France & Corsica Map 1906 Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Ajaccio

W. & A.K. Johnston Limited of Edinburgh and London published this France in 1906 in the second edition of The Victoria Regina Atlas, Political, Physical and Astronomical, a world atlas of 200 maps that the firm, established in 1825, had first issued in 1897. The sheet sits on page 63 of the atlas and measures 27 by 22 centimeters at 1:5,191,000, printed in color with the relief shown by hachures. Its style is the meticulous, clearly lettered one of early twentieth-century atlas cartography, with the mountains legible without crowding the names. It shows France in 1906, an industrializing republic that had settled its rivalry with Britain in the Entente Cordiale two years earlier and had just separated church and state.

The map names Paris, Lyon and Marseille among the major cities, and the Seine, the Loire and the Rhône are the rivers that organize the lowlands, with the Alps and the Pyrenees drawn in hachures along the frontiers. The English Channel, called La Manche, and the Bay of Biscay are lettered along the coast, and Spain and Germany are named on the borders. Corsica sits in the lower right corner, so the whole of French territory fits on one sheet, and the regions and departments are outlined with their own names. Paris was by far the largest city, Lyon the silk city on the Rhône, and Marseille the gateway to Algeria across the Mediterranean. Together these details give a complete portrait of France as it stood before the First World War.

A traveler who knows the Loire or the Riviera, a family with roots in Lyon or Marseille, or a collector of Edwardian atlases will find a clean, readable gift in this sheet. TheMapVault's 1922 De Agostini map shows France from an Italian atlas and its 1955 Bartholomew sheet comes from The Times Atlas, while this 1906 Johnston map is the Edwardian British view, printed in color with hachured mountains. Earlier maps in the collection show France by province or department, whereas this one shows the modern republic with Corsica at the corner of the sheet. 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.