France Map 1700 Postal Roads Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille

Pierre Mortier of Amsterdam published this Carte Particulière des Postes de France around 1700, a highly detailed postal route map showing the routes of the French posts at the end of the seventeenth century, with a note for each of the stations. Mortier was an Amsterdam publisher who issued French maps for the European market, and the catalog notes that this is one of the earliest obtainable postal maps of France and is based on a map of the same title by Jaillot. The sheet is valued for its dense practical information rather than for ornament, and every station along the roads is given its own note. It shows France around 1700, in the later reign of Louis XIV, when the posting system tied Paris to the frontier fortresses and the ports.

A postal map of this kind records the relay stations where couriers and travelers changed horses and the roads that joined them, and its notes for each station made it a working tool for anyone planning a journey. The French posts were organized as a royal service, with Paris as the hub of the system and the main roads running out from it toward the frontiers and the ports. Mortier published the sheet in Amsterdam, for a Dutch audience with commercial reasons to follow the roads of France. Because it is based on Jaillot's original, it shows the French system as the Dutch book trade sold it to Europe. The sheet therefore turns the country into a network of roads and relays rather than a patchwork of provinces.

A collector of postal history, a traveler who loves old road maps, or a family from along the old routes out of Paris will find an unusual gift here, perhaps for a postal historian. TheMapVault's other French maps of the same age show the country as provinces, with the 1622 Hondius and 1727 Seutter sheets set against decorative borders and coats of arms, whereas this one is a working map of roads and stations from about 1700. Where the Lotter sheet of about 1760 celebrates conquests, Mortier's records how people and letters actually moved. 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.