France Map 1835 Departments Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes

David H. Burr, a New York cartographer born in 1803, drew this France in Departments for A New Universal Atlas, which D. S. Stone of New York published in 1835 after Burr's own copyright of 1832, with printing by Cammeyer and Clark. The catalog calls it the first edition, with no date on the title page and map copyrights from 1831 to 1835, and it records that Burr finished only eight of the 63 maps before becoming topographer to the Post Office, so Illman and Pilbrow completed the atlas. This sheet measures 32 by 28 centimeters at 1:3,700,000 and is colored by department, with a list of numbered departments beside the map. It shows France in 1835, under Louis-Philippe, the citizen king of the July Monarchy.

The sheet tints each department, so the lines of the 1790 reform that replaced the old provinces are the main subject, and the numbered list lets a reader find every one. Paris on the Seine was the capital and by far the largest city, Lyon led the silk trade, and Marseille was the Mediterranean port that France had strengthened with the conquest of Algiers in 1830. Bordeaux shipped wine down the Garonne, and Nantes on the Loire was an Atlantic port of sugar and colonial trade. The map also marks major rivers and mountain ranges, so the departments sit within the Alps, the Pyrenees and the great river valleys. It records a country settling into its modern administrative form.

An American collector of Burr's Universal Atlas, a family from Bordeaux, Nantes or Lyon, or a student of the July Monarchy will find a handsome gift here. TheMapVault's other American France maps are Morse's of 1856, Mitchell's of 1860, Schonberg's of 1865 and Cram's of 1883, and this Burr sheet is the earliest of them by two decades, drawn before the railway age and the Second Empire, and it comes from the first edition of Burr's atlas. 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.