul, looks back to antiquity, while this one looks down into the ground. 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.