France Map 1794 Revolutionary Departments Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes

Mathew Carey published this France Divided into Circles and Departments in Philadelphia in 1794, one of the earliest American printings to show France under its new revolutionary administrative system. Carey, an Irish-born printer and republican sympathizer who had met Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris, produced the map for his plan to publish an American edition of William Guthrie's A New System of Modern Geography, and his publishing helped the young United States reduce its reliance on London mapmakers. The sheet is hand-colored by department, with a table of the ten Metropolitan Circles beside the map and a key explaining the boundaries and symbols. It shows France in 1794, in the middle of the Revolution.

The sheet shows the departments created by the National Constituent Assembly, which dissolved the old provinces in favor of a rational grid, and it names departments such as Calvados, Finistère, Gironde and Haute-Garonne. The ten Metropolitan Circles in the table include the Circle of Paris, the Coasts of the Channel and the Coasts of the Mediterranean, and the symbols mark the seats of Metropolitans and Bishops, towns with a Tribunal of Justice and the principal places that gave their name to a district. Longitude is measured twice, from London along the upper margin and from a Philadelphia prime meridian along the lower, a quiet American declaration of independence. Behind the lines lies the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July 1790, which tied the Church to the new departments and deeply divided the country, especially in the Vendée.

A collector of American printing history, a family with roots in Bordeaux or the Vendée, or a student of the Revolution will find a distinctive gift in this map. TheMapVault's 1835 Burr map is the departmental France of the July Monarchy, and its 1865 Schonberg map shows France under Napoleon III, whereas this Carey sheet is the Revolutionary original of the departmental system, printed in Philadelphia only a few years after the departments were created. 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.