France Map 1760 Louis XIV Conquests Atlas Print - Paris, Strasbourg, Lyon, Marseille, Perpignan

Tobias Conrad Lotter issued this Le Royaume de France et les Conquêtes de Louis le Grand in Augsburg around 1760, from a design engraved by Johann Christoph Steinberger near the end of the Nine Years' War and first published by Jeremias Wolff. Lotter, a leading German mapmaker of the eighteenth century, married the daughter of Matthäus Seutter, took over Seutter's business in 1756 and kept Steinberger's credit and the French explanatory text when he reissued the design. The sheet shows France by its historical provinces in contemporary hand color, with the Channel, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean named, and it celebrates the campaigns of Louis XIV with fortress plans and descriptive panels set into an elaborate baroque border. It shows the kingdom as Louis XIV left it, in a design first drawn in the 1690s and still sold around 1760, when his great-grandson Louis XV was on the throne.

The border carries the sieges and new works that made the map a celebration: Strasbourg, Philisbourg, Huningue, Fort Louis du Rhin, Haguenau, Longwy, Mons, Perpignan and Saarlouis each have their own notes. Most cluster along Flanders, Alsace and Roussillon, the frontiers that Vauban's system of fortifications defended and that France had secured by the later seventeenth century. Strasbourg, which Louis XIV took in 1681, anchors the Rhine frontier, and Perpignan marks the Roussillon frontier near the Mediterranean. A bold cartouche carries the French title beneath Ludovicus Magnus, and spellings such as Bourbonnois, Lyonnois and Gascongne keep the flavor of the late seventeenth century. The sheet reads as political propaganda presented as a geography lesson.

A history teacher, a family from Alsace or Roussillon, or a collector of baroque cartography will find a conversation piece here, especially if the Sun King is a particular interest. TheMapVault's Seutter map of 1727 is an earlier Augsburg France in the same baroque tradition, and since Lotter inherited Seutter's workshop, this sheet is its direct descendant, but Lotter's is the one that crowds the border with fortress plans and the conquests of Louis XIV. Neither resembles the plain departmental maps of the following century. 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.