France & Corsica Map 1831 Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Ajaccio

John Dower drew and engraved this map of France for Henry Teesdale & Co., the London publishers who issued it in 1831 as part of A New General Atlas of the World, and the catalog identifies it as the atlas's first edition. Teesdale had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, and his firm's atlases were prized for careful engraving and tidy outline coloring, as here, where thin pastel washes trace each administrative division without crowding the page. The sheet measures 41 by 34 centimeters at a scale of 1:4,300,000, shows relief by hachures, and carries a complete inset of Corsica and a keyed list of the provinces down its left margin. It records France in the first year after the July Revolution of 1830, when Louis-Philippe replaced Charles X on a throne that now rested on a more liberal charter.

Paris sits at the hub of the French road system, and the highways that radiate from it were the sinews of a centralized state. Lyon, where the Rhône meets the Saône, commands the southeast and had made its fortune in silk weaving, while Marseille, the oldest port in the country, looks across the Mediterranean to Algiers, which a French army had invaded in 1830. Corsica, drawn in its own inset, had been French since 1768, and Napoleon was born at Ajaccio the following year. The old provincial names, such as Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy and Languedoc, still lived in common use even though departments governed the country, and the keyed list on the margin keeps that older geography alive. The sheet therefore shows a nation between the empire and the modern state.

A traveler planning a journey from Calais to the Mediterranean, a family with roots in Brittany or Burgundy, or a collector of Teesdale and Dower atlas maps will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's Pinkerton map of 1809 shows the same country under Napoleon on a much larger sheet with every department in color, while Cram's 1883 map and the 1964 Pergamon sheet carry the story into the Third Republic and the postwar era; this Teesdale edition is the outline-colored view of the restored monarchy years, drawn for a British audience following continental affairs. It is plain, precise and legible rather than ornamental. 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.