Northeastern France Map 1865 Atlas Print - Strasbourg, Reims, Nancy, Metz

Edward Stanford of Charing Cross, London, published this France II in 1865 in The Family Atlas, eighty maps engraved on steel under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with J. & C. Walker and a team of named contributors credited on the atlas. The atlas has tabs for each map section and includes the San Juan Islands boundary map, and this sheet is a hand-colored map of 37 by 39 centimeters at 1:1,750,000, twice the scale of the atlas's single sheet of the whole country, with hachured relief and a grid of latitude and longitude. It shows northeastern France bordering Germany and the Low Countries in 1865, five years before the war that would change that frontier.

The sheet covers the part of France nearest the Rhine and the Belgian border, where the departmental boundaries are drawn in color and the frontier with the German states is clearly marked. Strasbourg, the Alsatian city on the Rhine with its great cathedral, lay in this region, as did Metz, a fortress town on the Moselle, and Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. Reims, the coronation city of French kings, stood to the west in Champagne. In 1870 and 1871 the war would bring sieges to Metz and Strasbourg and end with Alsace and much of Lorraine in German hands. The sheet is therefore a record of a border region in its last peaceful years under French rule.

A family from Alsace or Lorraine, a student of the Franco-Prussian War, or a collector of Stanford's regional sheets will find a pointed gift here. TheMapVault's France in Provinces maps of 1865 and 1872, from the same atlas, cover the whole country on a single sheet, whereas this France II is the close-up of the northeast at twice the scale, made for readers who wanted to follow the roads, rivers and frontier in detail. 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.