France & Corsica Map 1886 School Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Ajaccio

Claude-Joseph Drioux and Charles Leroy compiled this France divisée en 32 gouvernements for their Atlas Universel et Classique de Géographie, a new edition with 94 maps and insets that Eugène Belin published in Paris in 1886, approved for secondary schools by the Conseil supérieur. Cornelis engraved the sheet, A. Bizet lettered it and Bréhier printed it, and it spreads across two pages in full color, 43 by 30 centimeters at 1:3,760,000, with hachured relief and supplements for the Île-de-France and Corsica. The catalog places the atlas in the tradition of Soulier, bound in quarter leather with a gilt spine, and with children's drawings on the backs of some maps, so it was clearly used in classrooms. The sheet dates from 1886, the year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York.

The thirty-two governments of the title were the great military governorships of the old monarchy, and the map sets their names against the departments that had replaced them. Paris, Lyon and Marseille are marked, together with the Seine and the Rhône, and the Alps and the Pyrenees are drawn in hachures along the frontiers. The supplement for the Île-de-France enlarges the region around the capital, and the Corsica inset shows the island that gave the country Napoleon. Toulouse, on the Garonne, was the old capital of Languedoc and a major city of the southwest. The sheet therefore reads as a lesson in how the old France lay beneath the new one.

A French teacher, a family with roots in Languedoc or Corsica, or a collector of classroom atlases will find a useful gift here, and the notes in the margins reward close reading. TheMapVault's Vuillemin map of 1876 is a large school map of departments, while the 1852 Basset sheet shows the old provinces in hand-painted color; this Drioux and Leroy map is a two-page schoolbook spread that pairs the governments with the departments and adds two supplements. 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.